WHAT IS IT?

It’s Mahvel Baybee!

IS IT GOOD?

Excelsior!

WHO SHOULD PLAY IT?

10-year-old me.

GONNA TAKE YOU FOR A RIDE

It’s been fifteen long years since the last mainline Marvel vs. Capcom.

Released in 2011, Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 is, in many respects, the apotheosis of the Capcom “vs.” style of crossover games, which has produced everything from the legendary MvC series (Ryu vs. Wolverine never gets old) to the surprisingly effective Street Fighter X Tekken (2012) to forgotten oddballs like Wii-exclusive Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Cross Generation of Heroes (2008).

UMvC3 isn’t necessarily the best of these games, but with its 50-strong cast of decently balanced deep-cut characters, including highlights like Marvel’s Ghost Rider and Nova and Capcom’s Sir Arthur (Ghosts ‘n Goblins) and Dante (Devil May Cry), and its wonderful comic book aesthetic, it remains a beloved fighter and Esports mainstay.

That there hasn’t been an MvC game since UMvC3 gives added significance to the arrival of Marvel Tōkon, brought to you not by Capcom, but by Arc System Works, the mad geniuses behind the BlazBlue and Guilty Gear series of anime-inspired ultra-stylized fighters. Whether Arc – which previously and ably translated the Dragon Ball licence to video game format – could pull off a worthy successor to UMvC3 is the question that’s been on every gamer and comic book nerd’s minds since Tōkon was announced.

And with a fantastic roster and exhilarating gameplay, it’s my pleasure to announce that that’s mostly the case. While it’ll still take some time – not to mention roster expansion – to weigh quite how this ranks against MvCs past, it already has all the makings of a great fighter.

BERSERKER BARRAGE

If you’re anything like me, the first thing you look at is the who of your latest fighting game. And on that front, Tōkon delivers… even if it’s still far too MCU for our liking.

Of characters who’ve already appeared in the MCU, you’ve got Spider-Man and Green Goblin (the Spider-movies), Star-Lord (Guardians of the Galaxy), Captain America, Iron Man, Hulk, Loki, Shuri (all Avengers franchise), Ms. Marvel (who had her own TV series a few years ago) and (if you count Deadpool vs. Wolverine as canonical, which we do) Wolverine, Blade, and Deadpool. And that’s before you get to soon-to-be-MCU fixtures like Storm, Magneto, Ghost Rider (oh hi Ryan Gosling), and this year’s big Marvel villain, Doctor Doom.

If you truly want characters untainted by MCU appearances, it’s a pretty slim list: Magik (she appeared only in a forgotten Fox-era X-movie); Danger, who is a bizarre anime reimagining of the anthropomorphized version of X-Men’s Danger Room (yes really); Peni Parker and SP//dr (from the wonderful Spider-Verse films); and Carnage (who appeared in one of those execrable Sony Spider-movies).

Of the initial offerings, we’ve found ourselves immediately drawn to Deadpool (his fourth-wall-breaking humour remains happily intact), Green Goblin (who just looks so cool flying around on his goblin glider), and Carnage, who absolutely oozes menace, even if a few of his moves play too much like echoes of Venom back from the MvC days. And call us predictable, but it’s hard to resist the space-faring charms of Star-Lord or the classic berserker energy of fighting game mainstay Wolverine.

WEB SWING

Tōkon is complex. Understandably complex, but complex nevertheless.

For one, it’s a four-vs.-four tag-team fighter. While players only control a single character at a time, a plethora of support options – tag attacks, assists, tag counters, swap-ins, and more – means there can be anywhere from two to eight(!) characters (during screen-filling team attacks) on-screen at any given time. That’s a lot to keep track of, and while the game mostly does a good job of signposting what’s happening, it’s occasionally possible to lose track in the mayhem.

To be clear, this is not like MvC’s tag-team combat, not really. While games like UMvC3 or the fabled MvC2 allowed players to swap between three characters on the fly (each with their own healthbar), in Tōkon your team shares a single healthbar, and part of the challenge is landing the right set of moves to “add” your backup fighters into the fray. In fact, each match starts as 1-vs.-1, no tags, but by the end it’s a dizzying array of characters fighting one another until only one team stands triumphant.

The gameplay is your fairly standard fighting game left-to-right, low punch to high kick, combat, although one nice wrinkle is that if you land several successive blows of the same attack (say, medium kick) it will auto-trigger a Special move. These Specials are awesome, making excellent use of the Marvel licence for spectacular animations like Doctor Doom unleashing an armada of Doombots, or Carnage transforming into a giant gooey shark and chomping down on his foe. It’s great stuff.

What’s also great stuff is the overall aesthetic and production design. Anime-inspired, though not nearly as much as Arc’s previous games, Tōkon takes advantage of its non-canonical status to do fun things like give us a Gundam Iron Man or a Spider-Man who looks like a blend of Ben Reilly’s “Sensational” suit with the more recent Insomniac Games look.

The backgrounds are also wonderful, with a suite of stages – New York City, Asgard, Knowhere (replete with Nova Corps easter eggs), etc. – pulled straight from Marvel (albeit, again largely MCU) lore.

INSCRIBED IN THE PAGES OF FIGHTING GAME HISTORY

While Tōkon is built as a multiplayer fighter, some credit is due to the valiant efforts of the creative team asked to build (short, eleven-chapter) “dynamic comic panel” storylines for the game’s five single-player campaigns.

Clearly forced to work backwards from a corporate-mandated roster of characters, writer Kieron Gillen and his artist team have done their best with non-canonical storylines across the game’s five main teams, even if the teams don’t always make a lot of sense. Spider-Man, Star-Lord, Ms. Marvel, Peni Parker as the “Amazing Guardians”? Sure, why the hell not. But Green Goblin, Carnage, Doctor Doom(?), Magneto(?!?!?) as the “Knights of Doom”? It’s patently absurd, though Gillen tries his best to justify this arbitrary array of monsters, villains, and some-time heroes.

What’s better, however, is the way Tōkon lets you build your own team in its other modes, auto-assigning a bespoke name to your group, whether it’s the “Mutant Resistance” (Storm, Wolverine, Danger, Magneto) or the somewhat sillier “The Warbound” (Hulk, Wolverine, Ghost Rider, Blade). Mixing and matching characters, just to see whatever name Tōkon comes up with, is honestly part of the fun.

And that’s what Tōkon is, at least in its current state: part of the fun.

It hasn’t necessarily supplanted any of my other fighters (on top of MvC, there is of course Injustice 2), but I definitely see it entering the rotation at parties or other social gatherings. It would be hard to top MvC – let’s not forget UMvC3 had a roster of 50 characters (25 Marvel), while MvC2 had a whopping character count of 56 – but we like what we’ve seen so far, especially with the strongly-hinted Fantastic Four incoming as DLC. And if Arc is anything like Capcom, I, for one, look forward to Ultimate Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls: Hyper Champion Edition HD, with its supersized roster, arriving about a decade from now.

***
Final score: 9/10 Evo Moment #37s.

Visit the official website for Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls here.

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