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Marvel hasn’t had a great fighting game in almost a decade. Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite landed with a thud in 2017, Capcom quietly walked away from the crossover, and Marvel Rivals proved there was still an audience hungry for team-based hero battles, just not the kind built around combo strings and frame data. Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls, out now on PS5, finally fills that gap, and it’s a genuinely special game, built by a studio that has spent the last decade proving it understands this genre better than almost anyone else.
That studio is Arc System Works, the team behind Guilty Gear Strive and Dragon Ball FighterZ, and its fingerprints are all over Tōkon. Directed by Kazuto Sekine and developed in partnership with PlayStation Studios and Marvel Games, the game reimagines the tag structure that made Marvel vs. Capcom 3 so chaotic, then pushes it further, bumping the classic three-character teams up to four. Your whole squad shares one collective Vital Gauge instead of individual health bars, and instead of picking your full team upfront, you start each round with just a leader and a single assist. The rest gets earned mid-fight, unlocked by landing throws or smashing through a wall into the stage’s next section. It sounds needlessly complicated on paper. In practice, it gives every match a rhythm that ramps from a tense one-on-one poke-fest into a full four-character brawl by the end, the smartest structural idea a Marvel fighter has had since the original vs. series went out of print.
Twenty characters at launch, split into five teams of four, and the roster is where Tōkon earns most of its goodwill. Captain America, Iron Man, Spider-Man, Wolverine, and Hulk are here, because of course they are. But so is Danger, the X-Men’s sentient training-room android turned playable fighter, which seemed like the most expendable pick when the roster reveals started rolling in and instead turned out to be one of the most inventive fighters in the game. Magik brings sword-and-teleport chaos to the Unbreakable X-Men alongside Storm and Wolverine. The Knights of Doom pair Doctor Doom with Green Goblin and a genuinely unsettling take on Carnage, whose symbiote infects opponents with a lingering Necrosis effect and can detonate a Parasite Bomb for extra pressure. Ghost Rider leads the Samurai Outriders alongside Blade, Loki, and Deadpool. Character for character, this launch lineup already tops what the original vanilla Marvel vs. Capcom 3 shipped with over a decade ago.
The single-player side is more of a nice-to-have than a highlight. Episode Mode was written by Kieron Gillen, a comics writer with real Marvel pedigree, and runs roughly 10 hours across all five teams, told through a mix of animated cutscenes and moving comic-panel art that looks genuinely great, if a little repetitive from one episode to the next. The opening chapter for each team is also a little too easy to clear, and it takes a few fights before the difficulty catches up to the presentation. It’s a solid way to learn each team’s dynamics and lore before jumping online, just don’t expect it to be the reason you buy the game.
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On PS5, the presentation is unmistakably Arc System Works. The studio’s house style, opulent menus, dramatic announcer narration, mid-fight cinematic flourishes, carries over from Guilty Gear Strive and Dragon Ball FighterZ, upscaled to 4K with 3D Audio pulling every impact and stage transition right up next to your ears. The DualSense earns its keep too, translating hits and Wall Breaks into distinct haptic feedback that makes even a basic combo feel weighty. Outside of matches, the Open Lobby lets up to 64 players wander around as chibi avatars, picking up games and bumping into strangers in a way that genuinely recaptures the arcade-floor energy the genre lost when everyone moved to menus and matchmaking queues.
The one real hurdle is the tag system itself, which takes a match or two before it clicks. Juggling a shared health bar, staggered character unlocks, and three different assist types (shooter, vertical, and assault) all at once is a lot to hold in your head during your first few sessions, and the default control layout is worth remapping before you take it online. Once it clicks, though, it clicks hard, and that short adjustment period is about the only real friction in an otherwise confident, polished launch.
None of that has slowed the game down. Tōkon moved roughly half a million copies in its first week, a big number for a genre that rarely sells like a blockbuster, and Arc System Works has already confirmed a Year 1 pass bringing four more characters and a new stage, with Phoenix Cyclops locked in as the first. That roadmap, paired with a launch roster this deep, suggests the studio built Tōkon as a years-long platform rather than a one-and-done crossover cash-in.
Play it on PS5, and there’s very little to hesitate over. The tag system takes a session or two to fully click, the story mode is a nice-to-have rather than a highlight, but everything else, the roster, the combat, the presentation, the sheer arcade joy of the Open Lobby, is exactly what a Marvel fighting game should feel like in 2026. This is the best Marvel fighter since the vs. series left Capcom, and one of the best fighting games Arc System Works has ever made.
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Verdict
Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls is a rare thing: a licensed fighting game that would still be excellent with the serial numbers filed off. The Vital Gauge and staggered-unlock system genuinely reinvent the tag formula instead of just skinning it in spandex, and the 20-character roster is stacked with both marquee names and inspired deep cuts. The tag mechanic asks for a bit of patience up front, the default control scheme is worth remapping, and Episode Mode is more serviceable than essential, but none of that comes close to a dealbreaker. On PS5, this is an easy recommendation, for fighting-game veterans and Marvel fans who’ve never touched a fight stick alike.
