Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls Director Issues Apology for Rocky PC Launch, Details Upcoming Balance Adjustments

Kazuto Sekine, director of Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls, has released a statement apologizing for the game's problematic PC launch and outlining forthcoming balance changes based on the development team's observations.

The statement was shared on Monday, September 14, through a brief social media post and a more comprehensive blog post on the game's Steam page.

Sekine began by acknowledging the severe issues that plagued Tokon's PC release, which were significant enough that prominent fighting game streamer Maximilian Dood uninstalled the game during a live stream.

"Witnessing the positive reception to the game's content, with players enjoying the experience and feeling motivated to continue playing, has brought immense joy to the entire development team," Sekine wrote.

"However, we are also aware that the launch period was marred by stability issues on PC, and we sincerely apologize for the frustration this has caused our players. It was never our intention for players to be unable to enjoy the game as we envisioned, and we are actively working on improvements to the PC version so that everyone can fully enjoy the game."

He then highlighted a couple of areas that the development team believes "need to be addressed," including reassessing input responsiveness and concerns about overly frequent assists and tags.

"We have noticed that certain inputs, such as attacks from aerial dashes or Free Flight, would sometimes fail to register correctly or at all," he explained. "To fix these issues, we plan to adjust the current input windows to ensure a smoother and more responsive gameplay experience.

"Currently, there is a 6-frame input buffer when holding a button. However, we intend to modify how inputs are handled so that, in certain situations, the action will be executed even if the button is not held."

Regarding frequent assists and tags, Sekine acknowledged that the game was initially balanced with the intention of players constantly switching characters in and out of battle. In fact, he revealed that the current state of the game has surpassed their expectations in this regard, though they recognize the community's concerns that this might be occurring too often.

Specifically, the team is working on increasing the cooldown time for certain assists and switches to "allow us to maintain rushdown capabilities while also creating more time for phases of neutral play." Sekine stated that the team is aiming to implement these changes in updates "as soon as possible."

However, changes to overall character balance will be minimal. Sekine and the Tokon team believe it's too early to make sweeping changes, as they are currently in a "discovery phase." Sekine said it is "still too early to start modifying character traits," especially since the changes to assists and tags will also impact gameplay.

This is the latest statement from the Tokon team following producer Takeshi Yamanaka's apology for the rough PC launch and his admission that regaining players' trust would be "extremely challenging."

"Unfortunately, in the PC version of the game, there have been in-game issues experienced by many players, and we sincerely apologize to the player base for all of these problems," he said in an August interview with VGC.

Despite these difficulties, Tokon was well-received critically, with IGN scoring the game a nine out of 10. After Steam reviews took a hit, Arc System Works quickly released an update that resolved many issues for PC players and has been regularly communicating with the fighting game community in the weeks since, as evidenced by this latest blog post.