Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls Devs Reveal How They Came Up With Deadpool’s Reference-Filled Moveset (Exclusive)
Since its launch this past month, arguably no fighter in Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls has been more popular than that of Deadpool. While the “Merc with a Mouth” is already one of the most beloved characters in the entire Marvel universe, developer Arc System Works opted to make Deadpool’s moveset the most unique in the entire game, as it features a number of callbacks to other fighting game franchises like Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, and Tekken. Now, the team behind Marvel Tokon have opened up about how they came up with this idea for Deadpool in the game, and how they ultimately had more plans for the character than they could implement.
Speaking exclusively to ComicBook, Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls director Kazuto Sekine said the key focus with Deadpool’s moveset was rooted in the character’s frequent breaking of the fourth wall. This focal point of Deadpool’s design led Sekine to come to the idea that he could have him break the fourth wall in a unique way by using various attacks and abilities that are famous in other fighting games. Once Sekine and the team behind Marvel Tokon found a canonical way to have Deadpool discover these moves (which comes by way of him reading a gaming magazine within the story of Fighting Souls), he said that the process of selecting which moves Deadpool would actually be able to use became the most difficult part.
“There were definitely a lot of things about Deadpool that were challenging to make a reality,” Sekine said. “I had so many different ideas for references that I wanted to include because I grew up with fighting games and now I live with fighting games. That’s my life. I have a huge volume of knowledge about fighting games, so it was actually really challenging for me to choose and pare down all the ideas that I had. I had too many, and I couldn’t fit them all in.”
Sekine didn’t reveal any additional info on the Deadpool ideas that ended up on the cutting room floor, but some of the ones that did make it into the final version of the game are quite bewildering. Outside of referencing fighting games, Deadpool’s moves include some deeper callbacks to PlayStation’s own history, in addition to others seen in past Marvel video games. To spot every Easter egg in Deadpool’s moveset would be an incredibly tall task, which shows just how extensive Arc System Works was when it was creating the fighter.
Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls is available now across PlayStation 5 and PC platforms, with future updates and DLC on the horizon. For more on the game, you can check out our dedicated review right here.