Continuum Shifts; Quality Doesn't

This time last year I gave a rave review to BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger, the new fighting game from the developers of the Guilty Gear series. I didn't expect that I would be back this year to review a new installment in the BlazBlue series, yet here I am, once again delivering a thoroughly positive take on Arc System Works' latest production.

I was slightly disappointed when BlazBlue: Continuum Shift was announced. Though I was glad to see a great game get a sequel, it initially appeared that the "new" game would include relatively little new content. There were four new characters, a few new stages, and adjustments to existing characters, but I worried this would be as disappointing an upgrade as the reiterations of Guilty Gear X2. Given Arc System Works's history, I wasn't wrong to worry, but I'm glad to say that Arc has come through this time. BlazBlue: Continuum Shift is so chock-full of new content that it makes its predecessor's abundance seem paltry.

Though there are several very obvious differences between Continuum Shift and Calamity Trigger, Arc System Works have also demonstrated admirable attention to detail with a whole slew of small changes. The first game's slapdash menus have made way for a more elegant setup. If the short load times bother you, you can now shorten them still further by installing the game, which takes about five gigabytes on the hard drive. All the new characters have new portraits, the art gallery has twice as many unlockables, and the in-battle "HUD" has been redesigned.

When the Guilty Gear games first appeared, they were praised for their beautiful sprite graphics and smooth animation, which made most 2D and many 3D fighting games appear dowdy and outdated. The BlazBlue franchise's HD sprites surpass their Guilty Gear precursors, though I admit I rather miss the old games' sprite backgrounds. The 3D backgrounds in Continuum Shift are lively, detailed, and full of spectators and moving parts, but Arc System Works' 3D output never approaches the beauty of their 2D work. The stages, though not unsightly, represent a missed opportunity.

In an interview from 2008, Daisuke Ishiwatari of Arc Systems Works compared his games with games like Street Fighter IV, which claim to be user-friendly but which are impenetrable to those unfamiliar with fighting games, their history, and their terminology. As he put it: "In my own opinion, no matter what the game, it's important to make sure that beginners and non-gamers can pick it up, and have fun just mashing the buttons." Calamity Trigger, with its Drive (i.e. X Button/A button) attacks and right-stick special attacks, achieved this goal quite well, but Continuum Shift manages to be even more user-friendly. Though you no longer have the option to perform special attacks with the right joystick, Arc System Works instituted a new Beginner Mode which remaps buttons, removes certain of the more arcane techniques, and generally accommodates new players and button mashers. If you'd like to learn the game in-depth, there's also a Tutorial mode that explains the game's various rules, systems, and terminology in a reasonably comprehensible manner. If you're really dedicated, there's also Challenge Mode, which teaches you some very difficult combos. Continuum Shift is as accessible as this sort of game can ever be.

Calamity Trigger featured a Story "campaign" for each character, fully-voiced with multiple endings. The plot features various warring factions, mysterious entities, cat people, squirrel people, two psychotic children, time paradoxes and loops, cursed weapons, damned warriors, flashbacks, violent sibling rivalry, vampires, and ninjas. The characters talk a great deal without explaining very much, and the multiple endings and the characters' tendency to make every meeting end in violent conflict help make the developments even more opaque. Even so, Continuum Shift's Story mode is a great improvement over Calamity Trigger's. Aside from the increase in anime sequences and set piece battles, seeing all the story paths requires significantly less tedium.

Though Continuum Shift is advertised as having four new characters, it would be more fair to say that it has three-and-a-half. New fighter Lamba replaces Nu from the first game; the two characters look and play very similar, though Lambda is all in all less dangerous than Nu, who was after all a boss character. Continuum Shift's one hidden character, Mu, somewhat resembles Lambda, but plays quite differently. Hazama, the villain of the piece, seems like a very difficult character to learn. He can summon green energy chains to bind opponents, jet around the arena, etc. His special and super moves are among the most impressive in the game. The final new character, Tsubaki, is a conservatively-dressed (!!!) female with very easy to perform special attacks. Each of her attacks has four variations; her Drive move charges up a gauge that lets Tsubaki perform especially powerful takes on her moves. She's not a very flashy character, but I've found her a lot of fun to play.

