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post-launch tokon review

again, getting it out of the way: the state of the pc port is inexcusable and I would not blame anyone for being turned off by its state at launch. sony sticking a ton of anticheat and antipiracy bloatware into the game to enforce the psn infrastructure is explicitly anticonsumer and my current hope is that players and prospective customers can bully the publisher into removing it altogether, like with helldivers 2. to asw's credit, they seem to be doing a really good job at putting out hotfixes in an extremely timely fashion- pc performance has improved quite a lot in less than a week of the game being out.

I've been at the point for a while where when a new game comes out I can discern my taste and decide where it sits on the spectrum of:

"this game is really good and I want to keep playing it," often despite what other people believe about the game

"this game is really good, but has some problems, but I'm willing to ride those out"

"this game is good, but I would rather put the time into something else"

"this game has too much stuff in it that keeps me from wanting to play" or maybe "this game doesn't have anything in it that will keep me playing"

the only game I'm currently playing that immediately hit perfectly for me once I got my hands on it was uni (from when I began playing unist all the way up til the current patch of uni2.) games like strive and mbtl sat for me around the second bullet when they came out, and after a lot of patches and quality of life fixes, they sit solidly in the first bullet. games like granblue or dnfd sit around the third bullet, because I liked them fine enough but they had bits in them where I couldn't imagine taking them seriously, whereas 2xko or tekken 8 are in the fourth where they were either lacking stuff to keep my interest or just outright had repulsive or bizarre mechanics or implementations.

tokon is currently in the second bullet for me, and I personally believe it's only a few patches away from staying in the first bullet. my main issue, I think, is that the problems I have with the game are also bits that seem intentional and may even have had a lot of thought put into their design, but should probably still be tweaked at some point.

what this game does that stands apart from other tag fighters in the recent trend (2xko and invs) is that the characters are really stand-out in how unique they are. even the white bread characters (cap and tony) have a lot of creative stuff going on. my main problem with 2xko was that very few characters were doing stuff I hadn't seen in other fighting games before, there was a shocking lack of verticality for a tag game, and toolkits were also very small. invs also had the same issue where every character was basically "guy who flies and punches you," and it had a bunch of system stuff that seemed straight-up bizarre. I think I've finally settled on tony point and spidey/shuri/blade for my remaining slots, since those characters all feel really good to play and have a lot of the options that I tend to like in my mains.

unfortunately despite being really excited about danger there's a lot of stuff about her that feels really weird and offputting. she's by far the worst-feeling hoverdash character I've ever touched and I've been playing both morrigan and i-no across various versions for quite a long time at this point. danger's hoverdash just feels bizarre and floaty (j.m and j.h may even whiff on crouchers sometimes) so instant overheads feel really hard to do and holding 663 to get the lower angle to make them hit feels really awkward. she and robbie also have the same issue with not being able to go into uniques from normals (I don't know if anyone else has this problem but I've tried everyone for a little bit and I don't think they do) so it feels a lot harder for her to set up the drones that make her gameplan work compared to other characters' steps one and two. the closest comparison I have is magik who can set up her portals from buttons fairly easily. other than danger, however, I think every other character on the roster is at least very well-tuned and at most a blast to play. I also genuinely think green goblin is one of the coolest new fighting game characters ever, period.

tokon's main friction, to me at least, comes from offensive systems that seem like they're deliberately holding you back, combined with weak or limited defensive options that make you realize why the offense is so tightly restricted.

there's the four-gatling lockout on block, of course, but beyond that there's also that frustrating lockout on assists and raw tag where you can't do any of those unless you're in neutral or a recovery state. since plus frames from normals aren't very abundant and you still need to wait until the recovery frames from those buttons (or from specials and uniques) there's usually a gap between your button and your assist call in a blockstring, which makes your pressure feel less airtight than a comparable tag fighter like dbfz.

this also has the added effect of making mixups feel weak at a system level, even though there's a lot of air mobility and airdashes are incredibly snappy. loads of characters still have ways around this within their own kit, either with canned high/low or true ambiguous 50/50s, and stagger pressure is very strong since there's no pushblock (more on that in a bit) but for the most part since it's hard to stay plus even on some assist calls it's hard to begin high-low. you can, however, enforce left-right very easily since meaty active tag mixups break crossup protection, and this can even be performed meaty and/or against breakable walls. j.Ls are also all mids, which is fine- this isn't the first game to implement anti-f-shiki tech like that- but it also makes the inability to act during an 8-way airdash a bit nonsensical if instant overheads are already not going to work. 8-ways also have other utility for the characters that have them anyway so I don't think it matters much.

