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.
across 3 days there’s less than 24 hours of play time. Subtract 2 more if you don’t count cpu battles. Bro what is this beta. https://t.co/TbeIB7nEFS
— Cloud805 (@cloud805) September 5, 2025
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.
This beta time for Marvel Tokon is actually so unfortunate
It starts friday night and ends sunday morning meaning its basically a day and a half long lol pic.twitter.com/2suqxx280P
— SQ (@SQuirrel147) September 2, 2025
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.
Bro what is this https://t.co/SE6peRlbKn
— TSM Leffen (@TSM_Leffen) September 5, 2025
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.
Marvel Tokon Closed Beta has been weird man
First of all, this is a PS5 exclusive beta, half the people on my timeline didn’t get the code for it and now there are specific 6-hour sessions to play it? https://t.co/JgagVVfLlr
— Fighting-Games Daily (@FGC_Daily) September 5, 2025
With the 2XKO Closed Beta happening mere days after Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls’ period concludes, there’s a strong chance that the FGC will draw comparisons between both titles. However, unlike Tokon, 2XKO has seemingly capitalized on its scale, inviting more players to enjoy it via PC.
Other than that, Riot may look at the excessive backlash surrounding Tokon’s restrictive beta timings and avoid breaking their invite-only early access into various chunks. This can improve the complete timeline and let the audience build a stronger perspective around the game and what it needs.
However, that’s not to say the next Marvel fighting game doesn’t have anything going for it. Taking out the 2-hour CPU matches, there’s still 21 hours of online play you can access during the beta. As such, we can definitely see small-scale tournaments and even tier lists for the six playable characters confirmed to appear in the Closed Beta.