Battle Arena Toshinden

"Nope, Not tosh!"

When fighting games come out these days, hardly any can cope with Tekken, Mortal Kombat, or Street Fighter. We have many games which have being missed left on the shelf, these are Psycic Force, Dragon Ball Z, Darkstalkers, Bloody Roar and Battle Arena Toshinden. All these are un-noticed, and some of them are good, some are excellent and some are plain rubbish.

I first played Battle Arena Toshinden on my Demo ONE disc which I got free with my Playstation. Several years later, I went in Toys R Us and got the game for twenty of my hard earned pounds, not only that I was late for Toy Story as Toys R Us made me wait for twenty minutes while they find the disc, only to find it was inside the case, I was annoyed, and even more annoyed when the game was not as good as the demo made out to be.

The demo let you control an old magician person, a swordsman and a green hair ninja girl, the characters in the full game are just like these, only with certain attributes. Of the ten or so characters, only five are worth bothering. Also, none of the characters are attractive either, like with most beat em ups, you will go for someone with a huge sword, A mask or big breasts rather then somebody like a small mage man with unbelieveable powers. The 'main' character, the one who you always go for whom has brown or black hair with a karate suit (Ryu, Kazuya, Mitsurugi and Son Goku) is there and just as good as he makes out to be.

I must stress out that the game is very difficult to play. You see your opponants using magical spells, jumping a couple of feet in the air and walking on a magical ball which are spectacular to watch (and get hit by) but a shame that you need to practice several combinations of buttons to pull off those moves yourself. You can easily avoid standard attacks too (sword slash, punch, kick etc.) with a simple side step, or should I say side roll.

Battle Arena Toshinden looks a good game for its age, but is sadly overtaken by Battle Areana Toshinden II and III (Which just has bigger swords, bigger masks and bigger assets aside from the music, graphics and a small part of gameplay) in terms of graphics. I like the look of magic spells, but if you compare it to Battle Arena Toshinden III and Tekken III, the game doesn't compare much in graphics, rather poor because polygons stand out like a soar thumb in the snow.

However, I love the music, it has a nice mix of funk in there somewhere, amazing to listen to whilst kicking worms out of your friends in Multi-player mode. Whenever you win a battle, sometimes your character says something as a victory pose, Of course this is usually in Japanese or another language, it would be great to know what they are actually saying.

Good!

- A fairly average fighting game
- Great music
- Very challenging

Bad!

- Too hard to pull of moves
- Bad graphics

Summary:

Graphics - 3/10
Sound - 9/10
Music - 10/10
Gameplay - 4/10
Challenge - 8/10
Enjoyment - 5/10
Multiplayer - 4/10
Lifespan - 5/10
Overall - 6/10

Alternatives: Tekken, Dragon Ball Z, Battle Arena Toshinden sequels, Fighters Destiny, Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, Powerstone, Super Smash Bros, Virtua Fighter, Bloody Roar, Killer Instint, X-Men, SNK, King of the Fighters, Capcom and Darkstalkers usually provide everything you want for a fighting game!

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 09/09/02, Updated 09/09/02