Tag team fighters are some of the most fun fighting games around, both for casual and competitive players. It introduces more chaos and allows players to choose multiple of their favorite characters rather than being locked to one. It also provides a higher skill ceiling, as pros must learn multiple match-ups and movesets. The latest tag team fighter, Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls, turned heads when it was first revealed by Sony and Arc System Works, but one aspect has fans divided.
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Typically, when you play a tag team fighter, each character can be used to fight, or can be in reserve and called in for an assist. The norm is for each of these characters to have an individual health bar. Where Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls differs is that all four characters on a player’s team share a single health bar, and fans are not sure how they feel about this.
Does Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls Shared Health Bar Work?
There are two sides to whether a single health works in Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls. On one hand, tying the health bar to all four characters allows players to simply learn one character and pick their assists as they like. This is great for casual players who may be intimidated by learning four characters. On the other hand, it doesn’t reward smart switching or catching an opponent’s switch like it would in other tag team fighters.
A shared life bar also means you don’t have to worry about one character getting knocked out and playing at a deficit. Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls takes the opposite route and lets you unlock the rest of your team, with losing a round automatically getting another teammate. As you unlock more teammates, your health bar will increase, and this is still shared between all characters.
However, others feel this simplifies the game too much. Normally, when an assist character is called in, that character can be damaged and thus reduce that character’s health bar. This doesn’t seem to be the case here, indicating that there won’t be much punishment for whiffing an assist attack.
It also potentially takes away from match-up knowledge and encourages playing to unlock your characters as fast as possible. This will lead to neutral heavy gameplay where players are simply resetting as they try to launch one another with stage transitions. If there were multiple health bars, players would be less inclined to trade neutral back and forth for a few of losing a character and missing out on combos.
Health bars have been handled differently in tag team fighters. Some games give all fighters an equal health bar, while others can change depending on the fighter or the number of fighters. Skull Girls is one where you can bring one, two, or three characters, but their health is a percentage depending on how many you bring. Experimenting with how health bars are implemented is always welcome, and Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls is taking a big risk with its system.
Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls’ philosophy seems to embrace an easy entry point while maintaining a high skill ceiling. By opting to use a single health, Arc System Works appeals to both of these, allowing for casual and competitive players to come together. It remains to be seen how this will be received when the game officially launches, but it has certainly caused a stir among fans.
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Image courtesy of Focus Features.
