Battle Arena Toshinden CPM 60 minutes English/Japanese English Subtitles Released: 01/25/2004 Reviewed: 01/10/2006

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The history of anime DVDs in the US is a long and storied one. It goes back many years, some seven or eight (I know, it's like forever and a day), to a time when the first DVD released on these American shores was one by the name of Battle Arena Toshinden. This was a DVD so old that my poor Xbox couldn't even figure out how to work the thing. It cried, grinding its gears at me and cycling over and over through the FBI warning until I dumped it into the PS2 and we were off! Though I have a feeling that we all would've been better off had the Xbox just broken the thing in half like it so obviously wanted to do. This is a cursed DVD, something that was not wrought by human hands. I do not blame the medium, as old as it may be. I believe it is the content and that caused such a horror inducing malfunction. How this show got a re-release by CPM two years ago just leaves me at a total loss.

Toshinden is based off of the Playstation 1 launch title of the same name. It was an intensely mediocre 3D fighting game, a genre that was coming into some popularity at the time. It seemed that all you needed was a halfway decent fighting engine and you could put something out on a videogame console. Whether or not that game would be worth anything was a different matter. I seem to recall Toshinden being pretty popular in its heyday. Looking back at it over ten years later, I have no idea how such a thing could be. That game was super crap. The anime is no different. Should something be based on a fighting game, as anime frequently is, it's almost a guaranteed seal that it will suck. Do I need to remind you of the laughably bad Street Fighter movie? Even with the king of awesome, Jean-Claude VanDamme, in the starring role it couldn't pull a bearable plot out of its rear end to save its life. Raul Julia certainly picked a bad film to die after completing. Now the videogame situation is even more dire, with jerks like Uwe Boll and Paul Anderson crapping all over good and bad franchises alike. Fun things like Resident Evil and House of the Dead are equally unsafe as are junk franchises like Bloodrayne.

Anime like Battle Arena Toshinden proves that the translation of videogames to more passive forms of entertainment was never really a good idea. What makes it even worse is the inclusion of Masami Obari as director and possible character designer. Like we've discussed in the past this guy just ruins just about everything he comes into contact with. I don't hate him as a person, but his character designs drive me absolutely insane. I guess he doesn't have as much room to work with here since these are established videogame people. Every cloud has a silver lining. I guess there's a story buried somewhere in this two episode OVA. There's a whole bunch of characters that fight a whole bunch of other characters, there's a girl named Uranus who might be a robot, or a knight, or a robot knight, and she seems like shooting arrows at her robot clones and making them explode. I'm pretty sure she's the ultimate badguy, though I couldn't tell you why. There's a whole bunch of bad guys that are sort of actually good guys and an annoying little blue haired chick that's voiced by Lisa Ortiz (hooray). And like every single other videogame anime in existence, this show sees fit to throw in a shower scene of its main female character. The girl, Sonia, just so happens to be a happy-go-lucky bondage chicky with a whip. Can't get enough of them!

Over the course of 50 minutes there's a stupefying number of 15 second fight scenes. Characters engage in battles and finish them in less time than it would take to play them out on your archaic Playstation, screaming their trademark supermoves all the while. Like I said: if there's a plot to speak of I must've missed it, but I have to admit that I wasn't really going out of my way to find one. I'm just so tired of crappy anime to waste my time on. With the quality of Battle Arena Toshinden I have no idea how the US market for anime DVDs ever got off the ground. Are there people that actually watch trash like this? If so, why? The animation's trash, the character designs are trash, the plot (or lack thereof) is trash. There isn't a single redeeming feature contained in this disc aside from the fact that it eventually ends (it's a hackneyed saying, but it's true all the same). While I enjoyed the time spent dancing around the room to the barf-tastic ending theme with my roommate Jerry, the sooner this thing is out of my mind the better..