MARVEL Tōkon Builds a Brilliant Fighter, Then Trips at the Door

Start with what works, because a lot of it does. The core is a tag fighter built around a squad of four, but you do not simply pick four and go. Matches begin with a single point character and one assist, and you earn access to your full lineup during the round by hitting mid-fight conditions, chiefly dealing damage and triggering Wall Breaks that punt the action out of the current stage and into an adjacent one. It is a clever way to pace a team fight: your options literally expand as you assert control, so a comeback feels like clawing your roster back into the fight rather than just chipping at a health bar.

The moment-to-moment combat carries the Arc System Works signature. Movement is quick and airborne-friendly, assists snap in to extend combos and cover your recovery, and the switch mechanics reward players who can think two characters ahead: tag out under pressure, catch the opponent with the incoming fighter, then keep the pressure rolling. The twenty-strong launch cast is spread deliberately across archetypes, from close-range brawlers and zoning projectile specialists to agile rushdown picks and heavier technical characters, so the team-building has real texture. Figuring out which four cover each other's weaknesses is where the game is at its best.

Accessibility of execution is handled with the modern fighting-game toolkit, with simplified input options sitting alongside traditional motions, which lowers the barrier for the enormous Marvel-curious audience this game is clearly courting. When it clicks, when the netcode holds and the frames are steady, the tag chaos is exactly the loud, readable spectacle the concept promises, and it is easy to see the tournament-viable game buried in here.

The problems are almost all structural rather than mechanical. The most cited is performance: PC players report the game struggling to hold a stable frame rate even on strong hardware, with configurations that should run this comfortably reportedly wrestling to stay smooth. For a genre where consistent frames are not a luxury but the entire foundation of fair play, that is close to disqualifying, and it colors every other complaint. A one-frame stutter in a single-player action game is an annoyance; in a fighting game it is a dropped combo and a lost round.

Then there is the lock-out. The game leans on Easy Anti-Cheat in a configuration that currently prevents it from launching on Linux and SteamOS devices at all, which means Steam Deck and the newer Steam hardware are simply off the table. Layered on top is a mandatory PlayStation Network account requirement to play on PC, the exact friction that triggered a review-bomb backlash against other PlayStation PC ports, and it has done the same here. Neither of these has anything to do with how the game plays, and both of them are the first thing a prospective buyer runs into.

Monetization is the final weight on the scale. This is a full-price release, listed around seventy euros, and the storefront around it is already lined with individually sold cosmetic DLC, from alternate costumes to color unlocks. None of that touches the balance of a match, and cosmetic shops are hardly new to the genre, but stacking an aggressive a la carte cosmetics model on top of a premium price and a rocky launch is precisely the kind of thing that turns a frustrated player into a negative review. As live-service fighters go the content cadence may well improve, but a review has to judge the thing in front of it, and the thing in front of players at launch asked a lot and delivered unevenly.

Visually, MARVEL Tōkon is the least compromised part of the whole package, and it is genuinely striking. Arc System Works has built its reputation on making 3D models read like hand-drawn comic panels, and that expertise is all over this cast. The characters have weight and snap, exaggerated key poses hold for just long enough to register before the animation whips into the next beat, and the Marvel source material lends itself beautifully to the studio's love of bold silhouettes and saturated color. Special moves land with the kind of screen-filling flourish that made DragonBall FighterZ such a joy to simply watch.

The Wall Break system is as much an aesthetic idea as a mechanical one. Punching an opponent clean through the boundary of a stage and into a new arena gives fights a cinematic sense of escalation, each transition a small set-piece that resets the visual stakes. It keeps the backgrounds active participants rather than static wallpaper, and it is the clearest expression of the game's core fantasy: these are titans, and the environment is disposable.

Where the presentation stumbles is, again, in delivery rather than design. The art direction is confident and the character work is excellent, but all of it is filtered through the same unstable performance that undermines the play, and a fighting game that cannot reliably show you its animation at a steady frame rate is not showing you its best work. The craft on display makes the technical state more frustrating, not less, because you can see exactly how good this is supposed to look when the hardware finally cooperates.