Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls Review – Mahvel’s Back Baby

People have been starving for another Marvel fighting game for damn near ten years, so you can imagine the fervor for Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls is at a boiling point. People are tired of waiting, and thankfully Arc System Works is here to give them what they want.

Marvel Tokon’s biggest hurdle that it needs to clear is undoing a lot of the expectations that I’m sure a lot of people (myself previously included) are likely going to jump into this game with, and that’s with the assumption of this being the next Marvel vs Capcom game; which it very much is not. Tokon is a bit more mechanically dense in some ways, and whereas MvC was a tried-and-true tag fighter, Tokon feels more like it’s masquerading as one. Is Marvel Tokon a 4v4 fighting game? Sure. But the more I played it, the more it felt like the game wanted you to treat it less like a tag fighter, and more like a 1v1 with three assists.

Now that’s not me trying to be a curmudgeonly old man who’s upset there’s only a single health bar for your four fighters, but that does partially play into it. In traditional tag fighters, each fighter had their own health bar, so the logic was that you needed to really know how to play as each of your chosen characters because you’d play as them at some point in a fight. I couldn’t just pick Sentinel because I liked their assist action and just never practice with him. Marvel Tokon doesn’t abide by this, however.

You’ve got four characters you can choose from, and they all slot into a specific role: your main fighter, shooter assist, vertical assist, and assault assist. So for example, you might make Magneto your main fighter because he’s the one you’re best at, but you like Wolverine’s shooter assist, so you’ll slot him in that spot. Here’s the kicker, however: they all share a single health bar, so you don’t ever really need to switch from your main fighter. The more I played this game, the less I was incentivized to swap between my characters, especially since you can bring them out for assist combo maneuvers thanks to the dedicated assist button. During my online matches, I was rolling with (in order) Cap, Green Goblin, Ghost Rider, and Carnage. But the more I played, the less I would switch out from Cap just because there really wasn’t any major incentive around it. Of course, there were a few moments where an opponent was playing as someone Green Goblin was perhaps a better matchup against, so that was a rare moment where I swapped over from Cap, but in those moments I usually stayed as the character I swapped into.

Now, this isn’t me shitting on how Marvel: Tokon plays; I just want to set expectations for anyone expecting this to be a true successor to MvC, when it’s more doing its own thing while taking some slight inspirations. I think a lot of Tokon’s changes to the tag formula make a lot of sense because, for one, it makes matches play out much faster since you’re not going through multiple characters to end the match. Additionally, if you treat the game how I previously mentioned, as a 1v1 with assists, that cuts down on the time needed to spend practicing with a whole team of characters and allows you to focus on just one.

Which honestly might be the best way to start playing, because there’s a lot to learn in this game. Each character has your typical selection of light, medium, and heavy attacks, all with their own combos to do; on top of that, however, there’s a button for skills, assemble (assists), and a character’s unique ability. All three of those have their own string of combos to learn from, and considering how fast-paced a fighting game this is, it can be daunting to try to learn four characters off the jump. Of course, the best way to start playing is to simply choose a character.

Marvel: Tokon does something I think Marvel Rivals also does very well: if you are familiar with a Marvel character, you’ll likely know how they’re going to play. Spider-Man, for example, is super quick, with fast combos and the ability to web-zip in any direction to either get away or close the gap with someone. Storm is able to control the wind, which helps with either pushing or pulling opponents, but also maneuvering elemental traps you can place in the arena. Ghost Rider is one of my favorites to play, and he features a “vengeance gauge” that goes up or down depending on the special move you do. He walks this tightrope in matches where the higher the gauge is, the more damage your skills will do, but you run the risk of overloading it and being put in a stunned state and open for punishment. So many of the characters in this roster feel genuinely different from one another that it’s one of the few fighting games where I’d actually encourage you to sit and try out literally every one of them to find your favorites. As a longtime Marvel fan, it’s also one of the most surprising rosters, because who genuinely expected to get Danger or Carnage in one of these games?

