Trivia / Battle Arena Toshinden

• Dueling Works: Back in the 1990s, Takara was duking it out with Namco's Soul Series in the specific field of 3D weapons-based fighting games. The Battle Arena Toshinden series had an earlier start (with the first BAT coming out in January of 1995 and Soul Edge being released to arcades in December of that same year) and released more titles between the years 1995 to 1999, four games (seven if including reformulated ports and spinoffs) to only two titles for the Soul Series in that time frame.
• Franchise Killer: Toshinden 4 wasn't received well, so much that because of it, Takara decided to bury the franchise for good. An attempted revival of the franchise, titled Toshinden (with different kanji) was released for the Wii in 2009, but low sales and reviews made the planned overseas localization, to be called War Budokai, cancelled, ending both the revival series and the series as a whole for good.
• Killer App: Seen as this when it first came out, though the series later fell into decline. Game Players Magazine promoted it as the "Best Brawler EVER!" on one cover, giving it 98% (the only other games that were previously given this score were Final Fantasy VI and the SNES port of Super Street Fighter II), over Virtua Fighter and Tekken, to whom it was a major competitor. This became Hilarious in Hindsight once the other series came to far surpass it, as Toshinden is nowadays considered a joke.
• Manual Misprint: Toshinden 2's manual printed Eiji's movelist twice, pushing the other characters' lists back two pages, but leaving out Chaos.
• No Export for You:
  • Toshinden 4 was released in Japan and across Europe, but not North America. This was due to poor sales and negative critical reception in those markets, and thus it was decided by Takara that it would be better to cut their losses by not having the North American release.
  • Toshinden reboot for Wii was planned to be translated overseas by the name of War Budokai, but cancelled due to the low sales and reviews in its domestic market.

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