Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls Director Addresses PC Problems and Plans Input, Assist Changes

Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls director Kazuto Sekine has issued a new apology to players affected by the fighting game's troubled PC launch, while also setting out the development team's immediate priorities for gameplay changes. The planned work centers on PC stability, more reliable input recognition, and adjustments intended to reduce the frequency of certain assists and character switches without abandoning the game's aggressive identity.

Sekine shared the message on Monday, September 14, in a brief social-media post and a more detailed Steam blog. His statement follows an especially difficult opening period for the PC release, where players encountered enough technical problems to disrupt the experience for a notable portion of the community. The issues were visible enough that prominent fighting-game streamer Maximilian Dood removed the game during a live broadcast.

The director said the development staff has been encouraged by the positive reaction to Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls itself. Players have responded enthusiastically to its content and have found reasons to keep exploring its combat systems. At the same time, Sekine acknowledged that the PC version's stability failures prevented some customers from enjoying that experience as intended.

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He apologized for the frustration caused during launch and said improvements to the PC build are making progress. While the statement did not attach dates to individual patches or list every technical issue being addressed, it makes clear that restoring a smoother, dependable PC experience remains a major concern for the team.

For useful background on this topic, read Bungie Delays Marathon's Symbiosis Update to December as It Moves Away From Seasons.

PC stability remains a priority

A fighting game is particularly exposed when performance and stability falter. Matches depend on timing, fast decisions, consistent feedback, and confidence that the game will respond as expected. Even players focused on offline modes can be frustrated by crashes, stuttering, or unreliable performance, while competitive players have an even lower tolerance for issues that may affect execution or match flow.

That context makes Sekine's direct acknowledgement important. Rather than presenting the game's strong content reception as an answer to the launch problems, he treated the two as separate realities: the team is pleased that people see potential in Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls, but recognizes that the PC launch did not provide a satisfactory foundation for everyone.

This is not the first apology from the project's leadership. Producer Takeshi Yamanaka had previously addressed the PC difficulties in an August interview, apologizing to affected players and describing the task of winning back their trust as extremely challenging. The latest message from Sekine suggests that communication has continued as the team works through the post-launch response.

An earlier update had already resolved many issues reported by PC players after Steam user reviews initially declined. The new statement indicates that the work is not finished, with further improvements still underway alongside gameplay-focused updates.

Input response is set for reassessment

The most detailed gameplay topic in Sekine's post concerns inputs. The team has observed situations in which specific actions--particularly attacks attempted after an aerial dash or while using Free Flight--could fail to register properly. In some cases, the intended command might not be recognized at all.

For a fighting game, that kind of inconsistency can become much more than a minor annoyance. Air movement and mobility-based offense often demand rapid transitions between directions and buttons. If a player believes they executed the right sequence but the game does not produce the expected attack, it can undermine confidence in both practice and competitive play.

Sekine said the developers intend to revise the current input windows in pursuit of smoother, more responsive controls. The existing system uses a six-frame input buffer when a player holds a button. The planned change would alter how the game processes inputs so that, in certain situations, an action can occur even if the button is no longer being held.

That explanation is deliberately technical but stops short of a complete final specification. It does not say exactly which situations will qualify, whether every type of action will use the revised behavior, or how the change will feel once it reaches players. Still, the objective is clear: reduce missed actions and make commands more dependable during fast-moving scenarios.

Input-buffer decisions are always sensitive in fighting games. A more forgiving system can help intended actions come out consistently, especially under pressure, but players also expect their controls to remain precise. The team will need to strike a balance between responsiveness and predictability, particularly for veterans who build habits around exact timing and input sequences.

Assists and tags will receive cooldown changes

The second major area being examined is the pace of assists and tags. Sekine explained that Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls was designed with frequent character switching as a central goal. The developers wanted players to actively rotate characters in and out of battle, and the current game has apparently exceeded the team's expectations in achieving that level of activity.

However, community feedback has raised concerns that assists and tags may currently occur too often. Constant access to partner actions and quick switches can create a relentless style of offense, potentially making it difficult for players to establish breathing room or reset a match into neutral play.

In response, the team is looking at longer cooldowns for certain assists and switches. The goal is not to remove the rushdown possibilities that define the game's pace. Instead, the developers want to preserve its capacity for forceful offense while creating more opportunities for neutral interactions.

Neutral play generally refers to the period when neither side has an overwhelming advantage and both competitors are maneuvering for a clean opening. It is often where spacing, movement, defensive reads, and careful decision-making become most visible. If assists and tags can be deployed too constantly, those exchanges may be shortened or crowded out by repeated pressure.

By increasing cooldowns only for particular options, the developers appear to be aiming for a targeted correction rather than a fundamental redesign. That distinction matters. Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls was built around active team mechanics, and Sekine's wording suggests the team does not want to erase the freedom and momentum those mechanics provide. The intended result is a more sustainable rhythm where pressure is still powerful but cannot be maintained so easily without interruption.

Broad character nerfs are not planned yet

Players looking for a major character tier-list shake-up may need to wait. Sekine said the team expects overall character-balance changes to remain limited for now because Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls is still in what he called a discovery phase.

The developers believe it is too early to make substantial changes to individual character traits. That caution is connected to the planned assist and tag revisions: altering cooldowns and switching frequency could significantly change how strong characters, team compositions, and strategies appear in practice. A character who seems overly dominant in the current environment might look different once opponents have more room to play neutral, while other characters may benefit from a slower or more deliberate team-resource cycle.

This is a measured approach to balancing a new fighting game. Early impressions are often shaped by players finding the clearest, most immediately effective strategies first. As more techniques, counterplay, matchup knowledge, and team combinations emerge, initial assumptions can shift quickly. Adjusting character-specific strengths too aggressively before that process plays out can create new problems or obscure the real cause of an imbalance.

That does not mean the director dismissed community concerns. Rather, the team is prioritizing system-level changes that could affect the entire roster before deciding whether individual fighters need more extensive tuning. It leaves open the possibility of future character work, but no sweeping overhaul has been promised at this stage.

Updates are planned as soon as possible

Sekine said the developers are investigating how to implement the input, assist, and tag changes in updates as soon as possible. No specific deployment date was announced, and players should not assume all adjustments will arrive together. The statement frames them as active development priorities rather than finalized patch notes.

For Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls, the coming updates will therefore carry two connected responsibilities. The first is practical: continue improving the PC version so that stability problems no longer stand between players and the game. The second is competitive: refine the systems around input recognition and team offense in a way that supports both the game's high-energy strengths and healthier periods of neutral play.

The project has retained considerable goodwill for its core fighting-game experience despite the PC launch setbacks. Whether that goodwill turns into lasting confidence will depend heavily on the consistency of future technical fixes and on how these early balance decisions land with the community. For now, the team's message is one of continued support, restrained character tuning, and a willingness to adjust the systems players are already scrutinizing most closely.