BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger

by Aksys

Product Features

• Brand new music, animations, backgrounds, and a fully fleshed-out story mode have been made exclusively for the console release
• Train your skills online through ranked and player battles, create online lobbies where up to six players can battle each other or spectate from the sidelines to gauge their opponents
• Take advantage of Barriers, Counter Assaults, Rapid Cancels, Barrier Bursts, Ukemi Tactics, Distortion Drives, and console-exclusive Astral Heat for all characters

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B002IAU14A
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches ; 4.8 ounces
• Media: Video Game
• Release Date: July 28, 2009
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,087 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)
  • #73 in Video Games > PlayStation 3 > Adventure
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Platform: PLAYSTATION 3 | Edition: Standard

BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger by Aksys Games is a 2D one-on-one fighting game, which features an original cast (including many weapon fighters) and uses a four-button control scheme (weak, medium and strong attacks plus an EX button which makes your character perform unique special attacks). The fighting system is based around the ability continue combos when opponents are in a down state. On the defensive side, you'll have a number of ways of getting back up when down, so combo attacks don't pummel you. BlazeBlue employs the Type X2 arcade board and mixes 3D characters and 3D backdrops.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars You like fighting games? Get this game!, August 20, 2009

By 

Joseph (Houston, TX) - See all my reviews

= Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars 

This review is from: BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger Standard Edition (Video Game)

I already reviewed the Limited Edition of this game but I believe this game is so great I had to review it again. First of all thank heavens for Street Fighter IV. Because of the success of that game, (yeah, go get that one too if you haven't already), the 2-D fighting genre has been revitalized. Anyway, back to the review, there are many elements to BlazBlue that make it such a great fighter. So if you wanna know why I gave this game 5 stars, read on!

First thing is the diverse cast of characters. Each character in BlazBlue plays completely different. In some games, if you've mastered one character, you've mastered half of them. This is not the case here. Aksys accomplishes this with an interesting mechanic called the Drive System. Each character's drive can be performed by simply pressing a button. This simple action opens up a wealth of possibilities. For one character, it enables you to freeze them. Another character's drive allows them to control the wind, giving you further control over your movements and even your projectiles movements. Yet another's character's will drain their opponents life and... well...you get the picture! You WILL find a character you fall in love with! I play mainly with the general who freezes and the kid vampire who controls wind. Which brings me to another point. Not only do the characters play differently they LOOK completely different too. The characters designs are completely over the top, thought not in a way which will repulse you. You do have some insane characters though. There is a scientist whose degenerated into a goo of insects, an asian doctor with huge boobs, a cat girl, and so on. Really the character designers had no problem thinking out of the box.

The second reason I love this game are the fighting mechanics themselves. BlazBlue does a couple of things to further differentiate itself from other games in it's genre. First, there is the combo system. Unlike SFIV, which to me felt like most of the combos were scripted, Blue's combo system encourages expirementation. Each combo relies on a stun value each hit produces. If you can get another move out before the character recovers, then you can create a combo. If you hit a character and create a "counter", which the game will announce, then the stun value is extended even more, letting you create some other combos not otherwise possible. Although there are some bread and butter combos, I was able to come up with some pretty awesome combos on my own, including some which takes more than half damage. I also enjoyed Blue's defense system. Instead of just holding back, you have the option of adding a barrier, which pushes back your opponents from you. You can also hit back at the moment an opponent attacks you. This gives you a shorter recovery time, allowing for some counters. And finally you have the barrier burst. The barrier burst drains all your barrier gauge, but stops any combo and pushes your opponent across the screen. This is very handy for stopping those insanely damaging combos, but leaves you in a "danger" state where you can no longer use your barrier, and you take about 25% more damage for the rest of the match.

The graphics in this game are simply phenomenal, and will appeal to those who appreciate anime and just great art in general. The characters are all high res 2-D sprites and beautifully animated. The backgrounds are combination of 2-D and 3-D and look great. As far as the music, many people have fallen in love with blue's soundtrack but apart from a few numbers, was mostly forgettable for me. As long as it didn't distract from the game, I was good. I did enjoy the sound effects though.

Finally, BlazBlue excels in it's online component. There is occasional lag but this is mostly limited to the introduction of each match. The actual matches themselves are almost flawless. Blue also lets you record your matches, and download other user's matches. A cool thing is that these are not huge video files. I believe it works by the game recording all the controller inputs, and then replaying them, thus effectively recreating the match. I'm not sure if this has been done before but I thought this was pretty clever, since this takes a minimal amount of space in your hard drive.

Wow, I could go on and on and on but I would easily double the length of this review. Blaz has multiple game modes, it looks great, and most importantly, it's just plain fun! Do yourself a favor and buy this game! Highly recommended!

