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The humble combo trial is a time-honoured tradition in fighting games. It’s a quick and relatively easy way of trying out a new character, feeling out their general flow and kit in a low-pressure environment.
They are, also, fundamentally useless. The combos in question are rarely optimal, and often devolve into simply playing Simon Says a dozen times before throwing yourself to the wolves of online matchmaking and hoping for the best. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I rarely retain any of the stuff I pick up during combo trials, and usually end up defaulting to the likes of Dustloop or trusted YouTube tutorials to figure out how to actually play a character.
That doesn’t exactly change in Marvel Tōkon. It still presents you with basic moves, combos, and assist combos that you’ll do once and move on from, the likelihood of carrying them over into real scenarios next to zero. But Tōkon also includes something that I really like, and sincerely wish other fighting games included: a series of challenges that force you to think about the tools you’ve been given, and how best to implement them.
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Each character trial in Tōkon wraps up with five “Level-Up Missions”. Instead of laying out all the inputs for you, the missions instead present you with a handful of criteria and leave you to cook up the combos yourself. Maybe you need to start or end with a certain string, or ensure you’re throwing in a particular move or hitting a certain damage threshold during the combo.
In reality, it’s something you can probably just go ahead and look up if you really don’t want to bother with it. But I like the fact that, even with the inclusion of basic combo trials, the Level-Up Mission is something that tries to challenge you to cook something up yourself. It’s arguably one of the best parts about a fighting game–even if everybody ends up using the same BnBs and optimal combos in the end, figuring things out and playing around with a character’s kit is a great way to understand their fundamentals even if you don’t come to the most min-maxxed conclusion.
And the best part is, these Level-Up Missions are genuinely tough. While the early stages mostly require you to start with a string, add one move, and end with a certain damage number, the later ones stack far more requirements on you. That’s when you really have to start thinking about things like your meter, assists, jump cancels, and damage scaling to squeeze the absolute most you can out of these challenges.
Again, are these Level-Up Missions going to have much impact once you get out there against real players? Probably not, but they at least require you to interact with the systems that Tōkon throws at you. Especially in a fighting game, where tutorialisation is still kinda rubbish and mostly consists of multiple text boxes bombarding your brain all at once, sitting down and puzzling out how to really maximise my damage in one combo—including whatever parameters Tōkon wants from me—at least helped stuff stick a helluva lot more than it would have otherwise.
Having a relatively open-ended goal and then handing you the entire toolkit to accomplish it instead of simply following a piece of paper feels much closer to how fighting games actually shake out in real time. Tōkon’s Level-Up Missions are such a simple yet smart way to navigate it, I hope it’s a feature more fighting games crib from in the future.
