Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls review – Avengers assemble for 2026’s best fighter

There’s a brand new Marvel fighter in town and it’s an impressively unique take on both the fighting game genre and the superheroes themselves.

The days of licensed video games being low quality shovelware, where the majority of money is spent on acquiring the licence rather than making the game, are thankfully long gone. The general standard of games based on movies, TV shows, and comics is now extremely high, to the point where it’s more a sign of quality than an indication that you’re about to be ripped off. And Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls is the latest proof of that.

The turnaround has not simply been a case of making better games but of realising that trying to turn a two hour movie into a much longer video game is always doomed to failure. So the trick has been to focus on more specific elements of a franchise and, as we saw just this week with Bit Reactor and Star Wars Zero Company, to hire developers who are experts in their particular field.

In this case, Sony has signed up Guilty Gear and BlazBlue maker Arc System Works, one of the best fighting game makers working today, who already have experience with licensed games such as Dragon Ball FighterZ and Persona 4 Arena. This time they’re taking on a Western IP but, interestingly, they’ve been allowed to put their own personal stamp on it, as a Japanese developer.

You may be wondering why it is that, talented as they are, Arc System Works has been gifted the Marvel licence and not long-term custodians Capcom. As much as we’d love to see a new Marvel Vs. Capcom the reasoning is pretty straightforward: Sony wanted a new console exclusive fighting game and given their success with the Spider-Man games, Marvel seemed an obvious way to go. But since Capcom’s name is literally in the title of the game that was never going to work for them.

Despite there being no formal connection between the two series, it’s not just the characters that are reminiscent of Capcom’s work, since Tōkon (the name means fighting souls, making the subtitle amusingly redundant) is also a tag team fighter. You start off with two fighters at a time and, if you perform specific moves and actions, you can extend that to a grand total of four different fighters on your side. Although, unlike most other tag team games, your whole team uses the same health bar, so tagging someone out is not used as a way to recover.

Although Tōkon is not as complex as the likes of BlazBlue, it is still a very technical fighter, where button bashing will you get you nowhere and the learning curve is steeper than the likes of Tekken and Street Fighter. There are moves common to all characters – and you can trigger combos automatically, or simplify the inputs for special moves, if you want – but everyone has their own specific abilities and quirks.

Headliners like Captain America and Spider-Man play much like they always have in a fighting game, but all the characters have their own unique systems, like Ghost Rider’s tendency to overheat, Carnage’s various parasites, and Peni Parker use of her giant mech.

Since you have to have at least a passing knowledge of all four characters in your team the bar to entry is fairly high, as the game forces each of them to take on a specific role – leader, shooter, assault, and vertical – which determines what kind of move they perform when you call in a standard assist. If you want a more powerful attack you have to use a section of the Assemble meter, but the timing for getting this right, or taking over control of one of the non-leader characters, is easily fumbled and, in our experience so far, the hardest part of the game for less experienced players.

It’s a lot to take in, especially as these are non-standard concepts for a fighter, although new ideas are exactly what fighters are in need of at the moment, so we’re loathe to complain too much. Especially as the simplified controls and combos do make the basics perfectly accessible, and that’s all you need at first.

The game’s training mode is very good but the most enjoyable way to learn what you’re doing is via the story modes which, unlike almost every other fighting game ever made, are very good. There’s five character teams with their own story to play through, both heroes and villains, and while the actual plot is just a superhero version of Enter the Dragon the writing, by comic book scribe Kieron Gillen, is great. And we’re not just saying that because he included Squirrel Girl in a bit part.

Story mode is also a prime way to show off the game’s anime-influenced designs. Some characters have been changed more than others – most obviously Iron Man’s new Gundam-inspired look – but although the animation is beautiful, we feel the anime aesthetic isn’t quite pronounced enough to be a real selling point. We found the comic book panels, by various different artists and featuring full voice-acting, to be far more interesting and unique, which was a bit of a surprise.

In terms of performance, the PlayStation 5 version is nowhere near as bad as the already infamous PC edition, but the online netcode could still be better and we experienced some choppy gameplay at times, even on console.

Tōkon is not perfectly formed but it looks amazing, at least on a technical level, and it’s got real depth. This isn’t a shallow spectacle meant only to attract causal Marvel fans; it’s a serious fighter, that we fully expect to become an esports favourite, that just happens to be about superheroes. It’s also got some genuinely new and interesting ideas and for a genre like this, that so often seems frozen in time, that feels like a heroic effort on the part of the developer.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed) and PC
Price: £59.99
Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment
Developer: Arc System Works
Release Date: 6th August 2026
Age Rating: 12

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