About a month after the release of Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls, the game’s director just announced that many more fixes are on the way for this tag fighter. In a post on Steam, Kazuto Sekine acknowledged ongoing performance issues on PC and said Arc System Works is “currently making progress on improvements to the PC version so that everyone can enjoy the game to the fullest.” While Marvel Tokon has received multiple patches that have marginally improved frame rates for some, many players are still experiencing issues.
Beyond the technical problems, Sekine also promised a big gameplay change that will address the main thing players are complaining about across PC and PS5: assist spam. He said the studio will increase the cooldown before an assist becomes available again. As it stands, once players have assembled all of their assists — which can be done as early as the first round — players are incentivized to begin rapidly calling in assists to pin down their opponent, filling the screen with projectiles and chaos. The only cost of calling in an assist in neutral is that the summoned character is unavailable for a very brief cooldown, which is a small cost to pay. This also makes it easy to perform long, oppressive pressure sequences. As a result, many players feel the game is “spammy” and overly chaotic. The cooldown changes may fix this dynamic.
Sekine also promised that the team will update how the game’s input system works so players don’t need to hold buttons to buffer attacks. In a refreshing move compared to many fighting games, he also revealed that they are going to avoid making hasty balance changes to specific characters, as every fighter’s win percentage currently falls between 48% and 52%.
How has Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls been received?
Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls has had a rocky start. The game launched on Windows PC in a broken state, with massive performance issues that made it difficult to play online. While multiple patches have improved the game’s stability, it still doesn’t run as well as a hacked version that removed its controversial DRM (which still failed to stop players from cracking the game for piracy).
As a result, the game seems to be doing quite poorly on Windows PC. According to SteamDB, it currently has fewer active players than much older games like Mortal Kombat 11, with a peak of only 1,157 players in the last 24 hours. For comparison, Street Fighter 6 had 34,855 peak players over the last day, Tekken 8 had 6,516, and Mortal Kombat 11 (released in 2019) had 2,278. The game sold around 500K copies in its first week, according to Alinea Analytics. While it doesn’t help that Tokon isn’t available for sale in dozens of regions, the game’s release woes seem to have been a big blow to its momentum.
