The announcement of Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls from developer ArcSystem Works was met with near universal excitement when it was revealed last year at Sony’s State of Play. Some of that excitement took a hit during the first beta due to some issues with the games’ tag and assist mechanics, but the changes made in the subsequent play tests seem to have brought people back around. At Evo 2026, I got a chance to speak with Battle Director Kazuto Sekine, Producer Takeshi Yamanaka, Michael Francisco of Marvel Games, to talk about the feedback gained from that first beta, the design philosophy of creating Tokon characters, and how they approached creating their version of Magneto, one of the most iconic Marvel characters in the world of fighting games.
IGN: Tokon has changed a lot since we first saw it, specifically gameplay-wise, since the first beta. Can you talk a little bit about the feedback you gained from the betas and how that has shaped the game into it what it is today?
Kazuto Sekine, Battle Director on Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls: I feel like we’ve been able to maintain the core of the mechanics, while also we’ve had this continued communication between ourselves and the player base as we work on development and I feel that has helped us establish a great balance in the game design. I feel that this process of communication has helped us achieve both the direction that we are looking for, from a development perspective to where we want to take the game, as well as for the players to be able to have the game experience that they’re looking for. So I think that it’s been a very mutually positive interaction. And for me, I think that it’s really helped me keep a really positive attitude during the development process.
Michael Francisco, Senior Producer at Marvel Games: I’ll add to that. We really welcome and encourage feedback. We understand that the FGC is one of the most hardcore communities in all of gaming, so we understand it comes from a place of love and people want the game to succeed. So keep it coming.
When it comes to the story mode, you’ve said in the past that it’s around ten hours’ worth of content and that there would be playable battles throughout. Can you talk a little bit about how that mode will be structured? Will we be following a single team, or creating our own team of four, or bouncing around between the perspectives of multiple teams as the game goes on?
Takeshi Yamanaka, Producer on Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls: So there’s a shared overall structure of the story where the promoter and the champion, these characters have, they’ve arrived on Earth, um, and the champion is searching for powerful fighters to face him. And so the promoter has sent these invitations to battle to the heroes and villains throughout the Earth. So the characters who’ve received these invitations are characters, like Captain America, Storm, and the other characters we’ve announced as leaders. The story follows those leaders throughout and covers the challenges that they face.
Going back to gameplay, for characters like Dr. Doom, Storm, Spider-Man, Magneto… all these characters have appeared before in Marvel versus Capcom. Do you try to take inspiration from those previous iterations and try to deliver upon the kind of experience that fans of those characters from those games might expect? Or do you treat Tokan as kind of a blank slate where you can craft your own completely unique versions of these characters? Or is the answer somewhere in the middle?
Sekine: Of course, with the previous Marvel related games, I’ve played a lot of those myself and have a deep respect for them, but for us, our policy when we’re looking at creating the characters for Tokon is that we want to create the coolest possible version of these characters that we can make at ArcSystem Works. But within that, the Marvel characters, they each have their own identity. So we look to things like the comics, the movies, the animated series for those characters’ identities, and try to consider how we can express their, that character’s identity and their abilities, the kind of powers that they have. So the final result is our interpretation of how we can take that identity of the character and make them fun to play, which leads to their actual battle style, or how they play in our game. Of course, for some characters, they have this core ability that’s very central to their character that couldn’t really be changed.
Whereas for other characters, I think we had more leeway to make our own adjustments to kind of what the expectations might be for that character. Or there’s things like, of course, if it’s Iron Man, everybody expects him to be firing beams, so that’s not something we’d be looking to change necessarily. So I think that when players look at the result, they might feel that some aspects could be an homage to other games. But for us, they’re a result of looking at all of those different aspects of the character, and this is the answer that we’ve come up with as far as how we can make them as cool as possible.
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