Tōkidenshō Angel Eyes (闘姫伝承 ANGEL EYES Tōkidenshō Enjeru Aisu?, "Fighting Princess Legend - Angel Eyes") is a fighting video game developed and published by Tecmo for the arcade game market in 1996. It was later ported to the PlayStation game console, being released on December 11, 1997; in 2009, it has been also made available as downloadable content in the Playstation Store, for the PlayStation 3 and the PSP. Both the original arcade version and the PS version were released in Japan only, and the downloadable version for PS3 and PSP remains in Japanese language.
Angel Eyes featured an all-female character roster, in the same way as other fighting games with all-female rosters like Metal & Lace: Battle of the Robo Babes, Variable Geo, Seifuku Densetsu Pretty Fighter, Arcana Heart and Asuka 120%. In a similar way to Capcom's Justice Gakuen series, most of the characters were teenage students fighting for the honor of their school and to earn the right of becoming the Great Angel. The game sported very high-quality, manga-styled character artwork, vigorous animation and attractive backgrounds. Contributing to the game's uniqueness, its visuals combined two-dimensional and three-dimensional graphics. Angel Eyes has remained mostly in obscurity in the West, due to not being released outside Japan. In Japan however, it gained a moderate success and following, and is still being used in tournaments there.
The game's storyline takes place in Japan. The substance of an angel from heaven was sent to Earth to incarnate in a human. However, there are eight girls holding the potential to become the host of the angel's substance. Therefore, who is worthy of inheriting the substance is to be she who proves herself the strongest in battle.
Tōkidenshō Angel Eyes was as most fighting games of its day, a two-dimensional and sprite-based (although some of the characters were three-dimensional models, that interacted with the hand-drawn, sprite based characters in a two-dimensional environment), one-on-one fighting game, and the objective for the player was to advance by defeating the opponent by winning two rounds out of three in competitive matches.
Following the traditional template of fighting games, the characters had at their disposal and arsenal of normal martial arts moves varied by the characters' posture, complemented by special moves endowed with additional power or abilities. The game also featured certain gameplay mechanics that although by today standards are commonplace, were rather unique and innovative back at the time of its release, such as a mid-air dash, mid-air suspension, mid-air chase capabilities, a homing jump, high jump, and a special ability trigger called Angel Synchro.
Source: Wikipedia, "Tōkidenshō Angel Eyes", available under the CC-BY-SA License.