Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls Offers 4v4 Tag Mayhem With Solid Potential

By Elijah Gonzalez | September 9, 2025 | 10:45am

Video Games Features Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls

Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls Offers 4v4 Tag Mayhem With Solid Potential

While there have been a decent number of fighting games with Marvel characters, there’s one in particular that steals the show: the Marvel Vs Capcom series, which has produced countless classic fighting game moments thanks to its chaotic, freeform gameplay. While Arc System Works’ upcoming Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls isn’t directly related to MvC, it will almost certainly be compared to this genre legend simply by sharing some of the same spandexed heroes.

It’s a tag fighting game with Marvel characters that was recently announced but already received its first closed beta test over this weekend, one that I was lucky enough to be invited to (and I mean that quite literally, press and content creators didn’t receive special treatment, so it was pure luck of the draw). Having played around seven hours of the game over the weekend, it has some very solid potential, that is, as long as you leave your MvC-flavored expectations at the door.

To lay out the game’s mechanics and main gimmick, this is a four-versus-four tag fighting game, which means that both players pick a team of four characters. For context, that’s a lot! Three characters per team has more or less been the standard for tag games for a long time, with some games having as few as two. A big difference, though, is that instead of each character having their own health bar, allowing them to be knocked out prematurely, here they all share the same one. Basically, you can primarily play as a single character for the entire match, instead of being forced to switch between them as they get knocked out. You’ll still be calling in allies for assist attacks and can switch to your other fighters during a battle if you want to, but this change means you won’t need to know how to play every character on your team. Having a team of four also allows you to call in quite a bit of backup, filling the screen with shouting superheroes.

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However, it doesn’t begin that way. At the start of a match, both players can only call in one of their supporting characters via an assist, with additional ones unlocked over the course of a bout until you have all four characters available. Basically, there’s something called the Assemble Gauge, with each bar representing how many allies you have access to. Players earn additional bars by either causing a “wall break” (basically performing certain moves while their opponent is cornered) or by losing a round.

As for other aspects that convey the flavor of this experience, most of the game’s fighters have an air dash, which lets them quickly approach from above, along with a grounded dash, resulting in a reasonably quick pace of play. Additionally, this is a five-button game: there are light, medium, and heavy attacks, an assist button, and a “Unique Attack” which varies from character to character. There are also a whole bunch of other assist-based actions besides just calling in your allies to attack, such as a universal armored overhead, an attack that lets you break out of block pressure, and more.

Now with the basic explanations out of the way, let’s discuss the actual feel of the experience. For dedicated fighting game heads, the quickest way to explain things is that the game incorporates elements from many of Arc System Works’ most recent titles, with Guilty Gear Strive, Granblue Fantasy Versus, and Dragon Ball FighterZ all being good jumping-off points; its core feel and speed of play similar to Strive, it has Granblue Fantasy Versus’ simplified input system, and it uses autocombos and a general magic series combo structure that is similar to Dragon Ball FighterZ (don’t worry if you don’t get these references).

To put it somewhat uncharitably, this is a relatively “on-rails” kind of experience, that some Marvel Vs. Capcom fans may bristle at. While the game is still in beta and it’s far too soon to say anything definitive, there doesn’t seem to be advanced movement techniques like wavedashing, and while some characters have an eight-way airdash, these can’t be used to set up lightning-fast mix-ups where you perform low-to-the-ground aerial attacks, like Storm and Magneto could in Marvel Vs. Capcom 2. Instead, battles very much play out at a speed that, while reasonably fast, doesn’t quite reach the pace of things like older Guilty Gear games, MvC-era tag fighters, or Dragon Ball FighterZ.

