Blazblue as a franchise: no Vision and no Relevancy

Blazblue is a multi-faceted series; not only am I criticizing it for its unoriginal ideas, but its bad gameplay as well.  Chances are good that I wouldn't have ragged on Blazblue's story and characters as much in my previous post if it was a solid fighting game.  It's not, and honestly, a lot of the mechanics in Blazblue's newest installment Chrono Phantasma are toxic in a competitive and casual environment.  If the series started out with a shot in the knee because it attempted to recreate Guilty Gear's success, then the whole franchise is in the process of being dragged out to the parking lot and beaten senseless by its creators with the bad decisions being implemented.  Before Chrono Phantasma was announced, a new installment of Guilty Gear was announced.  Adding insult to injury, Arc System Works' Persona 4: Arena received great acclaim for being easy to pick up without pandering too much to newcomers to the franchise owing to it being the sequel to a role-playing game, which was supposed to be one of Blazblue's main selling points back when the series was first announced.  Take into account that a new revision of Guilty Gear - the game Blazblue was created to entirely to profit off of! - has already been rereleased on PSN and XBox Live and is recieving an update, and Blazblue: Chrono Phantasma is already irrelevant as a fighting game despite not even having come out on consoles yet.

Firstly, let's talk about three good fighting games that really scratch my one-on-one deathmatch itch.  Street Fighter III: Third Strike is probably the least balanced and certainly the oldest of the three, having been released in 1999.  It makes my list for having the balls to innovate the already established Street Fighter II cast and having the parrying mechanic.  Parrying is the precursor to the Focus Attack mechanic from Street Fighter IV, which allowed a character to absorb a hit while preparing for an attack.  Parrying in Street Fighter III completely negates damage, but can only be performed right as an opponent's attack hits you, requiring very precise timing.  However, with this difficult technique comes a greater benefit; parrying successfully leaves the character in a neutral state, able to continue parrying attacks or leaving them in an optimal position to unleash a counterattack.  In the following video, note how both characters parry each others' attacks, though Ken's lengthy parrying saves him at the very end.

Arc System Works' Guilty Gear XX: Accent Core and Persona 4: Arena are more balanced than Third Strike, but none of the mechanics have the same impact that Street Fighter III's high-risk, high-reward Parrying does.  Instead, they both focus on great characters and solid fundamentals, and while Persona 4: Arena does have a Comeback Mechanic in the form of Awakening - increased defense and special meter as well as an extra super attack when your character's health drops below a certain point - a skilled player can completely bypass this by defeating their opponent before this can occur, and the defense boost only really shuts down single attacks and smaller combos, requiring more thought to be put into every action.  Guilty Gear is sort of a "happy medium" between Persona 4: Arena and Third Strike in that it is modestly balanced between the two and has no comeback mechanics.

To those not really familiar with fighters, you may be wondering what exactly constitutes a comeback mechanic?  Put simply, it's a facet of the game that gives players that aren't doing as well an added advantage.  A good example from outside of a fighting game would be in Mario Kart, where you get better items when your placement is lower in a race.  It's fine ordinarily, but most people play fighting games to see who's better.  Plenty of fighting games like Guilty Gear and Street Fighter appear at enormous tournaments where hundreds of people compete to see who the best is.  If a winner emerges because they were helped back up, then why should it be treated as anything but a hollow victory?  Imagine if when a team scored a touchdown in football, the other team was given the opportunity for a PAT instead of the team on the offensive.  It wouldn't make any sense because it would punish the team that managed to make the effort of scoring in the first place.

A real-life example of a comeback mechanic from the 2012 Olympics.

Comeback mechanics aren't anything new either; they've been appearing in fighters like Street Fighter 4 and Marvel vs. Capcom 3, and the fact that the company creates games that encourage competitive play but promotes mechanics that don't promote as much skill is mind-boggling.  This could easily tie into last week's post about how Blazblue has no clue how to do anything new, but I'll let that slide for now.  All you really need to know is that Blazblue: Chrono Phantasma implements a comeback mechanic.  The issue with such a mechanic that the risk vs. reward is skewed in favor of the player who has performed poorly.  As a counter-example, Street Fighter III gave resources (super meter) both to players attacking and being attacked, but gave more to the player on the offensive, incentivizing the player on the offensive to continue being aggressive while also incentivizing the player on the receiving end to fight back in order to get the resources that they needed to win.  At the same time, its parrying could be used by either player in an attempt to thwart an aggressive opponent or shut out an opponent who was already on the ropes at any point in the match.

While there are improvements made in the new Blazblue such as toning down the ridiculously long combos and damage, the speed of the game was increased as well.  As it stands, fighting games in the same vein as Blazblue, like Guilty Gear and King of Fighters XIII, aren't really played in the U.S. because of their speed.  In my opinion Chrono Phantasma's speed increase will only really serve to alienate players accustomed to the modest pacing of the previous Blazblue titles as well as prevent interested parties from actually buying the game.  As of now, Blazblue is something of a middle child among the fighting games that populate Arc System Works' roster, discounting the ridiculous one-offs like Fist of the North Star and the criminally under appreciated Battle Fantasia.  It's younger than the experience and reliable big brother Guilty Gear but older than the rising star younger sibling Persona 4: Arena, and as a result it has no real identity in terms of gameplay or story.  It attempts to parrot its more competent family with little success, and with no features to make it unique among games with three-man tag teams like Marvel vs Capcom or King of Fighters or a functional gimmick like Persona 4: Arena's Personas make it feel thinly spread in its desperate please to other game's fanbases.  The next installment of Blazblue needs to be game-changing in order for the series to remain relevant among a crowd that vastly outclasses it.

The image used can be found at the following article: http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/olympics-fourth-place-medal/boxing-judge-expelled-olympics-controversial-decision-170133250--oly.html