MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls Mechanics Breakdown
What We Know So Far
The beginner guide for MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls just dropped. I’m just going to refer to it as Tōkon unless someone comes up with something better. I thought it'd be fun to break down the guide to better understand how the game might play. I also like having a record of how the game looks at this moment in time (there will inevitably be changes between now and release). Finally, it’s just fun to try and predict how the game will turn out (I assume I will be wildly wrong, but it’s my blog, and nobody can stop me).
The Control Scheme
When I’m trying to wrap my head around any new fighting game, the first thing I want to know is what buttons exist—I think there’s no better way to start understanding the game. Tōkon has a bunch of buttons:
Light Attack (L)
Medium Attack (M)
Heavy Attack (H)
Assemble (A): Your assist button
Unique Attack (U): Similar to the drive button in Blazblue or the stand button in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure (your “do your character’s unique mechanic” button)
Quick Skill (QS): A button for one-button special moves
Quick Assemble (QA): Does a variety of different team actions—we’ll talk about this one later since it doesn’t have a good point of comparison from a past fighting game that we can use
Quick Dash (QD): Dash button
One reason I start with the control scheme is because one of my earliest goals is figuring out what my button layout will be. Part of that question is how many of these buttons are actually necessary. L, M, H, Assemble, and Unique Attack are the core five buttons for this game, and they’ll be needed no matter what, so at minimum, this is a five button game.
The three “Quick” buttons could all theoretically be omitted. Quick Skill lets you do your special moves without doing motion inputs. Motion input specials do a bit more damage, so you’ll want to do those when possible (in combos/when reaction times don’t matter), but as we’ve seen in Granblue Fantasy Versus, there will be times where in high level play, you’ll want to use the one-button specials—in situations where you’re trying to react to something, it’s much easier with a single button press, so I think Quick Skill is functionally mandatory.
You could also technically do without Quick Dash, since you can also dash by double tapping a direction, but pressing a single button to dash is unambiguously better than double tapping a direction, so this button is mandatory as well.
Quick Assemble can also be done as a single input by doing L plus the Assemble button, so this is the one button that can be safely omitted.
Putting all of this together, we’re looking at a seven button game. When thinking about my button layout, I’m also thinking about what buttons might need to be pressed together. Like we just talked about, we’ll be doing Quick Assemble by pressing L+A, so we’ll want those two buttons near each other if possible. You do throws with M+H, so we’ll want those buttons near each other as well. I’ll want the dash button in an easy to reach place, and to the extent that it’s possible, I’ll want the layout to be similar to what I use for games I’ve played in the past, to minimize the learning curve.
For me personally, I’m leaning toward:
We’ll talk more about this later!
User Interface
After looking at the controls, the next thing I look at when trying to understand a new game is the UI during a match. If the developer thinks something is important enough to represent it graphically on screen at all times, it’s probably important to know what it is.
Shared Life Bar
This was hinted at before this video dropped, and now we have confirmation that rather than individual characters having their own life bars (and being able to be taken out individually), your team has a collective life bar. This will help avoid slippery slope situations like I talked about in a recent video, but it also means if the opposing team has an assist that’s hard to deal with, you can’t ever kill that assist character—you just have to deal with that assist forever. That being said, hitting the assist does do damage to the collective life bar, so you can still punish opponents for poor assist calls.
Character Portraits
Next to your health gauge, you have the four portraits of the characters each player picked for their team. When the match starts, you only have access to two of your characters (presumably the first two you picked on the character select screen) and the other two are greyed out. When you meet certain conditions, you unlock your third and fourth characters, giving you access to their help via the game’s different team/tag mechanics that we’ll talk about later. Unlocking additional characters also increases your total health and maximum possible super meter:
Round Counter
Versus games traditionally don’t have rounds like you see in most 1v1 fighting games. Tōkon differs from them and has a best of five round format. After losing a round, you unlock your next character for the remainder of the match (if you have yet to unlock all of your characters).
Traditionally in versus games, the losing player will have access to fewer and fewer mechanics as the match goes on (since they are losing characters). Tōkon flips that on its head and instead has the winning player gain access to more and more mechanics as the match continues. In some ways this is functionally the same. Whether it’s the winning player becoming more powerful or the losing player becoming less powerful, you’re still creating a slippery slope situation. It differs in that:
The losing player will still eventually unlock all their characters, so the advantage given to the winning player is temporary and
You can never have less than two characters, so you will always have access to team mechanics (unlike a traditional versus game where you lose access to them completely when you’re down to your final character).
There’s also the psychological phenomenon called loss aversion—the pain of me giving you $20 and then taking it away feels worse than me just not giving you $20 in the first place. Giving the winning player more stuff will feel better than taking away the losing player’s stuff.
Assemble Gauge
It’s a bar with three chunks underneath your health gauge that’s used for certain team mechanics.
Skill Gauge
You spend this to do supers and EX moves.
Basic Mechanics
Basic Attacks
Light, medium and heavy attacks seem like they work exactly like they do in Dragonball FighterZ, down to each button having its own auto combo and 2H being a universal launcher.
Assists (“Assemble”)
Like other versus games, you can call in your off-screen characters to help while still controlling your point character. Tōkon handles this a bit differently than we’ve seen in the past. There’s just one assist button (they call it “Assemble,” but I’m going to talk like a human here and just call them assists). You choose the assist you call by pressing a direction plus A. You call assist 1 by doing 5A or 6A, you call assist 2 with 2A, and you call your third assist with 4A.
