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It seems a bit crazy to be reviewing this game when the rest of the world has been playing it for almost a year, and the sequel is all ready out in Japan. BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger certainly took it’s sweet time girting its way by sea to our fair country, abounding in wealth and toil. Is it worth the wait for the discerning Australian gentleperson gamer? That largely depends on your tastes when it comes to fighting games and your tolerance for bizarre anime plots.

BlazBlue is a 2D fighting game, carrying a big torch for this flagging genre, like its spiritual predecessor the Guilty Gear series. What it lacks in three dimensional flash and eerily life like wire frame models it makes up for with a huge depth of gameplay and a super slick art style. You could easily spend the better part of a year mastering the intricate combinations and moves of BlazBlue and still get your ass handed to you by most of the online mavericks. BlazBlue also pulls of that rare hat trick that the recent King of Fighters and Guilty Gear series often fail to do by giving the low skilled entry level gamer a satisfying experience with plenty of achievable flashy moves.

Jin and Noel are both good characters for beginners with uncomplicated but powerful and visually sweet attacks

If you haven’t been exposed to the convoluted plotting of anime before the story of Blazblue may get a little confusing. It’s certainly one of the games strongest features and beats the hell out of the ‘mysterious tournament run by a bad guy’ scenario of every single other fighting game. I’ll try and summarize it here. The game is set years after an apocalyptic event when a ‘dark beast’ tried to destroy the world and was defeated by six mysterious magical hero’s who passed their techno-magic knowledge, called Amagus, to humanity. The Amagus functions as both fuel source and super power provider to the world and after the ‘dark beast’ is given a spanking an organisation called the Library is established to govern the use of Amagus. Unfortunately a socioeconomic gap is created between the haves and the have nots when it comes to access to Amagus and a civil war breaks out which is harshly suppressed by the Library and even stricter controls placed on accessing the power. The main, Ryu style, character in the game is Ragna the Bloodedge. A revolutionary warrior type not afraid to stick it to the Library single handed with a powerful form of Amagus called BlazBlue. After a major attack on the Library he finds himself being hunted by various bounty hunters, ninjas and members of the Library’s military. See, that wasn’t so confusing, was it?

Space Ninja versus weird cosplay furry girl... fight!

Obviously each character has their own story to follow and the story mode is pretty detailed with lengthy introduction and text dialogue sections for each character. Some gamers might want to skip all of these and play the Arcade mode instead. But personally, after the pain of so many awful ‘King of Iron Fist’ plots, I enjoyed a fighting game with a complicated story you could really sink your teeth into. There’s a fair bit of variation in the characters as well, with the usual sword wielding tough guys offset by creepy vampire tween girls who fight with monster hand bags, giant Frankenstein style characters, morphing blobs and oddball cat people. My one complaint with the characters is that the roster is made up of only twelve fighters with no unlockable characters to work towards. Not that it will be hard for fight fans to pick a few favourites from the ones available, it’s probably the most colourful and interesting collection of 2D fight game characters since Darkstalkers.

This is the best time to start hurling yirmumah jokes at your opponent

Graphically BlazBlue is sweet visual candy fired straight through your eyeballs and into your brain, delighting every part of you that’s ever enjoyed a well animated show. The character sprites are bright, detailed and gorgeous and move fluidly as you leap around the screen pulling of crazy combos and bizarre moves. It’s not quite an anime show come to life, but its damn closer than any 2D fighting game before it, and I presume that’s the goal of the animators here. The backgrounds are equally impressive and mesh 2D drawings with some cool 3D animations. Cut scenes are a mixed bag, some are full on anime segments taken from the BlazBlue movie, others are ‘fake’ stop motion animations using small movements on static images and still others are the classic dynamic pose drawing with dialogue captured in scrolling text in a window. The art style and design is constant across all the variations so it doesn’t look as disjointed as it probably sounds from that description.

The trade off for a small roster of characters means every character feels completely unique, no Ryu/Ken doubles in BlazBlue

The brass tacs of BlazBlue is its fight system. Each character has a Light, Medium, Strong and Drive attack mapped to the four face buttons. The Drive attacks are unique for each of the characters. Combinations of these four basic attacks are used to execute throws and Barrier Blocks which can protect the player if their block guard guage is reduced to zero. Juggling between Regular blocks and barrier blocks is important in more advanced play to survive an opponents combo. On top of the Health, Guard and Barrier gauges, players also have a Heat gauge at the bottom of the screen raised by attacking and taking damage. When the Heat gauge is full players can pull of a special, super, mega fun time Drive Distortion attack that fills the screen with kaleidoscopic mayhem and does buckets of damage to your opponent. Like the hyper attacks in Street Fighter IV this is the moment to leap to your feet and shriek and laugh hideously when playing against another person and quite possibly earn yourself a well deserved punch in the balls.

Even the static dialogue segments look great, and yes localised copies are in English

In the final calculation BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger doesn’t do anything that feels particularly innovative. What it does do is bring a lot of quality 2D fight game elements together extremely well and pull of a top notch game with lots of modes to explore and a multiplayer component that strips your dignity right to the bone, in fact if you ever beat someone online it’s probably me, I'm cursed to suck at all the games I really like. On the negative side of things the roster is painfully small for a fighting game in this day and age, with 3D games usually boasting at least twice as many characters, and if your tender white bread sensibilities can’t cope with over the top anime style games then BlazBlue will likely rub you the wrong way. But then again, even if your not normally a 2D fighter kind of person, or haven’t been since Street Fighter II then BlazBlue is a worth while pick up. The biggest thing BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger has running against it is the fact it’s come out in Australia so damn late compared to the rest of the world. The sequel BlazBlue: Continuum Shift will be released in North America mid July and it might be worth your while biding your time and importing it. If you're a dedicated 2D fight fan chances are this review is wasted on you anyway as you'll all ready have picked this up as one of the best examples of a thinning genre. But if you're just curious about the game I'd highly recommend ponying up the cash, your curiosity will be rewarded.