Toushinden

Ah, fighting games. They make such awful anime adaptations, no matter how much potential the content of the game has to offer. Some fighting games deserve the right to have some of the most bad-ass movies, OVAs, and specials ever made! This is not one of them.
For anyone who carefully perserved their button-mashing brains in Tekken, Virtua Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat back in 1995, you were fortunate enough to pass up Battle Arena Toshinden, an early psuedo 3-D fighting game that's so bad, it makes Rise of the Robots look like Guilty Gear. This sorry excuse of a game not only ... managed to get 3 sequels and countless spin-offs for the Sega Saturn (remember that dinosaur?), but a really crappy two episode OVA that does everything possible to ensure that nobody will want to ever play the games ever, brought to us by the Uwe Boll of anime, Masami Obari.

STORY: (2) Um, let's see, Eiji is haunted by nightmares of losing and Sophia has boobs. An organization has put a hit lists to battle the most generic fighting game characters ever, and Sophia has boobs. Sophia has a shower scene.......This story blows. You're not really told anything and the plot assumes you already know who these people are and what's going on. It's like watching TNA Impact!
ART: (3) Obari's art style is probably the worst I've ever seen back in the early and mid 90's. All male characters are tall, lithe, and are somehow rippling with muscle. The females are thin-faced, tiny-waisted, and buggy-eyed with enormous, unsexy breasts. The backgrounds are uninteresting, but not really bad. There's really nothing impressive to look at and the only visually impressive-looking character is Sho, but that's about it. The art sucks.
SOUND: (4) The music is bland and overdone, the English dub is impressively bad. The only highlight is probably Duke's seven seconds of overblown victorian dialouge near the end of the show, but it's not worth it. Everyone else, especially Ellie, just sounds grating and forced.
CHARACTER: Nobody has any personality. As I said eariler, this is about as stale as you can get in terms of cookie-cutter fighting game characters. Eiji and Kayen are Ken and Ryu, Sophia's the busty, scantily clad sex symbol, Ellie is the pre-teen little munchkin that you want to step on, Fo is old, Sho is mysterious, etc, complete with some of the lamest special attacks you might ever see. These people are pretty much unlikable, underdeveloped and I never found reason to root for anyone of them.
ENJOYMENT: (1) This is about as enjoyable as having your teeth smashed in with a hammer. I'd rather walk through a dark room barefoot and blindfolded with the floor covered in rusty tacks and sharp objects jutting out of every wall. Or you can watch it and keep a notepad and a pen nearby to write down all the other things you can do that would be a better waste of time then watching Battle Arena Toshinden!!!
OVERALL: (2) Toshinden is pound for pound one of the worst titles I've ever seen. It's easier to choke down than the Tekken animated movie, but that's like saying I'd rather eat a handful of glass shards instead of drinking scalding hot frying medium. It's boring, annoying, and based off of a franchise that nobody could care less about, but frankly, the world is a better place not acknowledging this one. Out.