BlazBlue - Fighting Game Retrospectives - Part 1

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of fighting game retrospectives and this year has been great for this show we've covered some iconic franchises and cult classics but for our final episode of the year I want to go out with something different I want to go out with a dash of anime more anime [Music] no more anime [Music] more anime [Music] yeah slightly less anime let's pull it back a bit there it is yes folks this is one of those games I've been looking forward to covering ever since we started the fighting game retrospectives it's a series of low with creative mechanics stylish Sprite work and memorable characters a game that largely defined the seventh generation of consoles helped Arc systems return to the world of fighting games and has an appeal that goes beyond the fgc itself so today the wheel of fate is turning as we dive into a world of Beast robots magic whatever the hell this guy is and we talk about this series development the groundbreaking gameplay and the lore that the lore that oh oh God right I have to actually explain the story of blaze blue now don't I uh uh is it too late to go back to Wacky Wacker seven [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] yes welcome to another episode of the fighting game retrospectives and folks I am not kidding when I say this is a big one and for once that's not because of some crazy development problems although believe me there aren't going to be a couple of those too no on this show we tackle the behind the scenes stories of your favorite Fighters but we also tackled the in-game stories we talk about the characters in the plot of these series and I have to get this out of the way right now if you know anything about blazeblue it's that this game has the craziest most complicated story in any video game none any fighting game games period more than Tekken more than Metal Gear more than kingdom hearts even more than Guilty Gear I can sum up the plot Gilda gear in a tweet mankind knew that they cannot change society reflecting on themselves they blame the beasts done read that while listening to some Queen music and you're good the plot of blaze blue [Music] foreign of one game so I'm sure that some of you tuned in today thinking oh man I can't wait to finally learn the plot of blaze blue and do you I have to apologize because after studying everything that I could after going through all the story modes and reading all the wikis I have come to the conclusion that the story of blaze blue would be too long and too complicated and require far too much explaining to fit in here with the development and the mechanics and everything else that we have to cover so no I'm sorry but we will not be covering the story in this video that's what part two is going to be for yes folks this is going to be a two-parter part one will cover the development and gameplay and features of each individual game as well as giving you a very basic introduction to the characters and story then part two will be the actual breakdown of the plot I decided to do this because as I said this story is so big and complicated it would make this video a jumbled mess trying to fit everything together but also because honestly I know there are a lot of people out there who just want to know what the hell this story is and they just want a video only about that they don't want to sit through me talking about the gameplay so for those people I think they'd be much happier just getting their own video so if that's you then make sure that you click that subscribe button so that way you'll know when part two comes out also just going to throw it out there right now but we set a goal at the beginning of the year to hit 50 000 subscribers by the end of the year and we are so close right now so if you do decide to subscribe then thank you I really do appreciate that but for now let's talk about blazeblue's creation the story of how the blaze blue Universe was born began several years before the first title was even pitched and it was birthed from the dying ashes of another fighter Guilty Gear yes if you know your anime air Dashers then you've probably heard these two compared quite often and for good reason their histories are deeply tied to each other go to gear was the predominant fighting game franchise for Japanese developer Arc system works and while it never sold as much as Street Fighter or Tekken or Mortal Kombat or dark stalkers or star Gladiator yeah look at the sales figures on Guilty Gear sometime its early games did not do well but despite those sales it did have some of the most stylish Sprites quickest combat and inventive mechanics of any game out there and it built up a fan base that was fiercely dedicated to it and I'm including myself in there I'd love to go to gear ever since X2 The Moment I Saw every insane thing this game was capable of it instantly became one of my favorites but what does all this have to do with blazeblue well gildier was a very personal project for its creator daisuki Isha watari he had built up this massive world and long running story connecting all these games and you could feel how much he loved these characters hell he even voiced the protagonist of the series this was his baby so you can only imagine how much it must have hurt him when he saw his creation taken away from him you see guilty here with his Sleek graphics and crazy story modes and all the work that went into them cost a lot of money money that our systems didn't always have so most of their games were published by Sammy