Customer Reviews

BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger Standard Edition

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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!

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.

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.

This game is incredibly fun and rewarding if you take the time to master your character, will not go much into depth as the other reviews, but i will point one thing out the other reviewers left out, the online. Be prepared to get your ass handed to you as most of the players online just use 3 characters that are kinda unbalanced and cheap. One of them is a robot girl named V-13 which you can learn easily and just spam 3 moves over and over and over again, which is really annoying and really ruins the game for me sometimes because i have to resort to using a cheap character as well just to beat that character. I know I will be bashed for this but think about it, can you really beat v-13 or noel with hakumen?? I really like to see that, well anyways if you tend to play on a regular basis you will be okay, you been warned.

Been playing it for about a week now.

The story mode is lengthy and very in-depth, which is nice for fighting games, as of late. Very high replay value. Each character is wholly unique from the others, creating a unique style of play with each time you pick up the controller.

The two-dimensional gameplay doesn't detract at all after so many fighting games played in 3-D, especially due to the uniqueness of the style and controls inherent in the game. The sprites look fantastic, and there are intricate designs and actions in each character (such as comments they make specific to other enemies during battle) that really help bring out the character's personalities.

HIGHLY recommended. I believe that, once I get the platinum trophy for this one, I'll be purchasing the sequel, even though some critiques of it make it out to be just another rendition of this game with two new characters. I simply think the game is THAT good, and cannot wait for the next full sequel.

I stayed away from this game cause it was the same makers of the guilty gear seris and I played every one of them and have the blisters and headache to prove it. The first thing I notice is that the learning curve in Blazblu is based on the characters and not the AI. Also to pull off some of the more diffcult moves have been reduced greatly. And the action has been dialed all the way up. There has been some serious balance in the game. Bottomline is all the problems that made the gulity gear series hard to play or even hanging on to has been fixed in this game. And one thing that I notice that was a huge surprise was that when I was fighting the final character I didn't feel "cheated" the way I did in guilty gear. Look I'm not bashing guilty gear in no way if anything that series made me a better fighter in street fighter and KOF. But this title is what happens when you take what works and what doesn't and fix it. Not just repackage it with a few fixed bugs and paint job. Bottomline get this title you will not be disappointed in it. BTW! The reason I picked it up my cousin told me that it was alot better and after playing this title I feel this is a strong contender aganist SF4 in 2d fighters. KOF just fell off for me.

BlazBlue is an exceptional fighting game. Not only does it stand apart from games such as Soul Caliber, Mortal Kombat, or even the Street Fighter series due to its complex, but easily learned controls, but it stands above them in a league of its own.

BlazBlue is not your typical fighting game. The art is reminiscent of the glory days of fighting games; it's sprite based which means it has been drawn and then animated, rather than rigging a 3D model which is (arguably) aesthetically less pleasing. Not only do you have the peace of mind that the developers actually spent time on this game, something which is rare these days, but that they went the extra mile to make the game downright beautiful.

Each character has his or her own set of moves; from a light kick or jab, to heavy punches and throws. Chaining these moves together yields combinations, depending on several other factors (such as how much drive you have) and can be unleashed with dramatic and spectacular effect. These special moves are hard to "button mash", since they are time based as well as complex in their succession. It took me a while to get used to it but now that I've spent a couple of hours trying to NOT play Street Fighter, I've learned how to execute combinations and drive moves in "clutch" moments.

One of the greatest features of the game is that it does not rely on two or three characters during multiplayer alone, such as Street Fighter (Ken, Ryu, Sagat). Instead, since each character has been so well balanced, you can choose which character fits your play style without having to worry about his or her handicap versus the rest of the roster; learn your character, and you'll be able to do well. This is truly a game which does not relies on your skill with a character rather than the character itself.

All in all, this game has been a breath of fresh air in a genre that has been stagnant for far too long. Is the game perfect? No, but it's miles ahead of the competition when it comes to balance, aesthetics, and just how damn fun it is.

BlazBlue is a very deep, and intense fighter, despite the rather low amount of characters who are present within the game. Consisting of a mere 12 fighters, the game may seem simplistic too many fighting game veterans. However, none of the 12 characters play like each other at all, whereas in many other games, such as Street Fighter, similarities can be found between multiple fighters. With BlazBlue, you are given a smaller roster, but with more variety.

