(I am splitting this into two posts: it's taking forever.)
Now that everything else is out of the way, we can get down to the meat of the thing. With the rights issue, the future of Guilty Gear has been questionable. Even as popular as GG is, it obviously doesn't make a ton of sense for Arc to push all their resources into a theoretical new title when Sammy/Sega are just going to swoop in and take a chunk out of the profits. Blazblue is understood to be Arc's new flagship franchise, if not a replacement.
A lot of GG fans were kind of weepy about this turn of events: Blazblue was put down as Arc making a knockoff of its own game, and having a few character designs-- Ragna, Jin, and Tager-- who were transparently based on GG characters didn't help matters much. There's some truth to this, of course, but it makes more sense to think of Blazblue as a Guilty Gear reboot. New lead designer Toshimichi Mori has taken a close look at Guilty Gear and rebuilt the whole damn thing from the ground up. I may be crucified for saying this, but I believe the game is better for the effort.
As you might already know, Blazblue is the first 2D fighting game to be drawn from scratch in HD resolution (720p, in this game's case). It can't be overstated how hard it is to draw and animate good 2D sprites: from what I've been hearing, games like King of Fighters XII and the recent freeware labor of love Vanguard Princess both took their artists three to four years to get good-looking sprites done. These games have lower-resolution (smaller) sprites than Blazblue. Only Street Fighter II HD Remix was done in a higher resolution (1080p), and as a redraw of long-existing work, that game doesn't really count. We can only imagine how long Blazblue must have taken. Maybe they answered the question at AX?
It paid off: character art is extremely crisp, and considering the immense size of the sprites, the detail is pretty impressive. The animation is a little more fluid than that in Guilty Gear, but it doesn't come close to games like SF3 or KOFXII. I actually think the very busy 3D backgrounds are more impressive than the sprites: I can't recall the last game I saw where 2D and 3D graphics meld so seamlessly. Usually, when a 3D background is used in a 2D game, the results are two very disparate aesthetics-- see Marvel Vs. Capcom 2, or many of SNK's Dreamcast ports-- but in Blazblue the look stays consistent.
Blazblue smooths out Guilty Gear on a fundamental level, starting with the button layout. The Guilty Gear layout is an odd cousin of the later Samurai Shodown games. You have punch, kick, slash, hard slash, and dust. This naming system never really made a lot of sense, being as not everybody had an object for slashing with in the first place. Dust is an oddball button that performs a variety of miscellaneous actions. Though the button layout is near and dear to us GG fans, it's pretty weird and certainly confusing to the first-timer. Blazblue has four buttons: A, B, C, and D. The first three are attack buttons, weakest to strongest, and the last is the Drive button.
The Drive button is a smart design decision, in that it does a little something for every player. The D button does different things for every character, and usually has something to do with the gimmicks that define each character. For the casual player, this means that the character can do a lot of very fancy-looking things very easily. Mori said this back in the Gamasutra interview:
"Sure, people like us who work with games, or fans of fighting games can do a hadouken or a shoryuken without thinking much about it, but for somebody just getting started? Those moves are pretty tough! You can't expect new players to just whip those moves out every time."
So Mori's game has a single button that makes Taokaka fly back and forth around the screen, or Jin pop a glacier out of his hand, and so on. When I first read this remark, I was a little surprised to hear it coming out of a guy who works on the most complex games in the genre, but seeing a system like this, I understand where he's coming from. This isn't going to turn anybody into an instant expert, but it's going to open up a little more of the fun of the game to a bigger audience. The home version also has special attacks mapped to the right analog stick, if you can't do the moves or you're just feeling that lazy.
For the serious players, the Drive button typically serves a gimmick that defines the character. These gimmicks range from the simply cool-- Ragna's Drives are heavy sword strikes that steal life-- to the truly unique: Rachel can control the wind, Carl has a helper character controlled solely with the D button. Every character has something distinct that makes for really complex, interesting play styles that feel genuinely fresh. There isn't a single character here that I don't intend to take a long, hard look at.
Next is a more in-depth look at the engine.
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