Battle Arena Toshinden

Ah, fighting games. They make such awful anime adaptations, no matter how much potential the content of the game has to offer. Some fighting games deserve the right to have some of the most bad-ass movies, OVAs, and specials ever made! This is not one of them. For anyone who carefully perserved their button-mashing brains in Tekken, Virtua Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat back in 1995, you were fortunate enough to pass up Battle Arena Toshinden, an early psuedo 3-D fighting game that's so bad, it makes Rise of the Robots look like Guilty Gear. This sorry excuse of a game not onlymanaged to get 3 sequels and countless spin-offs for the Sega Saturn (remember that dinosaur?), but a really crappy two episode OVA that does everything possible to ensure that nobody will want to ever play the games ever, brought to us by the Uwe Boll of anime, Masami Obari. STORY: (2) Um, let's see, Eiji is haunted by nightmares of losing and Sophia has boobs. An organization has put a hit lists to battle the most generic fighting game characters ever, and Sophia has boobs. Sophia has a shower scene.......This story blows. You're not really told anything and the plot assumes you already know who these people are and what's going on. It's like watching TNA Impact! ART: (3) Obari's art style is probably the worst I've ever seen back in the early and mid 90's. All male characters are tall, lithe, and are somehow rippling with muscle. The females are thin-faced, tiny-waisted, and buggy-eyed with enormous, unsexy breasts. The backgrounds are uninteresting, but not really bad. There's really nothing impressive to look at and the only visually impressive-looking character is Sho, but that's about it. The art sucks. SOUND: (4) The music is bland and overdone, the English dub is impressively bad. The only highlight is probably Duke's seven seconds of overblown victorian dialouge near the end of the show, but it's not worth it. Everyone else, especially Ellie, just sounds grating and forced. CHARACTER: Nobody has any personality. As I said eariler, this is about as stale as you can get in terms of cookie-cutter fighting game characters. Eiji and Kayen are Ken and Ryu, Sophia's the busty, scantily clad sex symbol, Ellie is the pre-teen little munchkin that you want to step on, Fo is old, Sho is mysterious, etc, complete with some of the lamest special attacks you might ever see. These people are pretty much unlikable, underdeveloped and I never found reason to root for anyone of them. ENJOYMENT: (1) This is about as enjoyable as having your teeth smashed in with a hammer. I'd rather walk through a dark room barefoot and blindfolded with the floor covered in rusty tacks and sharp objects jutting out of every wall. Or you can watch it and keep a notepad and a pen nearby to write down all the other things you can do that would be a better waste of time then watching Battle Arena Toshinden!!! OVERALL: (2) Toshinden is pound for pound one of the worst titles I've ever seen. It's easier to choke down than the Tekken animated movie, but that's like saying I'd rather eat a handful of glass shards instead of drinking scalding hot frying medium. It's boring, annoying, and based off of a franchise that nobody could care less about, but frankly, the world is a better place not acknowledging this one. Out.

Story: This show had a nice concept of cyborgs and so forth! The inspiration from dragonball Z is obvious with 'Z-fighters' compared to 'Toushinden participants' Art: The art style was well done! The simplicity in it was the thing that made me love the show! Sound: I really love the simplicity in sound design in older anime series from the 90s. Having the exaturated explosions, sword clashes and screams are the things that make me look up older series. Character: I really love how they represented the fighters and how they already knew each other. Enjoyment: I never played the games honestly. But this show has amazing animation comparedto shows from nowdays (I'm looking at you Toei Animations) This was only a short show so it was intended to be a bigger show. I enjoyed it and I hope other people did as well. Overall: I recommend you to watch it!

Battle Arena Toshinden is a ridiculous fighting game adaptation that's 90% fight scenes and 10% nonsense. It's essentially nothing more than an advertisement for the game, which I suppose served its purpose as I'd never heard of it before. Though, it fails at being an anime, which is what I'm rating here. Beginning with the story, there really isn't much of one. There's a tournament, there's a secret organization bent on creating evil supersoldiers, and there's big fights. The whole thing feels insanely rushed, with no explanation as to why anything happens, which is compounded by the fact they dropcharacters into the story out of nowhere and act like you should care, which would only be true if you're already a fan of the game. The story just feels like an excuse to show off their roster, which makes sense I suppose, but it certainly doesn't make for a good anime. The art is, tentatively, the strongest aspect of this anime, though that's not really saying much. The art and animation generally meet all basic standards of quality for the time, though the one thing that stands out is the character design. The character designs are interesting and visually engaging throughout, but on this same note, this is the only aspect about the entire anime that really stands out at all. The sound is serviceable, meeting all basic standards of quality for the time, bolstered by fun, upbeat music. The characters are generally flat, but serve their purpose in the show. Of them, it doesn't really make sense to choose favorites since they're so generic, so I'll instead choose based on who it looks like I'd main in the game, those being Gaia and Kayin, whose fighting styles are based around their big swords. Also, one more general note about the anime since I didn't know exactly where to put this- I've seen bad dubs before, but I don't think I've ever experienced a notably bad sub until now. Spaces are missing between words, brackets and commas appear for no reason, and some words are just replaced by strings of numbers. I don't know what the hell happened here, but whoever did the subs for this anime should honestly be locked up, as these subs are the work of a lunatic. Overall, Battle Arena Toshinden is a pretty bad anime, and I wouldn't recommend it unless you're a huge fan of fighting game anime, or a huge fan of this game in particular, and even then, you'd have to be ready to forgive quite a lot in order to find yourself enjoying this slop.