Battle Arena Toshinden is a ridiculous fighting game adaptation that's 90% fight scenes and 10% nonsense. It's essentially nothing more than an advertisement for the game, which I suppose served its purpose as I'd never heard of it before. Though, it fails at being an anime, which is what I'm rating here. Beginning with the story, there really isn't much of one. There's a tournament, there's a secret organization bent on creating evil supersoldiers, and there's big fights. The whole thing feels insanely rushed, with no explanation as to why anything happens, which is compounded by the fact they dropcharacters into the story out of nowhere and act like you should care, which would only be true if you're already a fan of the game. The story just feels like an excuse to show off their roster, which makes sense I suppose, but it certainly doesn't make for a good anime.

The art is, tentatively, the strongest aspect of this anime, though that's not really saying much. The art and animation generally meet all basic standards of quality for the time, though the one thing that stands out is the character design. The character designs are interesting and visually engaging throughout, but on this same note, this is the only aspect about the entire anime that really stands out at all.

The sound is serviceable, meeting all basic standards of quality for the time, bolstered by fun, upbeat music.

The characters are generally flat, but serve their purpose in the show. Of them, it doesn't really make sense to choose favorites since they're so generic, so I'll instead choose based on who it looks like I'd main in the game, those being Gaia and Kayin, whose fighting styles are based around their big swords. Also, one more general note about the anime since I didn't know exactly where to put this- I've seen bad dubs before, but I don't think I've ever experienced a notably bad sub until now. Spaces are missing between words, brackets and commas appear for no reason, and some words are just replaced by strings of numbers. I don't know what the hell happened here, but whoever did the subs for this anime should honestly be locked up, as these subs are the work of a lunatic. Overall, Battle Arena Toshinden is a pretty bad anime, and I wouldn't recommend it unless you're a huge fan of fighting game anime, or a huge fan of this game in particular, and even then, you'd have to be ready to forgive quite a lot in order to find yourself enjoying this slop.