Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls – PS5, PS5 Pro, PC, NXG Technical Review
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Anime-zing Pulp Piece
Arcade fighters have enjoyed one of the longest runs of any gaming genre, starting life back in the early to mid-80s.PlayStation and Arc systems works have teamed up with marvel to reinvigorate the genre, with Tōkon fighting souls. Running under the latest UE5 engine, with Arc’s superb 2.5D cell shaded anime graphical style from their modern Guilty Gear and DBZ fighters. As a fixed arena fighter, Server and input latency, plus performance are all vital ingredients in the fighting pot. PS5 and PS5 Pro have but one mode, which targets 60fps and hits it most often (when offline at least). No 120hz mode is a shame, but the input latency is excellent, with a median of 65.7ms being very responsive, helped by the key frames being tight giving the game a fast, tight, and responsive feel across all characters.
Where offline modes are, mostly, locked to 60fps and maintain a 16ms cadence perfectly. Online is a little different and, depending on connection, roll back code and server latency, we can have very minor but noticeable dips under that 60fps plateau. Most are single 33ms dips but a high point of 99ms can occur in my tests so if a game starts laggy it will likely remain that way. You can help by choosing regions close to yourself and keeping the speed of connection at 3 or higher which can extend games being found slightly but is a small and worthy sacrifice for better consistency in the battles. Once the server latency and roll back frames become high, anything at 4 or more roll back frames, the games feel, accuracy and quality suffer. In some of my examples in the video review we get 8-9 roll back frames and it causes the other fighter to jump all over the arena and it feels very sub-par. When you get a game with this much latency and roll-back it is not a fun experience, thankfully the menu choice of local regions and speeds really does, if not fully resolve, help.
Stay Inside the Lines
The game is a visual art showcase, offering strikingly clean, stylish and emotive designs and animation. That same single 60fps mode also offers a 4K output, the same baseline for both consoles, PC can go higher if your hardware does. PS5 appears to use FSR1 by the looks of things, upscaling from a dynamic 2240×1260-2560×1440 base, while PS5 Pro players see a 56% increase to a 3200x1800p base. PSSR2 is likely used here, but the impact is minimal even in quick view cuts when super moves or arena changes happen, sparse effects such as SSR, lighting and even characters edges are clearer, sharper and more coherent with better denoising, as is texture quality, edge aliasing, shimmer and edge break up, all improved on PS5 Pro. A welcome visual Boost but not a transformative one with many of the key visual blemishes being close to identical or just reduced.
The Effects the game uses, such as Screen Space Reflections(SSR) for reflections, causes obvious depth, Occlusion and distortion issues on both, just better on Pro. Shadow maps and AO add more depth along with the superb cell sharing, dynamic and stylised light sourcing on characters. Which look amazing and with the custom 2.5D effect, anime-tion they really steal the show. Convincing it is a genuine cartoon animation, sprites and cell drawings rather than 3D geometry, which it is. The results are exemplary in the aims of bringing Japanese anime style to western comics, melding the 2D fighting seamlessly into 3D views to enhance the quality and impact with conjugated sections when you create a high juggle, tag team attack, arena breakthrough and more, adding to the style and flamboyancy.
Sadly the backdrops and background characters do not, having a much simpler construction, lighting, shading, animation and presence in the world. The contrast makes sense, as it creates background scale to contrast the larger than life characters in the foreground, but it would be better if the consistency of the arenas was higher. As is the relative lack of interaction and destruction. Being raised up for a power move, or kicked left or right into a second stage area is a nice but old touch. Being able to kick into or even out of the screen would add more pizazz and break more than the 4th wall. Some of the arenas, such as the night city wet streets, strobing cop car or the space station are much more impressive, dense and visually striking than the African huts or Dinosaur farm levels. The arcade hub tries to create a small, 3D arcade area to allow you to roam free in a virtual, mini marvel character. But the detail, popin, SSR, and more, so performance really hamper it, making it feel a little tacked on with the rest of the games clear carton and comic pulp design. I commend the team for another showcase in style, animation, and presentation which belies the UE5 engine it runs on, not relying on Lumen, Virtual Shadow Maps(VSMs), or Nanite (although some assets in the open hub use Nanite) As the games visual punch does not rely on the big ticket features showing they are not needed just for the sake of marketing.
