#584 Battle Arena Toshinden 2 (ARC) Bosses (1/2): Master playthrough.
0A playthrough of the final boss Master in Tamsoft's Battle Arena Toshinden 2.
Master's moves:
http://www.gamefaqs.com/ps/572397-battle-arena-toshinden-2/faqs/1208
The BAT series always changed up its bosses from game to game, and it's one of the aspects I admire most about it. Gaia this time is demoted from a boss to a regular character (even getting a pretty decent redesign in the process), but it won't be the last we see of him, regardless. This BAT game, for some reason, received an arcade release. Covering the second game in the series without covering the first just felt wrong to me, and then covering the second game without covering its derivatives and its sequel felt wrong to me as well. The fact that the PS1 port of BAT 2 even adds two new bosses meant I knew I had to give the series a bit more of a proper runthrough.
For this game Gaia was replaced by a new final boss, Master, as well as a sub-boss called Uranus. Master is an odd, androgynous character, who is stated to be female in the Japanese version and male in the Western versions of the game. Why they did this I have no clue, as it doesn't exactly add or take away anything from the game.
Master is quite a departure from Gaia. In contrast, she's considerably more fragile as a character, specialising in magic and telekinesis in particular, but as a result is also considering quicker. She fights using a variety of sword summoning spells, the majority of which hits multiple times for an excessive amount of damage. She even has a shoryuken style move, which acts as a great counter to the slow aerial attacks present in the game. She also has a sort of charging energy fist attack, which allows her to inflict some strong, cheap damage with ease. What's more, most of her special moves propel the opponent back considerably, making them easy targets for a ring-out. In this way, she's incredibly powerful, and bordering on broken. That said, I quite like her as a boss, if only because she's such a contrast to the usual large, lumbering bosses you'd typically expect in a fighting game. That said, she's not even the most broken boss in the game, either. But we'll get to that when we get to it. On the whole, I quite like Master, most probably because of just how unconventional she is for the better part.