Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls has been highly anticipated for some time and that’s partly because it’s from Arc System Works, the company behind the likes of Guilty Gear, Blazblue, and Persona 4 Arena. Yet Steam users are disappointed in its opening few days. That’s because despite many praising the game itself, it reportedly has a litany of tech issues.
The game currently sits at a ‘Mixed’ (56% negative) rating on Steam with almost 1,600 reviews, and it appears to have around 10,000 concurrent players on SteamDB at the time of writing. Considering it’s a $60 game, that’s a pretty sizable number of people.
One of the top-rated negative reviews right now complains that they’re getting 45 fps on the game, where they get significantly more on Tekken and Street Fighter. This would be the perfect chance to use the fairly new system for adding PC specs into Steam reviews, but alas, the user leaves none. Still, good performance is necessary for fighting games that rely heavily on reading moves and responding as fast as possible. Another popular negative review says, “either the netcode or the poor performance makes the online play very bad, with rollback spikes.”
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A user on the r/games subreddit echoes this same frustration with performance, saying “The CPU utilisation in this game is straight up bonkers. It tapers off a little bit after the tutorial, but there is no reason why this shouldn’t be able to run on lower-end rigs.”
This is all after the devs vowed to fix performance issues for launch day, at the end of July.
(Image credit: Arc System Works)
With its anti-cheat system (Kernel Level Easy Anti-Cheat), one Steam review says the game is “aggressively hostile to Linux players for absolutely no reason”. It notes that, even though previous Arc System Works games with Easy Anti-Cheat work on Linux (like Dragon Ball FighterZ), Fighting Souls simply refuses to play.
The final common critique is that Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls forces users to sign in with a PSN login. This same critique hit Helldivers 2 back in May, 2024, when Sony added the login requirement months after the game’s launch. In fairness, part of the anger around the Helldivers 2 update was that players who already bought the game, played it, and could potentially struggle to refund it felt like they had been tricked into making or maintaining an account for a console they don’t even use.
Still, early player figures seem fairly strong, getting two-thirds of the peak concurrent players of the Fighting Souls Open Beta. That peak concurrent figure places it just below Dragon Ball Fighter Z and Guilty Gear Strive for opening day, and the weekend could shift those figures too. SteamDB tell an incomplete picture, so take those figures with a grain of salt, but there are enough players complaining that Arc System Works is likely very aware of what the mixed rating is all about.
Here’s hoping we see fixes in the coming weeks, as it seems like a solid game. We even said it “has the sauce” just a few weeks ago, so it would be a shame to see that sauce go rotten for reasons beyond its gameplay.
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