Blaz Thumbs
Blaz Blue: Calamity Trigger is a very serious game that isn’t afraid to beat you into the ground with its hard difficultly. And yet at the same time it seems to not take itself very seriously when it gets into the story using a lot of self aware humor. If I had to describe it. I would say it was Devil May Cry meets Final Fantasy as an arcade fighter. The game gets rather hard however. It seems to keep a good difficulty for most of the game. That is until you have to fight any bosses. And the difficulty curve changes dramatically as soon as one of the two bosses steps onto the stage. Most of the characters are fun to use and easy to button smash and create nice combos that feels very satisfying. The buttons are made up of weak attacks, medium attacks, strong attacks, and then dash attacks. All of which is easy to understand so using many different characters is easy. It is hard however to run. Having to tap the desired direction twice and then holding feels a bit awkward when all you want to do is get to your opponent so you can smash your weapon into his face. Mostly cause all characters walk very leisurely and then when they run they are across the screen within a matter of seconds. Which also doesn’t help when some attacks have an extremely short range. When others swipe across a good range across the screen. So you will find yourself swiping at air a lot of the time unless you learn most of your moves. The game makes no attempt at making the move list easy on you. Listing buttons as things like W. and S. making me not care to memorize each characters move list.
Recovering after being hit is nice and easy to do keeping combat quick and fast pace. Being able to recover and land on your feet in mid air gives it a nice anime combat feel. And somehow the game keeps every fight intense and always sitting on the edge of your seat. The bosses feel almost too over powered however. Having a lot of health and at the same time doing way to much damage. A specific boss a few times would love to soak in a lot of my quick strong combos and then he would pull a special move and destroy 80% of my health. After taking the devastating blow I looked at his health and it wasn’t even down more than 75%. But nonetheless the combat feels great when you are not punching air and you can get your combos to connect. I found my thumbs hurting at the end of most fights forcing myself to use the D pad to get my attacks correct. Most fights became so intense that I couldn’t help myself but really jab my thumbs into the buttons.
The voice acting is hit and miss in this game. And the voice actors seemed to have a lot of talent but most of the time they seemed unaware of what emotion the game was asking them for. Not as much of a fault on the voice actors as much as the voice director. In scenes with dialog the game takes on a RPG style of storytelling. With a board at the bottom with text. And illustrations of the characters speaking above it. The narration is very rich and seems to be well thought out. The way they would describe character’s actions seemed like the stuff of a novel writers. Oddly though as soon as a character speaks it seems like an anime again.
The game has a very nice humor oddly placed throughout the story modes. A lot of Japanese humor with stuff like eating an over amount of food and sweat dropping. But there is a scene where the character Bang says *gasp* aloud. When in the dialog box it is obvious he is supposed to gasp. It made me curious whether this was on purpose or not. But none the less I found it funny chuckling as I held my controller. My thumb still throbbing from the intense fight just before it. It was interesting to play the story and see how all of the characters had relationships with each other. Which also showed through in game play with the character’s shouting back and forth at each other. Shouting each other’s names and saying things like “Brother!” For example. Seeming very aware of whom they were fighting. The dialog board often covered some of their art however which can be disappointing because the game is very well drawn. And when it turns into a battle it has a nice classic pixel look on the characters. Easily reminding me of games like Marvel Vs. Capcom 2. The story for most characters end very quickly with not much of a climax. Even when they did have a climax it was most likely confusing and left me wondering what even just took place. The game has a large amount of content packed in it and I found myself wanting to play more and at the same time not really caring. The announcer really has to be the major down fall of the game. She almost sounds like the original Japanese announcer trying to speak English and failing at it. At the start of each fight she says “Rebel 1 Action!” confusing why she can’t just say “Ready Fight” like most arcade style fighters. She also insist on saying “Counter” Every time a character hits the other player before they can finish their attack. Which happens a lot. So trying to ignore her gets hard.
None the less this game is very exhausting and yet somehow fun to play. Although the combo sheet doesn’t really seem very deep it still is a game that seems made for the more serious arcade fighting gamers out there. But the question is if it is worth full price or not. I’d suggest just renting the game if you are into fighters. And that you don’t really need a friend to play because the computer is still a very worthy opponent. And very happy to pound your face into the concrete.