that bit above is stuff I've remarked on about offense already, but I want to elaborate a bit more about stuff I think is really neat, mainly the combo system. there's loads of stuff about combos that people are discovering every day, and I think the main appeal that it has to me is that there's a lot of focus on improvisation over optimization. different starters and parts of the screen will lead to different combos, and since you can see the combo gauge fill up as you go, with different tools like assist otgs and ex moves resetting the gauge, you're encouraged to clean up your route on the fly. the execution is also not as lenient as most of asw's other games, with an input parser that feels more like fpan or snk's. the tight execution also makes things like doing restands or rejumps or flight cancels or 8-ways to extend your combo feel pretty good when you get consistent. maximizing your damage also seems to entail tagging after the assist call to do the next character's combo, and you can probably repeat this with every member if you're precise enough. this is also a hold-to-tech game so the possibility of blue beat routes exists again. I personally feel like this could be one of the most expressive modern games we've seen in a while in terms of combos- as people figure out more of the built-in tricks to subvert juggle decay and the filling of the combo gauge, it'll probably feel a lot like how people adjust their routes in sf6 based on starter hit versus optimal route versus drive gauge and super gauge availability.

although admittedly you can almost always route into something like a j.2h assist otg if you don't feel confident going for something more complicated. that's probably why a lot of people who aren't thinking much about labbing routing or who are spectating the game with disinterest complain about same-y combos- because people still aren't comfortable with more complicated stuff like tagging after assist otg to maximize their damage, so all they see is basic ladder combo x3 into level 2 or something. also, the juggle decay or undizzy or what-have-you (marked by "Combo time-out!" like the gbvsr "Combo limit" indicator) is hidden and seems to be unrelated to the situation when you max out the combo gauge, which I think is unnecessary and even confusing obfuscation when games like uni2 and the upcoming mbtw have very detailed combo counter information. it'd be nice quality-of-life if some of that got to be peeled away, especially since this game has quite a lot of other good qol and ux design in it, second only to sf6. (it's even got replay takeover, and they didn't bother advertising that at all, lmao. I really hope they port that into strive, because it's asw's first post-strive game to have it.)

one of my biggest chafing points with the game is that defense currently feels really weak, or more specifically uninteractive. as mentioned before, there's no pushblock (either like mvc advancing guard or gg/bb fd) so you don't have a quick method of sending the attacker back during a blockstring. instant block has a lenient input window but doesn't adjust the defender's frame advantage, instead providing them with a bit of meter gain and reducing chip damage and pushback. (there's no chip kills in this game.) different characters also have access to stuff like armor, parries, real dps, and level 1s are all invincible on startup as well. the only defensive mechanics are tied to spending assemble gauge and have kind of confusing in-game terminology. there's assemble counter, which is the 4L+A parry (that even beats throws!) but is very slow and can easily be baited or os'ed against, and can't be input during blockstun.

the next option, which is I think more problematic, is crossover, which is the guard cancel that puts you in the qte cutscene. the first problem with crossover is that unlike other guard cancels, it forces you into the qte, so you can't bait it like you can with dead angle or strive-yrc. the counterplay is also very uninteresting and is almost always weighed really bad against the defender. if the attacker presses the assemble command (L+A) as soon as the qte begins, the attacker will spend a bar of assemble gauge to reset the situation back to neutral. if you press too late or you don't have gauge to riposte with, the guard cancel is successful. however, if you press the riposte at the correct timing, you get a perfect crossover reflect, which puts the defender in the disassembled state, locking them out of team actions until their entire gauge refills. the second problem with this is that inputting a perfect reflect is really easy and can be hit pretty consistently even with minimal practice. the input window is only like five or six frames wide, but there's a massive visual queue for when you want to input it correctly (when the big text that says CROSSOVER in the background begins to change colors) so if the attacker is bothering to pay attention at all the defender will basically just lose every single time for picking the only defensive option they have access to during blockstun. this essentially means that, if the defender uses crossover correctly (when the attacker has no assemble gauge remaining) there's absolutely no counterplay available and it's very uninteresting in terms of interactivity; but if the defender presses it at any other time, it's basically a kill-yourself button. I'm quite shocked that a defensive mechanic like this exists at all and I would not be surprised if it got reworked or replaced very quickly given how much asw's tokon team seems to be responding to feedback.

