Games People Play--THE KING OF FIGHTERS XIII

Well, I thought we'd commemorate the end of 2011 (a year I will be exceedingly happy to throw in the bin, because God DAMN it sucked) and post #400 of our little miracle we call Witless Prattle by completing the circle on a somewhat infamous feature.

If you remember, back in the Prattle's first year of issue, I looked at The King of Fighters XII, which was the most recent--and the first HD-ready--installment in the now nearly twenty year old series.

It was a disaster, and I was not kind about saying so.

Essentially, what we got was a half-baked game that had some great-looking character animation, but had no storyline, no end boss, and half the moveset gone. My litany against this awful, awful, game was only one of many--pretty much everyone panned it, and it was such a failure, in fact, that talk was afoot that SNK would probably be finished.

Well, since today we're looking at the 13th installment, the answer is "obviously, they weren't." The even better news is this: The King of Fighters XIII is the return to form that XII should have been, and features pretty much everything that was missing from that misbegotten mess.

This is good and bad, but we'll get to that in a little bit. The storyline picks up from XI again as effete antihero Ash Crimson finally pays off his ongoing master plan, which, I'm not going to lie, started out being overly baroque and ends in the most "wait, what?" way possible and a lot of things get explained and yet don't. I'm being intentionally vague, but even if I explained it in detail it would still make your head explode.

If this seems like an awful lot of tortured plot for a game which involves people beating the crap out of other people, let me remind you that previous storylines involved clones and satellites blowing up cities and millennia-old Japanese mythology. This is just about par for the course.

Gameplay-wise, things are back where they should be, featuring the usual teams of 3 vs. teams of 3 combat and an insanely cheap boss at the end, as is the custom with SNK games. To round out the package, there is a massively increased roster with a substantial increase in moveset (supplemented by 3 DLC characters who act as enhanced alternate versions of three of the cast members) two unlockable characters, and several different play modes.

It's not all sunshine and roses, however. The online is god-awful, despite the legion of killjoys online who will try to make it out to be your fault for not having a wired connection and playing with a joystick The Way God Intended. Fortunately, Atlus is on the case and an online patch is on the way to deal with the crippling lag which is a problem because . . .

KOF XIII has the strictest damn inputs for special moves I have ever seen. And given the depth of the combat system this time and how dependent it is on cancelling moves into other moves and all that, and since online is such a major part of the fighting game scene nowadays, it's kind of a major flaw.

(Then again, one might say that overly byzantine combo and combat systems, coupled with strict inputs and a rather unforgiving learning curve is what ensures your fighting game falls more on the Street Fighter 3 Third Strike--which demands a certain investment of time and is not for everyone--end of the scale, rather than the more accessible Street Fighter II, which pretty much anyone could pick up and play. I'm not saying that one or the other is good or bad, I'm just saying this is what the split between depth and accessibility looks like)

But the general underpinnings of it are sound (and they are making some headway to working on the problems, which is more than we ever got for KOF XII) and I've had more fun with this game than I have an game in a few months (though Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3 was still the winner of the year) and over and above all that it's great to be able to have one of these end on a high note, so let me bottom line this by saying that the sins of the past are put to rest, and I have plenty of hope for King of Fighters XIV. This game is well worth your time.

Games People Play--DYNASTY WARRIORS GUNDAM 3

OK, so having put in nearly a week's worth of hours into this game, and lacking anything else major to talk about, I figured I'd finally go ahead and post my thoughts about Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3, a game which I have mightily enjoyed and, amusingly enough, I've sorta become tech support for.

Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3, like its previous 2 sequels, is about fanservice, pretty much. The formula goes something like this--gathered together from 30 years of Gundam anime, side stories, and god knows what else, a handful (OK, 50) characters, their giant robots (called mobile suits) are plonked into a game that involves them beating the holy hell out of other mobile suits by the hundreds of thousands.

. . .and then when you finish the game (SPOILER) there's a bit at the end that says we should all strive for peace. No, really. The cheek of this game being able to say this with a straight face just goddamn kills me. Not that the show isn't guilty of the same kind of thing, of course, but it's somehow more glaring when you plug it into the Dynasty Warriors engine, which basically involves killing people, taking fields, and then killing the big boss.