meaning they owned the rights to them and Sammy for years have been trying to merge with Sega but Sega kept telling them no but Sammy was determined so they kept waiting watching for the moment that Sega slipped up and speaking of Sega slip-ups the Dreamcast and the Saturn and the Sega CD okay there were a lot of slip-ups back to back it wasn't exactly one thing that did Sega in but after the fall the Dreamcast Sega hit rock bottom and Sammy was there to take advantage of it they merged with Sega to create the new Sega Sammy holding his company and gave them all their properties including Guild a year to which Sega said uh thanks yeah Sega really had no interest in making someone else's fighting game hell they barely had any interest in making their own fighting game at the time and I should clarify yes Arc systems could still technically make a Guilty Gear game but it wouldn't be the same because Arc systems own the rights to the characters from the first game but any character after that now belonged to Sega so if they want to make a new game they couldn't include characters like dizzy or Ino or so many other characters who were very important to the story and Daisuke really cared about that story so even though he tried to make a new game that could work around these restrictions it just wasn't the same although it wasn't a fighting game and it kind of sucked so yeah it had that going against it So eventually Arc systems had to accept that Guilty Gear was gone their standout franchise was now the victim of corporate IP shuffling so Daisuke knew that they needed to create something new they needed to make a fighter that could carry on that game's Legacy and bring it into a brand new era so that's when Daisuke got the brilliant idea to step aside and let somebody else take the lead yeah sorry for that misery but I had to bring this up right at the start over the years I can't tell you how many people I've heard say that blaze blue was made by the same guy who made Gilda gear and while Daisuke did work on the soundtrack for blazeblue and he did help provide his career with guidance during the initial development daisuki ishuwatari did not create blaze blue no that was toshimichi Mori better known by his fans as Mori P Maureen Daisuke had been friends for years even before they start working together the two of them both attend the osaga amusement Media School to study game design and fun fact the reason Mori decided to go to that school in the first place was because of Pop Idol he liked occasionally gave lectures there and I just find that hilarious I mean imagine if the reason that Mortal Kombat came into existence was because Ed Boone and John Tobias went to college together but they only went to that school because they thought that it would somehow help them meet Debbie Harry and I can't find out who that Idol was but I really do wonder if she has any idea she's indirectly responsible for an entire Universe of games existing guys game would end up bringing Mori onto Arc systems as an artist working on Guilty Gear X and other Fighters even creating the fan favorite characters of ABBA and Robo Kai but after so many years of working on other people's games he decided to challenge himself to create his own he pitched his idea to Menorah kidoka the hen founder of Arc systems who knew that was good you're gone it was time to create a new franchise but the creation process of the series would be not exactly a difficult road but a road with many different ideas and voices especially when it came to the title together Mori and kiruoka agreed that the theme of the game should be blue quite possibly to separate itself from the overly redis deck of guildy gear so with that in mind the series took out many early names with the original title being and I kid you not Blue Bloods and speaking as someone who understands English and realizes the connotations of that term in this language holy crap did we ever dodge a bullet there I don't think this series will have sold nearly as well if its name implied that was all about well the aristocrats find over their inheritance the name was eventually changed to Riot blue which was the title that they plan on sticking with but apparently at the last hour and I mean that quite literally apparently just two days before they had to release the first arcade machines they found out that there might be a copyright issue around Riot blue so they had to change it to blaze blue and I think I speak for all those who always say the better name one out now when development began both karaoke and Mori agreed on one thing the new game would have to be simpler kidoga thought that while go to gear X was great and helped the company make a name for itself he said that with every update and boy were there a lot of updates the game got more Niche and the barrier for injury became higher appealing to a smaller fan base and making it harder for new players to start so if this new game was going to be the gain of a brand new franchise it would have to be accessible enough to bring in a wider audience and this was a sentiment that Mori agreed with saying I thought the Gilda gear franchise became too difficult as a game I wanted to simplify a lot of it to kind of reset the fine game platform and honestly this wasn't a bad idea I know that when it comes to simplifying fighting games to appeal to a wider audience it's kind of a sore subject for the fgc I know that most dedicated and professional players hate it but the truth is sometimes it does help I've heard so many dedicated fine game players say