20. marvel tōkon: fighting souls
this will be the only time i put the macron over the o: at the time of writing, marvel tōkon: fighting souls is a bad game.
i was tokon's number 1 supporter. a few days after deadpool was announced - footdive, totsugeki, vegeta assist deadpool - a bunch of my friends and i watched all of the game's team trailers in a voice call. then, not long after, the final beta went live. we played the shit out of that game.
then the game came out, and i was busy that day. then the next day, or maybe the day after that, i finally got to play tokon. and i did, as i expected to, love the game.
i really like magik. i think she's really hot. like, unbelievably hot. i'd never even heard of her, having managed to dodge both marvel snap and marvel rivals. i didn't even know she had the accent when i picked her. i just thought, here's a white woman who looks to have some wealth. the accent sealed the deal, and her orange-skinned install sealed the deal. somehow, some way, that tail would be getting involved.
unfortunately the pc version didn't work then and barely works now, the game's balancing feels nonexistent, neutral is determined by who's army of assists can create a better smokescreen, and you sit there crouching for half an hour blocking mid after mid, praying that your opponent will tag in spider-man soon so he can hit you with his overhead and you can at least lose the match rather than be trapped in this endless blockstring. oh, and also, why do motion inputs feel like that?
it's funny how little i care about tokon considering it helped indirectly spark a meltdown that i had in front of basically everyone i know. one minute we were discussing the game and the next i was attacking, with venomous precision, several of my friends. it was horribly embarrassing, even moreso in the aftermath of the event, where i had to apologize (something i'm terrible at) to several people, and ultimately reckon with the idea that i have not been "holding it all together" as effectively as i'd led myself to believe. since that day, i agonize over basically every interaction i have. i've always struggled to be a nice person. i'm blunt and dismissive and arrogant and combative. i've felt for most of my life that i've been battling my antisocial tendencies. every year i felt i was making incremental progress. this year i think i've lost the fight entirely.
the nice thing about tokon is it finally got me into x-men. i fucking love x-men. i just finished season 1 of x-men '97. that shit was awesome. shout out the big dog erik lehnsherr. i would turn on humanity so fast for that guy. i'd be like yes bro get the white ones first. i tried reading x-men as well. well, i say i tried, but i'd rather saying i'm trying. it's just hard to get into that era of comics. they're so wordy, and as someone who actually reads books (like, you know, like actual novels, without any pictures in them) i find it hard to stomach a lot of it. i'm still powering through, though, on the promise that it'll get good eventually.
i hope tokon adds nightcrawler next. he's my favorite mutant so far, other than magik. oh, but i want daredevil even more. that guy is my favorite super hero ever. that netflix show gagged me as a kid.
just today arc system works said they were going to fix the game. it's supposed to be reassuring but it's not. "we didn't know it would be assist slop," they claim. but how is that even possible? obviously no developer of a competitive game can accurately predict the shape their game will take once players are let loose, but...seriously, how could you not know tokon would become this? it speaks to a frightening incompetency.
i've basically given up hope on tokon. between the botched pc release, the balancing, and the systems feeling rotten at their core, i'm just going to leave any expectations for the game behind. if arc sys fixes it, hey, awesome. if not, i'll just play avatar. been really enjoying avatar.