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This game is Awsome., February 26, 2010

By 

Killer J "Don't add fuel to the Fire" (Bronx, Ny) - See all my reviews

= Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars 

This review is from: BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger Standard Edition (Video Game)

I really love this game. The graphic's are great, the voice acting is great, the onlineplay is great and the story mode is great. There is nothing bad I can say about this game. I play online on this game every day. This game never gets boring to me. I play people online and its very fun. Some of them cheat but I still have fun playing. My favorite characters in this game are Ragna, Noel and Jin. All the characters are Awsome but those are my favorite ones. If you don't have this game go and buy it. It's really worth it.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The best 2D fighter of this generation, but it makes me miss Guilty Gear., April 29, 2010

By 

Armando N. Roman (Hillsboro, OR) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

= Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars 

This review is from: BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger Standard Edition (Video Game)

I loved the Guilty Gear series more than any other fighting game franchise, and this is coming from someone who played Street Fighter, Fatal Fury, Samurai Showdown and others when they first came out, and as each series got a new title. Fighting is one of my two favorite genres of games (the other being puzzle), and even with the likes of Street Fighter 3: Third Strike, Last Blade 2, Capcom vs SNK 2...Guilty Gear X2 is easily my favorite title. So when I found out that BlazBlue was to be the successor of that franchise, I got excited. The graphics were incredible, character designs looked great, gameplay was nearly identical to GG, and it had the same, deep story mode that the later GG games had. What was there to complain about? In short, nothing really, but BlazBlue just makes me wish Guilty Gear X3 had come out instead because of how similar it is.

BlazBlue plays wonderfully, and I was able to get right into the game. You have 4 standard attacks- light, medium and heavy attacks, along with the Drive attack. Drive is your main special move attack that can also be used for different regular special attacks (quarter circle motions and all that). It varies for each character, like freezing the opponent, controlling wind, shooting forward, magnetizing the opponent, etc. Barrier Bursts, like the Burst feature from Guilty Gear, are used to get out of tight situations. Say your opponent has you stuck in a huge combo- use the Burst and you'll break out of it, shoot them away, and have a chance to recover and get back to the action. Everyone has Distortion Drives too (again, like Overdrives in GG), and some of them are just plain gorgeous to see in motion. Instant Kills are here too, but you can't use them as freely as those in GG. See how similar this game is to Guilty Gear with how much I reference back to it? But the game's fun, and anyone with experience playing fighting games will more than likely love BlazBlue. You also gotta love the characters, like Taokaka, a kind of cat/human hybrid with a wacked out face, that only cares about food and has a great nickname for Litchi. You'll probably spend a couple of hours just enjoying seeing how the characters animate and fight. I know I did.

BlazBlue has a lot of different gameplay modes. You have the regular Arcade mode, where you go through the game as one character, taking out all the others with a little bit of story going on in the process. There's a Story mode that you can play through multiple paths with every character (kind of a Choose Your Own Adventure deal), and you'll need to play through each character's story multiple times in order to get 100%. There's also Score Attack, Training and Replay Theater...but then there's multiplayer. Trust me when I say that it's a thousand times better than the mess that was Guilty Gear X2 #Reload's online mode. You earn experience that ups your rank, and player cards show things like which character the player uses the most and more. I never had any problems with lag during gameplay but there is a little bit right before the match starts- the part when the fighters appear on-screen and when the announcer is saying her usual lines. Everything ran smooth immediately when the match started. And for trophy junkies, there are quite a few for BlazBlue, and a couple are very tricky to get.

So with all the great things in the game, why the 4 star rating? Honestly, this is more of a 4.5 star rating, but I had to round down in this case. BlazBlue is so similar to Guilty Gear, that is almost comes off as a rip-off of the series, despite being made by the same company. Many of the characters here are practically characters from GG but with different designs. Iron Tager = Potemkin, Jin = Ky, Ragna = Sol, Carl = Bridget, Arakune = Eddie, and so on. Heck, even a lot of their moves are nearly the same as their GG counterparts'. I respect them for making a new fighting game franchise, but if they had done things a bit differently, I wouldn't have felt so...well, I don't know how to describe how I feel. Again, don't get me wrong, because I love this game, but it's a little too close to GG for my tastes. But if you never played GG before, then that shouldn't be a problem.

And you know what? There's an upgraded BlazBlue title coming out in a few months, similar to Super Street Fighter 4 being the upgraded version of regular SF4. I'm hearing that it'll come out between July and October, but it's not official still. The game will feature a few more characters, re-balancing the cast, and probably a few more moves for everyone. But while BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger is so cheap now, you really should pick it up so you can have a head start on the new version when that comes out. Hopefully if this franchise does well, we can get GGX3...and a true sequel for BlazBlue too :p.

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