The score attack AI is some of the biggest bullshit i've ever seen in a fighting game. When i used voltec charge with Tager the cpu ALWAYS used a reversal on frame 1, even if they were fullscreen and couldn't hit me, it input reads so fucking hard i was able to abuse it to win. And that's against the regular characters, against Unlimiteds it's even worse.

The worst part is that when i finally beat URagna the game crashed so i didn't even get a congratulations screen.

That aside, the arcade mode is worth playing for the character interactions and endings, and the story mode is also pretty fun. Worth playing if you're interested in the plot, otherwise just play Central Fiction.

the characters were fun to play as but the plot sucks and the story was dragged out WAYYYYYY too much. The plot is told like both sonic-adventure-style, where its multiple characters' different perspectives on the same period of events but also it isn't that at all and its confusing and makes no sense whatsoever. More VN than fighting game in a single player context imo. I'm sure the multiplayer was fun when it was new but nowadays I don't think theres a lot of reasons to play this with pals over central fiction. Even if I didn't really understand what was actually going on, at least the characters were kinda cool to see interacting with one another and the world was kinda interesting?

I'm not really sure how to write a review of either a visual novel or a fighting game, and this is both, but I'll give it a shot. As a fighting game, this is fantastic. I haven't played any of the later ones, and I'm sure they're more polished and stuff, but as it stands this is a wonderfully weird anime fighter from ArcSys.

You can tell that there's some lineage from guilty gear here, from the designs of Ragna and Jin to the music (composed by Mr. Guilty Gear himself, Daisuke Ishiwatari), but it feels rather different to play, or at least as different as an anime fighter by the same dev can.

I think if I had to describe the difference, it's that blazblue is more lenient input-wise but much more esoteric as far as character strategies, where guilty gear is stricter and more cracked altogether, but each character isn't quite as completely nuts as blazblue's characters tend to be. Blazblue is smoother but weird, guilty gear feels like heavy metal cocaine.

Story-wise it's wiiiiild, I think this is a better visual novel than any of the guilty gear games. It's not super clear how all the story-lines fit together literally, but they mesh together masterfully, drip-feeding information until you have almost half the picture, which is EXACTLY the right amount to explain. Plus, going through and getting all the endings is a lot of fun, and pretty painless as well (there's only 3-6 battles per route, so restarting isn't rough at all).

Anyways, I imagine this is a hard game to recommend since like, no one plays it anymore, but the story is cool and the mechanics are solid and cool, and it's only 10 bucks these days. Vibe on!

Hoping the sequels improve from this. Really confusing story and structure, especially to someone playing this as their first traditional fighting game campaign. By the end I had an idea of who each of the characters were and what happened overall, which was what I was really looking for, but the level of confusion plus occasional difficulty spike for most Hakumen boss fights (until I worked out just grabbing him over and over worked pretty well) meant I was never really engaged. As for the gameplay, it seems like it'd be really fun if I took more time to learn it, but this is the first of 4 games though, and there are no tutorials or practice combos in it, so I decided to use what knowledge I have from other fighting games and just kind of amble my way through.

All in all game is pretty fun but story is super confusing. Short enough to buy for sale price and go through if you really want to know more about BlazBlue lore instead of just playing Centralfiction first. I wouldn't say it felt like a total waste of my time.

This is not a review based off of the game as a competitive game

BlazBlue Calamity Trigger is without question an extremely interesting game. Mainly because it suffers from first game syndrome harder then just about any other game I’ve played. Which is especially noticeable when it’s the beginning of my favorite series of all time. To get presentation out of the way the spritework is great and the soundtrack is top tier. Now let’s start with the basics of gameplay. BlazBlue is a 4 button fighting game with an A, B, C ,and D buttons. A is light, B is medium, and C is heavy. Now where things get interesting is the D button which is a unique ability for each character known as a drive ability. Most drives are some form of attack with a special property for example Ragna’s Drive Soul Eater allows him to steal health from the other player and Jin’s Frostbite allows him to freeze the enemy solid. While other drives such as Noel’s and Carl’s are more complex with Noel being put into a state that completely changes her normals for a brief time and Carl being able to move Nirvana around and attack with her.

