What do you get when you take an already made sequel to a mediocre (at best) game and jackhammer it into a completely different system than intended? You get a product that looks like it was hastily put together by lego knockoffs. Battle Arena Toshinden URA was meant to be a Sega Saturn release that veered away from the ongoing plot of the main series. Why? Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? It’s well known that the Saturn has a completely different operating system than the Playstation, so it’s obvious that they would need to take a different route in its creation.
But, for real, Takara, Sega… WHY!? Why would you do this? It's like they took a look at Virtua Fighter and said, "I bet I can do that BACKWARDS!" Where Virtua Fighter 2 came out looking smooth with much more crisp (if not moon-jumpy) controls, this one came out much choppier. One single look at this game and your heart will sink. The character models lack any real detail. The smoothness of the background is gone. Even if you don’t care all that much about the first one, you still made an effort to get this game in some capacity. Whether it be by money or whatever else, you still spent time to make this game playable and now you look at THIS! The character select screen is enough to cause you to scowl. It is ugly. I know graphics don’t mean everything, but this looks like vomit of the blockiest quality!
That’s not even talking about the gameplay. Oh, no. Those two paragraphs were just about the look and the history of this “game.” As soon as you get to your first match, everything gets much, much worse! The controls are floaty to a degree that it doesn't even feel like you are in control at all. Aiming attacks at enemies is a ridiculous feat as turning and third dimensional movements do nothing but JOLT around!
You have to try to be this lazy with a game. Remix was already a crappy enough port, but now, you don’t even have a story mode. Not that the first game pulled that off at all. Oh, no no no, no story what-so-ever is ever really shown, though that could be a good thing. There is a story somewhere in here, and it’s about as nonsensical as you’d expect. You get 5 to 10 second cut scenes that show off their hot new bad guys. I get that Gaia had on a strange fantasy set of armor, but who thought to put in a Gargoyles knockoff? This game was set more in a pseudo realistic special move Street Fighter-esque world with concepts that leaned toward Japanese folklore, though, not by much. The anime had some clones, and other small elements, but this was just too much.
It’s even worse than I could have expected, and I was expecting some bad stuff. Remix was no masterpiece, by any means, but it had merit in the ways of dumb fun. This has none of that. The voice clips during the fight sound far worse, and there isn’t even a story mode as a vehicle to show off the cheesy voice acting between characters. Playing the main game is equivalent to an arcade mode. So, with the new characters, you get no character at all, just new fighters. Trust me when I say it’s not worth it. This is definitely a front runner for the worst fighting game on the Sega Saturn!
