3 days ago
‘Marvel Tokon' Puts Marvel Back in Its Best Gaming Home
Before the likes of Insomniac Games and Square Enix got their hands on Marvel, the publisher's superheroes inhabited many a genre. But they were most at home in the fighting space—X-Men: Children of the Atom, Marvel Super Heroes, and of course its many, many crossovers with Capcom, which famously include the vs. Capcom series, are fondly remembered and define Marvel's video game presence.
Since 2017's Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite, and with the growing popularity of cinematic action-adventure titles, no one knew if Marvel would ever return to the fighting space. Then came PlayStation's recent State of Play stream, which concluded with the reveal of a wholly new title: Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls, courtesy of Arc System Works, the Japanese studio best known for BlazBlue and several Dragon Ball fighting titles. The 2026-bound game has caught attention online thanks to its art style and the pedigree of its developer. Oh, and it's a 4v4 tag team fighter, the very same thing which defined Marvel vs. Capcom. (Save for that series being 3v3.)
A behind-the-scenes video for Marvel Tōkon shows this wasn't just a happy accident. Marvel Games' Michael Francisco explicitly stated PlayStation came to them with a desire to 'bring Marvel back to the forefront of the tag-team fighting genre,' a tacit admission that Infinite came and went faster than expected. The game reportedly missed its sales targets after less than a year of release, and launched to decent, but not glowing, reviews. A particular critque was aimed at its roster; previous entries got to have big, then-out there choices like Nova, MODOK, and Silver Samurai. Infinte was not so lucky, and coming out at the height of the MCU, it primarily featured characters Marvel had the rights to, which famously meant the loss of a bunch of series staples, including no Doctor Doom or X-Men of any kind.
Since then, things have worked in Marvel's favor (read: Disney bought all of Fox) that it's been less restrictive about who's in their big video games. Blade, the Fantastic Four, and various X-Men are all over Marvel Rivals and Midnight Suns when they wouldn't have been just a decade earlier. That freedom will be a big help for Tōkon; rosters are a huge draw of fighting games, and Arc System Works showed it's got the juice right away with its opening lineup including Ms. Marvel (Kamala Khan), Ghost Rider (Robbie Reyes), Storm, and Doctor Doom. There's likely some intentional cross-mixing here with NetEase's future Rivals additions—sooner or later, Kamala and Robbie will be in the game, I'm certain—but it also doesn't hurt that several characters will use this game to make their debut in the genre. Fighting games are big and flashy as hell, and one way to get people interested would be showing how someone like Miles Morales or the Vision translates to a genre we've never seen them inhabit before.
Also working in Tōkon's favor is how it'll run unopposed in the licensed fighting game space for a while, at least when it comes to its direct competitor. After Injustice 2 in 2017, NetherRealm has kept its focus on Mortal Kombat, likely in part because it didn't know if it'd even get to to keep making Injustice. Now that it's closed the book on Mortal Kombat 1, a third Injustice is probably around the corner eventually. But making games takes time, and the studio's next project is likely a year or two away from a reveal, much less release. Until then, Arc System Works will keep on showing off its roster, gameplay mechanics, and art design to an audience more than eager to play with a shiny new Marvel thing.
With the existence of Marvel Tōkon, a popular joke floating around is how put out Capcom might feel about all this. The Resident Evil publisher has had plenty of hits in recent years that it might be willing to let Marvel vs. Capcom hang on the shelf indefinitely, but it might also renew the developer's desire to get the franchise back on track. A collection of remastered games from 2024 might've helped get the ball rolling on a potential revival, and last year, Capcom producer Shuhei Mastumoto underlined that both companies would be keen to bring MvC back. Having a classic fighting series stand alongside a fresh new one would definitely be a boon to Marvel and their respective developers. We won't know until we know, but regardless of how things shake out, lovers of the fighting game space will be more than satiated.