To be fair, DWG3 has added some tweaks to that formula--now, instead of random fields that are generally indistinguishable from on another apart from maybe having some obstacle or something in them somewhere, there are actual strategic points on the various maps that will help you finish the mission--from catapults that allow fairly instant movement from point to point, to missile bases that allow you to launch missile strikes on enemy fields, to bases that allow you to call reinforcements or stop enemy redeployment.

This is kind of cool, in a sorta Herzog Zwei way (only I could talk about Gundam, itself a niche, and cite something that's even more of a niche. I would be gobsmacked if anyone reading this knows what Herzog Zwei even is) and it kinda works, except there are a few bits where it's kinda buggy. Occasionally the computer will ignore that these locations are supposed to affect the gameplay of the mission and just randomly take fields or drop enemy aces into your territory and generally violate the laws of causality, time, and space, because, well, that's what computers do, really. In situations like this, then, all you can do is just kill every ace on the board and drop the enemy meter down to zero the boss will come the hell out and get his ass killed.

There are other tweaks--the teeth-bleedingly annoying Friendship system from DWG2 has been tweaked, and now is a lot clearer and most importantly, doesn't go down and sabotage your progress. It's still a little opaque--for instance, I had 15 mission unlock because I had one character who was one friendship level below what he shoulda been--but it's a lot better than the nightmare that DWG2's was, trust me.

The Official Mode from DWG1 and 2, that being the mode which allowed you to play as missions from the various anime series has been downgraded into History Missions, which cover the various series just as well and give you the option to play it from both sides in certain cases (which, in one particular case, allows for a different outcome for a critical moment) For those of you who have no real idea where to begin with this Gundam stuff, well this will give you a decent grounding in it in half the time watching 30 years of stuff would.

Online has been heavily overhauled as well, and good thing. The Vs. Missions DWG2 had have been replaced with a slate of missions designed to be impossible to complete alone (SPOILER: They're not) and replaced with missions where you team up with 1-3 other people and kick some ass. They're quite fun and very useful for grinding up your pilot's levels and getting higher-rank plans for your mobile suit (allowing you to customise more powerful suits) and generally, a good way to kill some time--er, when the netcode is stable. It usually is, but somedays you'll have no end of problems with it crapping out as you're trying to start a group mission.

The Story Mode, however, is Fanservice Central. Borrowing liberally from Secret Wars (only better) it involves Our Heroes (and villains) being spirited to the land of NonCanon, wherein they compare notes on how they got there and what they should do next and what the hell is up with the Knight Gundam (it's a long story) showing up, being inscrutable and magic'ing away at appropriately dramatic moments.

It's kinda fun and has a pretty epic sweep. Being that this kind of crossover is tacitly impossible (as these series generally exist in separate time periods and universes) it's cool to see all the evil masterminds from various series unite and all the idealistic pilots form one bloc, and so on. In fact, it was so much fun to see them interact it made me lament that most crossovers in comics don't have this kind of weight to them, now.

So it's pretty cool. I haven't covered in detail the DLC for the game (which, depending on your feelings about DLC may or may not be a deal-breaker) which features a handful of pilots from 00 Gundam and Gundam Unicorn, and a few special missions which were fun to play, but also mighty damn fiddly. The DLC issue is something I vacillate on--here, I'm generally OK with it, but I lament that the bonus pilots can't be more fully integrated into the game--they have no real story modes, nor can they be incorporated into the game and randomly show up in missions for instance. This is a real missed opportunity, I feel.

So in all, it's a pretty fun game. If you look down on Gundam and Dynasty Warriors games as monotonous an inane, this is probably not going to change your opinion any, but if you're the sort of person who likes this sort of thing, it is absolutely the sort of thing you will like. Obviously I do, because I did do a whole Gundam week that one time . . .

Games People Play--HARD CORPS: UPRISING

It's never easy to change up a long-running series. Whether you're moving from 8 to 16 bits or 2D to 3D, inevitably something will get lost along the way. Castlevania continues to struggle with this at the time of this writing--for all the attempts to bring it out of the DS ghetto and come up with a faithful evolution of the series, the best they seemed to do was to slap some Castlevania names on a mediocre God of War clone, add in a twist ending that even M. Night Shyamalan would have said was bullshit, and rolled out the resultant product to the bored yawns of many.

