Franchise Reboots Entry #27: Toshinden: War Budokai

Instead of
talking more about how
Bloody Roar 5/Project 2012 was someone’s idea of an inane joke, let’s
feature an obscure fighting game franchise that actually did receive a reboot
recently: Battle Arena Toshinden: War
Budokai for Wii.

 

You could
ask a gamer that usually plays fighting games to tell you what they thought
about Toshinden being rebooted, and their answer would probably be something
along the lines of “Wait, Toshinden got a reboot!?” That’s how under-the-radar the announcement and its release in
Japan went. There are gamers who heard the announcement and subsequently forgot
it existed.

 

The
Toshinden franchise was never that popular, and it likely would have never been
if it wasn’t for the first game releasing in the right place at the right time.
The original Battle Arena Toshinden
launched with a then-unknown console called the Sony Playstation back in 1995.
It was one of the earliest 3D polygonal fighting games released in that
generation, and the only game available in the genre that early into the
PSOne’s life. There wasn’t another game like it, and gamers purchased it after
obtaining the system to use it as an early showcase of the PSOne’s graphical
capabilities. The fact that a demo came included on a disc that came with the
system also helped.

 

Or maybe
they purchased it to see its dominatrix gear-donning blonde femme fatale in
action, who even has a attack called “Call Me Queen!” In the interim between
the first and second games, titles like Soul
Edge and Bushido Blade had done
more for the weapon-based fighting game genre than Toshinden could. Still, Toshinden 2 did well because people
remembered having a good experience with the first game. But the franchise had
completely fizzled out by the time the third game released, especially since
its promises of having double the cast of the previous game was due to the game
having clone characters. There was a fourth game made, but it was only released
in Japan (as Toshinden Subaru) and
Europe (as Toshinden 4). It
is apparently not very good.

 

For some
reason, a company thought this
franchise was a good candidate for a reboot; and that company was Takara Tomy,
who used DreamFactory as its developer. And this new one left its three
remaining fans in anguish, as saying it didn’t turn out well is an
understatement. You only need to see the game in motion to
realize that it’s not very good. The only relation this game has to the older
ones is the main character, Toji Shinjo, sharing the same last name as the
protagonist of the previous games: Eiji Shinjo. It’s unknown as to whether
they’re related, or if the name’s just an homage. The game does feature character designs from Mana Khemia artist Kazuyuki Yoshizumi, however, which you can see
on the
official website.

 

The game was
only released in Japan, and no western publisher wanted to take a chance on it
after it sold an incredibly paltry
1,100 copies in its first week of release in Japan in December 2009. You
don’t need me to tell you those sales are really terrible. It’s at about this
time where I’d talk about how the game was received by fans, but there isn’t a
single opinion to be found all over the internet. No one aware of its existence
(which isn’t a big number) could be bothered to import it.

 

The question
now isn’t whether Toshinden will still live on (whose answer is a blatantly
obvious “No”), it’s “Did Toshinden need to be revived in the first place?” And
that answer is “probably not.” Still, it’s worth recapping here because no one
thought an obscure, forgotten fighting game franchise like this would be
revived when there are others that haven’t seen an installment in ages.