that all you need to bring in new players is cool characters and good visuals and while that does certainly account for a lot I can say as someone who exists in that weird blurry World between dedicated and Casual players yeah I've heard so many other people in my life say they didn't get into fighting games because that barrier for injury was just too high hey you wanna play a fighting game I'm not really into fighting games it's okay it's okay I'll take it easy on you okay we can give it a shot cool let's play wanna play again no I think I'm good no I'm not saying you shouldn't make complicated fighting games no not at all but if you're making a brand new series for a brand new console generation and you're hoping to bring in a brand new audience yeah making that first game very accessible and then increasing the complexity with each later installment is probably a smart idea but even though kidoka and Mori wanted to simplify the game to appeal to a wider audience there was one decision they made that was actually kind of bold for the time and did run the risk of Turning Away new players I mentioned this before but in the mid-2000s 2D Fighters were kind of dead if you were making a fine game everyone believed it had to be 3D who cares if 2D fighting games have their own unique charm and completely different tactics and gameplay the PS2 and the Xbox air were the age of 3D Fighters so if you're making a fighting game you better get on board or you're going to be left behind but they both realize that the 2D Sprite base anime aesthetic was one of the defined appeals of their company it's one of the things that just screams Arc system works so even though it was a risk they weren't going to budge on it and I'm glad they did because these Sprites look great this became one of the best looking Sprite base Fighters out there you could go frame by frame and just see how much love and attention went bringing these characters to life imagine in our darkstalkers episode how that series would go on to inspire an entire generation of sprite bass anime fires and Mori has admitted that dark stalkers had a huge impact on him and you can see that in just how Lively these Sprites are you can see it in the exaggerated Expressions they make in combat I mean whenever a character gets electrocute they turn into a cartoony skeleton and that is straight out of dark stalkers and speaking of those characters if you look at this cast they might feel a little all over the place and there's a reason for that you see while this was mori's creation Arc systems was a tightly knit company rather than one person dictate every aspect of a game instead everyone was allowed to have a say including in the character creation so while Mori did create several characters himself such as hakuman who he had created back in middle school and had been holding on to ever since name the other fires were created by other employees at ARC systems for example the big Grappler of the game iron tager was made by a self-proclaimed bodybuilding fanatic get the company and I love that I can't help but picture some giant muzzle bound dude over at ARC system works just going around and shoving developers into lockers until they agree to put Grapplers in the game but the important thing is that by having so many voices in the creation process it made Blaise blue feel kind of all over the place but I mean that in a good way you see sometimes blaze blue can feel less like a unified world and more like Anime the fighting game it feels like dozens of characters and ideas taken from all over the place shoved into a single world but that was kind of its charm It gave this game a crazy colorful variety that a lot of other Fighters were lacking and sure to some people it might have been overwhelming but to a certain audience this Variety in tones and Designs hit just right and this menagerie of ideas extend into the game's story which oh God the story yeah okay as I said I'll be talking about the actual story itself in its own video but I do need to bring up the inclusion of the story in here because it did play into the game's development for starters I mentioned that toshimichi Mori had been working at ARC systems on go to gear and some other fires like battle Fantasia and he was a fan of dark stalkers but that doesn't mean fighting games were his first love no Mori has done multiple times he got into game development because he wanted to make RPGs he wanted to create a big sprawling world with massive stories that stretched on for dozens and dozens of hours he just kind of fell into working on fighting games because he knew Daisuke isabutari and Daisuke got him to Arc systems Works in fact I've actually heard from multiple people that Mori originally pitched this game to kidoka as an RPG but kidoko wanted them to make another fighting game after losing Guilty Gear and that's all Blaze Bloom morphed into a fighting game now I will admit I haven't been able to find any actual interview where he actually says this but when you play through the game yeah it certainly feels like that's real because every single blaze blue game has a massive story mode longer than anything you had ever seen from another fine game and this was back when story modes weren't even a given in fine games nobody was really Thinking Beyond just how having a symbol arcade ladder back then however while I'm sure that Mori pitched these story modes because he literally had been building up this story in his head since middle school and he wanted to make sure that got out there into the world in some form or