Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls is the Tag Fighter You’ve Been Waiting For

I’m not completely new to fighting games. Growing up, I dabbled in Street Fighter and Injustice. I played some Marvel vs Capcom 2 and Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 when I grew older. I’ve even played some Dragon Ball FighterZ (the last Arc System Works developed IP tag fighter before Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls) and did some combo challenges, and I played some 2XKO during the early days. I also actually learned Smash Ultimate, but whether a party platform fighter fits in this is your prerogative, dear reader.

Even then, I never quite learned them. It was mostly mashing my way through. There was an attempt with both FighterZ and 2XKO, but never quite far enough. Even MvC2 (which I’ve played in a cabinet) I wasn’t quite masterful with.

Yet, there’s something I’ve always loved about fighting games. I love the high skill ceiling, I love the amount of player expression in these games, I loved watching tournaments and seeing people do cool shit. I remember sometime in 2019 I saw a screenshot of a 4chan post where a “leaker” talked about how ArcSys was developing a Marvel game. Obviously, at the time it was fake, but as a fan of FighterZ it’s something I immediately wanted. In a lot of ways, it was the dream fighting game for me.

Flash forward to June 2025’s Playstation showcase, which ended with the reveal of Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls. I was immediately pumped. I flashed back to that “leak” and it was genuinely cooler than what I imagined. I loved how it looked, I loved those new designs (I still do!), and the fact that it’s 4v4? Nuts. I told myself then that if I ever learn a fighting game, it’s going to be this. It’s one of my favourite IPs ever by a developer I admire so much, it was a dream come true.

I played both closed betas and the open beta, and while I wasn’t good at any of them, I had fun going around and kind of doing my thing even if I lost more than I won. In the lead up to the launches of the betas and the main release, the big thing on my mind was something a lot of my favourite fighting game streamers internalized in me – that you have to be patient with it. Yeah, you’ll lose because of your mistakes, but you need to be open to learning and improving. And it’s not going to be handed to you, you need to actually put in the time.

There was some other stuff too that excited me leading up to the launch, particularly:

1. The bonus costumes. I mean, those classic Iron Man and Captain America looks are so insane. I love the Gundam Exia inspired Iron Man, but I am who I am. Punk Storm!!! But most importantly, the Advanced Suit 2.0 from Insomniac’s Spider-Man 2. 

2. Kieron Gillen writing the five episodes and working with a talented bunch of artists on it, namely: 

• Fighting Avengers with Hiro Mashima (Fairy Tail)
• Unbreakable X-Men with Emanuela Lupacchino (World’s Finest: Teen Titans) and David Curiel (colourist on Inferno)
• Amazing Guardians with Betten Court (My Hero Academia: Vigilantes) 
• Knights of Doom with Mike Deodato Jr. (New Avengers) and Jão Canola (colorist on Speed Racer)
• Samurai Outriders with Yusuke Osawa (Spider-Man: Fake Red) 

Mostly though, it really was just the rush. I’ve been slowing down on my last hobby (building scale models) and I was ready for something new, with this game on the horizon I was ready to finally dedicate myself to something in the fighting game genre.

And I’m glad I did.

Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls is a gem (mostly). I really like how it feels to play even as a fighting game novice. It’s fairly intuitive, with a really low barrier to entry (at least when it comes to learning the game), and with what seems to be a very very high skill ceiling. Like FighterZ and 2XKO there are autocombos (essentially, you mash light, medium or heavy and your character automatically does a skill and usually ends on a super). There’s also macros such as quick skill so that you can press that button (either on its own or with a direction) to use a special or super instead of having to do the motion input (quarter circle forward/quarter circle back, z-input, etc), quick dash so you don’t have to tap forward or back twice, and quick assemble (so that you don’t have to press light + assemble (essentially your assist calling button)). Of course, auto combo is made for beginners, but Quick Skill does have actual benefits. In a combo you might prefer to use motion inputs, because those give you 1000 more damage compared to the quick skill variant, but sometimes it’s quicker (heh) and safer to use the quick skill variation in case you’re worried about dropping the combo (or even in cases like Spider-Man’s Z-Input, his Spider-Sense parry where you need to do a really quick input). 

