Battle Arena Toshinden

Battle Arena Toshinden, released in Japan as Toshinden (闘神伝), is a fighting game series developed by Tamsoft and produced by Takara.

Video games

Developed by Tamsoft and produced by Takara, the Battle Arena Toshinden series is composed of four video games, though the first three numbered entries are often referred to as the Toshinden trilogy. A prequel game, Toshinden Next, was revealed in 1997 featuring concept art, but ultimately cancelled.

Spinoff games

While the main series used realistic proportions for the cast, the spin-off titles instead used a chibi artstyle.

Characters

When Tamsoft was initially developing the cast, director Shintarō Nakaoka started with a basic concept taking inspiration from the duality of

Critical reception

As the series progressed, media outlets took issue with the differing versions of the games that would exclude certain characters while introducing new ones. In particular, Toshinden URA received disdain for this aspect, with some reviews calling Ronron one of the worst characters in fighting games in general.[52][53][54]

The staff of Diehard GameFan in their retrospective on the series felt it was "trash", with several expressing they saw the cast as lackluster. Chris Bowen in particular felt they were equally as terrible as the cast of fighting game series Killer Instinct, and further argued the game had no place amongst modern fighting games, as he felt a market for sex appeal in fighting games amongst otakus had been claimed at that point by the Dead or Alive franchise. Mark B. shared similar sentiments, stating that Sofia was one of the few memorable aspects from the series, due to an overtly sexualized design that was "pandering to young boys everywhere". But felt the character's relevance had faded, as in 2010 he had "seen more huge chested females in fighting games in the past ten years than a chiropractor in California".[55]

The staff of Chinese magazine Ultra Console Game in a 2004 retrospective stated that while Toshinden had a strong initial showing due to its visual presentation, overshadowing Sega's Virtua Fighter and Namco's Tekken series, they felt the latter was more due to Namco focusing more heavily on its Ridge Racer franchise at the time. They further stated that while the gameplay was severely lacking, the visuals and simple special attacks allowed players to excuse it. However, when looking back they felt the games overall just lacked too much depth, were clunky and even slow paced, and questioned many of the positive reactions the series received from gaming magazines at launch. They found comparisons of Toshinden by such publications to Virtua Fighter and Tekken laughable, as while both of those series persisted, Toshinden had become mostly forgotten before the turn of the millennium.[56]

title	Battle Arena Toshinden
genre	Fighting
developer	Tamsoft
creator	Shintarō Nakaoka
publisher	Takara
platforms	Arcade, PlayStation, Sega Saturn, Microsoft DOS, Windows 95
first release version	Battle Arena Toshinden
first release date	January 1, 1995
latest release version	Toshinden 4
latest release date	June 30, 2000

Battle Arena Toshinden

Video games

Spinoff games

Characters

Introduced in Battle Arena Toshinden

Introduced in Battle Arena Toshinden 2

Introduced in Battle Arena Toshinden URA

Introduced in Battle Arena Toshinden 3

Introduced in Toshinden 4

Other media

Critical reception

References

Video games

Spinoff games

Related

Characters

Introduced in Battle Arena Toshinden

Introduced in Battle Arena Toshinden 2

Introduced in Battle Arena Toshinden URA

Introduced in Battle Arena Toshinden 3

Introduced in Toshinden 4

Other media

Critical reception

References