Fighting Souls Commits a Cardinal Video Game Sin

There’s a lot to love about Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls — at least now that its PC performance issues are resolved. It makes great use of heroes like Spider-Man and Blade to create fighters with diverse movesets. It sports stylish art that captures the essence of both comics and anime. And its matches are full of dramatic reversals, making for a great spectator sport. There’s just one problem: I’m still struggling to remember what the heck every button combination does.

Yes, Marvel Tokon carries on a time-honored fighting game tradition, in that it contains a lackluster tutorial that throws a lot at you at once. It’s fine for genre veterans who know the dance by now, but it puts a barrier on a game with more mainstream appeal than your typical fighter. I’m not asking for much; I’m just begging for one good onboarding experience in my life.

Marvel Tokon teaches you the ropes in a long-winded tutorial that walks you through every single thing you can do in the game. Blocking, Link Attacks, Assemble Assists — you’ll execute every move at least once in your first half-hour. How well will you retain any of it? Well, that’s a different story.

While I hit all the right marks in the tutorial, a lot of moves quickly faded from my brain by the time I started playing through Tokon’s single-player story. I could remember the basic combos and I knew how to attack with my heroes in reserve, but I couldn’t keep the finer details straight. What did pressing these two buttons at the same time do again? How do I counter an attack? Wasn’t there a second counter, too? It’s like being told a 12-digit number sequence and having to hold it in your memory for hours before you can punch it into a computer. (Maybe I’m just revealing something about my short-term memory here, but surely someone reading can relate!)

This is a recurring issue for me as someone who casually enjoys fighting games. I similarly struggled to find my sea legs in Invincible Vs, which has a similarly bare-bones tutorial. Simply telling me what a button does and then having me press it three times against a stationary enemy isn’t a great way to learn. It rarely gives me a sense of the actual context I’d use that move in, and context is everything in a fighting game. I either find myself constantly referring back to the tutorial or a menu when trying to learn a fighting game, or just remember what I can and make the most of those moves until I naturally learn to use something I’d forgotten about.

I’m sympathetic to fighting game tutorial designers, of course. They have the unenviable task of trying to explain dozens of complicated systems in a quick manner that lets players get to the fun so they can start experimenting. No one wants to be stuck in a long tutorial! But after struggling to get started in another great fighting game that otherwise feels built for me, I’m once again hungry for creative solutions.

I can’t pretend to know the solution, but for my money, Street Fighter 6 is still my north star. Say what you will about its Yakuza-like World Tour mode as a single-player offering, but it’s an incredibly effective teaching tool. The mode gradually introduces new techniques in side-missions as the story progresses, giving you time to learn a move and then put it into practice before being taught something new. That gave me time to commit each new move to memory, and I could hold my own in online matches as a result… Well, I could at least get a few punches in before getting air juggled, at least.

Even if its tutorial is insufficient, I’m planning to push on with Marvel Tokon anyway. It’s the rare competitive fighting game where you can button mash your way into cool combos, and that motivates me to learn how to play more deliberately. Once I actually figure out how to pull off an Assemble Counter on purpose, it’s over for y’all.