I Couldn't Give a Tokon

If you’ve visited this site in the past for some game reviews, or if you read my list of favorite video games, you’d see that I happen to have a keen interest in fighting games. It’s a genre that I have loved since Street Fighter II came to the Super Nintendo. I would never claim to be very good at any of the games, but I always enjoyed the process of learning the mechanics and how the characters operated within them. It was like solving a complicated puzzle without much instruction.

Dagon Dogs Posts

July 8, 2026

50 of My Favorite Video Games

July 8, 2026

Much like every other genre, as the game industry has exploded with popularity, it’s reached a tipping point for me. The last few years in which fighting games were finally learning how to implement good netcode in their online modes, were an overdue godsend that allowed me to enjoy countless hours online. However, all the signs have been there that fighting games were heading down the same path as many others. You have Capcom charging an arm and a leg for new characters and costumes in Street Fighter VI. You have free-to-play 2XKO launching with an expectation that it was going to be so good that the entire genre would change, only for the team to downsize and now have a slow removal of support until it shuts down. You have Sony publishing the next big Arc System Works fighting game.

If you haven’t been paying attention to the video game industry, Sony has been coming under a lot of heat from fans lately, and rightfully so. I won’t get into the details, but just know that they’ve done all they can to show how they’re a big corporation that doesn’t care what you think because you’re going to buy their products anyway.

The truth is, I WAS considering buying one, which is the aforementioned Arc System Works fighting game, Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls. Arc has put out several of my favorite fighting games of the past decade, including Dragon Ball FighterZ and Guilty Gear Strive. Both are beautifully designed anime-style fighting games with fast movement and flexible system mechanics. They also both happen to be rather well-optimized fighters that don’t take up a ton of space on your PC and do not require powerful video cards and processors to handle their graphics. When it was announced that Arc would be making a fighting game using the iconic heroes and villains of the Marvel universe, I was excited to see what they would create. Since its release, however, my interest has not just waned, but plummeted.

But why did my interest fall so fast and hard? Why did I ultimately decide to wait to buy Marvel Tokon? There were a few contributing reasons.

Published by Sony

As I mentioned, Sony has seemingly been on a negative press tour lately, pissing countless people off with policies that either make little sense or are simply designed to remind people that you will own nothing and that you can do nothing about it. Sony-published games have often had a controversy or two attached, like Helldivers 2 did when PC players suddenly learned they had to sync their PC accounts with a PSN account. Sony overturned this particular decision for Helldivers 2 after significant backlash, but it was clear this was always going to be something you would have to do if you played Tokon on PC.

The reasoning for doing this is seemingly just to get as many PC players into Sony’s online ecosystem, because there would be no significant benefit from playing the game online through Sony’s servers. In fact, it would be a negative for a lot of people and not just for performance reasons. Sony’s online service, PSN, is region-locked, meaning that there are numerous countries throughout the world from which you cannot access PSN. Without a PSN account, you can’t play Tokon online, which is essentially saying you don’t get to play the fighting game. I’m not in a blocked region, but I don’t like the idea that I cannot play something I paid money for unless I sign into some online account. Considering all the other cheeky things Sony has done this past year, I’m not exactly eager to hand any money over to them.

A Disastrous PC Launch

While PS5 players seem to be pretty satisfied with the game, the same cannot be said for those who tried the game on PC. In addition to the PSN account shenanigans, players often found that a vast majority of their online matches were unplayable. There was an open beta prior to launch that many players encountered similar issues and raised their voices about. Nonetheless, those issues were not fixed in time for the game’s official launch, and the first few days consisted of mostly negative reviews on the game’s store pages in relation to Tokon’s performance. Streamers and fighting-game professionals were very vocal during these first few days about how awful the experience was online, and many swiftly jumped ship to the console version that ran much better.

