BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger Review
Let me start this review by saying American gamers suck. Happy 4th of July everyone! No seriously, while we are sitting at home living our little anti-social lives behind our little anti-social World of Warcraft accounts, Japanese gamers are still hitting the streets, going to arcades, and wasting their quarters away eighties style in one glorious social gaming experience. Of course, when you get a good enough at an arcade game you stop being a person and start being a button pressing machine so you can argue that pro-arcade gaming isn’t the most social activity out there but … wait where was I going with this … ?
Oh yes! In American arcades you will be hard pressed to find even a lone copy of Street Fighter among the cavalcades of crane games, slot machines and skee ball rigs that pander to the toddlers and 60 somethings of the world, and this is precisely why when I went screaming to all my friends to tell them “Holy Crap! BlazBlue, one of the highest rated Japanese fighting games of all time is getting an American release on the PS3 and Xbox360” everyone responded to me with a resounding “whaaa?” Then I murdered them for not having good taste in fighting games.
BlazBlue is a fighting game done by ARC System Works, and is sort of a spiritual successor to their previous best selling title Guilty Gear. Guilty Gear was loved by many for its complex fighting system and memorable anime characters, but was shunned for these same reasons by fighting game fans who didn’t have time to learn the intricacies of the system, and decided to basically say “screw this anime bullshit” and play more realistic fighting games like Tekken. (Wait a minute, don’t you fight a boxing kangaroo in Tekken?) ARC System Works heard these cries however, and did their best to fix and evolve the Guilty Gear system into something both complex and newbie friendly.
There are only 4 basic buttons you have to remember in BlazBlue labeled A, B, C, and D. A, B, and C are light, medium, and hard attacks respectively. Light attacks are quick but weak, hard attacks are strong but slow, and players can chain weaker attacks into stronger attacks to create basic combos. The D button or drive button, triggers each characters unique ability. Each drive ability is an “almost special move” with unique properties, which is treated like a normal attack. For example, Ragna, our silver haired anti-hero du jour has the Souleater ability which steals life from his opponents. As a result, each press of the D button allows him to swing his sword around with life stealing darkness covering it. Jin has Frostbite, which allows him to freeze his opponents, Rachael can control the wind, and other characters each have a drive ability which works with their unique fighting style. Essentially it is a generic “use cool powerz” button, no command inputs required.
The rest of the system is the standard fighting game faire we have all come to know and love. Some attacks hit high, some hit low, and you must block high or low respectively. You can jump, double jump, high jump, dash and air dash to get around. Different button combinations allow you to throw, cancel your moves, block harder, and counter attack, an specific command inputs such as the tried and true quarter circle forward will allow you do to special movies, or super moves (called distortion drives) if your heat meter is filled up enough. The heat meter fills when you attack or take damage and is used for any special function of the system, like canceling moves, or counter attacking. Insta-kill moves from Guilty Gear are back, now called Astral-Finishes, but they can only be used when you are on the last round of a fight, and your opponent has fewer than 20% of his life left, so they are really little more than flashy ways to end a match, but then again what more can you ask for.
Players also have a barrier meter, which depletes as they use their barrier a better form of blocking. A “guard libra” rests in the middle of the screen under the timer, and shows how much pressure is being put on which player. Push the guard libra all the way to one side, and your opponent enters block stun, allowing him to punish him for his defensive playing. Speaking of defensive playing, BlazBlue is not a game for the defensive minded. You may be used to the block+projectile fests you may see in other fighting games, but BlazBlue makes sure you get down and dirty with your opponent. If you retreat or block too much, you receive a negative penalty, which makes you take double damage for a short period of time. If you barrier too much or deplete your barrier gauge you also take more damage for a period of time. The more you relentlessly pursue your opponent the lower your chances of incurring these debilitating states. So BlazBlue is a lot less about blocking and a lot more about punishing your opponents for their mistakes and performing flashy anime style combos.
The graphics in this game are mind-numbingly beautiful. Each character is drawn in anime style, and the frame rate is so high and so dense it feels like you are playing a living anime. Yes, this means that the game does include “that anime bullshit” that turned people off to Guilty Gear, but screw you for hating on anime in the first place. The amount of detail that was put into the 2-D character animations is stunning. Characters react differently to different types of attacks, slashes, punches, and gunshots all have their own unique hit animations, and the whole game is so fluid you really zone out when watching the carnage unfold. Even the environments are beautiful, as the camera takes you through a fully rendered 3-D world just to get to the 2-D battleground you will fight on.
The sound is also phenomenal. It’s almost as if the old Guilty Gear sound team came back to do what they do best all over again. Oh wait… they did! Yes all the speed and thrash metal you know and love from Guilty Gear returns, and really what better type of music is there to put to intense anime battles. The English voice acting is … uh … capable, but let’s face it the Japanese voice acting will always be better in a game like this, and luckily enough the original Japanese voices are but a click away in the options menu.
The story is … well … it’s a fighting game story, let’s not fool around here. It’s long and convoluted and has enough nonsensical plot twists to make Hideo Kojima cry. Still, BlazBlue excels in the story area over other fighting games, in that it actually has one. If you can push yourself past the absolutely absurd reasons that most of these characters are fighting each other, you may be able to enjoy the text based cut scenes, or special full motion video sequences, if you are into that sort of thing. Either way the story mode at least keeps you amused for a good long while, which is important because you will be getting a majority of your unlocks from this mode. There is a bit of non-linearity thrown in as your path braches depending on how you do in battle and what choices you make in dialogue, but most gamers will just read a FAQ to get the good ending anyway so it’s kind of a moot point.
Of course the real meat and potatoes of any fighting game comes from it’s versus modes, and BlazBlue has plenty to offer there. In addition to standard offline versus mode, gamers can hook up their system to the inter-tubes and play online matches as well. In addition to a friend system and leader board functionality, players can set up rotation rules, mimicking the arcade quarter line experience. It’s a great innovation, even if it does encourage gamers to stay inside even more. Also a special note for all you online junkies out there, in all my time playing BlazBlue I have never ever encountered even a bit of lag. Props to ARC for making a server system that works. Get it? ARC System Works? It was funnier in my head.
In the end there is nothing bad I can say about BlazBlue. So the anime style may not appeal to everyone, and the story may be a little wonky, and the game does take some liberties with the English language, but that’s all really nit-picking. Honestly, even if these things put a bad taste in your mouth you should still pick up BlazBlue. The game is so simple to learn and so hard to master it will have you playing against your friends for a long time to come. ARC System Works thought of everything. Don’t believe me? Well check this out, in the special edition the game even comes with a DVD that gives you special game play tips from both developers and arcade pros! So even if you have never picked up a controller in your life, you can sit down, pop the DVD in, grab a bucket of popcorn, and be fighting with the best in no time!
(25 votes, average: 2.80 out of 4)
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