Watch On
Fighting games are hard. And I don’t just mean they’re hard videogames to master, with complex input strings and character match-ups to memorize. They’re seemingly hard games to sell and convince new players to devote hours of their lives to—just look at recent League of Legends fighter 2XKO, which saw 80 developers laid off shortly after release.
Despite that, we’re in the middle of maybe the most interesting year for fighting games that I can remember in forever, with multiple new games gunning for Street Fighter 6. Marvel Tōkon from Guilty Gear creator Arc System Works seems like it should be the front-runner, but two licensed fighters, Avatar Legends and Invincible VS, have recently been getting more buzz. Even though both are based on cartoons, it’s clear from a glance that the people making them are diehard fighting game players themselves.
“Everybody should play every fighting game,” Invincible VS game director Dave Hall told me in a recent interview. “Fighting games are just fun—we have a great IP here, and that’s going to make people want to look at it a little more—but it’s fun to get in there, press buttons, and hit people. Be competitive if you want to be, go as far as you can take it.”
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Hall played fighting games casually growing up, but when 2008’s Street Fighter 4 came out, he started getting more invested in the competitive scene thanks to a colleague at his game studio, who was good enough to place third at fighting game tournament EVO. That’s when Hall really got the fighting game bug.
“I was enthralled and fell in love,” he said. “As a developer, I wanted to make these games. Three or four years later we started working on Killer Instinct, and it was really fun. For me, as a developer and a game fan, it was once-in-a-lifetime to be able to work on a fighting game—so for us to be able to come back and do [Invincible VS] is really awesome.”
While Killer Instinct was a one-on-one fighter, Hall said Invincible’s superhero roster lent itself perfectly to a tag team fighter—making it the second of three similar games coming out in a 10 month period (2XKO last October, and Marvel Tōkon coming August 2026).
And he’s right: from the short amount of Invincible VS I had a chance to play, being able to call in an assist does a great job of recreating the multi-person battles from the TV series. Fighting game pros may soon prove me wrong, but I also got the sense that Invincible VS is a bit more approachable than tag fighters that have a tendency to be in high level play. Both Marvel vs. Capcom and Arc System Works’ Dragon Ball FighterZ are (in)famous for extremely long “touch of death” combo strings that essentially guarantee a kill if the attacker doesn’t screw up.
Perhaps that will end up separating Invincible VS from Marvel Tōkon among diehard players, though Hall said that they didn’t shy away from complexity. “We really wanted to integrate teammates into the combo system, and that’s something we really concentrated on,” he said.
The cartoonishly bloody, over-the-top brutality of Invincible may end up being the bigger distinction from every other fighting game this side of Mortal Kombat. Now in its fourth season, the animated adaptation of Invincible remains one of Amazon’s most consistent hit shows, and the developers have been teasing a singleplayer mode with involvement from the show’s writers.
Even if the game ends up a little more approachable than some older tag fighters, when I asked Hall what success looks like for Invincible VS his mind still immediately went to the fighting game community. He said that the team has been diligent in acting on community feedback from alpha and beta tests. “We listen to all of it, for real. We do listen to every single part of it,” he said.
“We continually do playtesting to validate we’re going the right direction, and we’re going to continue that until we ship. For us, success is just having a badass game, and hopefully the fans come.”
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