Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls is shaping up to be an awesome fighter from the team at Arc System Works, offering a Japanese take on classic Marvel characters. But if you enjoy a chunky singleplayer story mode like the ones seen in the recent Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter games, you might be dissapointed.
4-Gamer.net sat down with lead battle designer Kazutoshi Sekine and producer Takeshi Yamanaka, and brought up the topic of a solo mode. What was revealed is that the campaign is actually a 10-hour comic book containing no gameplay.
The following quotes use Google translate.
From the beginning of the project, we decided that a story mode was absolutely necessary for casual players, and the only thing left to discuss was what form it should take. Marvel is all about comics, so we thought about how to make it interactively enjoyable, and that’s how the idea of making comics move came about. – Yamanaka
4-Gamer.net seemed surprised as well, and asked the question straight: does it really contain no gameplay? No fights?
No. Basically, once you start episode mode, the story will progress even if you leave it alone. You can fast-forward by pressing a button, or pause and enjoy the illustrations at your leisure, but it’s designed to be enjoyed in the same way as reading a comic book. – Yamanaka
It’s…a little strange, I reckon. Why not intersperse the comic with actual matches where you play out the battle depicted in the comic? Other games have done something similiar, after all.
This is a blow to people like myself who love to play through fighting games solo, since venturing online is a one-way ticket to an ass-whooping. Of course, we will still be able to jump into random matches, but a proper campaign where you move from fight to fight has been a huge reason for my enjoying of stuff like Mortal Kombat 11.
WGB 