BlazBlue

Fighting games are a hard genre to review, for one simple reason; the game you play on day one isn't the game you play on day 100.

In the upcoming August '09 issue of Play, Heather had these words to say in her monthly comment:

Sometimes I wish reviews could be ongoing. Like the Fullmetal Alchemist:Brotherhood series I’m doing on Playmagazine.com. Often, our opinions shift their shape as the material matures in our minds. For example, my opinions on Street Fighter IV (go figure) are stronger now than they were when I first played the game; I’d be more inclined to give the title a 10 after playing it for all these months.

What I experience today when I sit down for a game of BlazBlue isn't the same as what I experienced from the game the first time I played it, and is also different from what I'll experience from the game a month from now. One could argue that the First Person Shooter genre is very similar, because it, like the fighting game genre, presents us with titles where a lot of what we get from any particular play session depends on where our skill level is at at the time.



However, the truth is, I could pick up Resistance 2 or Halo 3 or whatever else and, even with no skill at all, receive a decent level of enjoyment. While time and practice will certainly make me better, they don't change the fundamentals of the game to a large degree, especially as any knowledge of previous FPS franchises will give me some level of preparation for what I'll be in for.

Every fighting game, however, is its own little universe, and that is what has made the genre not only so rich and varied over the years, but also so hard to define for any one particular title. What causes a game like BlazBlue to evolve over the course of its lifetime is a series of things, and not just the skill level of the player; it is also the skill level of the other players out there, the depth that has been built into the game's core engine, the balance between the individual characters it presents, and not only the possibilities intended to exist from the start, but all that potential for combos or fighting styles or whatever else that even the creators themselves could never have predicted would be found. Fighting games are, possibly more than anything else in the world of video gaming, an example of the contradiction born from an existence that both has been fully defined and yet continues to evolve and re-define itself.

So, when a person like me tries to sit down to "review" a game like BlazBlue, I think the honest truth is we cannot truly review the game; we must, instead, review the potential.

I was never a fan of Guilty Gear. In comparison to the sophistication of Capcom and the stylishness of SNK, it was the crazy annoying kid running around my living room after one too many bowls of Coco Crispies. The rules of most fighting games made sense to me--punch or kick the other guy until I could perform two scoops to unleash a special move--but Guilty Gear felt like it had been intended for some alien species, unearthed by humans totally by mistake, and we didn't play it so much as we tried to figure out what this strange technology would do if we pushed this button or moved the joystick in that direction. Don't get me wrong; I had fun with the games the times that I played them, but that fun was the same kind of fun your younger cousin has when they grab the controller at the local game shop and waste time with whatever random demo is currently running on the machine. So long as something happens when the controller is interacted with, they're happy.

(cont...)

• Showing Page 1 ( of 4 )
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4

blog comments powered by Disqus