Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls for PC gets off to a rough start

So Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls – Sony’s latest live service title and its first true fighting game for the PlayStation, developed in close collaboration with Arc System Works – has just been released on PS5 and PC, roughly a year after it was first announced. The game has had something of a bumpy ride to the finish in terms of community reception and development choices, causing enthusiasm and controversy in equal measure. As it turns out, it was foolish of us to believe that such an impressive but divisive production would ever cross the line with no issues whatsoever – even if not all gamers are affected.

Yours truly did not want to publish a story on this game before checking out both its PS5 and the PC versions, as well as running a few tests on the latter in different configurations. That’s what he did over the weekend and… first things first: this is an absolutely gorgeous fighting game, probably the best-looking “2D/3D” one to date.

Yes, Arc System Works had already impressed everyone with the graphics, art direction and presentation of Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls during the closed and open betas, but the final version – where consumers get to see how all the visual elements come together – is so spectacular, on so many levels, it’s hard to believe it’s running on a standard PS5. Yes, this is no exaggeration: it is that beautiful at times.

The PC version of Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls is not where it needs to be yet

There’s a reason behind this visual masterpiece which, sadly, seems to have also contributed to Sony’s latest title being hammered with negative reviews on Steam right now: Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls is based on Epic’s Unreal Engine 5 – a development platform that’s capable of amazing results, but also one that’s demanding on system resources and in dire need of careful optimization for different formats.

As this article was heading for publication, over 60% of PC gamers dropping a review on Steam report low and unstable frame rates – even in low graphics settings – plus a lot of microstuttering that makes it hard to play smoothly, especially online. These technical problems had been widely reported during the July open beta and, well, less than two weeks’ time was obviously not enough to fix them.

Yours truly was able to replicate these issues on three different machines – and, while they were not annoying to same degree in all three cases, they were definitely there. On his daily driver PC – Ryzen 9 7950X/RTX 4090/128GB RAM – there were no dropped frames at 4K/60 at maximum graphics quality, but he did detect the microstuttering issue many times, not following any pattern in particular but randomly appearing in several sessions. To be fair, it did mainly affect online play – which gets much worse if the person at the other end of the line also experiences microstuttering – but still.

On the living room gaming PC – Ryzen 7 5800X/Radeon 9060 XT 16GB/64GB RAM – there were quite a few dropped frames at 4K/60 at high graphics settings, but the game was still enjoyable for the most part. The microstuttering issue was even more pronounced, though, especially in online play. Just like with the daily driver PC mentioned earlier, the game was not unplayable – but it definitely was not anywhere near as smooth as one would expect of that hardware in either case.

With an old, recently upgraded, soon-to-be-a-Steam-Machine office PC, though, the overall experience was much, much worse. That PC’s configuration sits between the minimum and recommended specs Arc System Works published for the game – Core i5 8500/Radeon RX 7600 8GB/16GB RAM – and it was just not possible to get Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls to run smoothly enough on it at 1080p, let alone 1440p or 4K, even at low graphics settings. A stable framerate of 60 FPS is what most fighting game fans rightly demand nowadays and the title was running nowhere near that, frames dropping all the time, microstuttering evident in all game modes, all the while looking worse than it does on the PS5.

Many consumers posted negative Steam reviews for the game for other reasons too – ranging from the mandatory PlayStation account login to the lack of Linux support – but, even regardless of those, it’s clear that the PC version of Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls has not been properly optimized. A lot of people blame the Easy Anti-Cheat system embedded in the title, which seems to be keeping the CPU of many PCs way busier than it should, while others point out that neither the minimum or recommended PC specs for the game are actually realistic. More worryingly, a lot of gamers are reporting crashes both predictable and unpredictable in nature, regardless of the tech specs of the PCs in question.

Whatever the case may be, it’s clear that Arc System Works has a lot of work to do in the weeks and months ahead if it means to deliver a PC game that’s worthy of the incredible work its designers and animators did for it. The company’s track record is not impeccable when it comes to PC ports, but future tournament presence, Sony’s involvement and the percentage of fighting game fans who actually prefer using PC over console these days should help things along… hopefully.

The PS5 version of Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls is absolutely amazing, though

The unsatisfactory state the PC version of this game shipped in is unfortunate… but it’s not something players who will pick up the PlayStation version of the game will face. Since the PS5 has clearly been the lead development platform for Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls – it is a Sony-funded title after all – there are virtually no technical issues to speak of. Yours truly played the game on both the standard PS5 and the PS5 Pro and can confirm that the game is always locked at 60 FPS, even at times when there is a lot happening on screen.

This is important because the hardware of the standard PS5 is not exactly cutting-edge anymore (not even on par with the hardware specs recommended by ArcSys for the game on PC actually), yet it seems able to handle this Unreal Engine-powered title just fine. One might discern a few corners cut in the graphics quality of some effects here and there while watching others play, but that’s about it. Certainly not something anyone actually playing the game would notice in the heat of battle – in stark contrast to the amazing design and art direction of the title, which absolutely everyone will.

Sony notes that Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls takes advantage of the extra power offered by the PS5 Pro in some way but, for the life of his, yours truly was not able to tell the difference during his first few hours of play. It may be that the game runs at a higher internal resolution on the Pro and that the PSSR algorithm does a better job at upscaling the resulting image to look sharper, but it was very hard to tell in motion.

In any case, the graphics of the game are just as clean and detailed on the PS5 Pro as on the RTX 4090-powered PC yours truly runs it at native 4K resolution with every feature maxed out, so consumers using Sony’s most powerful system basically get all the visual impact of the title without the technical issues PC gamers currently face. Not totally unexpected, yes, but something owners of both platforms might want to keep in mind.

It’s fair to assume that despite Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls being off to a rocky start on PC, its overall quality, the enduring appeal of popular characters and stories – as well as the reach of the PlayStation ecosystem as a whole – will help it secure a place among the most talked-about fighting games on the market for many months to come. Time will tell, though, when it comes to (a) how much damage this unoptimized PC version did to the game’s prospects and (b) how quickly Arc System Works can deliver the necessary fixes to ensure that this does not end up being a PS5-only title in the long term.

The real question is: will Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls impress consumers who haven’t played a fighting game before just enough for them to give this one a try and stick around? Plus, will it be able to build a loyal core audience of experienced fighting games players who will make sure it gets proper attention in high-profile tournaments and other events? Sony’s game needs both kinds of players in order to be widely considered as successful. Let’s come back to that in around a year’s time then, yes?