Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls Launched on PC With a Stutter Problem That Won't Go Away
Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls is out now, and its PC version showed up with a stutter that even a top-end rig can't shake.
Why the Game Keeps Hitching Mid-Combo
This is Arc System Works' first Unreal Engine 5 game after a run of UE4 titles like Guilty Gear Strive, Granblue Fantasy Versus, and Dragon Ball FighterZ, and the jump looks like where the trouble started. A locked 60fps game should produce a flat frame-time graph, but Tōkon's spikes regularly even while a character just stands still, with each spike lining up with a hitch you can actually feel. You can spot it without any monitoring tools too, just by watching something static in the background, like a traffic light, while moving a character side to side, small jumps show up at steady intervals.
A likely explanation comes down to how shader compilation works differently on PC than on console. The PS5 only has one GPU configuration to account for, so its shaders ship precompiled and ready to go, while PC has to cover thousands of hardware and driver combinations, so it ends up compiling some of those shaders on your machine as you play instead. Skip a proper precompiling step at startup, and you eat a small hitch the first time a new effect shows up, which for a fighting game tends to land mid-combo instead of somewhere harmless like a cutscene. My own first instinct was to blame my rig, but it doesn't seem to matter how strong your setup is: the stutter's shown up even on an RTX 5090 paired with a Ryzen 7 9800X3D running the lowest settings, and completing the full shader warm-up process doesn't clear it either. Frame-rate limiters can smooth the graph out so it looks flat, but the skips are still there once you go looking for them, so the fix stops at the numbers on screen and doesn't reach the actual stutter.
Getting Into the Game Is Its Own Hurdle
For some people, the stutter isn't even the first problem, since the game won't launch at all. The anti-cheat has opened a blank black window for some setups while pushing the CPU hard, with multiple copies of the PlayStation PC SDK attempting to start in the background. Linux support doesn't exist at all right now: the game blocks Linux entirely, including offline play, unlike Arc System Works' earlier fighting game Dragon Ball FighterZ, which uses the same Easy Anti-Cheat but still lets Linux in. Steam Deck runs into the same wall since it's built on SteamOS, a Linux-based system, so it can't launch Tōkon right now either.
That gap got more pointed after a comment attributed to the game's community manager compared asking for Linux support to asking for an entirely separate Nintendo Switch port. That comparison didn't hold up well against Easy Anti-Cheat's own documentation, which already lists Linux as something developers can simply turn on, seemingly a fair bit different from building an entire console port from scratch.
Where the Rating Landed, and What It Costs
All of this landed the game in Mixed territory on Steam, with a little over four in ten reviews coming in positive so far. It reportedly opened even lower, in Mostly Negative, before climbing back over the line into Mixed within the first day or so. Money's part of the frustration too. Tōkon comes in three price tiers, $60, $85, and $100 depending on edition, published through PlayStation, and European pricing landed higher once converted and taxed, with buyers reporting around 70 euros, close to $80, for what runs $60 everywhere else. On top of that, the PSN account requirement keeps showing up in complaints, and it's not the first time a requirement like that has drawn pushback on a PC release.
I'll be honest, seeing "requires PSN" attached to a PC release still catches me a little off guard every time.
What Actually Changed in the Day-One Patch
The day-one patch focuses mostly on performance and cleanup rather than anything flashy:
CPU load is down a bit, thanks to fewer unnecessary character animation updates and lighter UI update demands.
Running overlay or capture tools, like OBS's Game Capture or Discord's own overlay and capture, no longer tanks frame rate the way it did.
Automatic graphics quality now picks anti-aliasing based on performance, and a bug that let plug-ins like DLSS, FSR, and XeSS turn on without asking has been fixed.
Custom settings can now dial down how often background characters update, which eases CPU load a little further.
The shader warm-up prompt shows by default at startup now, and a separate bug that triggered warm-up on its own has been fixed.
Steam got a fix for delayed input data during matches, aimed at improving online play, and PS5 picked up its own input lag adjustments.
A handful of smaller fixes too: monitor-switching bugs on multi-monitor setups, people turning invisible in Online Lobbies after checking Ranked standings, distorted Ranked screens with long numbers, mouse-related menu crashes, and frame drops during text-heavy moments, especially in Arabic or Thai.
There are a couple of gameplay tweaks in there too. Input priority got adjusted so a specific attack lands more reliably after a certain sequence, and Danger's ground dash can now cancel into a skill instead of risking an accidental aerial special.
Nobody's confirmed yet whether any of this actually clears up the PC experience, so that part's still playing out, and I wouldn't assume it's fixed just from the patch notes alone.
If you'd already planned on jumping in day one, waiting for the next patch or two probably won't cost you much beyond a little patience, and if you're on Linux or Steam Deck, it's not really optional yet anyway.
