Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls Is Out Now on PS5 With 20 Fighters at £59.99

The fighting game PlayStation has been building towards all year is finally on sale. Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls, the 4-vs-4 tag brawler from Arc System Works published by Sony Interactive Entertainment, launched on 6 August 2026 for PS5 and PC. Twenty characters, full crossplay with the Steam and Epic versions, and a standard edition at £59.99 / $59.99.

The wrinkle for anyone deciding today is that there is nothing to read. Sony held review code back until the servers switched on, so the outlets you would normally check have not published a verdict yet. That makes launch day a slightly unusual purchase, and it is worth knowing exactly what is confirmed before you spend sixty pounds on it.

What's Out Now on PS5

Tōkon is the fighting game Sony announced back in June 2025 and has drip-fed characters from ever since, developed by Arc System Works — the studio behind Guilty Gear Strive and Dragon Ball FighterZ — with PlayStation Studios' XDev group and Marvel Games. It went on sale worldwide on 6 August, the same day on PS5, Steam and the Epic Games Store.

Unusually for a PlayStation release, it did not unlock at local midnight. Launch-time round-ups including Vice put the global unlock at 8am PT / 11am ET, which is 4pm BST in the UK — one simultaneous switch-on everywhere rather than a rolling regional rollout. Sony has not published that time on the PlayStation Blog, so treat it as reported rather than confirmed, and expect the store tile to be the final word.

If you played the free open beta a fortnight ago, this is the same game with the training wheels off. Our write-up of that beta weekend covers the fundamentals — the shared health bar across a four-character team, the assist system, the deliberately low execution floor — and none of it has changed.

The 20-Fighter Roster and the Modes

The launch roster is 20 characters, split into five teams of four: the Fighting Avengers, the Unbreakable X-Men, the Amazing Guardians, the Samurai Outriders and the Knights of Doom. Fifteen of them were playable in the beta; the remaining five, Deadpool among them, were held for launch day. Vice has the full list.

Twenty is a modest number for a Marvel fighter — Marvel vs. Capcom 3 shipped with more — but the shape of it matters more than the count here, because a 4-vs-4 game asks you to learn four characters rather than one. Five coherent teams is a sensible way to sell that.

On the single-player side there is Episode Mode, a set of story chapters built around each team, plus an interactive tutorial aimed squarely at people who have never played a tag fighter. Online there is casual and ranked matchmaking and open lobbies. Local versus on one console is in as well, which is not a given in 2026.

Prices, Editions and the Free PS Plus Pack

The standard edition is £59.99 in the UK and $59.99 in the US — a full-price release, not a budget fighter. Above it sit a Digital Deluxe and an Ultimate edition. Per Insider Gaming, the Deluxe adds the Year 1 Character & Stage Pass — the four post-launch fighters and a new stage — while Ultimate layers on five character costumes and a colour unlock on top. Those two were listed at $84.99 and $99.99 respectively; we have not seen sterling figures confirmed for either, so check the store rather than converting.

The practical question is whether to buy the pass now or later. If you are confident you will play this for a year, the Deluxe maths works out; if you are buying on the strength of a beta weekend, the standard edition and a wait-and-see is the safer call, and nothing about the pass is time-limited.

Separately, and worth two minutes of anyone's time: every PlayStation Plus member can claim a free Marvel Tōkon PlayStation Plus Pack from today. Sony detailed it in the August monthly games post: five PSN avatars (Captain America, Storm, Spider-Man, Doctor Doom, Ghost Rider) and a set of result-screen poses covering all twenty characters. It is claimable until 6 August 2027, so there is no rush, but you do have to redeem it from the store — it will not appear on its own. The avatars work whether or not you own the game; the poses need the game installed. Our round-up of August's PS Plus Essential line-up has the rest of the month's claims.

PS Plus, Crossplay and PS5 Pro

One thing that has changed since the beta: online play now needs PS Plus. The beta was open to anyone with a PS5 and a connection, which was the point of it. The retail game is a paid title, so casual and ranked matchmaking sit behind the standard subscription requirement. If you were counting on the beta arrangement carrying over, budget for it — our guide to the PS Plus tiers covers which one you actually need (Essential is enough for online play).

Crossplay between PS5 and PC is confirmed and on by default, which is the right call for a fighter's long-term health: one matchmaking pool ages far better than three. The PS5 version also carries the usual first-party technical checklist — DualSense haptics, 3D audio, and PS5 Pro enhancements for anyone on the mid-gen machine. If you are still weighing that upgrade, our PS5 vs PS5 Pro comparison is the honest version.

On the netcode: Arc System Works publicly acknowledged the beta's complaints — lag, rollback behaviour, frame-rate drops and crossplay faults — and said fixes were lined up for launch. That was a social-media statement reported by Game Rant rather than a published patch note, and most of the specifics named were PC-side. Whether the PS5 online experience is materially better than the beta's is exactly the sort of thing you can only judge once the lobbies fill up.

Why There Are No Launch Reviews

This is the part that should shape your decision today. Push Square explained that Sony withheld review code until launch day because the game's servers only came online then — a defensible policy for an online-first release, and an increasingly common one, but it means no outlet has had time to play the modes that actually matter. Push Square's own editor said a review is tentatively expected early next week, with the caveat that it is hard to promise a date when the testing has to happen on live public servers alongside everyone else.

So: there is no aggregate score, no consensus, and any "review" published within hours of launch has not seen the ranked ladder under load. The beta impressions were broadly positive, and that is real signal — but it is signal about a free three-day build with fifteen characters, not about a £59.99 game with a year of content planned. If you want a verdict, waiting a week costs you nothing except a slightly thinner launch-week player pool.

Year 1: Four More Fighters

Arc System Works has confirmed four additional characters across the game's first year, sold individually or bundled in the Year 1 pass. The first is Phoenix Cyclops, scheduled for autumn 2026 — a window, not a date, and nobody has narrowed it further. The remaining three have not been announced.

That roadmap is the argument for the game having legs, and also the reason to be a little patient. A fighting game's real character is set by its first balance patch and its first DLC drop, neither of which has happened. The launch window is also about to get crowded: Insomniac's Marvel's Wolverine arrives on 15 September as a PS5 console exclusive, and the run-up to GTA VI in November makes this autumn the busiest PS5 release schedule in the console's life. Tōkon needs to hold attention through all of that.

The Bottom Line

Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls is out now on PS5 at £59.99, with 20 characters, crossplay, a proper single-player mode and a year of planned additions. Everything material about the package is confirmed. What is not confirmed is whether it is good — because Sony did not let anyone find out before it went on sale.

If the beta sold you, buy it and enjoy a full launch-day lobby. If it did not, claim the free PS Plus pack, keep the avatars, and read a review next week. There is no launch-window discount to miss and no content that expires, which makes this one of the rare cases where waiting genuinely costs nothing.