After all these years it feels good to finally be playing the Blazblue series. I always knew it as a super cool anime fighting game with nice cutscenes and great gameplay. It definitely lives up to the hype and the story is even more convoluted than you may expect. It makes for a great time all around and I’m definitely looking forward to seeing how the sequels go.

The general plot is that Ragna is trying to destroy all of the Library installations for some reason. This group is corrupt to downright evil, but what if that’s not the case? Their best operatives will be doing their best to stop Ragna, but commander Jin seems rather crazy himself. Meanwhile a bunch of other characters are running around trying to fulfill their own destinies and they’re all in the same area so they keep on meeting up. The game has a unique gimmick where the only way to get each character’s story to 100% is to win and lose each fight. This would mean a lot of restarts so I didn’t bother with that. Fortunately you still unlock the true ending by playing everyone’s stories which is cool.

It does feel like a bit of a forced way to add replay value though since you have to play so many stories. Additionally the true story is mainly a mix of Ragna and Noel’s stories except this time we’re seeing what really happened so in some ways you were playing some fake stories before. I suppose to an extent this is usually true for games with a lot of stories as most of them end up being fake but I think the game could have handled this in a bit of a more straight forward manner. The convoluted part was really intentional but granted, it was still very engaging the whole time.

This is a game where you either love the crazy aspect of it or you just think it’s trying a bit too hard. The series is always famous for its top tier soundtracks and this game definitely had that all the way. Each of the themes sounded fantastic and the game never lost any of its steam. It just kept on going with no end in sight. That’s absolutely what I like to see. I enjoyed almost all of the themes. Then the graphics look really good. Obviously it’s super impressive that we had fully hand drawn cutscenes right from the jump but in game the graphics were also really good. Lots of vibrant colors for the special attacks and all of the costumes were good. The stages had great backgrounds as well.

This is one of those games that was really ahead of its time. The sci-fi type menus and visuals were really excellent all the way through. Blazblue definitely did not disappoint me in any way. Then the gameplay is very fast paced. It can be difficult to really get the hang of though. I never figured out how to use any of the special moves but granted, I didn’t exactly check out any of the training/tutorial modes. For the most part the game isn’t very difficult but there is one boss fight near the end that really ramps up the difficulty all of a sudden. Now that is an absolutely insane boss fight that took me a whole lot of tries to complete. Don’t expect to defeat it too easily.

As a small quality of life update, it would be nice if you could directly replay a fight. When you lose you have to go back to the main menu and then manually load your previous save file. It’s a bit much if you ask me. It’s not like this takes a very long time but it’s an odd approach since most games would just let you directly retry the match. It makes more sense to retry directly because why would you just give up after one try right? That’s really my only slight issue. Beyond that the gameplay is really a lot of fun and the game really has enough content to keep you busy the whole time.

Overall, Blazblue: Calamity Trigger is a really fun game. I definitely had a blast with it. The character roster may be a tad small for a PS3 game but I may be a little spoiled by Super Smash Bros. Regardless, all of the characters have very distinct gameplay styles which work well with the game. You will have a lot of fun choosing who your main is going to be. There is a ton of replay value here in terms of getting trophies and of course endless replay value with the multiplayer mode. This is the kind of game that just keeps on giving. I highly recommend checking it out as soon as possible.

Overall 8/10