Contra, Konami's other big franchise, has also spent awhile wandering in the wilderness. Sometime after the release of Contra: Hard Corps for the Genesis, they followed this up with two games for the original Playstation that were so god-awful that the few hardcore Contra fans I know have all but decided they never happened. Things improved a little in the next leap forward, as Shattered Soldier and Neo Contra were more in keeping with the Contra tradition of thumb-busting difficulty and insane set pieces, but in general, the Metal Slug series had stolen a good deal of Contra's thunder, because people will never get tired of the quick hit of dropping a quarter in, running right and killing everything in front of them. There's a reason I always see Metal Slug machines in movie theaters.

An attempt had been made to return the series to its roots with Contra 4 for the DS, which was mostly successful, had an awesome soundtrack, but suffered from that weird need that programmers have to make a specific feature of a console a core element of the game--in this case, it was the two screens, in the SNES days it was Mode 7, and generally felt less like something new than old wine in a new bottle.

So now it comes and here we go--through a bewildering set of circumstances I frankly know little about, Arc Systems Works (they of Guilty Gear and Blazblue fame) were engaged--somehow--to rework Contra: Hard Corps in their style and update it for the HD generation of games.

However it turned out, it was bound to be interesting. Arc Systems Works cut its teeth on fighting games with slashing metal soundtracks and the notion that they were going to be taking on a 2D classic like Contra was bound to be something else.

Fortunately for all concerned, that "something else" was "a really great game." Hard Corps: Uprising is a fantastic game that manages to balance the shiny new stuff of today with the classic gameplay of long ago. What Uprising has in spades in pounding action, fast paced gameplay, smooth control, and a great sense of cool set-pieces, something action games had pretty well ignored in recent 2D games.

There is, naturally, not much in the way of plot to be found--there's an oppressive regime that's . . .er, oppressing, the Earth, Bahamut, a former soldier and Final Fantasy enthusiast, takes up arms and the meat of the game is his attempt to overthrow the evil empire, hence the "Uprising" part of the title.

Bahamut's not alone in this (if he was, it wouldn't be much of a Corps, would it?) he is accompanied by Krystal (your average girl with a huge gun and an eyepatch) and, if you spring for the DLC (and you should) you can add in Harley (a powerful tank-like character who has the most ridiculous/awesome pompadour since Rocket Billy Redcadillac's in that second Gungrave game no one talks about) Sayuri (a ninja/assassin/samurai character who has no guns and actually turns the game into a very frenetic version of Strider) and Leviathan, Bahamut's recurring nemesis, who actually initially plays like a classic Contra character--one-hit death, one slot for weapons, etc. Generally, except for Harley and Krystal, they bring different play styles and options to the table.

Where the real differences come in is in Uprising's most fun feature: Rising Mode. Playing it on Arcade is, quite obviously, a test best reserved for the best of the best (and I, uh, fail that test) but is there because the Contra series is very difficult, people seek out difficulty to prove themselves, and this achieves that admirably. Good on you if you can do it.

Rising Mode is for the rest of us. Playing in Rising Mode works like this: As you play the game, in addition to your regular points, you accrue a second set of points called Corps Points, which go up or down based on the multiplier amount of your combo meter. Your Corps Points function as a kind of currency with which you can buy upgrades, allowing you access to rapid fire, extra air dashes and triple jumps, the ability to begin a stage with a weapon equipped already, or the ever-popular 30 lives (available for a somewhat inexpensive 57,300,000 Corps Points!) Some can be unlocked right away, most roll out as you complete more stages. Some of these allow you to enhance specific characters--Leviathan, for instance, gains a moonsault and slide move that allows him several frames of invincibility and the ability to throw grenades, which can get him out of tight spots.

That's the specifics, let's actually talk about the game and the whole "set pieces" thing I mentioned before. A set piece in this case is defined as "a moment in a game wherein it changes from a simple thing like a boss fight to a dramatic, awesome moment," or to use the TvTropes term, a Crowning Moment of Awesome. Uprising is full of them: There's the last minute jump to safety at the end of stages 1 and 3, the train car that you finished stage 6 clinging to the side of crashes into a statue of the Emperor at the beginning of stage 7, and also there's the chase between you and Leviathan throw a burning building in that stage as well, as he tries damn near everything from bombing the floor to leaping rooftop to rooftop to elude you. There's also the final battle (all three of them) in Stage 8, which culminates in a battle wherein defeating the boss is not the main thing to worry about, really.

