After two rounds of Closed Betas, Arc System Works’ Marvel team-fighter is finally throwing its doors open to everyone. The MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls Open Beta runs for a single 72-hour window before the full game arrives in August, and unlike the earlier tests, there is no gatekeeping — no sign-up form, no invite code, and no PlayStation Plus subscription required. If you have wanted to try the 4v4 tag fighter without committing to a purchase, this is the window. Here is how to get in and what you can actually do once you are there.
The window is short: July 24 to 26
The Open Beta is a hard 72 hours. According to the official PlayStation Blog rundown, it opens July 24 at 12:00am PT (8:00am BST / 4:00pm JST) and closes July 26 at 11:59pm PT (July 27, 7:59am BST / 3:59pm JST). There is no rolling extension and no early-access tier — when the servers close, they close, so plan your sessions around that block rather than assuming you can drop in the following week.
One detail worth acting on early: pre-downloads go live two hours before the beta starts. Fighting-game beta clients are not small, and queuing the download the moment it appears means you are throwing punches at launch instead of watching a progress bar.
Where to play it — and what you actually need
The beta is available on three platforms with no exclusivity strings attached:
- PlayStation 5 (console)
- Steam
- Epic Games Store
To get it, you simply download the Open Beta client from your platform’s store once it is live — there is no registration step. On PC, the game’s Steam store page is where the download will surface for that platform.
The requirements are light but not zero. PlayStation Plus is not required to play online during the beta, which is unusual and a genuine lowering of the barrier. However, every player — on both PS5 and PC — needs an internet connection and an Account for PlayStation to access the beta. That cross-platform account requirement is the one setup task to handle before July 24: make sure you have (or create) a PlayStation account and can log in on whichever platform you plan to use, so account creation is not eating into your 72 hours.
The roster: 15 of the launch 20, and Blade’s debut
The Open Beta ships with fifteen of the game’s twenty launch characters, organized into the game’s five-team structure. The headline addition is Blade, who becomes playable for the very first time in this test. The full beta lineup breaks down as:
- Fighting Avengers — Captain America, Iron Man, Black Panther
- Unbreakable X-Men — Storm, Magik, Wolverine
- Amazing Guardians — Spider-Man, Ms. Marvel, Star-Lord
- Samurai Outriders — Peni Parker, Ghost Rider, Blade
- Knights of Doom — Doctor Doom, Magneto
That is a deliberately broad slice — a mix of grapplers, zoners, and rushdown characters across the five teams — so you can test the tag system with genuinely different playstyles rather than a handful of near-identical picks.
You will fight across six stages, each modeled on a landmark Marvel location: Marvel’s New York (Day), Savage Land, X-Mansion, Knowhere, Wakanda, and Marvel’s New York (Night).
More than just online matches
Arc System Works has stressed that this beta is meant to preview the shipping game, not just its netcode. Alongside standard online play, the build includes several of the modes that will define the full release on August 6:
- Online Casual Match for quick games against similarly skilled opponents, and Ranked Match for climbing the competitive ladder.
- Versus Mode for local play — challenge a friend on the same system or drill against the CPU. For a genre where offline practice is how most players actually improve, having local versus in the beta is a meaningful inclusion.
- The Open Lobby, a social hub between matches built from miniature versions of the game’s stages, with a set of unlockable avatars to represent you.
That spread lets you sample the loop the full game is built around — warm up in Versus, find a match in Casual, then test what you have learned in Ranked — rather than only stress-testing matchmaking.
A quick checklist before July 24
If you want to make the most of a 72-hour window, handle the setup now rather than at the starting gun:
- Confirm your platform. Decide whether you are playing on PS5, Steam, or Epic, and make sure that store account is ready.
- Sort your Account for PlayStation. It is required on both console and PC, so create or verify it in advance.
- Watch for the pre-download roughly two hours before the 12:00am PT start on July 24, and queue it immediately.
- Pick a couple of teams to focus on. With fifteen characters across five archetypally different squads, you will learn more by going deep on two teams than by sampling all five in three days.
The Open Beta is both a free trial and the last big public test before launch, so feedback you send during the window is the kind developers still have time to act on before the August 6 release. For a team fighter that lives or dies on its netcode and its roster balance, three days of open, no-strings play is the most useful stress test the game will get — and the lowest-friction chance you will have to decide whether it is for you.
