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    Marvel Tōkon Fighting Souls: Deadpool’s 7 Best References

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    Before Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls was even out, fans spotted dozens of fighting game references in Deadpool’s character guide. Wade Wilson is known as a fourth-wall-breaking gremlin, so you would naturally expect him to have a few nods to pop culture in his dialogue, but Tōkon’s stuffed the guy’s red suit full of references to not only Marvel and fighting games writ large, but also the history of the fighting game community.

    YouTuber Dan Allen Gaming has put together two videos showcasing all the references fans have found thus far, and Deadpool’s kit is really just an amalgamation of so many different fighting game characters. Some elements come from series like classic Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and Tekken, but there’s also a swath of homages to various games in developer Arc System Works’ catalog like Guilty Gear and Dragon Ball FighterZ. If you want to see them all, you can check out both of Dan Allen Gaming’s videos, but here are a few favorites we wanted to highlight.

    Dropping an arcade cabinet on fools like Liu Kang / Woshige’s infamous EVO blunder

    One of Liu Kang’s fatalities in the Mortal Kombat series has the fighter dropping a whole Mortal Kombat arcade cabinet on his enemies. In those games, the cabinet smashed Liu Kang’s foes to a bloody pulp, and perhaps if Tōkon was just a Deadpool game instead of a broader, T-rated Marvel one, it might have done so here, too. But alas, the Deadpool cabinet that falls from the sky just knocks downed foes to the side a little bit. 

    Deadpool Arcade
    © Marvel / Dan Allen Gaming

    Also found in this sequence is a reference to the 2015 EVO moment where Guilty Gear Xrd Sign player Woshige preemptively celebrated winning a match before realizing there was still another round. Deadpool imitates Woshige’s pop-off before scrambling to get to the arcade cabinet that falls on his enemy, just as Woshige did at EVO.

    The dramatic fall of Fatal Fury’s Geese Howard

    If Deadpool is defeated while in the air, he will dramatically fall in a way that’s different from how most characters are knocked out in Tōkon. That’s because it’s a reference to an iconic win scene from Fatal Fury, in which antagonist Geese Howard falls from a tower into a chasm below. This moment would be recreated in several games that followed, and now Deadpool is throwing his mask into the ring of “people falling dramatically in fighting games.

    Cell’s intro recreated with practical effects

    Deadpool’s intro when he’s leading a fight is a callback to Cell’s intro in Dragon Ball FighterZ. While the Dragon Ball villain begins battles by charging himself up with a powerful aura that surrounds him, Deadpool merely imitates the visual of this by setting off a firework behind himself and striking the pose.

    A long-lost PlayStation icon

    One of the more bizarre references Deadpool has is to Polygon Man, an old PlayStation mascot that Sony quickly shelved in the ‘90s in favor of more marketable faces like Crash and Spyro. The purple, spikey, floating head later showed up in PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale as the final boss, and has since appeared sparingly in Sony’s marketing and online rewards. Tōkon is published by Sony, so this is probably how the character ended up in the game as the ammunition of one of Deadpool’s projectile attacks.

    Deadpool PAWNCH

    Keeping with the theme of crossover brawlers, Deadpool can also whip out Captain Falcon’s “Falcon Punch” attack from Super Smash Bros., though it doesn’t seem to send foes flying off the map like the F-Zero character’s move does in Nintendo’s games.

    Friend zone

    During one segment, Deadpool is shown taking photos with different characters, and he has half a “heart hand” up which the characters next to him don’t reciprocate. Presented with the caption “Friend zone,” this is a reference to a photo of FGC star Justin Wong and a Chun-Li cosplayer from 2017 which was posted on Twitter with the same caption.

    “Let’s go, Wade”

    Speaking of Wong, when Deadpool activates his super, he’ll shout “Let’s go, Wade!” This is a nod to the infamous EVO Moment 37 in which Wong was playing Street Fighter III: Third Strike and his Super Art attack was parried by Daigo Umehara 15 times, leaving him open to a punish that turned the fight in Umehara’s favor. Just before this, someone in the crowd can be heard shouting “Let’s go, Justin!” Though, if Deadpool lands his attack, things probably turn out better for him than they did for Wong.



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