As words are an inelegant and inadequate tool to describe it, allow me to pause for a moment while I show you a video courtesy of Youtube of the game in action:



Now, owing to the game being a bit retro in terms of style, it will not be to all tastes. Conversely, the fact that it's just a good solid game with a nice HD sheen over it is precisely why it may be to some tastes. It doesn't try to reinvent the wheel, it doesn't try to mess with what works too much, it is exactly what it needs to be: You walk right (or run right) and shoot things. Awesomeness ensues.

In short, I was quite pleased with this game, for reasons up to and including that it's tremendously great stress relief. It's highly recommended, y'all.

Games People Play--MOON DIVER

So I remember distinctly the last time I wrote one of these I was less than kind to the game I was reviewing. In my defence, they frankly should have fucking well known better than to unleash a piece of shit on the world like King of Fighters XII. I suspect that the utter revolt that was unleashed on that game has made it difficult for the sequel (which is alleged to be much better--we'll see guys, we'll see.) to find a release date.

I mention this, partly because it's been awhile since I did one of these (mostly because I didn't want to resurrect the series just to complain again, this time about the aggressively mediocre Blazblue: Continuum Shift) and also to prepare you: This will not be a favourable review, and you either know what the means, or you will come to know as we go.

I am a big fan of the game Strider, in fact, I mentioned it here comparatively recently. The character, the games themselves (for the most part) were and are some of my favourites and I consider it, along with Shinobi III, one of the exemplars of the action platformer.

This was, I should add, a form that had pretty much died out with the advent of 3D. The platformer changed with the times and became stuff like the newer Ninja Gaiden or Devil May Cry (not always successfully--I personally find nothing makes precision jumping more of an un-fun pain in the ass than a third dimension) 2D platformers of the kind I enjoy and were pretty much a curio, for awhile.

As of late, though, a tier for games that hearken back to the games of yesterday with today's production values have found a nice on the big consoles download services, and good thing, as this spares them from being ghettoized on the DS.

And so, we find ourselves here. Moon Diver is an exemplar of this budget 2D niche. It has a fantastic pedigree--it's made by Square-Enix, one of the folks who worked on the original Strider game worked on this one and it had the look of a Strider game, only it also has a bit of Castle Crashers, the Capcom D & D arcade games, and and a few other things, and it was designed to be a four-player game so . . .it all looked good.

The question, then, is where did it go so terribly wrong? Everything in Moon Diver should work--the control allows a lot of attack and movement options, you have four different characters all with different strengths and weaknesses, you have melee attacks and magic attacks to take on bad guys, you have several huge stages with lots of enemies, plenty of power to do amazing graphical things, but none of it works. Let's look in detail at each of them.

The controls are far too floaty and awkward. When you have to hold L1 or whatever to crouch, you have officially over-thought your control scheme. I wish I could convince game designers, now that 2-3 control sticks or pads, and 18 buttons are now the norm, it doesn't mean you have to use every single one of them in every single game. Nevertheless, there's far too much shit to keep track of for a game which should really be focusing more on its core action. Everything feels awkward and fussy and counter-intuitive. Just assigning your 4 magic slots before a stage is an exercise in frustration.

The four characters, while in some sense distinct (they're certainly wearing different colour scabby, chitinous armour) . . .aren't, really. They're generally about the same, with only slight differences in how easy or hard it is to grind them into a character that will last more than a few stages. Plus, they all look the same in that "ripped from the rejected pile of Final Fantasy character designs" by which I mean they look pretty damn ugly. There's no personality, no cool factor . . .nothing.

The focus on magic attacks means your melee attacks are pretty much only vehicles to grind up your magic points so you can level up enough to do those more often as even at maximum power, your melee attacks don't do that much. Plus, you have to find all the different magics around the stages and while there are a LOT of them, they're little more than just slightly more powerful versions of the stock spells, which means there's not a good deal of reward for all that searching.

