![]() ![]() THE CHARACTER: Duke’s full name is Duke B. I could definitely hear it in a club heavy on Euro music. In all seriousness, it’s probably the most modern-sounding track of the eight and has a pop/rave appeal. THE MUSIC: The heavy use of keyboards is a nice testament to Sofia’s babe factor. Maybe even a place of sanctuary because of the neutral colors, and I felt like I heard echoes at times. THE STAGE: I never knew exactly where I was when I was fighting with Sofia, but it looked like some kind of secret hideout. Her occupation as listed in her bio is “private detective” but I bet that was just a polite way of saying “dominatrix.” Revealing leather costume and a whip? Girl, WERK. THE CHARACTER: Sofia was my favorite character to play because I was and still am a fan of femme fatale-type characters in fighting games. However, they are all truly divine and all of them are worth listening to. So let’s take a trip around the world, shall we? Here are the tracks accompanying the stages for the eight selectable characters in the game (Bad guys Gaia and Sho’s stage tracks were included in the version I found, but I did not particularly care for them), in order from my personal favorite to my least personal favorite. Toshinden did it the right way, and that deserves to be recognized. It’s an extension of person, a reflection of place, and a companion to adrenaline. Particularly, how the composers made use of common instruments yet still catered to each character’s unique traits and origins are things that really make me adore and appreciate this soundtrack so much more than I did then, and damn, I loved it back in the day! It may sound lame to some people, but music is just as important of an element in a video game as it is in films and TV shows. I feel the same way about music in the Street Fighter and Tekken series (Perhaps there may be posts on music from those games too!), but everything about the original Toshinden was a special nugget. You truly got a sense of each individual fighter, their style, and the arena you were were having bouts in. What I love the most about the Toshinden soundtrack-composed ingeniously by Yasuhiro Nakano, Makoto Mukai, and Fumio Tanabe-is how each piece of music fit each character and their stage so perfectly. ![]() Then my inner eight-year-old was reawakened when I found it, each full-length track of throwback yet timeless techno to prepare me for virtual battle. One of them was Toshinden, which led to me searching for a rip of the soundtrack. Just a few days ago, I woke up one morning and took a trip down memory lane in researching some of my favorite movies based on video games, then my favorite anime based on video games, which led to looking up some of the video games themselves. ![]() In Toshinden‘s case, the diverse synthesized score stuck out at me immediately and I knew that no matter which stage my character would fight at, the BGM would be pretty darn sweet to my ears. For example, I loved being in Sakura’s stage in Street Fighter Alpha 2 because the melody of the background music was so cheerful and pretty. He got a package deal from Toys R Us and one of the games in that package was Battle Arena Toshinden, a pretty fair deal since my choice of games were always the fighting ones.Įven as a kid, I knew I had appreciation for more than gameplay and characters, but also for music in video games. When our Super Nintendo was fading into gamer obscurity, my dad bought me and my siblings one of our most sought-after items at the time: the Sony PlayStation. I blame it on the male presence on both sides of my family. In this blog, you will find out some surprising things about me, and one thing that may come as a surprise is that I’ve been an on-and-off occasional casual button masher gamer since I was about seven or eight. ![]()
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