These drives allow for an extremely diverse cast of characters in the gameplay department and speaking of characters and gameplay let’s go over them.

Ragna is a pretty basic Rushdown character similar to Sol from Guilty Gear. With the main difference between to 2 being that Ragna has a larger focus on spacing to get his pressure going and is arguably less punishing with mistakes due to his life steal.

Jin is the closest your going to get to a Shoto in this game. However he is much more pressure focused then say Ryu. He’s probably closer to Ken in all honesty. His ability to freeze enemies is extremely powerful especially in Calamity Trigger for reasons I’ll get into later.

Noel is a pure rushdown character being able to do massive damage with her Drive Chain Revolver which allows her to chain together her various drive normal

Rachel is a trap based Zoner character with the ability to use her drive Sylpheed to control wind allowing her to adjust her projectiles before the hit the ground and can move her various traps around. Also lightning rods.

Taokaka is a fragile speedster who uses her Dancing Edge Drive to rocket herself around the stage. She may not do that much damage but damn is she fast

Tager is a grappler with a major twist. That being of he hits an opponent with his Voltic Battler Drive they will be magnetized allowing him to pull the opponent in with his grabs.

Litchi is a stance character revolving around her staff Mantenbou which is controlled via her drive button and can be placed down to give her access to new moves as well as being able to launch the staff at a later point.

Arakune is weird to put it lightly. His gameplay revolves around hitting the opponent with his drive so he can summon an army of insects to basically create a bullet hell situation other then that don’t ask me how he works

THE ONE AND ONLY BANG SHISHIGAMI IS A HIGH SPEED MIX UP BASED CHARACTER WITH THE ABILITY TO MOVE EXTREMELY QUICKLY ACROSS THE BATTLEFIELD AND RUN MIX! HIS DRIVE ALLOWS HIM TO BLOCK AN ATTACK AND THEN COUNTER ADDING A SEAL ABOVE HIS SUPER METER WHICH WHEN HE GETS ALL FOUR CAN ACTIVATE HIS SUPER FORM FU RIN KA ZAN!!!! A FORM SO BADASS THAT IT CHANGES THE MUSIC ITSELF!!!!

Carl is a puppet character. Who requires the player to not only control him but a massive marionette as well. I think that’s all I need to say on him.

Hakumen is a defensive character based on countering the opponent with his drive Zanshin and has a unique super meter that slowly builds over time and can cancel his specials into each other with the trade off being that all special moves cost meter

Nu 13 is without question the “Queen of Zoners” who has the power to combo the opponent from just about anywhere on screen with her Drive Sword Summoner. With that combined with move like Gravity Seed and Act Parser she can basically control the match from anywhere on screen

What did I tell you we have a diverse set of gameplay styles here and while that’s a good thing the game play still has a few issues. Such as barrier burst being way too risky among other things like you needing to mash a direction in order to break out of Jin’s ice but overall with airdashing and other universal arcsys mechanics CT is a good time. At least causally. But wait you say! Didn’t I say that this isn’t a competitive review? You’d be correct! Which is why now we’re going to go into the single player of the game!

Calamity Trigger does have an arcade mode which is pretty good on it’s own with a few of the fights for each character having a little story sections which makes arcade mode well a little story mode similar to King of Fighters. But one very interesting thing is that the arcade endings (except for Ragna) appear to actually take place before arcade mode starts. Very interesting don’t you think?

However that’s not the real attraction here. That would be an actual Story mode. That’s right! Calamity Trigger has a full on story mode! But let’s be honest it’s probably just some version of a tournament arc like every other fighting game… Right?

Yeah the whole tournament arc thing a lot of games do. BlazBlue doesn’t roll that way. We have a full on anime style story mode to go through! And it’s not some short 2 hour affair. It’s a full length game. Like a good 8+ hours. BlazBlue’s story mode starts off being split between 10 characters with the final 2 being unlocked after all of them are cleared and finally a true ending once those are finished.

Our story begins with some scientists running an experiment on a “Subject 12” before they are obliterated by a Space Laser. Yep that’s how our fighting game begins. The best way I can describe BlazBlue’s Narrative is that they somehow made a JRPG plot and put it into a fighting game.

