You Can Barely Play the Marvel Tokon Beta This Weekend…If You Even Got an Invite

Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls recently rolled out codes for its upcoming Closed Beta weekend starting on September 5 at 09:00 PM PT. According to social media, it seems many players, including pros in the FGC, were not invited to the beta, and plan to either borrow it or watch livestreams, as Bandai Namco recently confirmed that we could broadcast sessions.

In their latest update, the official Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls X account released the playtime schedule for the Closed Beta. There are four sessions in total, each of which starts with 30 minutes of CPU battles. However, the bigger point of contention is that the first three sessions have a two-hour interval, with the final gap being a whopping eight hours.

This means that, including the CPU battles, players who were invited to the Closed Beta weekend will only be able to enjoy it for a maximum of 23 hours (and 21 hours if you exclude the mandatory CPU bits). Despite the overwhelming hype surrounding Tokon, this is among the shortest beta periods for a modern fighting game, and the community is extremely outraged by the decision. 

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Fans fortunate enough to be invited are calling the Closed Beta “mishandled”, blaming ArcSys, PlayStation, Bandai Namco, and sometimes even all three for not setting the proper expectations for Tokon and essentially giving 6-hour sessions. 

After its unveiling at the PlayStation State of Play, Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls quickly became one of the most highly anticipated fighting games releasing in 2026. If players wanted to experience it beforehand, the first opportunity was the Closed Beta, which they could sign up for free.

Unfortunately, the entire ordeal was carried out in a way that didn’t quite anticipate this level of popularity. To start, you could only register for the beta through the PlayStation Beta program, meaning that you had to be a PS5 owner to even gain access to the pool.

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On top of that, the number of players invited to the Closed Beta was surprisingly low — many pros and popular content creators, including the ones that were specifically on Tokon’s promotional material, reported that they didn’t receive a code. The final nail in the coffin was Tokon’s ruling to split the beta into 4 sessions that don’t even amount to a day’s worth of actual playtime.

What makes things worse is how the sessions themselves are scheduled at awkward times. For most of the FGC, at least one session is during late night, leaving out only three windows that stretch to 17 or 18 hours at most.

Some prominent FGC tournament players believe this choice, coupled with the low invites, has somewhat tarnished the goodwill for Tokon and will greatly impact the beta’s active playerbase.

The Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls Closed Beta begins on September 5 at 09:00 PM PT and wraps up on September 7 at 08:00 AM PT.

Here are the times for each session during the Closed Beta weekend:

While the beta itself lasts for 35 hours, there are also 14 hours of breaks in between. Many people are frustrated by this limited time period on top of the eligibility restrictions, claiming that the beta will not be enough to experience Tokon and evaluate what it aims to accomplish.