Marvel Tokon's Weirdest Team? Ghost Rider, Loki, Deadpool

Ghost Rider, Blade, Loki, and Deadpool walk into a tag fighter. No, there's no punchline. That's the actual fifth and final team for Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls, revealed at EVO 2026 over the weekend. Arc System Works is calling them the Samurai Outriders, and even the studio admits the lineup is random.

I kind of love that they leaned into it. Every other team in Tokon has a clear thematic through-line: Captain America leading a squad of heroes, Storm rallying her crew. The Samurai Outriders are just vibes. Ghost Rider Robbie Reyes leads the group, joined by vampire hunter Blade, the trickster god Loki, and Deadpool, voiced once again by Nolan North. According to Shacknews, Arc System Works acknowledged the randomness outright but said the story mode will explain what brought these four together. Given that the game's premise involves a cosmic champion sending fight invitations to Earth's heroes and villains, there's room for some weird pairings, and this is the weirdest one yet.

The reveal trailer showed all four in action, and the character variety here is striking even by Arc System Works standards. Blade and Ghost Rider look like aggressive, close-range fighters, while Loki appears to bring some trickery and spacing tools. Deadpool, predictably, looks like he's going to be the character people either adore or despise online. North's voice performance already drips with the kind of fourth-wall energy that made him the definitive Deadpool voice actor long before Ryan Reynolds took the role to cinemas.

What This Means for Launch

With the Samurai Outriders locked in, the full launch roster is now set. No more reveals, no more team announcements. Additional characters will come via DLC post-launch, though Arc System Works hasn't shared specifics on timing or pricing. I'll be watching that closely, because the roster size at launch already feels healthy, and how they handle DLC fighters will say a lot about whether Tokon respects its players' wallets or follows the fighting game industry's worst habits.

The game's development has been an interesting arc in itself. As IGN's interview with Battle Director Kazuto Sekine and Producer Takeshi Yamanaka revealed at EVO, the first beta drew criticism for issues with tag and assist mechanics. Sekine described an ongoing dialogue with the fighting game community that shaped subsequent playtests, saying the team wanted to "create the coolest possible version of these characters that we can at ArcSystem Works." Marvel Games Senior Producer Michael Francisco echoed that, acknowledging that the FGC is "one of the most hardcore communities in all of gaming" and that the feedback comes from a place of wanting the game to succeed. That kind of openness is refreshing. Too many studios treat beta feedback as a PR exercise rather than an actual development input.

Sekine also talked about the balancing act between honoring legacy Marvel fighting game characters and building something new. Characters like Magneto and Iron Man carry heavy expectations from the Marvel vs. Capcom era, and Sekine said the team looks to comics, films, and animated series for each character's identity before translating that into a battle style. Some characters have core abilities that can't really be changed; others gave the team more creative freedom. Eight minutes of Magneto and Black Panther gameplay shown earlier in the weekend backed that up, with Magneto looking like a character who respects his MvC roots while clearly being rebuilt from scratch in Tokon's systems.

An open beta runs July 24-26 on both PC and PS5, giving everyone one last chance to test the full package before launch. Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls releases August 6 on PC and PlayStation 5. The story mode alone is reportedly around ten hours of content with playable battles throughout, following each team leader's perspective as they answer the champion's call. For a fighting game to ship with that much single-player substance on day one is something I want to see more studios attempt. Between the roster variety, the story investment, and a studio that's actually listening to its community between betas, Tokon is shaping up as one of the more ambitious fighting game launches in years.