fashion he did say it was also part of his strategy for selling the game you see he wanted to make sure that these games had something Beyond just the combat to try and bring in players in an interview with gamesbeat Mori said quote instead of thinking of it as just a fighting game I wanted to turn it into a single piece of content an intellectual property and that way we could deploy it through many different mediums because we have a lot of cool characters here fighting games were still a very Niche genre back then so it really needed to have its own identity where it would be able to translate into multiple media and translate it did the story of this game would become a huge selling point that would influence how the future games were released and would translate into animes and mangas and so much more many of which would create their own original content though then feed back into the main series itself a again this was a very forward thinking approach more you went into this project not just playing on creating a game but a multimedia Empire but I'm getting ahead of myself all the spin-offs and the Side Stories and the alternate reality tales and yes that is actually a thing wouldn't come from much later for now it's time to finally delve into where this all began [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] blaze blue Calamity trigger launched an arcades in November 2008 and on home consoles in June 2009 where it was hit with a wave of Praise right off the bat it received some of the highest scores of any fine game in the 7th gen but again with the combat yes this game was simpler compared to its Guilty Gear Brethren but as I said that did help it appeal to a wider audience I originally saw this game over at a friend's place and while I had already been a big Guilty Gear fan my friend never gone to the series but he was loving blaze blue and I can tell you the simpler combat definitely helped get him hooked he could actually understand what he was doing in this game and speaking personally having gone back to this game after playing the most recent installments it is kind of jarring how different it feels from where this series would end up but it's still incredibly fun and it still comes with plain of its own crazy anime fighter mechanics like many games at the time you had a super meter called the heat gauge and you could use 50 of that meter to use your supers called Distortion drives but you you also had a barrier gauge and you could hold down two buttons to put up a barrier to prevent chip damage and block attacks that normally couldn't be blocked but as you did this you would eat up your barrier gauge and if that gauge got fully depleted then you would enter a danger State and in this state you would take 50 extra damage so yeah big reward bigger risk you could also hit everyone at once to perform a barrier burst which would blow your opponent back to give you some breathing room but it would also completely destroy your barrier gauge and I already told you why you don't want to do that so you better think of getting out of your opponent's combo is really worth that Gamble and just like how Guilty Gear became famous for its instant kills blazeblue create a similar mechanic with the astral Heats however the innocent kills in Gilda gear were easy to pull off you just hit all the buttons that wants to activate it and then you hit your opponent before the meter Runs Out boom that's it fairly simple for something that let you instantly win the round but Arc systems won blaze blue to be what's the word I'm looking for all right not horrendously broken so they put a ton of restrictions in here to pull out these astral Heats you would now have to have your heat gauge at Max enough to perform two supers and your opponent would have to have only 20 Health left meaning you could probably finish them off with just one of those supers and you would have to be on Match Point and I don't mean that if the match was first to two then you would have to have one win already no that makes sense I mean if it was first to two then you would have to have one win and your opponent would also have to have one win yeah if you wanted to pull up an astral heat it would have to be in the last possible remaining seconds of the last possible round that is an insanely specific situation and while I imagine if you ever pulled it off it would be hype as hell I I can also imagine some people probably playing through this entire game and never even knowing that this was a thing however here's something else really weird about the azero Heats and by weird I mean flat out unfair when this game begins only three out of the 12 characters had their Astros unlocked all of the remaining characters can only unlock their astrals if you beat their arcade mode meaning if you decide to get this game open it up and then just plop down on the couch with your friend and instantly start playing against each other there are three characters who just automatically have an advantage over everyone else sure it's a very specific probably we'll never pull it off Advantage but it's an advantage nonetheless this might be the be the game I have ever heard of where it came purposely broken and you had to unlock the balance patch and speaking of unbalance if you already had the character's astral unlock and you then played through the arcade mode again you would unlock the unlimited version of that character these were crazy enhanced Super Saiyan versions of each character that you could only play in offline mode which makes sense it would be way