If you’re looking for a fighting game that’s really accessible for new players, that’s as much fun to play single player as multiplayer, and that creates a lot of room for you to grow and gives you the tools you need to do so, try it. It’s so good, it makes me want to become a better fighting game player.īlazBlue: Central Fiction Special Edition for Switch is up for pre-order right now at Limited Run Games and available through December 12. But I keep coming back to the BlazBlue series. With very few exceptions (I’m looking at you, Waku Waku 8 ) the gradual shift of fighting games toward tournament-perfect technical mastery turned me off to the genre. I largely left fighting games behind after the Street Fighter II era. Want to learn the complex button inputs? Cool.
#Blazblue central fiction bullet how to#
It teaches you how to play any character you’re interested in learning more about, and builds in clever handicap options to help less-experienced players enjoy competing in multiplayer without a lot of tutorializing. There’s a LOT going on in the narrative approach, a lot to do, and some pretty interesting revelations to uncover along the way.Ĭentral Fiction ramps up smartly. But it’s also a standout single-player experience, and I can really appreciate that. The Dragon Ball elements are all there: attack names shouted out, massive flashes of light accompanying punches and kicks, explosive super-moves that shake the foundations of the earth.īlazBlue is a top-tier multiplayer fighting game according to human beings who understand such things, and I’ve certainly had a delightful time getting pummeled by other players over the years. Some of these frames are practically comic-book covers. Not a line is wasted, but the artists also aren’t stingy with their detail. I picked Noel because guns, and I’ve stuck with her ever since.īlazBlue’s hand-drawn character sprites evoke a massive, high-resolution, frenetic realization of Symphony of the Night ’s Alucard sprite. The story is very big and very in-your face, a narrative as blazing as the title. This is a fighting game where your character choices are evocative of the best of Demon Slayer or Ghibli fantasy, with the commitment to single-player storytelling gravity to match. It was a hyperactive realization of the promise of Melty Blood, a fighting game whose basic rules weren’t so esoteric as to be inscrutable, and whose extraordinary unique characters begged to be experimented with and discovered. I first encountered BlazBlue in Japanese arcades around 2008 when it was a brand-new series, and I’ve never been able to let go. It’s a tasty cocktail of good ideas: solid ingredients blended in perfect proportions Whether you suck at fighting games or rule at fighting games, you should play BlazBlue. I suck at fighting games, but I play BlazBlue because it lands an irresistible combination of these distinctive subtleties. air dynamics, character design, defensive mechanics, gore, gimmicks, and single-player modes. Contemporary fighting games distinguish themselves from one another through nuance within the Street Fighter II pattern: art style, speed, accessibility to newcomers, ground vs. But here in the prime dimension, they’re usually patterned as 2D or 2.5D bouts played out on a flat plane ( Virtua Fighter, Soulcalibur, and their ilk being notable exceptions). In some alternate reality, fighting games are codified into a one-on-one top-down genre. Go further back to the seventies, and things get even weirder. 1980’s Boxing by Activision was MUCH faster and also took a top-down approach, and even its visual abstractions couldn’t overshadow its innovations, including a primitive position-based blocking system and rules for scoring light and heavy hits. Despite the terrible, terrible chug, position was everything. The Bilestoad, a curious (and curiously addicting) little 1982 game for the Apple II zoomed in on hand-to-hand top-down duels with every bit as much emphasis on footsies and as a modern fighterer, and more gore and limb-lopping than most. Take fighting games: 1984’s Karate Champ seems like a good starting point for the conventions we recognize today, particularly the side-view aspect ratio and complex button inputs for moves, but a lot of earlier games embraced complex hand-to-hand combat in some pretty creative ways. That’s doubly true when you go looking for the origins of certain kinds of games and genre conventions. It’s a new, evolving field that’s not especially well documented. Video game history demands some fluidity from students.