Right now I’d consider us in the midst of what you might call a fighting game renaissance. It’s something that started with Strive during Covid, but solidified with strong releases in Street Fighter and Tekken drawing thousands of new eyes to one of gaming’s most storied genres. Indeed, it seems like fighting games, or at least the online netplay experience, has never been as popular and accessible as it is now. Compared to these juggernauts, why would you ever choose to buy an “outdated” anime-fighter with an iota of the playerbase, and a community so sweaty that you’re more or less guaranteed to get steamrolled until you’ve grinded hundreds of hours to learn even the most basic of combos? For me personally, BlazBlue represents the turning of an era in fighting games, when the developers weren’t as focused on growth and player experience, but rather exploring the uniqueness of the design space. And yet, BBCF is not a mish-mash of poorly implemented “cool concepts” like some of the other gimmicks of the era - it’s had years of stumbles to learn from at this point, and comes from a company that’s had many cracks at the genre. Because of this, it easily stands as the most polished anime fighter out there. It is also my favourite fighting game of all time, occasionally wavering into my favourite game, period. I cannot overstate how much I’ve come to love this game in the past year; the way it weaves its mechanics, character uniqueness, combo structure, offensive/defensive options, complexity, and neutral is true genius. What’s most apparent when you start your BlazBlue journey, is that offense is very oppressive and difficult to escape. This can be frustrating on a surface level, but it does mean that the easiest part of your character’s toolkit to access also happens to be the one that will actually win you the game. This game has a reputation for being “hard”, but you’d be surprised how often a simple game plan can steal a round from longtime players. The mental stack is heavy here, and sometimes they just aren’t ready for the fabled “DP every wakeup” Ragna winning a game with their pristine 5B->Gauntlet Hades neutral. Strong individual tools make good offense pretty easy, but what is hard is great offense. Defence is usually the focus when you think of high level play, but I’ve come to find hard offense is a really underrated thing. Great combos are hard. Great conversions are hard. Great pressure sequences are hard. Great mixups are hard. If you’re trying to up your game, you will mess up your offense constantly . Gun to my head, one factor that makes me love this game: this is it - the fact that you make mistakes on offense. Yes it is frustrating to drop your “Day 1” B&Bs 50 hours into learning a character, to feel like your opponent gets up for free on every knockdown. And maybe this is a part of the game that you really won’t vibe with, but struggle gives way for catharsis. The road to improvement in BlazBlue is often refreshingly obvious: it really is just your execution, a skill issue you might say. So hit the lab, grind those inputs out, and trust me, it will be so. much. more. rewarding when you finally land that shit in a match. It even gives you a new appreciation for the moments when you’re hit with some truly satanic scum mid-match; you understand that that person labbed the hell out of that, and you appreciate them for it. Offense is a big deal, because you will need great offense to open up opponents who have honed their defence. Despite its aggressive nature, BBCF features a robust wheel of defensive options. Barrier and instant block give a lot of agency to the defending player and when used smartly, end your pressure in just a couple of attacks. Guard cancels can be very hard to bait and turn situations in a flash if you overcommit even a smidge. Burst is essentially a get out jail free card. Yet, the most powerful thing comes in your wakeup options. Sure you have the generic option of flipping your character upright to get back on your feet, but you can roll forwards or backwards - hoping to create some distance or even steal the corner - for a little risk. To add another layer of ambiguity for the aggresso, all these getup options can be delayed to mess up with their attack timings and even punish them for running predictable setups. At the intersection of offensive and defensive play sits this game’s lifeblood mechanic: Overdrive . Gamers know, there’s no game you hate more than the one you play, and yet I have never heard a single person ever complain about Overdrive. It is integrated so ingeniously that it accentuates every strength of the game while adding so many possibilities. It is simultaneously: - a unique install that highlights character uniqueness and fulfills their power fantasy - a strong extender to show off flashy combos - an essential defensive option to punish opponents who think they’ve cornered you - a subtle comeback mechanic that creates extremely hype moments - a burst giving you a second chance at life, but at a heavy cost Being all of these at once, it seems hard to grasp, but BBCF specifically has added a new type of move in Overdrive, called Exceed Accel that smartly helps bring the mechanic down to earth for new players. It’s a straightforward super that can be done directly out of your Overdrive activation, consolidating many of its features in an accessible way. Perhaps the thing most touted in online spaces about BBCF is its character diversity. Characters don’t just have different strengths and weaknesses - the same tools but on a sliding scale, instead the character you pick defines the way you interact the game . It’s fantastic because you really feel a connection with your character, a sense of identity as a “main” of one of the colourful cast members. Even as a veteran, every new moveset you explore is a whole new world laid out in front of you, 36 ways to fall in love all over again with the game. But of course the downside is, there are 36 characters you have to learn to fight against . I’m not going to deny the knowledge-check nature of this game, and given the smaller playerbase, some characters are a rare sight. Everybody approaching offense differently also means you need to approach defense differently. You can read up online all you want, but you will not be able to explain what something like Arakune’s “clone” actually does in the context of a match until you’ve been cooked by it. I honestly love all fighting games, and I’ve poured many (maybe too many) hours of my life exploring this world. If you’re into the genre but have never tried BB before, you’ll find your own things to love/hate about it I’m sure, but I 100% think it’s worth a buy. If you’re still dipping your toes… it’s a harder sell for sure. The joy of BlazBlue is in improving, an arduous climb to a goalpost that’s always a little out of reach, and you have to be ok with that. You can discover this joy exists while learning the game (that’s usually what happens), but if your love comes exclusively from winning, you’re in the wrong place. Instead, find love in picking a main for yourself find love in the hours of training mode ahead of you find love in in intricacies of every single matchup find love in the cringe of your character find love in the cringe of other characters (very hard) find love in every game-winning combo that you land find love in every game-ruining combo that you drop find love in every wake-up DP and every reversal super find love in the soundtrack (shit slaps) find love in the fantastic pixel art find love in the beauty of a community that has kept the game alive for 10 years And if you’ve found that love, whoever you are, know that there is room in my lobby for you, whether you have ten matches or ten thousand.
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