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Well, this is going to be divisive.
If you’re a single player gamer hoping for a robust story mode for PS5 fighter Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls, then you may be expecting something similar to Street Fighter 6’s World Tour or even Mortal Kombat 1’s cinematic narrative.
But now Arc System Works has confirmed in an interview with Japanese publication 4Gamer that you’ll be getting a 10-hour comic book or manga, with animated panels.
The story will progress without any gameplay or battles, so it’s just something you’ll read. Apparently there’ll be DualSense haptic feedback support throughout, but nothing else – no dialogue decisions, no minigames, and so on.
You’ll be able to change the speed of the comic and even pause it while you look at the artwork, and there’ll be full voice acting across 10 languages, with Sony helping on localisation.
Fans of Guilty Gear Strive will already be somewhat familiar with this format, because that game’s story mode plays out a little bit like an anime. Again, there’s no actual gameplay.
Producer Takeshi Yamanaka explained, via Google Translate:
“Marvel is all about comics, so we thought about how to make it interactively enjoyable, and that’s how the idea of making comics move came about. By adding sound and movement to motion comics, we can also make use of the PS5's vibration function.”
Yamanaka reiterated that the content is designed to be “enjoyed like a comic”, so it’s something you read through before moving on.
We’re a little surprised the dev is touting 10 hours of content here, but with five teams in the full game, we suppose it makes sense.
Yamanaka described the story as ‘Episodes Mode’, so we suspect there’ll be five two hour episodes dedicated to each team.
Obviously fighting games are designed to be played competitively, and so that’s the crux of Marvel Tokon’s content. But given the large superhero appeal here, this does seem disappointing – even if the comics could be fun.
Our confusion around this is the decision to remove battles entirely. Zenless Zone Zero, for example, will often use comic book panels to tell its story, but these are included between bits of gameplay.
Could the comics not have been used to tell the story, with battles along the way?
Clearly this is going to be a big let down for a lot of people, but we are interested in seeing the type of story Arc System Works delivers here.
It’s teased the plot in the past, which revolves around a character called The Promoter, who organises a high-stakes ‘Challenge of the Champion’ tournament, involving some of Marvel’s biggest heroes and villains.
Want to know what happens? You’ll have to, er, read the interactive comic book to find out.