The huge stages with lots of enemies. Oh dear, this was perhaps the most disappointing. We have, conceivably, the processing power to make pretty much anything happen on screen. Moon Diver decided the best way to use that power was to make stages that ran the gamut from "burnt out city" to "city that is actually still on fire." Seriously, these are the most boring as fuck stages I have ever seen, and they're populated by enemies that look precisely as generic as your character does, which makes playing through them a little difficult, because of one other creative decision.

That being that the action is ZOOMED OUT TO APPARENTLY TWO FUCKING STATES AWAY. What the . . .you know, zooming in and out was a cool dramatic trick back in the 1990s--SNK made great use of it in a few of their fighting games and even Strider 2 did great with it 12 years ago. It was a way to get more of the stage into view back when we were limited by the dimensions of standard-sized monitors, but now, with widescreen HDTV being the new standard, why the hell was this necessary? It only plays up the problems with the game even more than was already apparent (why would I want to see more of a such a boring game?) by really foreground how poorly thought out the whole mess is.

I won't even go into the plot--it's bog-standard stuff, full of the kind of dartboard religious symbolism that's supposed to be shocking but just generally seems to be trying far too hard and none of it makes any sense so fuck it for a game of checkers anyway.

In short, this could not be less worth $15 if the game came with a $15 voucher to cover the money you spent on it. For people who don't love Strider they will find nothing other than misshapen half-assery, people like me who love Strider will find even more disappointing stuff here because the people behind it should damn well have known better and yet this thing plays like someone heard someone describe Strider once about ten years ago.

God, what a benighted fucking waste of time this was. If you need a $15 game to download, might I suggest the utterly splendid Hard Corps: Uprising, which actually has a DLC character you can get who makes the game play very much like a Strider game leagues better than this bullshit.

The Wheel Of Fate Is Turning (Again)

Longtime readers of this blog will note that last year I sang the praises of Blazblue: Calamity Trigger, the little fighting game that could. Mind you, I was still playing the game's Story Mode through at the time and only a couple months after I finished the True Ending (which explains the multiple time paradoxes that frame the story and how pretty much every ending actually happens in a closed-off time loop--seriously, if I were to try to explain to you, your head would explode, so I'll let the TV Tropes page do what it can) It wasn't a hugely successful game, but it was successful enough to get an update, which, as some may grit their teeth, is more of a Championship Edition style upgrade, but with a twist--since Blazblue's True Ending smashes the time loop that the first game took place in, time is free to take a new path (indicated in the new game's subtitle, hence, our sequel/revision/whatever, Blazblue: Continuum Shift

And here's the intro from the arcade version:



Man, I am so stoked for this.

Games People Play--The King Of Fighters XII

Under other circumstances, what would follow here would be a long recounting of the King of Fighters series of video games, explaining its origins, how it rose to be a true rival to Capcom's Street Fighter II in the early 90's in ways the Mortal Kombat series never managed to be, a brief recounting of parent company SNK's financial troubles at the turn of the century which very nearly buried the company, culminating with a few more hundred thousand words about how the latest now-reimagined-for-High-Definition King of Fighters XII related to the series as a whole and hopefully pointed the way to a new a promising future.

The problem is, having played KOFXII for a few days now and experienced its full measure, the only review I feel like bothering with is: "Shit sandwich."

Because it's awful. I was initially hopeful that it was simply mediocre or maybe rather disappointing, but SNK lived down to my expectations and failed with a commitment and determination usually only seen in successes.

The only redeeming features I can enumerate for you are the following: The new HD sprites look beautiful and the animation is gorgeous, the fighting engine is serviceable if a little backward-looking for the series and it doesn't blow up your game system when the disc is inserted (though it tries . . .because you are forced, thanks to a ridiculously enormous software patch to install the game on your hard drive, not that it does any good as the load times are still present and the whole thing is woefully pokey even installed on the HD) That's all can come up with.

The rest is bullshit. Even for a "dream match" (occasionally KOF does a story-light installment, wherein continuity is tossed out the window for a bit to have fun) the game lacks any character specific endings. Worse still, all the character specific bits of business, like Kyo Kusanagi and Iori Yagami or Ralf and Clark's special dialogue before a fight (which, for some of us, was the little extra attention to detail that gave the series its quality) are gone, as is any attempt at a musical score with any personality (another KOF hallmark, formerly--it's also pretty much inaudible), the game lacks a final boss challenge (those who hate "SNK Boss Syndrome" will be elated) robbing the game of any feeling of closure (it's five matches and done) and the online play (apparently the crucible of the new fighting game race is "who has the best netcode?") can best be described as just about as tragic as watching an old bag lady freeze to death watching a family that's eating Christmas dinner being beheaded by the Taliban.

