Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls

Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls launched August 6, 2026 on PlayStation 5 and PC, a collaboration between Marvel and Arc System Works, the studio behind some of the sharpest 2D fighters going, published by Sony. It aims to be the next competitive fighter with tight play, slick visuals, and the genre’s first real 4v4 team structure, letting you swap between all four fighters on a team mid-match. The game itself is polished. Whether a disastrous PC launch and Sony’s involvement drag it down long-term is still an open question.

Earth faces the Champion of the Universe, who travels planet to planet hunting challengers, destroying or enslaving whoever loses. After beating Chandilar, he sets his sights on Earth. A Promoter assembles five teams to fight each other and then the Champion himself: the Fighting Avengers (Captain America, Iron Man, Black Panther, Hulk), the Unbreakable X-Men (Storm, Magik, Wolverine, Danger), the Amazing Guardians (Spider-Man, Ms. Marvel, Star-Lord, Peni Parker), the Samurai Outriders (Ghost Rider, Blade, Deadpool, Loki), and the Knights of Doom (Doom, Magneto, Green Goblin, Carnage). Each team runs its own story path and ending, with no confirmed canon route.

The episode-mode stories are weak. Told through manga panels with voice acting, segments run seven or eight minutes of dialogue you’ll want to skip through, especially since the first three fights clear almost instantly. Manga panels specifically, meaning the finished pages read right to left rather than left to right like a Western comic. A few 3D animated sequences pop up per story, which just raises the question of why they didn’t animate the whole thing. Every route boils down to the leader recruiting teammates, fighting the other teams, then the Champion, and the writing along the way is basic at best or a poor read on the characters at worst. In the Fighting Avengers route, Captain America tells Hulk to leave over what is basically public perception, which is a dumb beat on its own and stings more since Cap’s voice actor also played him in Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, where Cap was the one encouraging Hulk to be a hero in the first place.

Voice work is a mixed bag, roughly split between returning actors and newcomers, then split again between good and bad performances. Steve Blum returns as Wolverine and as Green Goblin, the role he played in Spectacular Spider-Man, and Josh Keaton is back as Spider-Man; both are great. Kellen Goff’s Carnage is genuinely good too. Sung Won Cho’s Doom does not land, and while James Arnold Taylor has voiced Magneto before, I’ve never been a fan of his take. Regardless of quality, one annoyance across the board is that supers repeat the same line every time you land them. Not a dealbreaker, just tiresome; a rotating set of lines would have helped.

The gameplay is clean. Full disclosure: I’m not a fighting game person. My real experience is Smash Bros. with friends, and this is a traditional 2D fighter, nothing like Smash. As someone coming in from outside the genre, it does a genuinely good job feeling approachable. The tutorial clarifies button functions and move execution clearly, and every character gets a dedicated training mode breaking down their moves, inputs, and combo routes. Chaining Y or B presses into supers felt beginner-friendly to me specifically. That accessibility does not mean the game is easy; you still need to learn combos, spacing, and how each character’s kit actually plays. It feels easy to pick up and hard to master, which I genuinely enjoy. I get smoked online, but I’m not getting back-to-back perfects either. The core loop of juggling and comboing is a blast once it clicks, and the visuals and effects look great.

Modes cover offline and online: the episode stories already discussed, All-Star Arena as a roguelike run through levels with branching paths and pickup effects for score attempts, Arcadia Rumble as a party mode blending a 3D beat-’em-up arena with 2D fighting and upgrades, plus standard online Lobbies, Casual, and Competitive. All of it is fun, when it works.

That “when it works” is doing a lot of lifting, because the PC launch state was bad. Players everywhere struggled to connect to matches, and once in, frame rates tanked, reconnect prompts fired constantly, or matches just ended on disconnect. Genuinely embarrassing. Some will defend it with “well, I didn’t have issues,” but the game still launched broadly unplayable on PC for sixty dollars. The fix patch did not land until the 10th, four days after release. Scattered issues still get reported, though online play on PC is running noticeably better now overall.

Even fixed, those four days did real damage. A newcomer watching people fail to connect on launch week is a newcomer who does not buy the game. And even resolved, it plants distrust: it’s working now, but will the servers survive the first DLC character or map drop?

Speaking of DLC, more characters are confirmed: Phoenix Cyclops, an odd pick, plus strong hints toward a Thor variant, teased through Loki laughing at Deadpool in the Samurai Outriders route, with the Fantastic Four likely down the line as a team. The base roster sits at 20 characters plus one secret unlock, and while that cast is solid, I wish the launch lineup had been bigger before shifting into “pay up for the rest, bub” mode.

The last major issue is Sony. As publisher, they require a PSN account, created or existing, just to log into the PC version. Part of the early bug list was PSN login failures specifically: we personally hit a loop where login would start, crash, and restart endlessly. PSN also is not available in every country, so PC owners in unsupported regions simply cannot play, full stop. Worse, there’s no Linux or SteamOS support, meaning Steam Deck owners and any Linux setup are locked out entirely. Windows or nothing. A shame, because the actual game underneath is fun, and it feels like real effort went into making the PC release this rough.

Whether $59.99 is fair is on you. If you’re in a PSN-unsupported region or on unsupported hardware, skip it outright. If you don’t like fighting games, this will not convert you. If you already like fighting games, this is worth a real look. If you’re on the fence, watch it played before buying; it’s relatively approachable right now this early, but this will absolutely become a sweaty online scene over time. As a casual player specifically, this is built for competitive play, and the side modes aren’t enough reason alone to buy in. At $70 I’d call it a pass. At $60 I’m largely fine with it, though I’m already bracing for the complete edition eventually landing somewhere in the low hundreds depending on character pricing.