Marvel Tokon devs on Magneto, beta feedback, and building the FGC's next big Marvel game

At Evo 2026, IGN sat down with Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls Battle Director Kazuto Sekine, Producer Takeshi Yamanaka, and Marvel Games Senior Producer Michael Francisco to talk about how the game has evolved since its rocky first beta and what went into designing characters like Magneto.

Sekine says the team kept the core mechanics intact while running an ongoing feedback loop with the player base — a process he credits with helping the game find its balance. Francisco echoed that, noting the FGC is one of the most hardcore communities in gaming and that the team actively welcomes the criticism because it comes from a place of wanting the game to succeed. On the story mode, Yamanaka explained the setup: a mysterious promoter and champion arrive on Earth, the champion seeks powerful fighters, and the promoter sends out battle invitations to heroes and villains across the planet. Characters like Captain America, Storm, and other announced leaders each receive one of these invitations, and the story follows their individual challenges from there. The mode was previously confirmed to run around ten hours with playable battles throughout.

Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls is being developed by ArcSystem Works — the studio behind Guilty Gear Strive and Dragon Ball FighterZ — and was revealed at Sony's State of Play. The game features a tag and assist system, and early beta feedback flagged issues with exactly those mechanics, though subsequent playtests appear to have won players back. Magneto is one of the most storied characters in Marvel fighting games, with a legacy stretching back to Marvel vs. Capcom 2 where he was widely considered one of the strongest characters in the game. The interview also touched on whether the team draws from those Marvel vs. Capcom iterations when designing returning characters or treats Tokon as a clean slate — though the article cuts off before the full answer.

The conversation at Evo 2026 suggests ArcSystem Works and Marvel Games are leaning hard into community engagement as a development tool rather than treating post-launch patches as the only correction mechanism. No release date was confirmed during the interview, but the continued public playtests and Evo presence signal the game is moving steadily toward launch.