Incompetence and half-assedness leaks from nearly every bit & byte of the game--it seems, short of the graphic overhaul and making sure the character balance wasn't completely broken, not much work went into anything else in the FOUR YEAR lead time between the previous entry than this. It compels me to ask--was everyone working on the new sprites? Could they not spare someone for a few days to draw up character stills or compose a new theme or something like that, some little extra thing that would justify the wait for and expense of this game? (that this game runs for full prise MSRP is a gigantic middle finger to the consumer in an experience with no shortage of them) Street Fighter IV had fully animated endings, new sprites, a new game engine and felt completely fresh. Blazblue had all new sprites, a propulsive musical score, a story mode that makes DC's pre-Crisis continuity seem easily explicable by comparison and netcode that actually made it possible to play on the Internet. With people!

With all this going on, releasing something this undercooked and expecting people to pay full price for it is utterly ridiculous. Especially when, given it's competition, it's going to be (justly) looked on as the runt of the litter and walked on as such, which, if they're trying to justify the expensive of the graphic overhaul and re-launch the series to a wider audience, they failed utterly. As a celebration of KOF's 15th anniversary, they've failed too, because if this is the best they can do now, then they might as well retire the damn series before we get any more diminishing returns. Because the hardcore audience of SNK cultist is all they pretty much have, and even they think this is utterly chronic.

If it sounds like I'm being incredibly harsh, it's because I expect more from people who Should Know Better. I expect Jeph Loeb to write stupid comics because he's a stupid writer, who coasts solely on people's faulty memories of allegedly "better" comic work he's done in the past and his career in Hollywood. I expect a company that has been doing a series of games for the past 15 years, with many examples to point to of what works and what doesn't, and a company that even for a game that seem pitched at two people (plus the immediate families of its programmers, I guess) SNK had always tried to put a lot of care and attention into, and for some reason to abandon that . . .yeah, that earns you more than a little extra scorn.

So, as a longtime SNK and KOF fan, I urge--nay--I beg you--please, under no circumstances buy this game. Don't let people give it to you as a gift, don't rent it, borrow it from a friend, don't shoplift it, don't win it in a contest. In fact, do a service for your community by smashing every copy in the game store with a three pound sledgehammer. They'll thank you, believe me--one less piece of crap to mark down to $20 in a month's time.

The apologists will say "well, in not buying it you're consigning SNK to financial ruin again," and if that happens, too damn bad. However, I am under no obligation (especially in this economy) to throw down substantial amounts of cash on crap today in the hopes that I might be buying a jewel a few years from now. That anyone thinks that's the way economics work is high. On dope.

In short, I do not like this game, it is very disappointing, and its mere existence is despairing.

Games People Play--BLAZBLUE: CALAMITY TRIGGER

In the late 90's, the 2D fighting game--that last bastion and lifeblood of arcades everywhere--were falling on hard times. Whereas earlier in the decade, Capcom's Street Fighter II and its descendants ruled the arcades and brought in tons of money (admit it--the last arcade machine you probably saw in laundromats, supermarkets, and 7-11s was probably a SFII machine) as the new millennium dawned, they were looking a bit long in the tooth. While there were artistic if not financial successes (Street Fighter 3: Third Strike comes to mind)

Capcom's main competition, SNK and their King of Fighters and related series, weren't doing much better, but less because of creative doldrums (not with games like Garou and the Last Blade series) and more due to finances, which saw the company bought, smashed into the ground, and sent into a tailspin they would spend the next three years trying to get out of.

In the midst of all this, came a game from an unknown (at the time) group Arc System Works and the even more unknown Daisuke Ishiwatari. Ishiwatari's great loves, were video games & heavy metal music, and even those who sucked at fighting games found a game of their own in spotting all the metal references peppered within the game.

Enter Guilty Gear.