Characters fight in a similar fashion to past Arc System Works' games, fast, and chaotic. Moves are executed in similar manners to Guilty Gear, utilizing traditional down, down-forward, forward + attack commands along with other traditional move commands associated with fighting games. The characters are just as original as ever, it is Arc Systems' trademark to include rather unique characters on each of their games. If you've ever been a fan of anime series, any anime at all, then you know the routine. Anime consists of animal-human hybrids, cyborgs/mecha-humans, busty females, monsters and characters with guns and large swords. Well, BlazBlue takes the anime style of drawing and mixes it with proven 2D fighting mechanics, resulting in a great blend of the two that makes BlazBlue a game worth checking out. BlazBlue follows the fighting engine from Guilty Gear perfectly, imitating special moves, character design, and musical themes. The game features 12 characters:

Ragna (resembles Dante but fights like Sol-Badguy)
Jin (resembles and fights like Ky Kiske)
Noel (fights with guns and resembles Bridget, except for the whole "cross dressing" thing)
Taokaka (a cat-human girl with comedic relief with her constant remarks)
Iron Tager (resembles Potemkin)
Arakune (a blob monster similar to the spirits in "Spirited Away", resembles and fights a lot like Eddie)
Bang (a mixture of Chipp and Great Saiyaman from DBZ, always poses and talks about "Justice")
Carl (fights like Zappa since they both control another being)
Hakumen (resembles Justice from Guilty Gear)
V-13 (a cyborg girl)
Rachel Alucard (fights and resembles May, just a Gothic version of May)
and finally Litchi (reminds me of Bayonetta).

The game is fast paced and hectic. The story mode, at first, does not make much sense, but after several replays it will start to clarify itself more if you pay close attention. The AI can be difficult on the higher settings, and the last boss can sometimes be unforgiving. The moves are easy to perform and respond with amazing accuracy and timing. The game features a new move, known as "Drives". Each character contains a unique set of moves associated with the drive button. Depending on what combination of directional buttons is used with the drive command, different results will occur. Many of the characters' most devastating moves rely on the usage of the drive button. Characters such as Noel can use the drive command to create unique combos, while Hakumen's drive command sets him up to counter incoming attacks. The online game play is where things can truly become intense. Locating an open lobby is relatively easy and simple, and each one shows a list of users' levels within that game lobby. There is almost no lag, except for an occasional hiccup every once and a while, but it's not a major issue at all.

BlazBlue is a simply amazing game, especially when considering the small amount of quality 2D fighting games out this generation. It may not be as fast paced as games like Guilty Gear or Super Street Fighter IV, and it may not contain as many characters as games such as Tekken, but its unique spin on the fighting genre, and its usage of a new command button (drive) adds something new worth checking out. If you're a fan of fighting games or past work of Arc System Works, then this game is a must have addition to your gaming library.

wow, great game. tight controls. amazing graphics. good for newbies or experienced players. great story mode and challenging players online. everything you would expect from a great 2-d fighting game.

I got this game in the mail 12 hours ago and writing this review is literally the first time I've stopped playing it since. I'm also eating, something I've neglected to do for...huh, about 12 hours. Yes, this game is forget-to-eat good. Its a time travel game, where you start playing and the next time the clock catches your eye, hours have passed when it seemed like only one at most. This is due in part to the speed of the matches. Each round, or 'rebel' for some reason, packs a lot of fighting into it. The pace is frantic but never seems out of control.

The visuals are just as insane. Anime-style fighters doing fast, fluid battle in front of realistic backgrounds with details everywhere in both architecture and animation looks as cool as it sounds if not cooler. A lot of people say its like Guilty Gear. Well, I'm not a veteran of the series, but having played XX Accent Core, I would call BlazBlue a mix of it and Darkstalkers. In other words, its awesome.

If I have to make a complaint, its that not every character is pick up and play. Some have short range, some have drives that are more complex to use than a more basic attack, some are better in the air while others have a distinct disadvantage there. Its balancing and makes them more unique, but it takes some getting used to. Also, the story parts of story mode take kind of a long time and sometimes you can choose something you didn't want to while skipping over it.

Should you buy it? Yes. Oh, God yes. You're so close right now. In just a few clicks, all the goodness could be yours! I called it a time-travel game, but its more than that. Its an I-know-what-I'm-doing-tomorrow game.