BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger

Time for a very rare video game post.

I just pre-ordered a new fighting game coming out on June 30th. BlazBlue, which has already been released in Japan and has American cabinets, is a 2-D fighting game made by Arc Systems, the creators of the Guilty Gear video game series. The engine is very similar to Guilty Gear, but also mixes in it's own brand of uniqueness.

The two biggest differences at first glance would be BlazBlue's guard meter (known as Barrier) and the lack of a flying dash that Guilty Gear XX employed. The guard meter basically acts as a shield: as long as you block, the meter will be depleted, and if you take any damage, it will be drained faster. Not blocking will slowly regenerate the bar overtime. If the bar is depleted to 0, you get stunned, similar to the Street Fighter series.
Cabinet play is extremely fast paced and most characters have variation of 20+ hit combos, chaining attacks in the air, off the ground, or a combination of both (similar to juggling).

What I'm most excited about is the soundtrack, which is being composed by Daisuke Ishiwatari, the same composer of the full rock Guilty Gear XX OST. Special Editions are already on sale, and the 2-disc soundtrack, along with an artbook and a video disc that helps players learn the game (both basics and character-specific combinations), will be included in the set. Currently it is being sold for $59.99 USD at gamestop.com.

It will be released on the XBox 360 and Playstation 3.

The one glaring downside is that the character roster is very limited in size: 12 to be exact. The small roster opens up room for a character that can be, generally speaking, better than all the others when matching up strengths and weaknesses. All fighting games impliment some sort of rock-paper-scissors matching between characters for balancing purposes (obviously skill and gameplay mechanics negate this factor at professional tournament levels), but a smaller roster size may impede or limit the effectiveness of the balance. Still, there has already been several competitions played in Japan, and obviously there have been no major complaints since the game is being released on the console.

I haven't found a better version of the story than what Wikipedia offers, mainly because it was originally a novel which either hasn't been translated, or hasn't been popular enough to come up on Google searches. There has also been a manga series released, but it was based off the video game itself and thus does not hold true to the original storyline.

Here's a gameplay video: