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Backlog #8 Battle Arena Toshinden

Toshinden meaning "Fighting God Legend", so that means we have Battle Arena Fighting God Legend. I love Japanese game titles!

I think this was one of the earliest PSX games ever. I remember playing a Demo of this when the PSX had only just been released, and at the time it was pretty impressive. Not anymore though.
I dunno, I've never really been able to get into 3D fighting games as much as 2D ones. Even though this game is a good break from all the bog standard 3D brawlers that only allow for kicks and punches, in that it also has over the top special moves and fireballs etc. So this is probably the closest thing you could get at the time to a classic 2D beat-em-up in the vein of Street Fighter or King of Fighters.
It's just not nearly as much fun though. 3D wasn't really advanced at the time and the game is rather sluggish. It does have a good combo system though.
And there's ring-outs and everything, and you can actually make use of the 3D arena by making sideway dodges and such. It did a far better job at making a REAL 3D fighting game than Tekken did at the time. Tekken sucked. Still does.

But I'll be honest, I only rented this game once, and didn't like it all that much, but I loved the music, so I bought it many years later for nostalgic value.
And I STILL think the music's good, although there seems to be a big difference between the Japanese and the Western version, in that the Western version has live electric guitars, and the Japanese one doesn't.

Other than that, there's nothing really special here. A small selection of fighters, everyone gets the same ending (that seems to be coming into fashion nowadays though), there's one or two hidden characters, some secret special moves, but it's just not very interesting. A 6.7

posted by Ingen! @ 12:20 PM