While we mourn the passing of the late, great Akira Toriyama and celebrate his one-of-a-kind art and storytelling style, I thought I should mention an interesting, obscure PS1 fighting game that he did the art for that might be of interest of fans of Dragon Ball, Dragon Quest, or even Virtua Fighter (the actual gameplay was designed by former Virtua Fighter vets)--enter 1996's Tobal No. 1 from Squaresoft (before they merged to become Square Enix)!

As you can tell just by this "Character Select" screenshot (featuring some characters you have to unlock, so uh, spoiler warning for an almost 30-year-old game?) Squaresoft really let the great artist go to town with some extremely unique character designs that I don't think I've really seen before or since, even if the 3D artists seemed to have struggled to properly recreate Toriyama-san's designs in 3D while also drastically simplifying the 3D rendering so that the game could run at 60 FPS on the PS1, a smooth framerate that was often impossible to accomplish on consoles at the time.

My personal favorite design of the Tobal No. 1 bunch is for the BBW fighter, Mary. Totally not because of fetish-related reasons...

Nope, totally don't want her to sit on me. Nope-nope-nope. Still, regardless if Mary is your specific type, Akira Toriyama demonstrated years before we even worried about diversity and inclusion in the media that, if you must draw a bigger woman, at least make her look about as feminine as her thinner counterparts unless she is supposed to be queer or transgender. Mary is not completely devoid of "fat woman stereotypes," unfortunately, she has a deep voice similar to the "fat man voice" Zach Hadel does in OneyPlays bits, and in the pre-rendered cutscenes with Mary in more casual dresses, it is implied she is even wider than this, but she's probably wearing a girdle or something to give her a more-conventionally-attractive hourglass figure in the ring. Still, Mary is a very bold character design from Akira Toriyama, especially since it was made back in era where artists weren't forced to draw diverse body types so the company can come across as "progressive," they just did so because they wanted to.

Here is the inevitably-superior Japanese box art for Tobal No. 1:

And of course, here is the inevitably-laughable box art we got in North America--though I imagine promoting a demo of the now-legendary Final Fantasy VII helped sales a bit:

It did get a sequel, simply called Tobal 2, but unfortunately it only ever officially released in Japan (though of course nowadays you could download a ROM with an English-language patch, plus getting ahold of the actual CD and box of the original Japan-only Tobal 2 is surprisingly cheap, only about $30 on Amazon or eBay as of this writing). It's a shame it's not as accessible as the first, because it is a MASSIVE improvement over Tobal No. 1 in every single way. The visuals are more detailed and better capture the feel of Akira Toriyama's concept art, while STILL running at 60 FPS on the humble PlayStation AND even running at a higher screen resolution than most PS1 games at the time, looking more like a PS2 game at times! It also has more of a story and even a dungeon to crawl through and unlock goofy animal characters to play as, such as Brown Ape and Chocobo!

Fascinating stuff, this obscure Tobal franchise! I encourage you to at least watch some YouTube gameplay videos of Tobal No. 1 and Tobal 2, especially if you are a huge fan of the late, great Akira Toriyama!