The first BlazBlue received much praise for its "net code". Online matches flowed well and rarely suffered from noticeable slowdown. I've only played a few online opponents in Continuum Shift, but I've already noticed and appreciated a few changes to network play. You now have the opportunity to play Training or Arcade while waiting for a fellow human to come online and interrupt. Match observation has also been improved; you can now join as an observer mid-match instead of waiting at the "Connecting..." screen. Online play as a whole is far better than before; I doubt I shall be able to return to Calamity Trigger.

As happy as I am with Continuum Shift, I still have a few complaints. The enemy AI can be fairly cheap, especially with overpowered characters. Unlimited Hazama, the boss of Arcade, is the case in point: He seems to block everything, has three times your health, can poison you, and regenerates. As you might imagine, fighting him is an exercise in frustration. My other complaint concerns DLC – as I write, one new character is available on the Playstation Store. Two more will appear in the coming months. Each character costs $7.99. This seems exorbitant to me, especially since Story mode is plastered with "ads" for the new characters, all of whom have speaking (but not fighting) roles. At least the game itself is cheap; Continuum Shift launched with an MSRP of $39.99.

Continuum Shift is a fine step forward for the BlazBlue franchise, whatever minor quibbles I might have with it. I look forward to spending more time with it – I've played it a lot already, but I know that I've only scratched the surface. Well-worth the money for those already fans of the series, Continuum Shift is also a fine jumping-on point. Don't worry what you've missed – you still wouldn't understand that plot...

How DO You Pronounce That Anyway?: BlazBlue

Despite the unkind things I said about Marvel vs. Capcom 2, I'm a great fan of fighting games. I'm not especially good at them - I can't perform the most convoluted attacks, nor can I parry multi-hit attacks by counting individual frames of animation. And yet there's something about the genre that never gets old for me. It's not just the games' difficulty; I don't feel the same attachment to "bullet hell" shooters that I do for fighters. A lot of it, I think, has to do with my perverse affection for the aesthetics of fighting games: the implausible outfits, bizarre characters, awkward humor, overdone plots, and general campiness. Fights between Soul Calibur's Ivy and Taki look like an unmade Russ Meyer film, while Rival Schools United by Fate (love the title) has a lunatic plot about Japanese high schoolers fighting each other and their teachers – with swords, baseball bats, knives, hand-thrown fireballs, and electrical attacks. Fighting games don't make much sense, but how I love their incoherent campiness.

I've played altogether too many fighters – just ask my friends – but there were a few franchises I always kept coming back to. One of these was Guilty Gear. Back in the early 2000s, Guilty Gear had quite the reputation. Not only did the game have extraordinarily well-animated fighters, unique and plentiful characters, and a good rock soundtrack, but it was also from a previously-unknown developer. Guilty Gear X, the second game in the series, got very good reviews, but when the third game, Guilty Gear X2, appeared, it received raves. Guilty Gear seemed on the way to becoming the 2D fighter of choice for this decade.

Shame, then, that everything fell apart. Instead of making a new game, Arc System Works revised GGX2 multiple times - there was a "new" game that added one character, a further revision that added another but removed two hidden characters, etc. I gather the most recent edition of GGX2, Accent Core Plus (don't ask about the series' naming conventions) is quite good: It has all the GGX2 characters and features the return of story mode, which had been dropped in an earlier iteration. That's great, and I may eventually play Accent Core Plus, as even the basic version of Guilty Gear X2 is a wonderful game. But it does seem a bit ridiculous to me that the "final" version of the game came out seven years after the game's original release.

According to most reviewers, Arc System Works' new game BlazBlue is both a) the "spiritual sequel" to the Guilty Gear Games and b) a totally unique 2D fighting experience. If you think these two statements are mutually exclusive, you'd be right. Guilty Gear and BlazBlue have more in common than mysterious and alliterative titles; many of the fighters in BlazBlue are highly reminiscent of older Gear characters. This is especially true of the two "leads," Ragna and Jin, who look and play just like Guilty Gear's Sol and Ky. Many of the mechanics of BlazBlue echo those of Guilty Gear – the "Faultless Defense" blocks and "Roman Cancel" techniques from the older series appear under different names in BlazBlue.