From top to bottom, the experience is very much designed with newcomers in mind. As previously mentioned, you don’t have to perform motion inputs for special moves, meaning instead of doing a quarter circle motion to throw a fireball, you can instead press the dedicated “Quick Skill” button in combination with an attack button and a direction. Personally, I’m not a huge fan of systems like these, mostly because I play on a fight stick, and holding down multiple buttons to do something feels inelegant—yes, you can use regular motion inputs here as well for extra damage, but even high-level players will likely use some of the quick inputs for Z motion anti-airs and whatnot. I think helping to get new players in the door with these kinds of affordances is great, but Street Fighter 6 handled it best with two different control schemes that each have their pros and cons, one geared towards new players and one for seasoned pros.

Then there’s Marvel Tōkon’s big emphasis on autocombos, where you can more or less hit the same button to perform an attack string. While these are nowhere near optimal in terms of damage, they’re designed to help newer players feel like they’re doing things right out of the gate. Again, these are fine, but I wish I could turn them off; there are times in other games where you simply want to mash your fastest attack to get out of fake block pressure, and it’s a bit annoying to accidentally trigger an autocombo. And in a beta where there was no training mode to practice combos, it was quite easy to accidentally activate these—again, this will be a non-issue when the game actually comes out, but it did make this experience a tad frustrating at times. More fundamentally, I think over-emphasizing autocombos can make it much more difficult for newcomers to break bad habits, allowing them to beat other low-level players who are trying to learn non-autocombos, but leaving them overly mash-happy when they encounter someone with a better understanding of the game.

As for the bigger issues that could be longer-term problems even after we get more time with the game, there was a bit more homogenization between characters than you would want, which was fairly disappointing. Every character had the same number of special moves, all of which were on the same inputs, and the combo structure seemed quite similar for much of the cast. Assists were fairly universal as well, mostly boiling down to some form of projectile or an anti-air, while all assists called as you perform a combo seem near-identical. However, with all that said, this beta test is probably the least interesting the game will ever be, not only since it only includes six characters, but also because one knows what they’re doing yet; at one point, I went on a 15-game plus win streak while mostly relying on autocombos, a very cheap blockstring with Captain America, and a cheesy corner crossup setup with Star Lord.

And while there are many baseline similarities between the characters, they also have some interesting differences that could end up being a massive deal in the long run and make the cast feel less one-note. Storm is probably the best example. She can call a Tempest, a gust of wind that moves her across the screen, even as she is performing other attacks. At one point, I saw a Storm player call in a chunk of ice that freezes opponents on contact and then use Tempest to blow it across the screen to stop me in my tracks before performing a full combo.

Additionally, Ms. Marvel is already quite unique; uniquely evil. She lacks an airdash, but more than makes up for it with the ability to use her stretchy limbs to zip across the screen and command grab you into oblivion. In all seriousness, she’s an interesting character who points to the rest of the cast potentially being less uniform than this initial batch. Watching high-level competitive players is always a good way to get a feel for what the game will actually play like a few months into release for us mere mortals, and I saw Sonicfox and others setting up some tricky mix-ups with real promise.

Add in Arc System Works’ trademark visual flair, which includes cool interpretations of these characters alongside punchy animations, and you can see the game’s potential even through the inherent limitations of a beta that lacks a training mode or direct matchmaking.

All in all, while my hands-on with Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls left me with a few reservations, it largely proved a good time, which is a good sign because this is probably the “worst” version of the experience due to everyone (myself included) slamming autocombos like our lives depend on it. Even still, I had fun teasing out some of its more satisfying elements that are probably here to stay, like hitting opponents with Captain America’s difficult-to-react-to overhead or marveling at other people doing fancy shenanigans with Storm. Its core movement may not be quite as bonkers as some of those old-school hits, but its aerial movement is still quite fast, and its three-assist system may really set this experience apart. And if nothing else, it’s pretty damn likely ArcSys will nail the look; I can’t wait to see their potential takes on Blade, Hulk, and more of the Children of the Atom.

Elijah Gonzalez is an associate editor for Endless Mode. In addition to playing the latest, he also loves anime, movies, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.