In the big 2026, there’s really no excuse to drop a fighting game without a training mode, and Marvel: Tokon thankfully has that in spades. Each character not only has a suite of dedicated tutorials for basics like learning their moves, but you can also dive into a variety of combo tutorials. Want to practice comboing from a jump attack? There’s a lesson for that in here. Struggling to combo off of a character’s unique skill? We got that too. There are even lessons that give you a general idea of what you should be inputting for the start of your combo, and leave the rest to you, with the only goal being to reach a certain damage total. It’s pretty impressive how in-depth the system is, and I will definitely spend a lot of time practicing characters in here.

Being a fighting game, you can expect a handful of modes to play through to get yourself comfortable before diving into online matches. The first up is the game’s story mode, which is shockingly fleshed out compared to most in the genre. The Champion, a powerful entity whose only goal is finding a worthy fight, descends on Earth and tasks its heroes and villains with forming teams and competing for a chance to fight him and save their planet. Among the game’s roster, five teams are formed, with each one being led by Captain America, Storm, Doom, Spider-Man, and Ghost Rider. Each team has its own episode to play through, consisting of ten matches, plus a series of comic-book panel cutscenes that play out between episodes. In a really nice touch, each episode’s cutscenes are drawn by a different comic book artist, which helps give each one its own distinct look. Among the five episodes, however, the Doom and Ghost Rider ones are especially well written with some genuine emotional beats and character development.

The next mode is All-Star Arena, which includes two similar modes: Arena and Survival. The latter is your typical survival mode, where you fight round after round of increasingly difficult enemies. The slight twist here is that every five rounds you’ll be able to fight a boss and save your progress, but on top of that, if you perform well during your matches, you’ll earn XP to use to acquire Support Souls. These are randomly dealt cards that’ll give you permanent bonuses like increasing the attack power of assists by 15% or increasing your movement speed by 30%. It’s a nifty way to add a bit of replayability to what’s normally a pretty straightforward mode. Arena is similar in that it’s another mode where you’ll fight increasingly difficult opponents, but it only lasts five matches. The main difference is that there are multiple “courses” to choose from, each based on one of the five teams from Story Mode. In each course, you can take different paths that will have you fighting different sets of enemies and acquiring different bonuses (that the opponent might have as well).

Arcadia Rumble is a neat little attempt to add some flair to a fighting game’s additional modes. Usually your options are pretty scarce, with most fighting games releasing with an arcade/story mode, vs mode, and then your typical survival mode; so I always welcome any attempt to add a novel new mode to the genre. With Arcadia Rumble, it’s you vs a handful of other players as you compete for kills through two alternating games across five rounds. For three of the rounds, you all take control of your online avatar as you all run across Tokon’s online lobby, attacking each other for KO’s, which get tallied up for your points at the end of the round. The other two rounds involve matching up with another player for a vs match that lasts 99 seconds and basically comes down to which player gets the most KOs in that time.

As you scurry around the online lobby hunting for kills, you’re also picking up these blue or red crystals that’ll give you a variety of advantages. The red crystals are simple enough: they give you a power-up for the current round, like a potion to heal your health or getting to use Ghost Rider’s car to slam into a couple people for an instant KO. The blue crystals affect the vs mode, though. Before the game even starts, you’re asked to select three cards to go into Arcade Rumble, with a card representing each playable character in the game. The blue crystals you collect will level up these cards and increase the benefits they give you. Doom’s card, for example, will give you an attack boost during battle, but if you level it up all the way, you’ll also unlock extra health. Or another card that gives you a bonus if you match up against a player you have a higher KO count than. It’s all really simple, but there’s a silly fun to the entire thing that makes up for it.

I feel since I’m reviewing the PC version of the game, I should bring up the numerous performance issues players seem to be having since release. The game is pushing people’s CPUs to concerningly hot levels, causing crashes, and creating stutters when playing online. I thankfully haven’t experienced much of this, only my PC running a little hotter than a game like this should be making it, so I can’t comment on the slowdowns/crashes people are experiencing, but it does seem to be a credible concern. ArcSys pushed out a patch the other day to address these issues, but (at least on my end) the game is still running hot.