Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls

Reviewing a fighting game isn't really in my comfort zone. You see, whilst I have enormous respect for the genre and think it's an excellent spectator sport, I often find actually playing these games to be unfriendly to beginners and therefore generally rather off-putting. I'd almost liken learning a fighting game to learning a new language. Relatively little of your action game experience will be applicable when you open a command list and see long strings of indecipherable moves that are far from straightforward to pull off in practice.

Quite simply, I've never been particularly good at this sort of advanced button-mashing. I do love Street Fighter 6, mind you, but that's more of an exception than anything else, and my love for that particular game hasn't made me keen to explore other games in the genre. I'm explaining all this to you because I want to make it clear what my perspective is when approaching Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls. I like Marvel, I appreciate fighting games from a distance, and my personal experience of this sort of game is limited.

Having said that, this is a really fun game.

Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls is as a 4v4 tag fighter, which means that both players choose four fighters to take into a battle. A key difference between this game and others with a similar setup is that all four fighters share the same health bar, so you can't simply swap out your characters just because you're running low on health. This means that players can easily make do with getting to know just one character and leave the other three waiting in the wings unused. In the long run, it's obviously in your best interests to branch out a bit and try to learn more, but to begin with - at least for me - it was a relief to realise that I could perform quite well in matches by sticking to Spider-Man.

I have mixed feelings about whether Marvel Tokon is a good fighting game for beginners. On the one hand, thanks to the Marvel brand, it naturally has broader appeal than some other games from developer ArcSys, and you can easily hammer a button to pull off decent combos if you want to. On the other hand, the game has some confusing rules and systems that aren't explained in a particularly educational way. There are several different resources to keep track of and use wisely, and it's not exactly crystal clear what distinguishes a unique ability from a skill, or what conditions must be met before you can activate a super ability.

So if, as a beginner, you're happy not to immediately get to grips with the game's more advanced systems and techniques, and are content just to see cool things happen whilst you're hammering away at the buttons then it's probably a good starting point for fighting game novices. Perhaps the main thing is that the game feels really good to play, whether you're a complete novice or a pro. The animations are snappy and lively, whilst remaining easy to follow. The controls are responsive, and I like the tactile sensation you get when an attack lands.

Perhaps the greatest highlight of Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls, however, is its visual style. It's a phrase that risks becoming a cliché, but a comic book brought to life is still quite apt in this case. Arc System Works, a Japanese studio, has taken the liberty of infusing a touch of anime into the overall style, but does so without for a second sacrificing the Marvel identity with which these icons were created. I'm particularly taken with the animated comic-book panels through which the game's story is mainly told - they're packed with so much charm, personality and comic-book-worthy art that you can't help but be won over. And that's just as well, as these comic-style panels make up, roughly speaking, 75 per cent of the time you'll spend in the game's story mode.

The premise of the story in Marvel Tokon - and thus the whole reason why these characters are suddenly at each other's throats - is that a blue gentleman who calls himself the Champion (also known as the Fallen One and Tryco Slatterus in Marvel lore) suddenly turns up on Earth and declares that the planet's best, strongest and most dangerous fighters must face him in a battle - otherwise he'll take over the Earth and do God knows what with it. These fighters are divided into five teams of four; Captain America leads Iron Man, Black Panther and the Hulk in the "Fighting Avengers". Storm commands Magik, Wolverine and Danger in the "Unbreakable X-Men". Spider-Man, Ms Marvel, Star-Lord and Peni Parker together form the "Amazing Guardians". Ghost Rider, Blade, Deadpool and Loki are the "Samurai Outriders", whilst Dr Doom leads Magneto, the Green Goblin and Carnage in the "Knights of Doom". My personal favourite of these teams is the Samurai Outriders, because they're bloody metal. Each team has its own little mini-campaign, all of which begin with the arrival of the blue challenger on Earth and end with you beating him to a pulp. Along the way, the various teams will, of course, come up against one another, which is naturally thrilling for a Marvel fan.

The story itself is okay. It doesn't have much to say and is quite repetitive, as you'll see the same cutscenes at specific key points with all five teams. Instead, the game thrives on fun moments and interactions between the characters, and just how stylishly everything is presented. In my opinion, the voice acting varies in quality; it's never outright bad, but some performances definitely stand out more than others. Josh Keaton does a good job as both Iron Man and Spider-Man, and Giancarlo Sabogal is convincing as Ghost Rider - but the best is probably still Nolan North as Deadpool. Deadpool is probably the game's biggest star overall, with his witty references and breaks from the fourth wall.

It's, of course, virtually impossible to include absolutely every single one of everyone's favourite characters in a game like this, but I think ArcSys has, on the whole, done a good job with the roster and its spot-on characterisation. Most of the obvious heroes are here, and there's room for a couple of deep cuts as well. Sure, you might wonder where Thor, Daredevil or Dr Strange are, for example, but the developers can, of course, add new fighters whenever they like - and I think that'll be fun to follow.

Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls has managed to win me over, though. Perhaps Street Fighter 6 isn't the only fighting game my heart has room for? It's unlikely that I'll suddenly rush out and buy loads of games just to catch up but at the start of this review assignment, my plan was to play enough of this to form a sensible and concrete opinion of it, so I could tell you whether it's worth your time or not. But now that I'm sitting here, about to put the finishing touches to my final verdict, I find myself keen to carry on playing, to keep honing my skills and to play more online matches against real opponents. That's a good sign, after all. So I tip my hat to ArcSys - not bad at all.