Blazblue, Why am i still unimpressed?.....
By GunstarRed 41 Comments
I just got my import copy of Blazblue in the post today (ps3) and my first impressions have been hugely mixed. I went through the arcade to begin with choosing V13 to begin with and finding her absolutely weird to control and pretty much lost my first match to the computer. "ok" i thought , I'll try someone else... I chose poorly!
Carl is just not the kind of character you want to pick when first starting this game. I won one matcha nd then got beated over and over in the next, so i decided on taokaka(?) the cat girl. I had seen a lot of matches online with her and knew she was a very jabby-quick character which is the kind I like. My impression of the game changed drastically at that point as i start doing 20-30 hit combos with a combination of tested fighting game mechanics and button mashing.
I got through to hakumen and started getting a little angry at his stupidly powerful ultra's or whatever theyre called but I finally overcame him (in hindsight I really should have trained a bit and looked in the manual to see how to do her moves and how to defend myself better.) but then came the absolute cheapness of V13 oh my god one of the most hideously turtley, defensive, spammy final bosses I have ever encountered but once again in hindsight she is waaaaaaaayyyyyyy more tolerable and beatable than seth in SFIV.
*sigh of relief*
and then I did the wrong thing, I know it was wrong. Even as I type this I know exactly the mistake i made....I turned to someone and said
"I'm gonna fight someone online"
My first fight....I chose tao....i knew her....they chose bang.
I destroyed them even though they were level 5..... OH YEAH I IS THE AWESOMESTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT!!!!!!
make mental note to self....premature celebration will bring disappointment!... the next few matches i found myself being destroyed by ragna's and noels spamming one of two moves at me...AWE to the SOME!... "choose similar skill" lvl 43, 46,35,25...etc OH MY GOD!... there is nothing like terrible match-ups like this to make you never want to return to an online game of this nature, I am pretty tolerant and willing to go through the pain of trying to get better but many will be instantly turned off by a matching system that does that.
my first impression is that this game seems pretty unbalanced and I have absolutely no evidence to back that up and I'll only know for sure with time . The spamming and insults and my first psn messages I have gained in XBL kind of way have been disgusting, Everyone likes to say taht ps3 owners are a more mature crowd.... evidence today suggests theyre just the same as the ones playing the 360.
ad my final and biggest complaint whhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhyyyyyyyyyyy doooooooooooooooooooooeeeeeeeesssssssssss iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitttttttttttttttttt taaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaakkkkkkkkkkkkkkkeeeeeeeeeeeeee sooooooooooooooooooooooooooo looooooooooooooooooooooooonnnnnnnnnnnngggggggggg tooooooooooooooooo cooooooooooooooonnnnnnnnnnnnneeeeeeecccccccccccctttttttttttttt toooooooooooooooooo ttttttttttttttthhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhheeeeeeeeeeeee sssssssssssseeeerrrrrrrrrvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvveeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrssssssssss aaaaaaaaaaaffffffffteeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrr aaaaaaaaaaa maaaaaaaaaattttttttttttttttttccccccccchhhhhhhh????????? (why does it take so long to connect to the servers after a match)
it has taken (and I have timed it) up to 4 minutes before the game decides to save and let me search for a new fight with absolutely no way of skipping it, I have had about 50 matches and about 10 disconnects , huge lag which may be because its only out in the US and Japan.... so, yeah not the best of first impressions.
and I paid £50 for the damn thing and absolutely LOVE LOVE LOVE the art and the music and its general atmosphere (that english language dub is abysmal) and all the game has really done is frustrate me, Im totally going to put the hours in over the next few weeks to see if I change my mind....I want this to be better than streetfighter so much ( I ADORE sfIV with all my heart), I kind of need it to replace it for a while before fighting another member of my self-titled "trifecta of dumb" (ken-sagat-zangief) because I will probably go insane from that fucking cry of shofuckingryuken!
absolutely true.
Update.....
I have played the game pretty much constantly throughout the weekend with the intent of improving my game only to be crushed by the huge effort needed to get any good.. and judging by the online at the minute and frequency of certain players Im gonna say this is going to be hardcore-only within the next couple of months and I'm not going to torture myself only to probably fail at being anything other than mediocre.
It was about 7.42 on friday the 14th july that it finally dawned upon me that Blazblue wasn't for me, and that absolutely crushes me. I love me my anime and I love me some fighting games so why does BB not click with me at all??? I cannot find that one character that feels right. with only really jin and taokaka having anything resembling a character I'd want to play i have had about 240 matches and won like 55 with about 10 of them being jin, noel, ragna corner spamming and im not really proud of that at all.
I have read numerous times about how balanced the game is and that is just untrue, 100% untrue. like battle fantasia before it ( a better game in my opinion) , there is some huge issues and most of them come from that D button. noels whole game revolves around it and its absolutely deadly in the hands of a beginner even. so all you end up with is a bunch of players in a russian roulette situation hammering d and c hoping they hit the random autocourse correcting sequence of buttons to make their opponent die (probably in a corner) Infact the whole game seems to revolve around rushing your opponent into the corner and often times youre pretty much helpless to do anything. I dont think Ive ever been caught in so many infinite/ stupidly high damaging loops before. Ragna and jin seem to have such quick recovery times that you might as well not even bother blocking..and often blocking low willl get you punished that extra bit more.. unbalanced distribution of specials is also a problem if you ask me.. not only can jin fireball (sword) he can air fireball...multi air fireball.... freeze his opponents.... fly across the screen at high speed high or low throw better than most characters and do an up to 11 hit super slash move. Now I know akuma can pretty much do the same but he was balanced out by some pretty shitty stamina in recent sf games... jin is not. The pressure seems to just be constant and never in a fair way. spamming in this game is actually rewarded.. spamming in sf will often net you a lose. Here eventually their defense is going to break. I have won a bunch of my wins by just trapping people in the corner using sac spirit 2 and just not letting up with it. theres just so many things I am not fond of hakunen's idiotically powered c-slash, V13, arakune and rachels ability to just spam the screen with so much shit that eventually youre gonna win the game really needed to replace the stupid and uneeded barrier bar with some kind of limit on the abount of times that drive button should be allowed.
I know I'm going to get shit for all of this. I want so much to love this game, so, so, so much and it absolutely crushes me that it feels so wrong for me, I put in so much effort trying to perfect tao only to keep losing because of her unfair start-up times on her best moves coupled with reaaaaaally low stamina.... you have no fucking chance against a ragna or a hakunen with any level of skill.... and there are a lot of ragnas and hakunens online. I'm not bad at games , and rarely a sore loser and I never quit (still have a 0% disconnect rating in sfIV after over 4000 matches) but this game just makes me fail over and over and over and over and over and I just find myself getting angry and frustrated and completely unsure of why I keep losing despite watching the disk and numerous online videos coupled with extensive forum research...I have no idea how I got to level 26 online because I have had level 1's wipe the floor with me. It just seems like some kind of law of averages that I would win a match here of there that I didnt feel was scraped by. I understand the game and its mechanics so why am I never comfortable with it. I had some really shitty beginnings with SFIV but even after a couple of days I felt like I was improving yet with BB I get a decent win on a round and I still feel like I'm doing something wrong.
maybe theres just that one tiny nuance i'm missing (and impretty sure if i haven't found it by the end of the week I will be done with this game)
or maybe it's a character comfort issue
or possibly its just like the taste of peas...it doesn't matter how much I taste them over the years my tastebuds will never accept it.
I seriously dont think I have ever been this depressed over a videogame before and i know thats pretty lame... at least I played it before most europeans though....
and hitler.