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This Week In Retro: Battle Arena Toshinden
🕑 Added 2025-01-05 12:00:07 +0000 UTCJanuary 1, 1995: "Sofia Says get on your knees and bark like a dog."
by Diamond Feit
Tell me if this sounds familiar: You've got an assortment of video games in your home or residing in the cloud and even though you have so many you could easily spend the rest of your days playing them, you still look at the latest releases and convince yourself to purchase even more games. I'm writing these words mere days into a brand new year and I've already spent over one hundred 2025 dollars on video games, partly because of holiday sales but mostly because I saw them and a voice inside me said "go for it."
I'd love to blame capitalism or commercials for this wasteful behavior but I believe our nature as human beings drives us to seek out newness as a concept. For some people that means building ships and setting sail across the ocean but each of us can take small steps every day to explore our world. I have a pretty good handle on my personal tastes so I know exactly what kinds of food I enjoy, and yet I continue to sample unfamiliar cuisines and combinations of ingredients.
When fighting games took over my life back in the 1990s, I first fell in love with two-dimensional masterpieces like Street Fighter II, Fatal Fury 2, and Art of Fighting. While these titles carried forth the traditions of pixel art from the early days of arcade games, they also introduced innovations to stand out from their more primitive predecessors.
Yet just as quickly as the genre exploded in popularity, developers experimented with then-untested technology to bring fighting games into the third dimension. Instead of sprite-based graphics and flat backgrounds, polygonal models would grant previously impossible levels of depth to characters and environments alike. Some of these early efforts—such as Virtua Fighter and Tekken—continue to find new fans today, while others faded from the spotlight and fell into obscurity.
30 years ago this week, one such would-be franchise debuted on New Year's Day within a month of the Sony PlayStation's original launch. Battle Arena Toshinden quickly made a name for itself as a 3D fighting game designed for living rooms rather than arcades.
Released as Toh Shin Den (闘神伝) in Japan, international editions added the words Battle Arena to the title, making it clear that this game involves combat in an open space. Battle Arena Toshinden arrived on the heels of Virtua Fighter and Tekken which introduced arcadegoers to three-dimensional fisticuffs, with Virtua Fighter also launching alongside the Sega Saturn in Japan and Tekken coming to PlayStation later in 1995. This gave Battle Arena Toshinden the unique position as the first 3D fighter on Sony's new game console, at least in its home territory.
Toshinden had other things going for it besides beating the competition to market. Players can move their fighter towards or away from the camera using the shoulder buttons on the controller, making it easy to dodge attacks and close in on their opponents. Every character carries a unique weapon, putting the game ahead of the curve compared to the rest of the genre. While Toshinden lacks any kind of super meter, characters do have hidden techniques with complex inputs that deal extra damage—a feature common in 2D fighting games but still new to the 3D variety in 1995.
Battle Arena Toshinden also excels in the roster department thanks to the work of professional artist Tsukasa Kotobuki. While Virtua Fighter and Tekken deserve full credit for many landmarks, their early lineups lacked panache with stiff faces on the character select screen and boxy in-game models. In contrast, Toshinden took advantage of Kotobuki's skills in a multi-page spread hyping the game in the pages of Japan's Dengeki PlayStation magazine, injecting the cast with a dash of style.
While a far cry from what modern graphics can accomplish, Kotobuki's designs translate quite well into the game itself. Every character has their own voice, idle pose, and combat stance. The cast of Battle Arena Toshinden also includes a variety of body types and sizes, from spritely youngster Ellis and elder master Fo to hulking brutes like Rungo and the sub-boss Gaia. When a fighting game features a diverse squad like Toshinden did, it held my attention for longer because I felt motivated to try every character, something I can't say about the original Virtua Fighter or Tekken.
In the eight months that passed between January 1st and the global debut of the PlayStation in September, someone at Sony must have really loved what they saw in Battle Arena Toshinden. That "someone" might be Ken Kutaragi, then head of Sony Computer Entertainment, as he called Toshinden the "most impressive" game on the upcoming console in a 1995 interview with Next Generation magazine.
Not only did Sony assume publishing duties for Battle Arena Toshinden's overseas release, but early marketing for the PlayStation prominently featured Toshinden's whip-wielding dominatrix Sofia. Considering how Nintendo and Sega had Mario and Sonic as their mascots at the time, positioning a provocatively-dressed woman as the face of the new console really says a lot about how Sony wanted consumers to view the PlayStation.
By the time the PlayStation launched overseas, both Battle Arena Toshinden and Tekken were available from day one. Personally, I chose Toshinden because it played closer to the 2D games that I knew than Tekken did, making it more approachable. I also spent time with Tekken 2 in arcades that summer, so I felt comfortable waiting a year for that sequel to come home.
Competition amongst fighting games on home consoles was fierce in the 90s, as original creations and arcade ports duked it out side by side. I remember enjoying Battle Arena Toshinden with my friends for a decent length of time, but as the PlayStation's library expanded we felt less incentive to revisit launch titles—especially once the home version of Tekken 2 debuted in 1996 and absolutely blew us all away.
Battle Arena Toshinden continued to chug along with ports to other consoles (including the Game Boy!), an anime adaptation, and multiple sequels. Due to the lengthy delay between the Japanese and Western launch of the PlayStation, Battle Arena Toshinden 2 actually debuted in late 1995 mere months after curious gamers like me bought the original.
This deluge of iterations in such a short time period, combined with the rapid influx of software vying for PlayStation owners' attention, drastically lowered Toshinden's profile. By the time a fourth game launched in 1999, Sony had lost interest in pushing the series overseas and no publisher saw fit to release the game in the United States. Developer Tamsoft continues to produce and ship games for modern systems but a fifth Toshinden title never materialized—a 2009 Japanese Wii exclusive called Toshinden had no relation to this series.
A lot of experimental software got approved when a novice like Sony entered the gaming space, and as a PlayStation owner I remember seeking out new kinds of games just to glimpse what the system could offer me. This ran the gamut from familiar genres like fighting games to lukewarm material like racing games which I never particularly liked but I wanted to see how 3D graphics might change my opinion of them. Battle Arena Toshinden had relatively little impact on me compared to other, stranger 3D games that would follow, and I don't generally think about the series much outside of anniversaries like this week. It doesn't qualify as buried treasure or "underrated," for it offered precisely what it promised before becoming unprofitable.
I remain curious but unsold on 3D fighting games as a subset of the genre even today, but I'll give credit to where it's due: Battle Arena Toshinden had a funky soundtrack that still resonates with me 30 years later.
Writer/podcaster/performer Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but xer work and opinions exist across the internet.
Comments
Andy V
It's so strange I forgot about this game until I ran into it at a store around us called half Price books and for a mere $15 pretty good deal for some history and appreciation of that series. This game encapsulates how I felt being so excited for the PlayStation and what it could offer in the future.
David G
I'm excited to listen to this. As a 1995 Saturn owner, I was distraught at not having anything close to Toshinden at launch. Toshinden was treated by much of the gaming press -- Game Players specifically -- as a proper evolution of fighting games and 3D in general. It was treated as the PlayStation's first killer app. Even worse, when the Saturn did get Toshinden, it stunk. The graphics were butt and it just made the system look inferior. Nevermind that Fighting Masters and VF2 and Fighters Megamix were clearly better games. They weren't on the Saturn soon enough to make a real difference.
littleterr0r
Also, channeling Homer Simpson here but: "Whatever you say, Sofia!"
littleterr0r
Happy New Year! As the kids say (do they?), let's freakin' go!
