In a specific time and place Battle Arena Toshinden was an important video game. It was one of the earliest PS1 3D fighting games. Rather than go the realistic route (like Virtua Fighter, for example) it was instead over the top like Street Fighter II. Unfortunately it just wasn’t very good. Developer Takara was bent on making it a thing after the initial popularity waned and we got numerous sequels on both the Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation. There was also a spin-off released in Japan called Battle Arena Nitoshinden. The developers took a cue from Sega’s Virtua Fighter Kids and did the same thing with their franchise here. Unfortunately the results aren’t amazing. Let’s take a look.
In case I haven’t been clear up to this point Nitoshinden is a 3D fighting game that takes many of the characters from Battle Arena Toshinden, and gives you kid versions of them to play as. Like I said, it’s basically this franchise’s answer to Virtua Fighter Kids. Big heads and all. There’s also a much more colorful aesthetic. It does make sense considering how popular the franchise was at the time. Takara even considered releasing this one in the North American market as Toshinden Kids. I think they backed out from this prospect because of quality, and the fact that the North American market was obsessed with Tekken 2 at the time.
There’s no real story here. At least not one I could tell, but I don’t speak Japanese. What I will say is that the game has a LOT of FMV for a fighter. The opening sequence is surprisingly almost entirely composed of live action footage. This is pretty cheesy with actors cosplaying as the characters from the game, but I actually kind of liked it. The tutorials themselves are entirely full motion video with a real person super imposed over gameplay as they explain the mechanics. Unfortunately this is entirely in Japanese so good luck gleaning any useful information from it. The good news is the mechanics are simple enough that there’s not a whole lot you need to know before diving in.
It’s a shame that the gameplay is so poor. I went in expecting a toned down version of Battle Arena Toshinden (which wasn’t very good in the first place) but what I got was much worse. Nitoshinden ditches the mechanics of it’s big brother and instead approaches the genre in a more simplified manner. Think Sonic the Fighters, but really not good. It has all of the basics; you face off against another fighter in an enclosed arena, each of the face buttons perform a different strike, and there’s a parry button which lets you move off to the sides in the environment to dodge attacks. Like it’s predecessor Battle Arena Nitoshinden is a weapon’s based fighter. You don’t have punches and kicks but instead rely on these tools for the most part.
Unlike the mainline games Battle Arena Nitoshinden has fully enclosed arenas. There are no ring-outs here. That’s probably for the best because characters are floaty and kind of bounce around a lot. Unfortunately I don’t think the enclosed spaces add much to the experience. It seems like you should bounce off of, or at least be able to double jump off of them. Something. Unfortunately there’s nothing interesting like this about them. It seems that the developers used enclosed spaces simply so they didn’t need to render larger arenas. That, and the matches would be even longer than they already are if there was more empty space. It’s fine, but I find it questionable that the developers did nothing with this mechanic.
Unfortunately the gameplay is too simple. I put several hours into Battle Arena Nitoshinden and I’m convinced there aren’t special moves. I tried tons of different button combinations including directional pad sweeps and the like, but the result was always the same. There aren’t really light/strong attacks, and instead the face buttons perform what would be considered a special move in any other fighting game. This includes weapon strikes, slides, aerial hits, and spin attacks. These all have a lot of wind-up as well as leaving you vulnerable for a long time at the end. The amount of time it takes for the most basic attacks to complete is way too long. It makes the game clunky and messes up the pacing a great deal. Battles take way longer than they should because of this.
Now let’s dig in to the character roster. You have Eiji, Ellis, Tracy, Sofia, Ryuji, Rika, Shu, and Baifu. Several characters like Rungo and Kayin are missing in action, but that’s not a big deal. It’s not like I particularly care about the franchise. The characters chosen are largely fine. What’s more is the kid versions are fun. These guys are good representations of the main cast and are instantly recognizable. I will say that in the case of Sofia they stuck too closely to the original concept. They really should have done something about the fan service outfit because the kid version of this character is kind of creepy. It definitely doesn’t fit the aesthetic.
It’s finally time to touch on the game’s major problem. The characters are not very different from another. What does it matter if we have eight people to play as when they’re mechanically almost identical. What I mean by this is their attacks are all incredibly similar. Each character has a standard weapon strike that really only varies in range, a spin strike, slide, an attack that knocks foes into the air, etc. For the life of me I can’t even discern any differences in speed between these. The lack of variety between these characters mean you’re just going to choose on aesthetics, but even this is ruined. I’ll get to that in a bit though.
Options are fairly standard as far as fighting games go. The biggest head scratcher is the fact that the tutorial mode is the default selection. For someone who can’t read Japanese I couldn’t figure out why the game kept loading videos. When I finally decided to try a different option I discovered the main modes of play. You can play the arcade mode, versus with another human player, and one-on-one with a CPU opponent. During the actual combat you can select between two different camera modes. The default is super zoomed in and swivels around the arena when characters change positions. Honestly this was really disorienting for me. It wasn’t until I discovered the fixed zoomed out perspective that I was able to play properly. I’m not sure why this isn’t the default.
The final kick in the pants is the graphics. In screenshots the game looks decent. The character designs are fun, and the backgrounds colorful and detailed. Seeing it in motion destroys this illusion. Characters bend and contort when they’re hit or even while performing attacks. The background also bends and twists. It’s really off-putting because of how exaggerated this is. To make matters worse Battle Arena Nitoshinden does not run smoothly. The framerate is constantly low which by the time of release was nay unacceptable for a 32-bit fighter. Honestly the game is pretty ugly and feels like a low effort release. The soundtrack is also pretty uninspired. It’s all very bouncy and fun, but there aren’t any real standout tracks. Unfortunately everything kind of gets drowned out by the overbearing voice samples anyway. The aesthetics in Battle Arena Nitoshinden are very disappointing overall.
