Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls game review

Whenever a new game bills itself as a "spiritual successor," I brace myself. The label sets expectations among longtime fans that are often impossible to meet. Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls is not the next Marvel vs Capcom — it isn't a Marvel vs Capcom game in any sense. And yet it's the most fun I've had with a tag fighter in years.

A Marvel Universe Through a Japanese Lens

On paper, the package is straightforward: a 2D, 4v4 tag fighter where you build a squad of heroes and villains from a launch roster of 20 and throw them at other teams online or across a handful of single-player modes. Training options and basic profile customization round out a fairly standard set of features.

Where Marvel Tōkon immediately separates itself is presentation. Years of Marvel games have ranged from forgettable MCU tie-ins to faithful comic adaptations, but the team here — with Arc System Works' unmistakable touch — reimagines the Marvel universe through a Japanese design sensibility. It's a choice that cut straight through my superhero fatigue, even for the roster's dullest entries.

Take Captain America. He's generally fine — good guy, cool shield. His Tōkon design stays faithful while refreshing the details: the styling of the A and wings on his helmet, battle boots paired with a thick jacket. It works. The real payoff comes with characters we rarely see, like Green Goblin, a creepy scuttler who turns genuinely menacing when he takes to his glider.

Arc System Works also weaves comic-book aesthetics throughout the whole game. Menu borders are drawn as panel frames, hover boxes pop with a jittering orange pencil fill, and sub-menus carry a retro dotted texture. It's deeply nerdy to notice, but it makes the experience more colourful and joyful.

Slower, Simpler, Smarter

In actual play, Tōkon blends decades-old tag-fighter fundamentals with modern genre conveniences — smoothing out the intimidating parts of the sub-genre without losing the spectacle. There's a trade-off, though.

Compared to classics like Marvel vs Capcom 2, movement can feel tectonic, and the combat is clearly built around an intended way to play. A basic combo route on one character likely works on all of them, and early on the cast can feel a touch samey. That impression fades as each fighter's unique strengths open the door to trickier, more creative routes. Much of the mechanical freedom veterans remember from tag classics has been trimmed in favour of broader appeal.

What it buys in return is the best on-ramp for new players I've seen in any tag fighter. You start by mashing buttons while learning each character, then fold in the assist button for tag attacks, then attempt a basic manual combo — light, medium, heavy, down heavy, jump medium, heavy, heavy, assist, super. It works on everyone. From there, extending combos with assists comes naturally. Unlike Street Fighter 6 or 2XKO, which separate modern-control players from the rest, Tōkon offers one control scheme serving both newcomers and high-dexterity players.

Remarkably, a 4v4 tag fighter should be visual chaos — and sometimes it is, with matches devolving into a motorway pile-up of swords and fire blasts. But you're not dropped into that chaos at second one. Squad members unlock as matches progress, giving every fight a natural crescendo into a full comic-book brawl by the final round. It's great stuff.

Thin Modes, Solid Netcode (On PS5)

Single-player content is modest. Five episodes, each starring a different team, can be cleared in around an hour apiece — not long or challenging, but nicely presented with cinematics and comic-style animation, and each first clear unlocks a new character. Alternate modes include Arcadia Rumble, a light party mode with in-match boosts that struggled to hold my attention, plus arena courses, choose-your-own-adventure arcade ladders, and a 100-round survival mode rewarding the full-roster colour scheme.

Online, the core experience is largely faultless: casual and ranked queues, Arc System Works' signature avatar lobbies with arcade cabinets, and — a nice touch — a dedicated menu option for official PlayStation tournaments. Performance problems on PC have been widely reported since launch, and during review they made crossplay matches dreadful. PS5 players could disable crossplay to sidestep the issues, and a patch has since appeared to remedy much of it, though some PC opponents still struggle badly.

Letting Go of the Past

Judged on its own, divorced from Marvel tag-fighter legacy, Marvel Tōkon is fantastic. But the ghost of Marvel vs Capcom hovers over it, and I can't help missing the speed and complexity of those games — some of the series' absurd feats simply aren't possible here.

Maybe that's for the best. It reminds me a little of film versus digital photography: film demands mastery but yields shots that feel truly your own; digital removes the struggle and, with it, some of the magic. Veteran fighting game fans may feel the same about Tōkon. Time moves on, and shedding some of that hardship might be the right call.

Because Marvel Tōkon is a triumphant new chapter in the Marvel tag-fighter legacy — a bold game pairing gorgeous presentation with explosive combat that has earned a lasting spot in my weekly rotation.

A copy of Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls was provided for this review by PlayStation.

Source: Eurogamer