Here's a bit of cosmic irony for Marvel's favorite vampire hunter. Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls hands Blade his first playable role in the game this week, and the Daywalker keeps proving he can headline just about anything the moment you take him off a movie screen. He thrives in comics, he anchors crossover events, he shows up in games, and now he leads a team in Sony and Arc System Works' new 4v4 tag fighter. The one place he can't seem to land is the multiplex, and that gap has never looked wider than it does right now.
That contrast got a lot sharper this month. Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige, speaking on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, admitted he feels "like a gigantic loser and failure" for never getting the Mahershala Ali Blade reboot off the ground. The studio announced that film with the two-time Oscar winner all the way back at San Diego Comic-Con in 2019, and in the years since it has churned through writers and directors, lost its release date, and still hasn't made it in front of cameras. So the character who kick-started the modern comic book movie boom with Wesley Snipes in 1998 is, for now, easier to play than to watch.
Good thing the game gives fans plenty to chew on. The roster reads like a comic reader's fantasy draft, and the villain side is where it gets loud. The bad guys are billed as the Knights of Doom, pairing Doctor Doom with Magneto, which is pointed timing given that Doom is about to anchor the entire MCU in Avengers: Doomsday. Fifteen of the twenty launch fighters are in this weekend's beta, split across five teams:
- Fighting Avengers - Captain America, Iron Man, Black Panther
- Unbreakable X-Men - Storm, Magik, Wolverine, Danger
- Amazing Guardians - Spider-Man, Ms. Marvel, Star-Lord, Peni Parker
- Samurai Outriders - Ghost Rider, Blade
- Knights of Doom - Doctor Doom, Magneto
What makes the lineup sing for longtime readers is how far past the A-list it digs. Danger is the deepest pull on the board, the X-Mansion's Danger Room training system given a body and a grudge, introduced by Joss Whedon and John Cassaday during their acclaimed Astonishing X-Men run back in 2005. Peni Parker brings her SP//dr mech, Ghost Rider rides in on Blade's team, and Storm, Magik, Ms. Marvel, and Star-Lord fill out a cast that treats screen favorites and page-only picks with the same care. For more than a few of these characters, this is a first genuine turn in a Marvel fighting game.
The news peg underneath everything is a generous giveaway. The open beta runs this Friday, July 24th, through Sunday the 26th, free on PS5, Steam, and the Epic Games Store, with no registration and no PlayStation Plus required. As laid out on the PlayStation Blog, it's a full 72-hour window covering online ranked and casual matches, training mode, and the first three chapters of the Amazing Guardians story campaign. The finished game arrives August 6th with all twenty characters on the roster.
For a comic book movie crowd, the appeal here is less about frame data and more about seeing these characters handled with respect. A Blade who plays as sharp as he looks would be a pointed reminder of what the movies keep passing up, and a strong showing for Doctor Doom this close to Doomsday does the character no harm either. Arc System Works has serious pedigree in this space, having built Dragon Ball FighterZ and Guilty Gear Strive, so the odds of these heroes and villains looking great in motion are pretty high.
So the real question for this crowd is simple. Which comic-accurate fighter are you booting up first when the servers wake up on Friday, the sword-first Daywalker that Hollywood can't seem to figure out, or Doom in the middle of his biggest MCU moment yet? If the beta plays as well as it looks, does a strong build make you want to see these versions of the characters on a screen even more?
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