PC Quality
PC players have a tougher experience though, not terrible but certainly not great with my RTX 4070 laptop in the beta delivering just under 60fps even at 1440p DLSS quality mode, and sometimes CPU and memory were the bottleneck, although GPU bound is most often the cause. On this machine, it can struggle to maintain 60fps and as noted, even 1080p will not solve it as it is not always dropping due to GPU load. The final release has seen a patch to improve CPU usage, reduce animation and audio demands impacting performance, it can scale down but the height to best settings seem to align with PS5 aside Shadow quality and possibly SSR. Maxing out the settings still relies on SSR reflections everywhere and identical lighting quality, so only frame rate and resolution can scale meaningfully above consoles, but as noted CPU and GPU demands are high to achieve that and 120fps is not an easy feat. Due to the core visual design and construction scaling below PS5 is largely Vram resolution, bandwidth and fill rate more than key visual features. With some of the dips being the caused by assets being swapped in and out of Ram in combat. Setting the Warm up Shader cache and running once you install or update the game does help the drops caused by PSO compilation, but the other areas still cause dips in play and the PC version still needs more work to get as consistent as the PS5 version, although as noted that does still drop frames.
Fighting in a New Dimension
Tag team brawlers have been popular since the 90s, and this latest game owes more than a spinning hook kick to the mighty Arcade and SEGA Saturn monsters, Street Fighter vs Xmen, Marvel Vs street fighter and the originator X-men children of the Atom, and later Marvel Capcom games. Like Marvel vs Capcom, Tōkon is a tag team battler with up to 3 other combatants now in your corner but it has a tactical element of requiring you to achieve certain damage, arena breakthroughs or other requirements within the matches to unlock the option to fully swap or even use the 3rd or 4th players. The tactility is raised further with timed combo swaps, counter attacks on enemy swaps, stringed together combo hits, risers, juggling and epic 4 team super moves. It is easy to string combos with a low, medium and high powered move offering up a simple combo and finisher that rises from low to high being a mighty, multi team assemble finisher like move if done right. Opposing these are the counters and swaps and even reverse counters tied in with your skill meter meaning it is easy for anyone to string a good combo together with button bashing. But the best will learn the counters, character to use and timings to really excel.
Many characters are good, with each feeling unique and accurate to their core lore but Deadpool is the most fun, to watch and breaks that 4th wall often and mocks pop culture everywhere which can be a chuckle even when you are on the receiving end. The way you can, mostly, counter moves, use timing and string sequences together is the games biggest win but also issue. In that many games can be boiled down to who starts the juggle first and can be harder to escape, even when you know how. Adding to this is the fact some characters offer distinct advantages to others, such as Storms range and Stringers or Blade’s long combo that can be mixed quickly with ranged gun fire, making it hard to close the gap. Iron man is another that can become the modern fireball, sonic boom distance king. Games modes offer up a good spread off offline and online, each online battle is preceded with a training bout as it searches for a game, one found you select to join which is better than looking at a menu. We get training, cpu levels, casual , ranked online plus cutesy arcade pseudo battles with each offering the same choice of tag team 1 v1 fightings across 8 arenas and 20 characters, at least at launch. The story and comic sequences are nice to have but are not the best comic work and really only feed the world tournament plot. The facial and lip animation in the pre-post scenes is also weak and although voice work is decent, the script is often not, aside Deadpool.
Summary
Token is another marvellous fighter from Arc, the UE5 use is seamless in being as accurate as possible to the source material, but also being flamboyant, performance and striking to play and watch. The game modes are quite light, more choice would have been welcome. Training and practise are good, but a 2v2 local or online mode in larger arenas would have been superb, more like a modern power stone. More dynamic and destructive arenas, background detail and a connected story. But esports online is an obvious focus and here I think it is too easy for newcomers but can still become a “who you get matched with challenge” The pre-scripted attack combos and super moves are great but after a while they can become tiresome to sit through, even if you are delivering them. So an option to turn them off, even in a game mode, would be offer an old school, hardcore mode. A bigger-range of movesets with the inputs across characters and depth and verticality options would have offered more things for a larger audience. As it stands it is a fun, fast and engaging fighter that looks great in action, sounds good and will offer months of return play offline but online mostly. But I think its biggest Achilles heel, it tries to please everyone and falls short in some key areas because of that, and as such may not please anyone 100%.