Despite what first impressions might suggest, BlazBlue is not a palette swap of Guilty Gear. Many of Guilty Gear's excesses have vanished. To take one example, let's consider Guilty Gear's Instant Kills with their BlazBlue counterparts, Astral Heat attacks. In Guilty Gear, every character has a one-hit that can be performed at any point in the round (watch them here). They can only be used once, they're easy to dodge, and you suffer a lot if you miss, but the attacks are still very cheap, especially when used against those new to the game. BlazBlue's Astral Heats are as flashy and fun as the old Instant Kills, but they can only be used in the last round of a fight, when the opponent has 20% health or less, and you have a full special attack gauge.

BlazBlue also elaborates on Guilty Gear's efforts to be an "accessible" fighting game. In Guilty Gear, every character but one had the same button combination to perform an Instant Kill. The idea was that players wouldn't have to waste time memorizing two dozen different commands – if you knew how to do one character's IK, you knew how to do another's. Guilty Gear also allowed for button shortcuts – it's easy to press four buttons at once while standing at an arcade pad, but it's quite hard to do while holding a controller. Guilty Gear let you set shortcuts, so a tap on the R1 button was (say) equivalent to pressing Square, Circle, X, and Triangle at the same time. It was a much-appreciated gesture. BlazBlue is actually even more player-friendly than Guilty Gear – not only have shoulder button shortcuts returned, but there are now even shortcuts for special attacks. Furthermore, each character has a "Drive" attack that can be used by merely pressing the X button. Jin can freeze opponents, Rachel can control the wind, Litchi can place or recall her magic staff, etc. No matter how bad you are at fighting games, it's not hard to look cool while playing BlazBlue.

As I mentioned above, many of the characters in BlazBlue will seem slightly familiar to players of Guilty Gear. At times, this is perhaps tedious: Ragna's play style seems almost identical to his predecessor Sol's. Yet most of the fighters in BlazBlue expand upon their templates. BlazBlue's Carl Clover has quirky play mechanics reminiscent of Eddie from Guilty Gear, but Carl is a far more memorable and unique character than Eddie, one of the less-interesting GG fighters. Similarly, Litchi looks like a slightly sluttier version of Jam, but the variety of tricks she can perform with her magic flying staff set her apart from her precursor. And I shouldn't overemphasize BlazBlue's similarities to Guilty Gear; there are a few characters who, as far as I can tell, aren't near-doppelgangers to fighters from the older games.

BlazBlue, unlike many modern fighting games, has only a dozen playable characters. Normally this would be a great cause for complaint, but each character is so unique and enjoyable that it seems wrong to complain. And while there are not many characters, BlazBlue has quite a lot to do. There is, of course, a classic "arcade" mode, but BlazBlue also has a branching story mode guaranteed to take up a lot of your time. Furthermore, there are plenty of unlockables, including dozens of pieces of concept and story artwork. And while 2D fighters have a reputation for being archaic, BlazBlue has a number of current-generation features. In addition to online play, BlazBlue supports both Trophies and Downloadable Content.

Few games display such attention to detail as BlazBlue. The game displays in 720p and looks great; the animation is great, the backgrounds interesting, and the character sprites ornate. The voice acting isn't top-notch, but many fighters have unique voice clips for certain battles. If Jin fights the "Red Devil" soldier Tager, for example, he might yell, "Red Devil dies today!" in the middle of the fight. Several matchups, such Litchi vs. Arakune or Jin vs. Ragna, have unique battle music. Would that all games paid such attention to the little things.

I won't go so far as to say that BlazBlue is a fighting game for people who don't like fighting games. It isn't. If you do, however, like fighting games, BlazBlue is the game for you. Those with less-than-ideal skills will enjoy themselves, while "serious" fans will find that BlazBlue is extremely deep. Don't let the new name or the paucity of characters put you off: BlazBlue is the best fighting game I've played in a very long time.