For fans of the fighting genre, however, Guilty Gear functioned most strongly as a Third Alternative to Capcom's muddling along whilst lacking in innovation (again, Street Fighter 3 excepted) and SNK's continuing evolution of its various series (which. as much affection, as I have for it, tends to be rather stilted at times) GG was fast, rewarded aggression and played with an energy sorely lacking in fighting games at the time. Moreover, it had an art style somewhat apart from the Big Two. Edgier, and a bit livelier.

Guilty Gear was a cult success on the Playstation, and gave rise to Guilty Gear X, which got a higher profile and actually made it to arcades, the proving ground for 2D fighters. This would eventually begat an entire series of games, which, tragically, made pretty much the same mistakes as the series that Guilty Gear had once been such a welcome alternative to. There were the constant incremental update that promised big things that never broke into the next work in the series, the continuing piling on of more and more layers to the fighting engine, making the damn things so dense and overcomplicated that casual players soon shied away from the games, fearful of needing a 40 page FAQ just to have a hope in hell of winning a round.

So clearly, something had to be done. That this coincided with both Capcom and SNK revisiting their series (now necessitating some innovation, both in terms of updating the 2D fighter for the more demanding HD era and, especially in Capcom's case, making a viable bridge to a franchise whose last game was a full ten years ago) was either coincidence or happenstance means little, what matters is, there seems to be, in this generation of 2D fighters (which, if you'll remember, were supposed to be deaded once and for all a 3D became more cost-effective) is a turn towards freshness, a move back towards accessibility, and an attempt to justify that 2d games can still hang as a viable genre in the late-era of polygons.

Enter Blazblue: Calamity Trigger. Arc Systems Works (now Arksys) decided to point Guilty Gear in another direction and start fresh. Hence, Blazblue, which in many ways has a lot in common with the initial series--it's a fast, aggressive fighter that prizes speed and pressure over turtling and has that same extreme art style . . .

. . .but it also has lush HD graphics, a substantially beefed up story (and story mode--we'll get to that in a bit) and a really wicked sense of humour about itself--seldom do games come with their own sketch comedy parody included as an unlockable, and certain characters constantly remind the player that Blazblue comes with No Fourth Wall Installed (one of the characters, Taokaka tends to face the player and declare various silly things) and the whole game, can at times seem like a parody of 2D fighters, in a sense.

Of course, it's also a pretty damn good fighting game, with an engine that is at once easy to pick up and play and do well with but at the same time has a tremendous amount of depth. Each character has a specific system that can be exploited--for example, Rachael controls winds and lighting, Bang Shishigami has an arsenal of nails that can be utilised for various attacks, Ragna can drain the life out of his opponents, vampire-style. Varying each character's style in such a way--for me, at least--keeps the cast distinct and makes the cast somewhat differentiated from the common types you see in these games (the chick, the speed character, the joke character, the brick, etc.) This, coupled with the smaller cast (12 characters) keeps things distinct, which is a problem occasionally in larger casts.

Visually, it's a feast. Lush, fully-animated 2D sprites play out against hyper-detailed 3D rendered backgrounds. Everything looks fluid and colourful without being "OH GOD MY EYES MAKE THE COLOURS GO AWAY" Mind you, the usual caveats apply here--if you're not a fan of the anime style stuff, this is probably not going to sway you from that way of thinking.

And that brings us to the story mode, which, if the art style looks like anime, the actual story content's soaking in it. Every anime cliche is either hewn to in a tried and true way or (in the case of Bang Shishigami, who is probably everything Dan Hibiki dreams he could be) exploded and parodied and generally not taken seriously. In the midst of all this, or upon fulfilling certain conditions, your character is presented with a branching path in the storyline. Each path causes the story to take a different turn (it's been described as being somewhat RPG-ish, but unless you consider a Choose Your Own Adventure book to be an RPG it's uh, not) If you're OK with these kind of conventions, this won't be a problem. If you're not, the bits that seem to take gleeful delight in deflating those conventions might be to your taste.

In any case--and this is nothing unique to me--people have been saying Blazblue was quite a surprise. Perhaps some of that was due to the soft bigotry of low expectations, some of it was possibly due to its being wedged between two higher-profile releases (KOF XII and Street Fighter 4) and probably some of it's due to the fact that even at it's peak popularity, Guilty Gear was a well-regarded cult hit at best.

However it happened, Blazblue has earned a seat at the table, and I look forward to the inevitable (hopefully) sequel.