Since the game’s release, there have been numerous updates and patches specifically designed to address the PC performance issues, but the damage was done. There are barely any players on Steam now, when everyone expected Tokon to do similar numbers to Dragon Ball FighterZ. The player base has dropped off a cliff, and some of us never even got on board because the launch was so bad. First impressions are extremely important for games like this, and Tokon managed to make almost everyone who showed up on day 1 regret it. It makes me wonder why they didn’t delay the PC release until they had fixed more of the issues, especially when they already had evidence of problems after the open beta?

Unoptimized Modern Crap

Fighting games tend to be simple products that do not require much power to play. Usually, most of the graphical fidelity is put into the characters themselves and the special move effects, while backgrounds are often less detailed since most players would just be paying attention to the fighters on the screen. Arc System Works has established itself as a developer capable of creating visually stunning fighting games using creative camera and rendering tricks. The Guilty Gear franchise has always been at the forefront of discussion when it comes to how good a fighting game looks, but they rocked the world with Dragon Ball FighterZ and Granblue Fantasy VS.

Take a look at the system requirements I’ve listed below for Dragon Ball FighterZ and Guilty Gear Strive, two of Arc’s best-selling games that also happen to be some of their prettiest. I’ve also included the requirements for Street Fighter 6, a visually impressive game that is doing a lot of 3D rendering and particle effects. If you are familiar with these PC components, you can see how much less demanding the Arc games are in comparison to Street Fighter. If this is all Greek to you, I recommend just looking at the GRAPHICS and MEMORY requirements for each before I get to Tokon’s.

Dragon Ball FighterZ System Requirements

MINIMUM:
Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system

OS *: Windows 7/8/10 (64-bit OS required)
PROCESSOR: AMD FX-4350, 4.2 GHz / Intel Core i5-3470, 3.20 GHz
MEMORY: 4 GB RAM
GRAPHICS: Radeon HD 6870, 1 GB / GeForce GTX 650 Ti, 1 GB
DIRECTX: Version 11
NETWORK: Broadband Internet connection
STORAGE: 6 GB available space
SOUND CARD: DirectX compatible soundcard or onboard chipset

RECOMMENDED:

Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
OS *: Windows 7/8/10 (64-bit OS required)
PROCESSOR: AMD Ryzen 5 1400, 3.2 GHz / Intel Core i7-3770, 3.40 GHz
MEMORY: 8 GB RAM
GRAPHICS: Radeon HD 7870, 2 GB / GeForce GTX 660, 2 GB
DIRECTX: Version 11
NETWORK: Broadband Internet connection
STORAGE: 6 GB available space
SOUND CARD: DirectX compatible soundcard or onboard chipset

Guilty Gear Strive System Requirements

MINIMUM:
OS *: Windows 8/10 (64-bit OS required)

PROCESSOR: AMD FX-4350, 4.2 GHz / Intel Core i5-3450, 3.10 GHz
MEMORY: 4 GB RAM
GRAPHICS: Radeon HD 6870, 1 GB / GeForce GTX 650 Ti, 1 GB
DIRECTX: Version 11
NETWORK: Broadband Internet connection
STORAGE: 26 GB available space
SOUND CARD: DirectX compatible soundcard or onboard chipset

RECOMMENDED:

OS *: Windows 8/10 (64-bit OS required)
PROCESSOR: Intel Core i7-3770, 3.40 GHz
MEMORY: 8 GB RAM
GRAPHICS: GeForce GTX 660
DIRECTX: Version 11
NETWORK: Broadband Internet connection
STORAGE: 30 GB available space
SOUND CARD: DirectX compatible soundcard or onboard chipset

Street Fighter 6 System Requirements

MINIMUM:

Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
OS: Windows 10 (64 bit required)
PROCESSOR: Intel Core i5-7500 / AMD Ryzen 3 1200
MEMORY: 8 GB RAM
GRAPHICS: GTX1060 (VRAM 6GB) / Radeon RX 580 (VRAM 4GB)
DIRECTX: Version 12
STORAGE: 60 GB available space
ADDITIONAL NOTES: - The framerate may drop during graphic-intensive scenes. - Additional storage is required for each subsequent update.

