Retro Review - Tobal 2

I've said it in some reviews, but video games of the fighting genre are not my favorite and it's because I'm not really good at them, I've played a few of these and also over time I've done some reviews, however, even though my taste for this type of video game is not that great, some of the titles I've had the pleasure of trying out have been good enough for me to remember them fondly. One of those games that I will talk about next, at the time I had no idea that under the development of this title was one of the most popular and beloved mangakas in the world: Akira Toriyama, father of Dragon Ball and a great reference in the manga of the genre Shonen.

I won't talk about the story of Tobal 2, since I never played the first part of this game (although I read that compared to its second part it's pretty mediocre), besides the fact that Tobal 2 is totally in Japanese and also that the story in a fighting game never really mattered to me since my main goal in this kind of games is exactly that, to fight, although as I said before I'm not very good at this kind of games.

Tobal 2 is a video game that graphically is really good, both the scenarios and characters have a great design and details that we will enjoy in every fight we have with our enemies.

As I said at the beginning, Tobal 2 had in its development one of the most recognized and loved mangakas around the world and it is nothing more than: Akira Toriyama, the character designs in this game are made under the pencil of this famous manga artist, so we're going to recognize right away the distinctive character design of this cartoonist. It's worth noting that even though some of these designs are a carbon copy of characters like Goku or Piccolo, these designs have a great personality and charisma. Akira Toriyama has also participated in other video games such as Dragon Quest and one of my favorite video games: Chrono Trigger, so besides having an excellent design in the game itself, we will also be able to enjoy the excellent and distinctive conceptual art of this cartoonist.

As a good fight game in Tobal 2 we will find a good list of tunes, each one of them serves as an accompaniment in the different scenarios where we will dispute the fiercest battles that this universe has created. The soundtrack of Tobal 2 has different musical styles that are very catchy and in accordance with the type of game that it is. It also stands out in the voices of the characters ,that once again are in accordance with its design and what they represent, as well as the sound effects that are of great importance in a fighting game, since there is nothing like listening to the sound of impact on the face of our enemy.

Tobal 2 has great main characteristics of fighting games, in this aspect I didn't see much difference to other titles like Tekken, although I'm saying this from the perspective of a person who isn't that much of a fan of this kind of game, so in this aspect I don't have much to say, other than that at first maybe I found it a little difficult to adapt to the control of the characters, because many of them have a fighting style that I can label as "slow", many of them need to charge their energy bar to perform certain attacks, but at the time I noticed that this bar charges very slowly, because many times I didn't get to use special energy attacks, however it's just a matter of adapting to this type of gameplay.

In spite of that, Tobal 2 gives us a lot of freedom to move around the stage, so that we can, in a way, anticipate some attacks or simply create a better attack or defense strategy.

As I was saying at the start, when I was going to play Tobal 2 I didn't have the slightest idea that Akira Toriyama-san himself had worked on the development of this video game, but it wasn't until I got to the character selection part that I realised that this cartoonist's distinctive and highly recognisable character design was there, and even though this video game genre isn't my favourite, I kept playing it because I wanted to discover all the designs I had made. For my luck, Tobal 2 has a lot of playable characters, including Toriyama's own avatar, which is a kind of Robot and we can even find a Chocobo from the Final Fantasy saga. In short, Tobal 2 is a video game recommended for those who like the fighting genre or simply if you like the artistic style of Akira Toriyama.