The rest of the story revolves around the 13th hierarchical city of Kagutsuchi on the day when the SS class criminal Ragna the Bloodedge appears in town to destroy the branch of the evil world order known as the Novis Orvis Librarium located in the city and how the various playable characters react to his appearance. Ranging from bounty hunters and residents of the city to members of the NOL’s military. As well as a few special cases.

However a player who pays attention may notice various hints and references to a bigger narrative. However problems exist. There are also some joke endings but that’s not the real problem. Besides the fact that in order to have literally any context you’ll have to read the manual. Thanks game from 2009… There is the teach me miss Litchi sections but those are relatively hidden on the story menu and requires you to sit through these comedy segments before the actual information comes, Each character story has multiple endings and to have the game consider it cleared you only have to get 1. Because of this on one hand you can get an extremely important ending or you can get some random bullshit that has nothing to do with anything and the true ending isn’t very satisfying due to blatantly being sequel bait.

I’m going to be point blank here. While I do genuinely enjoy Story Mode I know the main reason I’m able to is because I already know what’s going on and know what endings to trigger for each character and well that’s a massive issue. Because I can guarantee that many many players got a bunch of BS endings that explain little to nothing and were left with pure confusion. Hence why BlazBlue’s story has a reputation of being a convoluted mess. I can appreciate the mystery novel style approach they took here but It really doesn’t work in this case.

There’s also some weird presentation quirks in story mode as well. The biggest one being the lack of music outside of battle. Which honestly makes things feel pretty empty at times. For example Ragna meeting Jin among other moments. This is extremely strange considering they released an entire soundtrack disk full of unused music which really has me questioning why they didn’t have music during story scenes.


Also the voice actors while great (I played this with the dub btw) have some weird direction at times and are oddly soft spoken. I mean it matches the relatively serious and honestly pretty edgy tone the game goes for. I say relatively because THE ONE AND ONLY BANG SHISHIGAMI and Taokaka exist. It’s just weird to me after playing the rest of the series is all. It’s blatantly obvious that the actors are still settling into their roles. But we still have some stand out performances mainly David Vincent’s Jin Kisaragi. You’re probably thinking it’s weird to be talking about the VAs in any sort of detail but it’ll make sense by the end of the retrospective. Not to mention the characters themselves are also still finding themselves. The most noticeable being Ragna the Bloodedge who is much more brooding then he is in later games.

Anyways back to the positives. This game at least the Steam version anyways has probably the coolest unlockables in any fighting game ever in the form of Unlimited Characters. You know how fighting game single player modes usually have extremely cheap boss battles which this game obviously does. Now imagine that for every playable character and all of them being playable. All you have to do is clear Arcade mode with the character of choice and boom! You get a comically overpowered version of the character to play around with in versus mode. I love stuff like this even just for the bragging rights of beating them on the highest setting and the pure chaos of 2 Unlimited Characters facing off.

I think the last thing I should cover is the version you should play and well I’d say the steam version is the best due to how often it goes on sale for a dollar and ease of access as well as extra content. However it lacks online mode (not that that matters for this game) and has a bit of a frame rate bug on certain setups. Mainly Laptops with Nvidia cards Mind you this is easy to fix once you know what to do.So [Here’s a Reddit post explaining how to fix it]( https://www.reddit.com/r/Blazblue/comments/8oydqd/psa_arcsys_pc_port_low_fps_fix_for_nvidialaptop/) Edit: Actually I just found out that all you have to do is switch it to use the Nividia graphics card and force V Sync

Overall I’d say CT is a really high 3.5/5. It’s far far from a bad game but it comes with so many issues that’s it’s hard to rate it much higher especially when the series does everything this game does much better in the future.

Edit: Upon further consideration and playing it some more my opinion of the game has been pushed over the high 3.5 mark into the 4 range

Carl is garbage to play as but all the other characters are so broken that it almost makes the game balanced and you know what its good. The story seems interesting but then it starts throwing phrases around like "quantum superpositional manipulation" (thats a real thing thats actually said) and by the end of it makes so little sense that I could probably figure out the definite ending to Inception first. Despite that most of the characters are unique and enjoyable and Noel is a whole ass cutie. Very curious to play more of this series. New facebook relationship status: would like to be smothered by Litchi and im not ashamed of it