BlazBlue – Calamity Trigger
After many hard hours of fighting the victor stands above everyone else. The one being victorious is BlazBlue and it has won over other fighters like KoFXII and SFIV. To read the oh so subjective review of why by manga, read on.
Let´s get one thing straight, I won´t be talking about the story. The story is great and much developed for a fighting game, but the fighting is what brings you back to play and this game is awesome in that department, the characters, combos, ways to inflict pain and everything is so well made, hell it even looks great when you´re getting your ass handed to you.
Modes
We have the usual stuff, arcade, story, network, training, versus, score attack and the somewhat new Replay Theater, where you can watch your own replays or other replays you´ve downloaded.
Arcade
Here you take on ten opponents in a row, with certain opponents being related to the character you choose. A sort of ministory. Compared to story mode you have the difficult setting here. I´ve only played on normal and it can be quite hard some times.
Score attack
This is the mode I´ve spent the least time on. You get a score for defeating opponents and there is a set amount of adversaries before you´ve completed it.
Training mode
Let´s you train your combos against your choice of opponent, you have various settings, if you want you can train against the computer or a second player. You get a lot of choices to make the training as pleasant as possible.
Network mode
The mode I´ve spent the most time on, this is where you connect to the internet and play against other people from around the world. You have two choices, Ranked Matches or Player matches. These both give you Rebel Points that decides your level.
Ranked matches are fought in a 2 round wins matter, no easy specials or unlimited characters but astral finishes are available. After the game you have the choice of saving the replay of the game and I´m not sure how but I know that you can upload your replays to the replay theater for other people to download.
Player matches are the more friendly version. Here you can either join a room and fight against people in the room or create your own room and act as the host. The most people that can be in the same room are six people. You can decide on how many rounds, if Astral Finishes are usable, if the unlimited character version is usable and if easy specials are usable.
The netcode that was created to this game is awesome, as soon as the match begins it feels as if you´re playing offline. There are very few occasions where there is lag.
All in all the network mode is fun, really really fun.
There is also a ranking mode here that let´s you see who the best players are at the moment and so on. If you choose a player nick you get to see who s/he is and who s/he uses to play as main and sub and if you´re lucky there is also a replay available for download.
Replay Theater
You played a match that you feelt was so extremely wellplayed, fun or just something you want to save then you can save it to your HDD for later use. You can also go to ranking and try and find other people´s replays and download them to watch.
Great for training purposes.
Story Mode
Every character has his or her own story that is told here. Depending on some easy choices you get a different happening, for some characters you need to lose against a certain opponent to get to the most wanted 100% completion.
One way is winning every match and for another way of doing it is making the special attack Distortion Drive finish.
What got me the first time I played trough story mode was that to get a 100% completion rate of the character I also had to lose every match. Which doesn´t take much time but it is a bit irritating.
All in all there is a lot to do for a fighting game. And the most of it is fun and challenging.
Choices
Just a small notice to let everyone know that you can choose between Japanese and English audio, when you play online and the opponent has English as his/her language it can be quite fun to listen to the voices. For the most part I do have to say that the English voices are not as good as the Japanese ones, but they are not so bad that it will hurt your ears.
