Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls has a lot going for it, from its invigorating 4v4 tag fighting to its great story mode full of motion comics. The PC version even seems to be fixed now, after a few days of players struggling to get Marvel Tokon running well. One thing the new Marvel fighter doesn’t have going for it, however, is a wide variety of what makes superheroes so iconic: Their costumes!
Arc System Works is known for anime-inspired fighters, and it brought an anime aesthetic to Marvel Tokon, which immediately turned heads upon its reveal last summer. So many of your favorite heroes look wonderful with a bit of anime flair infused with their traditional designs, like Iron Man’s suit looking like a person-sized Gundam. Everyone’s new looks really make them stand out, especially when compared to something like the designs in Marvel’s Avengers (RIP), which kind of felt like MCU-lite.
The problem comes when those anime-inspired looks are… all we get. Instead of being able to swap between different costumes for someone like Ms. Marvel, for example, like her original comics appearance or her new costume from Saladin Ahmed’s run, she just gets several color palette swaps. Ms. Marvel’s uniform can be purple or yellow or white, but none of those really go with the character.
Some color palette swaps can approximate other costumes, so at least there’s that. Mutants get yellow-and-blue spandex colors, and Wolverine can wear brown-and-tan and black-and-white patterns to imitate his classic and X-Force fits, respectively. Green Goblin effectively becomes the Hobgoblin with one of his color swaps. But if you want Spider-Man’s classic black symbiote look, Magneto’s white Krakoa-era digs, or Magik’s New Mutants look, you’re outta luck. For now, anyway.
A few heroes do actually get alternate costumes, but there’s a catch. As of now, you can only get alternate costumes for Captain America, Iron Man, Storm, Spider-Man, and Doctor Doom by paying extra for the Digital Deluxe Edition ($84.99) or Ultimate Edition ($99.99). If you don’t want to shell out more on top of the $59.99 standard edition, then you’re stuck with green, blue and other color swaps for the fighters.
Of course, Marvel Tokon isn’t the first fighter to forgo alternate looks for its roster. One of 2026’s other tag fighters, Invincible VS, had a noticeable lack of costumes, though that one is more forgivable as Invincible characters don’t have much costume variety to begin with. (Which makes locking a costume behind a pizza paywall a bit eyebrow-raising.) Costume variety was also an issue with Dragon Ball FighterZ, another Arc System Works tag fighter. You couldn’t swap out Goku’s gi, for example, but could make it green or pink, colors he’s very much known for wearing.
My beef with fighting games not including alternate costumes extends back to NetherRealm Studios’ Injustice 2, a game I put [redacted] hours into back in 2017. Instead of including alternate costumes for its roster of DC Comics heroes and villains, it went all-in on a gear system with color shaders. You could try to approximate heroes’ costumes, but you were at the mercy of the RNG gods. Case in point: Green Arrow was my main, yet I never got a hood gear piece for the Emerald Archer.
At least both Injustice 2 and its predecessor included skins that could change the characters themselves, lending some appreciated variety to the roster, like turning Superman into Bizarro or the Flash into Reverse-Flash. The first game even included an alternate skin for Green Arrow based on CW’s Arrow show, voiced by lead actor Stephen Amell. NetherRealm has moved away from a gear system with its recent games and included a good variety of costumes in Mortal Kombat 1. The team even added in a few costumes inspired by 2026’s Mortal Kombat 2 movie.
Playing Marvel Tokon a week after seeing Spider-Man: Brand New Day (and days before I go see it again in IMAX), I can’t help but imagine how cool it would have been if Marvel Tokon’s Spider-Man received a Brand New Day-inspired suit with Tom Holland lending his voice to Spider-Man’s pre- and post-match lines. Spider-Man, like every Marvel hero, has a wealth of costumes to choose from. His, and other heroes’, looks from the MCU alone would be enough to offer plenty of costume variety.
I recognize that making new costumes with accurate hitboxes is a tougher endeavor in a 2D fighter than a 3D arena fighter, like Dragon Ball Sparking Zero. But I’d have more sympathy if players weren’t charged extra for the only available alternate costumes in the game.