RECOMMENDED:

Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
OS: Windows 10 (64 bit)/Windows 11 (64 bit)
PROCESSOR: Intel Core i7 8700 / AMD Ryzen 5 3600
MEMORY: 16 GB RAM
GRAPHICS: RTX2070 / Radeon RX 5700XT
DIRECTX: Version 12
STORAGE: 60 GB available space
ADDITIONAL NOTES: - The framerate may drop during graphic-intensive scenes. - Additional storage is required for each subsequent update.

In the minimum requirements for each of these games, they’re asking that you have a graphics card from at least 4 generations ago and less than 12 GB of RAM. In the recommended settings for the Arc games, they’re still just asking for a graphics card that came out in 2012, and Street Fighter is asking for one that came out in 2018. Now look at the requirements for Marvel Tokon.

MINIMUM:

Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
OS: Windows 11
PROCESSOR: Intel Core i5-8400 or AMD Ryzen 5 1600X
MEMORY: 16 GB RAM
GRAPHICS: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 6GB or AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT 8GB
STORAGE: 27 GB available space

RECOMMENDED:

Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
OS: Windows 11
PROCESSOR: Intel Core i7-8700 or AMD Ryzen 5 3600X
MEMORY: 16 GB RAM
GRAPHICS: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 8 GB or AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT 16 GB
STORAGE: 27 GB available space

The minimum requirements for this game are on par with or more demanding than Street Fighter 6’s recommended settings, with the exception of the processors. So, on top of the fact that Sony’s region-locking shenanigans prevent people from playing the game, now the minimum system requirements are locking people out of it. Most PC players would require an expensive rig just to run this game, and it would be even more expensive for those trying to play on a laptop. I barely have the minimum equipment to run this game, with my older graphics card being the main thing that would hold me back.

On top of all that, it was reported by players at launch that even if you met the minimum requirements, you were likely to run into performance issues in both offline and network modes, with some of the blame being pointed at the Sony DRM running in the background—people were even saying that the pirated versions of the game ran better without it. Due to the game’s design, players in online matches with other players who had PCs with only the minimum requirements experienced laggy and awful performance because the game was trying to compensate for the graphical fidelity during the match. In other words, only players with PlayStation 5s and PCs that more than met the recommended settings could enjoy Tokon without performance problems.

No Tokons Left

While Marvel Tokon is still finding support from enthusiasts and fans on the PlayStation, interest in it on the much broader PC market has not just dropped off a cliff, but is practically non-existent.

Clearly, I am not the only person who lost interest in this game after it came out. You can see the small spike in players at the beginning of August, when they first implemented a set of patches to improve the game’s performance. However, it obviously wasn’t enough to correct the game’s downward trajectory. For some reason, the developers and journalists are shocked at the low number of PC players still engaging with it. I would think the reason why is pretty obvious when you make a game in a niche part of the video game market that prevents people from playing due to expensive upgrades to their systems or because they simply are locked out of a region.

Video games published by big companies like Sony and Microsoft are becoming too much of a luxury form of entertainment. New games are already expensive, and fighting games are a genre that requires you to buy the game when it’s new to get the most out of how many other players are online at launch. By making your game more expensive and also having system requirements that force out people who can’t afford it, you have made a niche game even more exclusive. Instead of producing a product that a lot of people would want to play, like Marvel fans, Sony has made a product for a very small audience.

It’s a real shame that all this happened for Arc System Works’ newest game, because by all accounts, people who were able to play it have claimed it’s pretty fun, even if some claim it’s not particularly complex at the competitive level. This should have been a slam-dunk hit. This should have been the next big fighting game to carry Arc System Works forward for the next few years. Instead, Sony did everything they could to sabotage Tokon’s chances at reaching a wide audience. I was looking forward to Marvel Tokon, but now I have no sympathy for its failure on the side of Sony. If sales end up being a disappointment to Sony, this is all I have to say: