I am not in the Arc System Works world.

I played a little Guilty Gear Strive with friends, but that’s about it. Most of my fighting game experience comes from Street Fighter 6 and the Marvel vs. Capcom series. If you really zoom out, you could trace my history all the way back to Marvel Super Heroes on PS1, but as a whole, my fighting game pedigree is pretty shallow. That’s exactly why I surprised myself when I signed up for the beta playtest of Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls.

I love Marvel—especially the early-to-mid 2010s era—and I’ve always loved fighting games, even if I’m decidedly not tournament material. So when a shiny new Marvel fighter shows up, developed by people who know what they’re doing, it felt kind of inevitable that I’d wander in and get punched in the face a few hundred times.

Picking a Main (and Why It Had to Be Ms. Marvel)

Before jumping into matches, I did a tiny bit of homework and settled on Ms. Marvel as my main.

My usual fighting game main-selection logic goes like this:

1. Big Beefers
   
2. The Funniest One
   

The beta roster, however, is shockingly devoid of Beefers. No Hulk. No Juggernaut. No Thing. No She-Hulk, which feels downright illegal. So with no walking tank available, I had to go with “The Funniest One,” and Kamala Khan fits that bill perfectly.

She’s stretchy and expressive, like a superhero Stretch Armstrong, and she brings the kind of femininity that inexplicably makes certain corners of the internet seethe. This is the exact same kind of logic that led me to hit Diamond in SF6 with E. Honda, and I’ll be damned if I abandon that nonsense now.

The beta offers eight heroes, and you build a team of four:

• Ms. Marvel
  
• Captain America
  
• Iron Man
  
• Ghost Rider
  
• Dr. Doom
  
• Spider-Man
  
• Storm
  
• Star-Lord
  

Again, not a single true Big Beefer. Pain. 

Because everyone’s working with the same small roster and building teams of four, you get a ton of overlap. While I didn’t keep hard stats, the most commonly seen heroes in my lobbies were Spider-Man and Ghost Rider, which makes sense—they were added specifically for this beta wave and people are excited to try the new toys.

With a starting roster this tight, there are some candidates I’d love to see on day one or as DLC. Obviously, we need some bigs. Hulk feels like a lock just based on sheer popularity, but I’d love to see She-Hulk, Juggernaut, or Colossus fill that niche too. Honestly, I’d like Hulk to lean more into a Potemkin-style grappler this time, instead of just being a hyper-armor tank like he often is in the MVC games. Kitty Pryde would also be awesome—I’m dreaming of a Ghostface-from-MK1-style trickster who plays both sides of the screen with portals and keeps opponents permanently off-balance. And okay, wrong universe, but someone with a Beast Boy–style moveset could be hilarious: elephant tusk to the face, gorilla punch to the gut, horse kick to the ass. Jubilee would also be a fantastic pick, especially if they really lean into the 90s nostalgia that a game like this is already dripping in.

Teams, Roles, and Assists

Your team of four is broken into one main and three assists. Your main is the character you control most of the time—in my case, Ms. Marvel. The other three are slotted into specific assist roles:

• Shooter – a ranged support
  
• Assault – rushdown / offensive pressure
  
• Anti-air – exactly what it sounds like
  

My setup ended up like this:

• Main: Ms. Marvel
  
• Shooter: Storm
  
• Assault: Spider-Man
  
• Anti-air: Iron Man
  

Did I have a galaxy-brain rationale for this team comp? Absolutely not. It just made sense in my Marvel brain. Storm felt like a natural zoner, Spider-Man as an in-your-face assist made sense, and Iron Man screaming upwards on the screen with boosters is basically his whole thing.

Each assist is triggered with a direction + X, and they pop in for a quick move before bouncing out. You can also hold X during the assist call to tag that character in as your new main, Marvel vs. Capcom–style. I did this approximately four times total because I am a creature of habit and refused to abandon Kamala.

Controls, Combos, and the Unhinged Throw Button

The actual fighting happens on a traditional 2D plane: you on one side, the opponent on the other, everyone politely ignoring gravity until someone gets hit.

Buttons break down like this:

• Square – light / quick attacks
  
• Triangle – medium attacks
  
• Circle – heavy / haymaker attacks
  
• X + direction – assist calls
  
• R1 / R2 – unique character abilities
  
• Square + X + direction – counter / reversal
  
• Triangle + Circle – throws
  

Let’s pause on that last one.

Throws are Triangle and Circle. Not Square and X. Not light + medium. Triangle and Circle. I cannot stress how deranged this felt at first. It’s one of those design choices where you go, “Surely I misread the tutorial,” and then you check again and no, that’s really it. Fucking Triangle and Circle. Unhinged.

On top of that, the game leans heavily into an autocombo system. Repeatedly mashing Square, Triangle, or Circle can trigger a preset combo that often ends in a flashy super or a team-based finisher. This has already set parts of the internet on fire because of course it has.

The thing is:

• You don’t have to rely on autocombos.
  
• You can build traditional combos with manual inputs.
  
• And if you’re the kind of person who makes fun of Modern Controls in SF6, congratulations, this game gives you yet another moral high ground to stand on while you get hit by full-screen chains.
  

The counter system is handled by pressing Square + X with a direction. Time it right, and you get a reversal-style move that blows your opponent back and resets the situation. The timing window is fairly generous, but the punish window if you whiff is enormous. This is not something you can spam unless you enjoy eating full combos for breakfast.

The Lobby and Art Style: Marvel Meets Anime

The beta runs through an online lobby system, with each room holding around 60 players. The lobby is dotted with little 1v1 arcade cabinets, and you walk your chibi hero avatar over to one to queue up a match. You can:

• Hop into random matches
  
• Set up fights with friends
  
• Or basically host your own little Marvel fight club
  

It’s a familiar setup if you’ve played other ArcSys games, but the Marvel skin and the character avatars give it a fun twist. Watching tiny anime-fied Marvel heroes run around and mash on fake arcade sticks is weirdly charming.

Visually, the game goes for a Marvel-meets-anime aesthetic:

• Big expressive eyes
  
• Stylized armor and proportions
  
• Iron Man looking suspiciously like a Gundam
  

It’s an interesting fusion you don’t see often in games—probably because it requires both an understanding of anime sensibilities and the willingness to stretch a very mainstream IP into something a bit weirder. The character models are detailed, and their traditional Marvel color schemes are preserved while still leaning into those anime exaggerations. It creates this nice tension between familiarity and novelty.

Stages

The beta includes three stages:

• New York
  
• The Savage Lands
  
• X-Mansion
  

The backgrounds generally look crisp and lively, though there are a few spots where the graphical quality dips a bit. It’s nothing catastrophic and, again, this is a beta. I’m not going to lose my mind over a slightly muddy texture.

Each stage is segmented by invisible walls on either end. If you slam your opponent into one of these walls with enough force, you trigger a stage transition—a quick cinematic that tosses both characters into a new area of the same stage. It’s stylish and keeps the fights feeling dynamic, but the novelty wears off a bit when it happens frequently.

More than once I’d knock someone into a new area, only for them to immediately knock me back to the old one. It starts to feel like you’re stuck in a Marvel-branded revolving door. I’d love to see those transitions sped up a little to make them feel snappier and less intrusive over time.

How It Feels to Fight

The big theme of this beta, at least from my experience, is that zone control is king.

A lot of characters have strong tools to control space:

• Iron Man – Uni-Beam and other ranged options
  
• Spider-Man – web zips and web shots
  
• Ghost Rider – absurdly long-reaching chain normals
  
• Storm – plenty of screen-filling nonsense
  

Meanwhile, Ms. Marvel… has a big stretchy punch and a slower, more awkward movement option that’s basically diet web zip. In other words: I got bullied from full screen. A lot.

This is one of those things that will probably smooth out with:

• Balance patches
  
• A larger roster
  
• And people discovering counterplay
  

But in the context of this beta slice, the zoning meta felt very strong. If you don’t have the tools or knowledge to get around projectiles and mid-range harassment, you’re going to suffer.

The Corner Game and My Throw Agenda

Despite all that zoning, one thing I really appreciate is how many tools the game gives you to escape the corner:

• The Square + X reversal is excellent for blowing someone off you and buying room.
  
• You can simply jump over people if you read their timing.
  
• You can rely on jump throws, which quickly became my entire personality.
  

Let me talk about jump throws for a second.

Underutilized in a lot of games, the jump throw in Fighting Souls is my new religion. When you jump, your opponent’s first instinct is usually to jump and swat you back down or meet you in the air. If you’re ready for that, you can air throw them and just fling them out of your personal space.

You can also mix in air counters or other options, which starts to create a whole little mini mind game of:

• Are they going to anti-air?
  
• Are they going to jump and swing?
  
• Are they going to block and wait?
  

It’s a small thing, but it made a lot of corner exchanges feel dynamic and tense rather than hopeless.

Dodges, Defense, and the “What Ifs”

Talking with friends in the beta, one recurring idea was the potential of adding a spot dodge or forward dodge mechanic as a universal system.

Ms. Marvel actually has a spot-dodge-and-counter skill baked into her kit, but I never got fully comfortable with its timing or usage. Between learning the basic game flow, dealing with assists, and trying not to get turned into a highlight reel, that specific tool just never clicked for me.

That said, I do think there’s room in this game for more defensive movement options:

• A universal spot dodge could help deal with oppressive zoning.
  
• A forward dodge could open up aggressive plays and make approaching feel less miserable against certain matchups.
  

Balancing those tools around everything else—the assists, reversals, supers, and tag mechanics—would be tricky, but if the devs ever decide to experiment in that direction, I think there’s a lot of potential.

The Flaws (With a Beta-Sized Grain of Salt)

This is a beta. It is, by definition, a work in progress. The entire point is to flush out bugs, test systems at scale, and gather feedback before launch.

You would not know this from reading some of the discourse online.

There’s already a loud chunk of people declaring the game “dead on arrival” because of the autocombo system, because it’s not Marvel vs. Capcom 4, because the roster is too small, because the assists are too busy, because the logo is shaped funny—take your pick. Gamers, overreact? In my current year? More likely than you’d think.

From my actual hands-on time, here were the main issues I ran into:

1. Timing and Hitbox Weirdness

Some of this is on me. I’m not deeply familiar with the underlying engine, and my timing was often off. But there were still moments where I swore an attack should’ve connected and it just… didn’t.

Whether that’s:

• Hitbox / hurtbox tuning
  
• Latency / rollback weirdness
  
• Or just the learning curve
  

…it’s hard to say from a short beta. But it was noticeable enough that it occasionally broke the flow of a match.

2. Visual Clutter During Assists

When both players start calling in assists, things can get very busy on screen:

• Supers firing
  
• Projectiles flying around
  
• Multiple characters jumping in and out
  

There were times where I genuinely lost track of where my character was in the chaos. Every now and then I could weaponize that clutter to sneak in a throw, but more often it just felt frustrating.

Some of this is the nature of a 4v4, assist-heavy fighter. Marvel games have always flirted with sensory overload. But if there’s any way to improve clarity—subtle outlines, better telegraphs, or slightly toned-down VFX—I think it would go a long way.

3. Personal Preference: I’d Rather It Be 1v1 or 2v2

This last one is pure personal bias, but I’ll say it anyway:

In my perfect world, this would be a 1v1 fighter, or at most a 2v2 tag fighter. I like smaller teams, clearer interactions, and slightly slower chaos.

That doesn’t mean 4v4 is bad—just that it’s not my ideal. The game is clearly built from the ground up around that team structure, and it does make for some hype setups. It just also amplifies the clutter and complexity.

So… Is Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls Any Good?

From what I played? Yeah. I think it’s going to land as a solid, fun entry in the fighting game library.

Arc System Works understands how to build satisfying fighting systems. Marvel understands how to package and sell things to a massive audience. I don’t think this is going to be the new Evo main event, but I do think it’ll be pretty good—and honestly, that’s where I think the discourse is going to get messy.

If it’s:

• Too accessible – people will call it “braindead” and “casual trash.”
  
• Too complex – people will say it pushed out newcomers and “missed the Marvel magic.”
  
• Too different from Marvel vs. Capcom – people will complain it’s not “true” Marvel.
  
• Too close to Marvel vs. Capcom – people will complain it’s a worse version of something we already had.
  

People are already lazily comparing it to MVC just because there are Marvel characters and assists on screen, but the games are very different in both gameplay and scope. And honestly? I don’t really want another MVC clone. We already have those games. I want Marvel titles to take weird swings and experiment.

From this beta, Fighting Souls feels like exactly that: a big, strange, Marvel-flavored swing at something new.

Will I be picking it up?

Yeah, probably. Maybe not day one, but somewhere along the game’s lifespan, absolutely.

And by then, if the devs really want my undying loyalty, they’ll have solved most of the early issues and given Ms. Marvel exactly what she truly needs:

The ability to pull out a gun.