Battle Arena Toshinden

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. Related ==Characters==

, Ellis When Tamsoft was initially developing the cast, director Shintarō Nakaoka started with a basic concept taking inspiration from the duality of Ryu and Ken Masters of Capcom's Street Fighter series. Working with character designer Miho Furukawa, he then followed with developing certain character archetypes to provide a variety of physiques to the game, such as the "big man", the "guru", and the "lolita". As development progressed others added their own elements, such as programmers adding unique animations to characters to give them more visible personality, while one core person was assigned to each character to assist with the planning stage. The character designs were finalized and drawn by Tsukasa Kotobuki, who also provided input on the development process. The game's publisher Takara initially sought to have Masami Obari for this role, but he was unable to due to obligations on another project and suggested Kotobuki instead. According to Battle Arena Toshinden URA director Norihiro Hayasaka, with the original game there was a noticeable discrepancy between the artwork Kotobuki would do for the game's characters and select screen and the character models themselves, particularly in how Kotobuki drew the female characters as slender with large breasts. Hayasaka pushed for the models to be closer to Kotobuki's art in terms of silhouette as a result, but also keep sharp edges to retain a style unique for Toshinden. Introduced in Battle Arena Toshinden Introduced in Battle Arena Toshinden 2 Introduced in Battle Arena Toshinden URA Introduced in Battle Arena Toshinden 3 Toshinden 3 not only featured characters returning from the previous games minus Fo Fai, but several new characters. Many of them however shared the same movesets of existing fighters, such as Zola being based on Sofia. Introduced in Toshinden 4 Toshinden 4 replaced most of the cast, with only Eiji, Naru, and Vermillion returning. The game lets you choose one of three three-fighter teams, with Vermillion being his own team. ==Other media==

From the beginning there was a manga tie-in with characters drawn by Tsukasa Kotobuki, alongside a number of other anthology comics in Japan, including from Hobby Japan, a monthly series by Takeshi Takibayashi on Monthly Shōnen Ace (with elements from Toshinden 2), another comic published by Softbank Creative, and one by Kozumi Shiita published by Enix. Drama CDs serving as sequels to the game were released named Before Stage, the first volume of which was released in March 1996, using the original Japanese voice cast. This would be followed by an anime OVA adaptation of the same title, released in 1996 and also dubbed in English. ==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. 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". 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. ==References==