awesome
wow, great game. tight controls. amazing graphics. good for newbies or experienced players. great story mode and challenging players online. everything you would expect from a great 2-d fighting game.

xpctations surpassd
I got this game in the mail 12 hours ago and writing this review is literally the first time I've stopped playing it since. I'm also eating, something I've neglected to do for...huh, about 12 hours. Yes, this game is forget-to-eat good. Its a time travel game, where you start playing and the next time the clock catches your eye, hours have passed when it seemed like only one at most. This is due in part to the speed of the matches. Each round, or 'rebel' for some reason, packs a lot of fighting into it. The pace is frantic but never seems out of control.

The visuals are just as insane. Anime-style fighters doing fast, fluid battle in front of realistic backgrounds with details everywhere in both architecture and animation looks as cool as it sounds if not cooler. A lot of people say its like Guilty Gear. Well, I'm not a veteran of the series, but having played XX Accent Core, I would call BlazBlue a mix of it and Darkstalkers. In other words, its awesome.

If I have to make a complaint, its that not every character is pick up and play. Some have short range, some have drives that are more complex to use than a more basic attack, some are better in the air while others have a distinct disadvantage there. Its balancing and makes them more unique, but it takes some getting used to. Also, the story parts of story mode take kind of a long time and sometimes you can choose something you didn't want to while skipping over it.

Should you buy it? Yes. Oh, God yes. You're so close right now. In just a few clicks, all the goodness could be yours! I called it a time-travel game, but its more than that. Its an I-know-what-I'm-doing-tomorrow game.

For Any Fans Of The Two-Person Fighting Universe
Having grown up and playing the Street Fighter games as well as being introduced to the Guilty Gear games this newest game from the Aksys makers is simply incredible. If you've played the GG games than the basic game play and storylines for this game shouldn't come as to much of a surprise to you and while there might not be as many playable characters to choose from like Tekken 6 or Street Fighter IV the characters they do have are very entertaining to play as well as the special moves and combos you can unleash with them. The characters like Tekken 6 and SF Iv have their own stories you can unlock but for the most part it's mostly meant to be what it is a fighting game, the one thing I truly loved about this game is like SF IV you can have the characters voices either with the English actors/actresses or the Japanese voice cast to listen to which I truly appreciate since there are some games that while the original voice cast were probably very good the English voices turned out to be just awful to even listen too. The added extras are very decent and for the price of the game very reasonable as well so if you're a game fan of the Tekken or Street Fighter Universe and are looking for something new to play here's a very good choice to try out....

The best 2D fighter of this generation, but it makes me miss Guilty Gear.
I loved the Guilty Gear series more than any other fighting game franchise, and this is coming from someone who played Street Fighter, Fatal Fury, Samurai Showdown and others when they first came out, and as each series got a new title. Fighting is one of my two favorite genres of games (the other being puzzle), and even with the likes of Street Fighter 3: Third Strike, Last Blade 2, Capcom vs SNK 2...Guilty Gear X2 is easily my favorite title. So when I found out that BlazBlue was to be the successor of that franchise, I got excited. The graphics were incredible, character designs looked great, gameplay was nearly identical to GG, and it had the same, deep story mode that the later GG games had. What was there to complain about? In short, nothing really, but BlazBlue just makes me wish Guilty Gear X3 had come out instead because of how similar it is.

BlazBlue plays wonderfully, and I was able to get right into the game. You have 4 standard attacks- light, medium and heavy attacks, along with the Drive attack. Drive is your main special move attack that can also be used for different regular special attacks (quarter circle motions and all that). It varies for each character, like freezing the opponent, controlling wind, shooting forward, magnetizing the opponent, etc. Barrier Bursts, like the Burst feature from Guilty Gear, are used to get out of tight situations. Say your opponent has you stuck in a huge combo- use the Burst and you'll break out of it, shoot them away, and have a chance to recover and get back to the action. Everyone has Distortion Drives too (again, like Overdrives in GG), and some of them are just plain gorgeous to see in motion. Instant Kills are here too, but you can't use them as freely as those in GG. See how similar this game is to Guilty Gear with how much I reference back to it? But the game's fun, and anyone with experience playing fighting games will more than likely love BlazBlue. You also gotta love the characters, like Taokaka, a kind of cat/human hybrid with a wacked out face, that only cares about food and has a great nickname for Litchi. You'll probably spend a couple of hours just enjoying seeing how the characters animate and fight. I know I did.

BlazBlue has a lot of different gameplay modes. You have the regular Arcade mode, where you go through the game as one character, taking out all the others with a little bit of story going on in the process. There's a Story mode that you can play through multiple paths with every character (kind of a Choose Your Own Adventure deal), and you'll need to play through each character's story multiple times in order to get 100%. There's also Score Attack, Training and Replay Theater...but then there's multiplayer. Trust me when I say that it's a thousand times better than the mess that was Guilty Gear X2 #Reload's online mode. You earn experience that ups your rank, and player cards show things like which character the player uses the most and more. I never had any problems with lag during gameplay but there is a little bit right before the match starts- the part when the fighters appear on-screen and when the announcer is saying her usual lines. Everything ran smooth immediately when the match started. And for trophy junkies, there are quite a few for BlazBlue, and a couple are very tricky to get.

So with all the great things in the game, why the 4 star rating? Honestly, this is more of a 4.5 star rating, but I had to round down in this case. BlazBlue is so similar to Guilty Gear, that is almost comes off as a rip-off of the series, despite being made by the same company. Many of the characters here are practically characters from GG but with different designs. Iron Tager = Potemkin, Jin = Ky, Ragna = Sol, Carl = Bridget, Arakune = Eddie, and so on. Heck, even a lot of their moves are nearly the same as their GG counterparts'. I respect them for making a new fighting game franchise, but if they had done things a bit differently, I wouldn't have felt so...well, I don't know how to describe how I feel. Again, don't get me wrong, because I love this game, but it's a little too close to GG for my tastes. But if you never played GG before, then that shouldn't be a problem.

And you know what? There's an upgraded BlazBlue title coming out in a few months, similar to Super Street Fighter 4 being the upgraded version of regular SF4. I'm hearing that it'll come out between July and October, but it's not official still. The game will feature a few more characters, re-balancing the cast, and probably a few more moves for everyone. But while BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger is so cheap now, you really should pick it up so you can have a head start on the new version when that comes out. Hopefully if this franchise does well, we can get GGX3...and a true sequel for BlazBlue too :p.

This is great fighting game
This is great 2D fast paced fighting game. Those who likes fighting games will love this,especially if you're like Anime.