There’s a lot the game does to teach you the mechanics too. When you launch the game for the first time, you’re given a tutorial with the basic controls that ends in a fight. You can then go into a menu that teaches you the game’s mechanics in even more depth. There’s character lessons that teach you what each tool in a character’s arsenal does, followed by combo challenges where you’re asked to pull off various combos that increase in complexity. Are they all viable in a real fight? Probably not, but they at least teach you the tools each character has so you can build your own combos off of them and really learn how the characters you pilot function, and once you complete them, you get a special colour variation for that character, which is in each instance a reference to another costume from their history. Finally, there are level up challenges, that give you a goal (what move you should start with, what move you need to incorporate into the combo, how much damage you need to do) along with the amount of resources you have to pull it off (ie. how much super meter, how many assists you can call) that you have to solve. They’re fun puzzles that really make the player engage with everything in a character’s arsenal. 

The campaign too is essentially a tutorial that lets you experiment with each character from the game’s 20 player roster, encouraging you to play with them and try out their different autocombos. When you beat your first campaign (you can play the 5 in any order), the next one becomes slightly harder, so on and so forth. When you beat all five, it unlocks the hardest version of the final boss – I still haven’t beaten him, but maybe you should. 

The campaigns are really, really fun. For what is a tutorial, they’re all engaging in their own ways. My favourites were Amazing Guardians and Samurai Outriders, mainly because they’re the two that have a character focus (on Peter Parker, my #1 guy, and Robbie Reyes) and it’s fun seeing them grow through the course of the story. Amazing Guardians in particular surprised me, mainly because the way Gillen writes Peter in it is a version of Peter we don’t really see anymore. He’s almost like a remnant of the Peter we used to get in Spider-Man adaptations (sans Raimi) in the 2000s, and it’s such a joy to be able to meet this version of him again. Fighting Avengers and Unbreakable X-Men felt the most ‘generic’ of the lot, they’re fun for what they are, very run of the mill stories of these guys, but I had fun. Knights of Doom is what I would describe as the bad ending, and while it almost edges on being obnoxious, it works out. I’ve always liked Gillen’s takes on Doom and Magneto, and his Goblin and Carnage are also really fun.

It’s also great to see all these artists on board! Everyone fits well, and it’s really fun how ArcSys has incorporated motion comics, the presentation is great.

The other big offline mode you can do is Survival. It’s almost their roguelike equivalent, where you face off in rounds of 4 in a team before a boss fight where the boss has special buffs. At the end of those 5 levels, depending on how you did, you can roll for buffs of your own, and you keep this going for as long as you can. If you can beat Level 100, you get colour 7 for all your characters, which are basically references to other characters in most instances (Deadpool’s colour 7 is Gwenpool’s colours, for example). Level 80 Doom and Level 100 Champion are some bullshit (complimentary).

When you go online, you can either just queue up casual or ranked from a menu or go to the open lobbies, where you can control a chibi version of one of the many playable characters in the game and go to the different stages. It is very cute. Matchmaking itself was rough for a variety of reasons, from bad matchmaking itself to PC players having bad performance leading to laggy matches, but ArcSys has been dropping patches, and the day of this review they dropped another one to fix matchmaking and it’s led to me getting more matches, so it seems like they’re slowly getting better and better. That being said, I do hope they (well, Sony) eventually pulls the plug on the DRM so that people can get proper performance and Linux/Steam Deck users aren’t locked out.

Training Mode is also crazy robust. You can fine tune almost everything you could possibly need on the fly, like how much health/skill gauge/assist gauge each player should have, to how the CPU should react or do certain actions. You can record them doing a specific combo or mixup or anything really, so you can practice how to actively deal with all of those things. You can even pause the game and quickly change characters, stages and music. It can be a little overwhelming with all of the settings once you start messing around, but it’s an invaluable practice tool. Furthermore, if you’re watching a replay, you can press a button to take control of yourself during that replay to maybe do something differently and see how that changes things.

All that being said, I am loving Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls and I’m continuing to learn it and play it every single day (I’ve already clocked in 40 hours). If you’re on PS5, it’s an easy buy recommendation from me, if you’re on PC, I’d say give it a spin and if it doesn’t work, you can always refund it and give it another spin.