Input-wise, I don’t love this, for the same reason that I don’t like needing directionals for assists in 2XKO. It makes it impossible to do things like block while calling assist 1. This is why I’m considering adding directional buttons to my control layout so that I can call the assist I want more easily:
Tōkon is also doing a few odd/new things with assists.
First, the assist a character does is dictated by their character slot. The character in assist slot 1 will do a projectile assist. If that same character gets swapped to assist slot 2, they’ll do an anti-air whenever you call them as an assist. If they end up in slot 3, they do a unique character-specific assist. This might not be as hard to keep track of as it first seems. Assist 1 will always be a projectile (or something projectile-esque), and assist 2 will always be a vertical/anti-air assist. However, it does seem like this might just homogenize the cast and make team comp boring, since each character’s assists might be largely interchangeable (outside of the slot 3 character-specific assist). If projectile/anti-air assists do differ a lot from character to character though, that homogeneity could be mitigated (at the expense of making the game a lot more confusing).
Second, you get a different assist entirely if your opponent is in hit stun or block stun, so it seems like every assist just becomes a combo/pressure extender when used while you’re hitting your opponent. This use of an assist also costs a chunk of assemble gauge, presumably to prevent infinite combos and indefinite pressure sequences.
Calling an assist in the air does an aerial version of the assist which seems to track to your height when you called the assist. This could make certain types of aerial strategies impossible—you may not be able to call an assist on the ground while flying around in the air.
You can also swap to playing your assist character by tapping the assist button during their attack or immediately after their attack. This seems a bit more restrained than you see in the active tag systems in games like Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite or 2XKO. I’m a fan of this approach since active tag in those other games can sometimes turn into feeling like you’re forced to play two characters simultaneously for a lot of the match. It can also make things visually really hard to keep track of.
Special Moves, EX Special Moves and Supers (“Skills”, “EX Skills”, and “Super Skills”)
Again, I’m going to stick with human language and just call these specials, EX specials, and supers. They aren’t really doing anything new or crazy here.
Specials can be done with motion inputs or with the Quick Skill button. As we talked about earlier, there will be times where either the motion version or the one-button version will be best, so you’ll want to have both in your arsenal (see: Granblue Fantasy Versus).
EX specials cost one chunk of super meter (25 meter) and allow you to do a powered up version of that special (similar to how they handled EX moves in Dragonball FighterZ).
Supers cost 50 meter, and level 3 supers (“Ultimate Skills”) cost 100 meter.
Team Mechanics
Assemble Smash
Costs 1 Bar of Assembly Gauge
On the ground, Assemble Smash is a mix of a universal overhead and drive impact from Street Fighter 6. You press the Quick Assemble button (or Light Attack+Assemble) to do an armored (seems like hyper armor?) advancing overhead attack. The startup is around 27 frames, so it should be pretty easily blockable on reaction. I assume this will be a popular YOLO option in the early days of the game. It’s not clear at this point how safe it is on block.
The air version is a bootleg DBFZ super dash, where you advance forward with an attack while nullifying projectiles. It’s hard to tell how strong this is. We’ll need details like:
How far it can go (does it go a fixed distance?)
How much recovery it has
Whether there’s any kind of vertical tracking
Assemble Counter
Costs 1 Bar of Assembly Gauge
Assemble Counter seems most similar to V-Shift from Street Fighter V. You press 4+Quick Assemble (or 4+Light Attack+Assemble) to do a back dash that will counter attacks if they make contact with you as you move backwards. It’s punishable during recovery, so you can probably be blown up pretty badly for overusing this.
Super Assemble
Costs 1 Bar of Assembly Gauge plus 50 Skill Gauge
This is just a DHC. It’s done by pressing Assemble during a character’s super. You can do up to two in a row.
Crossover
Costs 1 Bar of Assembly Gauge
Done by pressing Light Attack+Assemble while blocking, this is an alpha counter with a hint of Xrd blitz shield. If your opponent doesn’t do anything, you get a knockdown and get pressure afterward. However, your opponent can react with their own Crossover (they call this Crossover Reflect). If they do this, it seems to put you back to neutral. If you do Crossover Reflect with the right timing though, instead of resetting to neutral, you knock them down and get offensive momentum.
The possible sequences here are:
Player 1 is blocking > Player 1 does a Crossover > Player 2 doesn’t react > Player 1 is rewarded with offense.
Player 1 is blocking > Player 1 does a Crossover > Player 2 reacts with Crossover Reflect > Players are reset to neutral.
Player 1 is blocking > Player 1 does a Crossover > Player 2 reacts with a perfectly timed Crossover Reflect > Player 2 is rewarded with offense.
How this actually plays out will depend on how difficult it is to react to Crossovers and how difficult the just frame timing is when you do a Crossover Reflect. If it’s difficult to react to Crossovers at all, offense will feel very weak. If players get to the point where they can reliably do perfectly timed Crossover Reflects, Crossovers will become garbage.
There’s still a lot we don’t know here. Can Crossovers be baited with quick attacks that recover in time to block the Crossover? How real is the offense you earn from a successful Crossover or a perfectly timed Crossover Reflect? We’ll have to wait and see.
Conclusion
I don’t know that I have a coherent way to end this. If I missed anything or made any errors, please let me know. Before the starter guide video dropped, I was cautiously optimistic about the game. After watching the video, that’s still pretty much where I’m at.