Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls makes some wild changes from the tag fighting games that have come before, teasing a single health bar per team and 3 assist options for every character

Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls made an impressive debut last month, setting venerable fighting game studio Arc System Works to work on what seemed like it might as well be Marvel vs. Capcom without the Capcom. We knew Marvel Tokon would differ from those older games in its 4v4 battles, and a few new screenshots have the FGC picking apart some more wild changes.

Our first look at the in-battle UI shows only a single health bar for each team, suggesting that all four battlers will indeed share that life pool. That's in contrast to Marvel vs. Capcom, where each character has their own life bar, which can slowly recover in part while that fighter is on the sidelines.

More similar to MvC is the fact that each character has three assist types. But unlike MvC, where those assist options are unique to each character, here it appears that every team will have a "shooter," "vertical," and "assault" assist, with any character being able to fill each slot. The question, of course, is how a pure melee character might slot into a "shooter" category without an obvious projectile to fire.

Of course, this is all speculation based on a handful of screenshots shown on the PlayStation Blog, and it's entirely possible that the UI is obfuscating how these mechanics work in some way. But we'll find out pretty soon regardless, since Marvel Tokon is set to be playable at Evo next weekend, with a dev panel set to broadcast from the show on August 1 at 8pm PT / 11pm ET.

One other point of wild speculation that won't be resolved at Evo, however, is the size of the game's roster. The screenshots include our first look at the character select screen, showcasing the six fighters that'll be playable in the first demo. Some fans have already analyzed the spacing on that screen to try and figure out the size of the game's final roster. That count puts it at 35, and I've seen estimates go as high as 40, which sounds pretty ambitious to me, but it's looking like a meaty selection regardless.

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