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.
You kind of touched upon something that I’ve always been really interested about. In the West, Marvel Comics are ubiquitous. Everyone knows about Iron Man, Captain America, all these characters. But this is a game that’s being made in Japan, and I’ve always wondered how familiar the team has been with Marvel Comics, and what kind of research did you have to do to make these characters feel as authentic as possible?
Yamanaka: I think that compared to the West in general, we did start with less knowledge about the Marvel Comics source material. But from the start, there actually were several staff members of our team who are extremely familiar, like big fans of Marvel Comics, who we started out by learning about them from these staff members. Thankfully, [Michael Francisco] is here with us today, and the rest of the Marvel team, introduced us to things like the Marvel Unlimited service where you can read Marvel comics, and then we’ve also sought out a lot of reference material by buying comics for ourselves. So actually, the bookshelf that we have on the development floor is now filled with the comics. As I mentioned, there are fans of the comics, longtime comic fans within the team. So often they would pick up ecommended comics about the characters that we’re working on the development of, so everybody can read the comics about that character. In addition, if there’s something that they really want everybody on the whole team to know about this character, they’ll have a presentation, and we’ll give them the stage to talk about the character.
Sekine: And I think as a result of all of that effort we were able to get to the point where Tokon itself will become a comic. And when we saw that on the table, we were all celebrating. Like “Yeah! We did it!”
Francisco: I’ll add as well that at Marvel, we were always really impressed by the amount and level of research that these folks would do to understand the Marvel Universe. To be able to adapt that into a fighting game. Of course, we provided a lot of resources for them, but they even sought it out on their own, as they’re saying. I think they had, um, like Akitomo-san, who used to actually do the official translations in Japan for the comics, was also on their team consulting and translating comics that had not been yet translated to Japanese in real time for them.
And also, you know that ArcSys is also very particular and meticulous with their research so that every attack in the game actually they found like a panel from the comics that they used as a reference for their key frames. So, they know their stuff. I’m always really impressed by them.
To kind of dive into some of the stuff that I think hardcore fighting game fans, fighting game fans are interested in, we know that there’s gonna be a story mode, there’s online modes, but will there be any sort of in-game character guides or combo trials or features like replay takeover that you guys are looking to implement into Tokon?
Sekine: At the current moment, I apologize, we can only discuss what’s actually available within the hands-on demo. And so, while I can’t say anything more, I would just like to say that we have a long history of creating fighting games, and that myself, I’m personally a fighting game fan. So take that how you will.
I think one of the really awesome aspects of Tokon, especially leading up to the release, has been thesethese trailers that all kind of grouped together these canonical teams of four. When it comes to DLC, are you planning on continuing this trend? Like, will there be a season built around a specific team of four, or will they be characters that are from more disparate backgrounds?
Yamanaka: Yeah, I apologize that we can’t answer that.
I had a feeling. Had to try though. It’s obviously kind of early to say, but do you have a hope of how long you’d like to continue supporting Tokon with new characters and updates?
Yamanaka: I can’t say any specific numbers or anything, but I would like to say that as a team, we want to answer the expectations as long as the players are excited about the game.
We had Magneto playable on the show floor for the first time at Evo, so can you talk a little bit about the direction you took when it came to designing this character? Especially because, like I said before, this is a character that has a lot of expectations coming from Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and Marvel vs Capcom 3 especially. He was one of the top tiers and most notable characters of those games. So with that level of expectation on your shoulders, how did you approach the design of Magneto?
Sekine: So I think that for Magneto, everybody knows him as like this super, super cool character, like everybody likes him. I think that everybody here would all like, I mean, in the event, everyone would think of him as an iconic character. So we do of course have a certain level of pressure as far as like, how can we create Magneto for ourselves? So when we were setting out to create our version of Magneto, one thing that we really wanted to achieve was to take his magnetic abilities, those kind of gravity related aspects, and make that the center of his battle mechanics. Um, so you can see in the game that he does things like he, um, creates debris, which he can use to form weapons, or he can draw the opponent in towards him with magnetism to attack them. I think that previous versions of the character haven’t really focused on that aspect of him before. So we have these things like the magnetized state that he can inflict on the opponent, and I think that this creates an aspect of Magneto we really haven’t seen in games before, which is what we are really focusing on here as a way to make our Magneto super cool. So that’s kind of our starting point for how to achieve that.
Also when you press his unique attack, you can see he sends out objects using magnetism. And actually, depending on what stage you’re playing on at the time, whether it’s like New York or Ice Mansion, you’ll see different objects that he’s using. So that’s one aspect we put a lot of effort into recreating. And it’s just one of those things that I look at and I think “our Magneto is awesome,” I was curious as to what you think about him?
I think it’s so cool. Like I said, Magneto is such an iconic character for how he plays in MvC, but how he plays in those games isn’t really Magneto. It’s just kind of a really fast moving character that flies, shoots beams, and uses energy blasts. But when I think of Magneto, I think of him like manipulating metal, doing things like raising Wolverine up because of his adamantium and doing awful things to him, So I think you guys did a really good job.
Sekine: See, our Magneto is super cool!
Francisco: To add on top of everything [Sekine-san] has said, our one request at Marvel was can you find a way to show him manipulating metal as much as possible? Yeah. And that sounds really novel ’cause he’s the Master of Magnetism, but in a video game, it’s actually really hard to achieve both from a design standpoint and a technical standpoint because he’s got a lot of particles and debris that persist on the stage for a long time.
So, but I think what they’ve achieved here is that he feels like a more of a zoner or a conductor that’s throwing a lot of, like, metal girders and cars at you. And it’s like he’s warping the battlefield to put you at a disadvantage, which feels a lot more like Magneto from the comics. A lot of the reference material we sent them was, if you look at, like, covers or key poses or even action figures, like, he’ll be, like, surrounded by steel girders and, and metal shards and things like that. So that’s kind of the key image that, they were trying to go with for Magneto.
Mitchell Saltzman is an editorial producer at IGN. You can find him on twitter @JurassicRabbit
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