when it all comes together, you begin to understand maybe why assist calling has so many restrictions on it or why mixups are so hard to come by when the defensive mechanics are so rote. having said that, I think the obvious solution would be that both offense and defense should be much stronger in tandem, rather than putting restrictions on one to compensate for the weak options of the other. I don't think the game needs a pushblock, but if there was a stronger guard cancel that maybe cost super meter instead of assist and needed to be baited correctly in order to keep your turn, or if there was a burst to prevent the combos from feeling as long, or if the window on hitting a perfect reflect was much harder, I would then argue that plus frames should be more generous and that things like the gatling and assist lockouts should be done away with in order to facilitate better mixup options.

there's a lot of other stuff going on here that I really like and makes the game feel complete as a 'product,' even though I kind of hate thinking about art and entertainment like that and I really think that 'fighting games have a product design problem' essayist should be shoved into a locker. the combo trials are pretty simple and sparse, but they offer 'level-up missions' that try to get you to think about combo structure without actually providing the recipe, and attempting those and studying other people's solutions to them has been a lot of fun. as mentioned before, the game has replay takeover from the jump, and it has quite a lot of good training mode qol, so it's really easy to study the game on your own and find solutions without looking up other stuff, which is handy when the dustloop is still in its infancy. there's a lot of good offline singleplayer content, and they tied stuff like unlocking champion and the various colors to singleplayer mode completion, which gives you a lot of incentive to mess around with that stuff to get familiar with the game before jumping online. on the ps5 version at least, booting to main menu is extremely fast, especially now that they just let you skip opening logos instantly. I haven't tried the matchmaking queues yet (I've heard they're unfortunately hit-or-miss in quality, likely also due to sony tampering) but finding games in the big lobbies is thankfully very fast and you can matchmake into there from the title screen very quickly- in my experience the time from boot to match is about as fast, if not faster, than 2xko. I hope some of that stuff (specifically the reduced boot/server connection times and replay takeover) gets ported to strive, because I still plan on playing that game quite a lot and I'd love if improvements made in their other games teach them lessons on implementation.

that's about all I have to say about tokon for a while, I plan on just shutting up and playing it for the next little bit. I do think it's really fucked up that sony meddling by implementing bullshit for anti-cheat/anti-mod/even anti-linux ended up souring what should have been a slam dunk of a launch for asw. anime games really can't catch a break. I got my ps5 because the then-tech fad of crypto and nfts were driving up the cost of gpus and buying a console on sale was less expensive than upgrading my pc, but now all kinds of setups and machines are extremely cost-prohibitive due to ai, and I hate that this ends up gatekeeping a lot of people from both the general gaming hobby and my personal little niche. anti-consumer stuff like demanding a psn login to play on steam just ends up locking even more people from playing what is honestly an incredibly fun fighting game. I hope if any of this stuff changes at some point (the improvement of the pc port and the sony-exclusivity restrictions) that more people give it a shot because I think there's a lot of stuff here that shows that asw has learned a lot of lessons about fighting game design and isn't as concerned with simplifying or toning down mechanics for the sake of approachability anymore.

tokon currently feels like you took a handful of bbcf characters, stuck them into the launch-ish version of dbfz, and let them get stapled together in weird ways. based on how long dbfz continued to get support and how much crazier it got after its launch version, I can see this game also getting really nutty and becoming a bunch of people's forever game. my immediate hope for future patches beyond the port improvements is that they tweak defense to be more interesting and then hopefully saucier stuff will follow suit. as a sort of unrelated aside, I pat myself on the back a bit because getting good at other games lets me better assess the possibility space of a new fighting game way more than I could only a couple of years ago, but I also am not super cynical about new releases in the way a lot of other people are, so I tend to not get bummed out as badly about stuff that sucks. (2xko was really frustrating for me but that was because so much paratextual/metatextual stuff was hampering my enjoyment of the actual game... and then the frequent patch cycle also kind of took out a lot of the bits that I actually liked playing.) it's also what lets me be so positive about mbtw/mb2l despite everyone getting so pissed off about the ten minutes of baby gameplay we saw a couple of weeks ago lol. very interested to see what ceo's tokon bracket looks like this weekend.

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