Reviews

We've recently seen Samurai Shodown Sen and Super Street Fighter IV is also on the very near horizon. Before the two of them came this brawler, which clearly underlines the fact that it's fighting season in the console world.

As with many of its rivals, BlazBlue started off life in the arcades before arriving on consoles. The home version brings a variety of different modes to the table, all of which ultimately have the same aim - to beat the living tar out of everyone who dares to step in your way.

In arcade mode, the aim is to defeat 10 other opponents one after the other. There are numerous difficulty settings to choose from, ranging from Beginner all the way through to the appropriately named Hell difficulty, and you can even alter the number of rounds required for victory and the length of each round. Clearing Arcade mode will allow you to unlock new moves and even the Unlimited (stronger) versions of certain characters. Only four characters can have their Unlimited forms unlocked in the boxed game, with the rest unlockable if you're prepared to pay for that ability via DLC.

While the main focus of the Arcade mode is fight after fight, there are occasional pre-match dialogue exchanges between some characters, giving you a little bit more information about their relationships and past history. However, to get even more insight on this, you'll need to step into the Story Mode.

Story Mode is, on the whole, lengthier than Arcade Mode although the fights here only last a single round, and in a single play through you have less battles. So how could it be longer, I hear you cry? Well, I'm getting to that, Little Miss Impatient! There are several branching moments within the story where being defeated by your opponent doesn't cause the Game Over screen to appear, instead it simply sends you down a different route. Prior to each battle, you have the opportunity to save your game (and there are several different save slots available too), which means you can constantly revert back to a previous brawl and see where things would take you if you threw a fight, or perhaps got the win that you'd missed out on before.

Even winning all your fights in a story play-through will likely see your completion rate at less than 50%, so you'll have to keep going back a fair few times to finally clear the tale for a character. Some fights even require you to win with one of your Distortion (basically, the super powerful, super special) moves in order to get full progression. Only when you've fully cleared the story for every single character will you see the game's true ending.

The stories themselves play out via static, anime-style cut-scenes, mixed with dialogue boxes and voice acting. The voice acting itself mixes typically with the visual style, meaning lots of giggly, scared-sounding girls and tough guys shouting out macho phrases. The contrast between the tough image presented on the front cover by Noel Vermillion, and the actual character that you see in the game is ridiculously wide, as she stumbles over her words, playing the shy, almost frightened type the whole time out. Of course, following all that, she can still kick all kinds of ass.

On the subject of characters, BlazBlue provides one of the smallest character rosters in recent history for a fighter, with just 12 fighters to pick from (plus the four additional Unlimited unlocks). While some may mock this (slightly bigger than a) handful of characters, this is likely a consequence of the multiple plays required to fully clear the story mode. If a roster of 20-30 characters had been present, getting 100% with them all may have become a far more irritating chore.