Battle Arena Nitoushinden

PlayStation · 1996 · JP

Takara Tamsoft

Publisher: Takara · Developer: Tamsoft

Battle Arena NiToshinden is a spin off of the main Toshinden series. Set in a high school, NiToshinden is, like its parents, a versus fighting game. It features four fighters and a fifth hidden character from the first two Toshinden Playstation games; Eiji, Sofia, Ellis and Tracy along with four exclusive characters based off school stereotypes; Ryuji, Rika, Baifu and Shu.As in the main series, the arenas are 3D and a sidestep manoeuvre exists for moving around them, but otherwise the gameplay is different from its parent series.Each character has the same six attacks; hard, medium, light, low, special attack and desperation; the differences between the fighters are in the range, speed of and what the attacks do for each fighter. For instance, Eiji's special attack is to shoot a carrot from his sword, a play on his classic fireball attack, while Sofia's special attack is a variant on her classic Aurora Revolution attack.The game features no standard combos or blocking. Instead a parry must be performed to block all non-low attacks. Low attacks are unblockable and have to be sidestepped. The characters also have the ability to dive under any non-low attack.An unusual element of the game is its "practice mode", which, unlike other fighting games, is a series of short videos hosted by an enthusiastic Japanese lady and a small CGI version of Rika.The art style heads further into the realms of anime than the other installments of the series, with cell-shaded textures and fighters with huge heads and small bodies.