too unfair to take the unlimited characters online but you and your friends picking two unlimited characters and having an over-the-top crazy busted slugfest yeah that's perfectly fine go nuts but when talking about the mechanics of blaze blue what really made this series stand out was the drive ability you see blazeblue was sort of a three and a half button fighter because you had your three basic attacks a b and c essentially light medium and heavy but then each character had their fourth button the drive button and this was a unique ability for every single character with wildly ranging effects for example ragnos Drive was a large attack that would recover some of his health Jin's Drive let him freeze his opponent and Rachel's drive wasn't even an attack she was a character all about setting up objects and traps to mix up your opponents so her drive let her control the wind which could push her and her props around and just speaking personally this drivability is one of the best things about blaze blue it provides so much variety to these characters each fighting game has a range to what their Fighters can do and to understand the game you need to understand that range and the range of abilities in blazeblue are so wide that I'm sure some people might find it exhausting but I love it it made every character feel new and no matter how many fires were added in this series I always got excited to see what they could do I record a lot of food to these games and even late into the fourth installment I still wanted to keep playing and running through the arcade with these characters because it was always a brand new experience and I've always said that one of the best things about fighting games is that there is a character out there for everyone no matter what your play style is no matter what your taste may be you will find that character that is for you and with the variety and drivabilities and play Styles mixed with the creative cast of characters blazeblue is the living embodiment of that mentality and speaking of that let's go ahead and talk about these characters now as I said I'm going to save the big details about the characters for when we actually talk about the story but I do want to give at least a little bit of rundown on each of them which means that you do need a little bit of info on what the story is this series is set in a world where a hundred years ago a giant monster appeared called the black beast it rampaged across the world for years but eventually six Heroes appeared to fight back one of these Heroes developed a new type of Technology called grimoires which allowed humans to use an artificial form of magic called ARS Magus with these six Heroes and the armies of man now using ours magas humans were able to fight the Beast and eventually destroyed it unfortunately when the Beast died it let loose a wave of toxic gas called Seether to survive this new poison fog spraying across the world humans had to retreat to the tops of mountains and built brand new cities known as hierarchical cities after the war a new military force known as the Novus orbis librarium aka the nol aka the library declared they would decide who could and could not use ARS Magus people rebelled against this leading to a civil war in the land of ikarga resulting in the nol killing the agario leader and making themselves the police of the entire world now in each hierarchical City there's an nol branch and in the nol base there's something known as a cauldron which serves as a gateway to a dimension between realities known as the boundary which is overflowing with cedar this seems like a very dangerous thing to constantly be tapping into but since Cedar Powers the nol's grimoires that's why they keep these cauldrons running but also because they believe that at the center of the boundary is the most concentrated form of Seether imaginable known as the Azure which is said to be so powerful that you've got your hands on you could reshape reality so now that we've got all that established who are our Fighters our protagonist is Ragnar the blood Edge when he was a boy growing up in an orphanage his arm was cut off by his brother Jin his sister was abducted and his home was burned to the ground so yeah he's got a lot of baggage his life was then saved by jubei a talking cat who despite his size and appearance was one of the six legendary heroes from a hundred years ago Juve then replaces Wagner's arm with the Azure grimoire said to be one of the strongest grimoires imaginable with the power to as you can probably guess tap into the Azure itself Ragnar now travels the world trying to bring down the nol by destroying their cauldrons next up is Ragnar's rival his aforementioned brother Jin who not only joined the nol but even killed akarga's leader and was hailed as the hero of the okarga war he's a high-ranking officer in the nol and is always very serious and professional but he's also a complete a-hole who treats everyone around him like trash and the moment he hears his brother is headed to the cauldron in the city of kagetsuji he loses his mind goes AWOL and becomes obsessed with tracking him down working under Jinn is the final part in our Trio of Heroes Noel Vermillion she was an orphan who doesn't remember much about her past but despite being such a punching bag in the series that's actually kind of pathetic at times give it back please those are important they're really important to me so please give them back no she is incredibly skilled at RS megas and even possesses a set of guns that are some of the most powerful