How to Play MARVEL Tōkon

1. What a 4v4 tag fighter is

Each side brings four characters instead of one. Only one of yours is on screen at a time; the other three wait off screen and come in either because you swap them in or because you call them for a single attack. Controlling that is the entire job of the game's 8 tag mechanics. The launch roster is 20 characters, which the game groups into 5 official teams of four — the same size as a squad, so each team is a ready-made line-up.

The rest of a match works the way most fighting games do — you attack, you block, you move — except every one of those layers has a tag-team version attached to it. The 46 system mechanics documented below are the complete list of what the game gives you, read straight out of its own data, and each section links through to the full reference for its category.

2. Building a team

You pick four characters and the order they come in. Nothing ties you to one of the 5 official teams — those are how the game groups its 20-character roster in the character select, four to a team — but since a squad is also four, any one of them is already a complete line-up and a sensible place to start.

Mixing across the 5 teams is completely normal, and nothing in the game's data rewards or penalises keeping an official team intact. Anyone claiming to know the best team this early is guessing: MARVEL Tōkon ships its game files encrypted, so no public frame data or matchup numbers exist yet.

3. The tag system

This is what makes Tōkon a tag fighter rather than four separate characters sharing a health bar. The game ships 8 tag mechanics, and Tōkon Assemble is the team-wide one the rest hang off — the others are the specific ways a character leaves the fight or enters it.

The other 5 tag mechanics

4. Assists

An assist is calling a teammate in for one action without swapping to them. MARVEL Tōkon defines 11 assist types — the largest single category of mechanic in the game — and they split into 4 numbered assist slots and 7 named for the job they do. That split is what "split by role" means here: one group is positions, the other is functions.

The 4 assist slots

The engine names these 4 by position rather than by function — they are the generic call slots, and the letter tells you nothing about what the teammate will do.

The 7 role assists

These 7 are named for what the called teammate actually does rather than where they sit: Grounded Guard Assist, Air Guard Assist, Grounded Interrupt Assist, Parry Assist, Raid Assist, Tag Assist, Ultimate Assist. The assist you call follows the job you need done.

All 11 assist entries arrive with a name and an engine key but no description — this is the only mechanic category in the game's data where the description column is empty. We show the engine's own field name instead of inventing an explanation for each one.

5. Defense

9 defensive mechanics ship with the game. Guarding is the base; the two guard cancels are how you stop being stuck in blockstun, letting you attack or evade straight out of it; and air tech is how you stop a combo continuing once you have been launched. Learn those four before anything else on this list.

The other 5 defensive mechanics

6. Offense

11 offensive mechanics. Five of them decide how long a combo lasts and how much it is worth: counter hit for catching an opponent's startup, the per-move combo limit, the damage correction applied as a combo runs, and the wall and ground bounces that extend one. The rest are the attack and reaction states those five act on.

The other 6 offensive mechanics

7. Movement

5 movement mechanics — and this is the one section where the list is not identical for every character. 3 of them are per-character options rather than universal ones.

The 3 options that are not universal

Air Dash, Air Jump, Quick Boost are gated per character by their own engine flags, and the game's own mechanic entries say so outright. Do not assume your character has one because a video showed someone else doing it.

Which characters have which of these is not public yet: the internal ID is confirmed for only 20 of the 20 launch characters, so the per-character flags cannot be read for the rest. We would rather leave that blank than guess it.

8. Simplified controls and secret commands

The last 2 system entries are the ones aimed squarely at new players: a simplified input scheme that runs alongside traditional motion inputs, and the hidden commands the in-game command list carries. If you have never played a fighting game, start on the simplified scheme — the game exposes it as a control option, not as a separate mode you have to graduate out of.