Respawn Monday #9: Tokon Fighting Souls & the need to Palworld
I'm still focused on Palworld as the world keeps me invested the more I explore each area. It's massive, but I did squeeze in some time with Marvel's Tokon: Fighting Souls open beta. Some thoughts.
Palworld continues to impress
I'm now over 80 hours into Palworld, and it's a game that keeps on giving. The reward for exploring and capturing new Pals in each new location refreshes the gameplay loop, and I still have a long list of things I want to accomplish.
I've established three bases, each with its own specific role: a mining base, a ranch base, and a main base that mostly grows food to sustain all three while housing the upgrading tools that fuel my explorations.
Despite having three bases fully operational, I still don't have enough materials for my next batch of upgrades. A grind is forming as dungeons and certain encounters start to feel similar, and the requirements for items are mostly tall orders. It's not all bad, though, since the Pals and bosses I'm encountering are getting tougher too. I find myself preparing more often: bringing specific Pals to exploit elemental weaknesses, and more.
The bosses are no longer dying in a few hits. They're sponges with attacks that require chaining multiple dodge rolls together just to mitigate the incoming damage. My go-to Pal lineup had to be upgraded: stronger attacks, higher defense, and a bit of management on my part, being their trainer and all. When a Pal gets focused down, I noticed you can mitigate damage from something like a long beam attack simply by recalling it. I also realized it's better to keep switching Pals during a boss fight to maintain a constant stream of skills being cast. With skills going on cooldown, I can cycle through my whole roster and come back to my first Pal with everything ready to go again. it’s a bit more complex, which is something I appreciate considering how much time I’ve spent on the game so far.
I see issues the closer I get to the end of the game, but none are game-breaking enough to kill my urge to keep playing. Pocketpair did a fantastic job here considering the game's scale. Some things could have been handled better, but the evolution from a wooden crafting bench to full assembly lines feels satisfying to progress through. Highly recommended for anyone who loves survival crafting games.
Marvel's Tokon: Fighting Souls Open Beta
The open beta for Arc System Works' Marvel's Tokon: Fighting Souls ran last weekend, and I spent a full day with it, learning the new systems through casual online matches. It's a fun and accessible fighting game.
Newcomers will get confused despite the game's best efforts. There's no way around it: the tutorial (which you're forced to go through) does its best to explain everything, but not all of it sticks. Most players will have forgotten most of it after a few online sessions.
Players new to fighting games, or new to Tokon specifically, can mash buttons and still find success thanks to the auto-combo system. Pressing the same attack button repeatedly triggers a combo string that usually leads into a team-up attack or a character's super, dealing respectable damage. Spam buttons and you might even look cool doing it. Fighting game enthusiasts won't love that you can't turn auto-combo off, but I appreciate the inclusion. The genre has always been intimidating because of its complexity, and this at least lets a newcomer pull off a few cool moves in their first hours with the game.
But there's real depth underneath. Auto-attacks only get you so far against someone who knows what they're doing. I've already seen the potential for extended combos, assist tech, and solid bread-and-butter setups to keep the pressure on. It's only been a few days, but players are already finding these lines, and it was fun slowly discovering what's possible in the game's Training mode while waiting for online matches.
Another highlight of the beta was a few chapters of the story mode, which follows each of Tokon's major teams. We got a handful of episodes following Spider-Man's team and how it formed, told through comic-strip panels with limited animation to bring each character to life.
I can already see this format struggling to land. There's a lot of story building leading up to a single fight that barely lasts a few minutes before the game moves on to more panels. Hopefully later chapters bring more challenging and interesting fights, since the one episode available in the beta left a stale taste thanks to its cheesy writing.
It'll take weeks before the community gets a full grasp of the game. With only a few days of access so far, most online matches feel like 1v1s with assists tacked on, since few players are switching between characters mid-match while they're still learning. Understandable this early on, it's hard to learn all four of your characters in one weekend, but that versatility will matter a lot for how inviting this game feels to the casual crowd once it fully releases.
About the Author - Carlos Hernandez
Carlos Hernandez is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Too Much Gaming, where he writes about video games, reviews, and industry news. A lifelong gamer, he would do anything to experience Final Fantasy Tactics for the first time again and has a love/hate relationship with games that require hunting for new gear to improve your character.
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