Blazblue developed by Arc System Works and published by Aksys Games is a good fighting game that offers a wonderful art
Publisher: Aksys Games
Time Spent: 35-40 Hours
Positives: Fabulous Art, Cool Characters, Great Soundtrack, Extensive Depth and Modes
Negatives: Unbalanced Gameplay, Jagged Character Sprites, Online Difficulty
Blazblue developed by Arc System Works and published by Aksys Games is a good fighting game that offers a wonderful art style but some unbalanced gameplay. Blazblue at its core is a very complex fighting game that does not cater to beginners. However with a little practice the game can be very fun and each of the characters although extremely unique are fairly easy to grasp. Blazblue is your standard 2d fighting game, and moves are executed much in the way a Street Fighter game would control, but the moves in blazblue are harder and go into more complexities than in other fighting games. The most important part of being successful in Blazblue is the ability of the player to string combos together. This provides a lot of depth for experienced players, but for beginners it is way too complex to learn most of the good combos. When playing through the single player arcade and story modes it is not necessary to learn these complex combos as most matches can be won by using simple combos and tactics. Each of the characters has a very different move set with numerous special moves and variations. Each character has a heat gauge that when filled to at least 50% a special move can be executed. To take away some of the difficulty each direction on the right analog stick is mapped to a special move. The player can simply flick the stick to execute the move rather than inputting the command. The right stick shortcuts can be used in single player and in online player matches, but for ranked matches they cannot be used. This makes ranked online matches almost unplayable to most people as you will get slaughtered in about 10 seconds each round, and this is one of the major flaws of the game. To add to that the characters are not very balanced and characters such as Nu and Tager can be almost undefeatable online. The single player game modes are extensive, and this is where I spent most of my time. You can play through the story of each character with branching paths along the way. The story is mostly told through text dialogue and was a feature that many fighting games don't have. The arcade and score attack modes are also fun and there are many difficulty levels.
To me the best part of Blazblue is the outstanding and visually stunning art style along with the excellent Japanese hard rock soundtrack. The art that the game uses is reminiscent of Guilty Gear, but it is turned up a notch here and the character and stage designs look awesome. The game is also very smooth, with the only problem being that the outline of the characters is jagged and unclean. Despite this the overall visual and art package is amazing and if you like that kind of Japanese anime art then you will probably love this game.
I can easily recommend Blazblue for those that are fighting game fans or may be fans of the art style, but to me this game could be considered a 2nd tier fighting game behind such titles as street fighter and tekken. Blazblue did not live up to the hype I had been expecting for it.