grimoires on the planet next up the big Grappler of the game iron dagger he's a mountain of a man who's all about business and all about carrying out his missions and works for a super scientist named kokonoi who is part of sector 7. sector 7 is a group of scientists who oppose the nol I personally love tager not just because he comes off as a good dude but also because he's a Grappler whose drivability allows you to magnetize the opponent and pull them in just saying that sentence alone is enough to give some people nightmares there's Bing shishigami a ninja from ikarga who is trying to help other survivors from that war he's got a big heart and he cares about everyone but he's also kind of an idiot at times and he often gets used as a source of Comedy Carl Clover is a vigilante who hunts down criminals alongside the giant doll that accompanies him and as I'm sure many of you can guess he is a puppet fighter who controls his doll with his try button he also refers to this doll as his sister which will be important later next is Rachel a la carte a vampire who despite her appearances actually hundreds of years old and has helped you guide ragna in his quest for years even though her superiority complex frames all of her help through insults lychee FEI Ling is a doctor working in kagutsuchi the city where the first game takes place but she has a mysterious history that largely revolves around our next fighter Arachne this blob of darkness and insects used to be a scientist working for sector 7 but he became so obsessed with finding the Azure inside the barrier that he fell inside of it and well yeah this is why you don't want to expose yourself to Too Much Seether it tends to make cronenberg's happen then there's talcaka she's part of a race of cat people called the Kaka Clan and despite being the protector of said Clan she basically acts like a hyperactive kid who just wants to eat hakuman was one of the six legendary heroes who fought against the black beast and now for some reason he is obsessed with the idea of murdering ragna wow him and jyn have a whole lot in common I bet they'd get along great he's also one of the more unique fires in this early game as he uses his own special meter for all of his moves that slowly builds up on his own which admittedly can make doing some combos very complicated but he deals massive damage so it is worth that work and lastly the boss of the game new 13. she's what's known as a murokumo unit a type of Android designed to go into the boundary she's super robotic and emotionless unless she's fighting ragna then she becomes an obsessed fan girl also she's made of like 90 knives and swords and she fights like most zonary zoner in fighting game history and that is your roster and premise for blaze blue Calamity trigger okay I know that was a lot but I promise that's about the most story you're going to get in this episode if you could listen to all that without your head exploding like that guy from scanners then congrats yes folks this series plot is complicated and the world of blazeblue already has a massive wall of lore as soon as the Story begins and about seven more walls of lore that won't be revealed until later games even though they start referencing those later walls of lore in the very first game I mentioned that Maury P started thinking of these characters in this series back in middle school and this series totally has that Vibe of story you thought up 20 years ago and you kept adding onto it in your head for years before you actually wrote any of it out and to everyone who thinks I'm being too harsh on the story even more himself said this story is a jumbled mess in an interview with Red Bull in 2017 Moy was asked about his inspiration in creating this story and he said and I quote actually I just created a world combined a lot of things that interest me though I admit in hindsight it was probably difficult at times for players to follow along and speaking as someone who had to figure out this story for this retrospective I would like to respond to that comment with an overly sarcastic no the hell you say but I won't make something clear as crazy complicated and flat out incomprehensive as this story can get at times it is still totally possible to enjoy these characters without knowing anything about the plot I had several people talk to me while I was working on this video saying they don't understand the story at all but they still have a close attachment to these characters because their personalities and their relationships still manage to come through even if you don't understand the basis for it and I totally get that I had zero idea what the plot blaze blue was until like two years ago but I still really enjoyed these characters because these games give them so much personality whether that be in the actual story mode itself or in the combat there are so many unique interactions between specific characters when they fight whether that be unique in-round dialogue between characters or in the intro animations and imagine the unique voice lines and that's something else that I have to bring up about these characters The Voice Action in Japanese is great I think the actors each nail their care especially tomokaza tsugita who plays ragna and brings a Gruff beaten down anger to that role but this was one of the first times that I ever heard a Japanese fighting game get not just an English dub but an actual good English dub yeah at this time if a Japanese fine game got an English dub it was typically pretty bad but blazeblue had an All-Star cast of some of the biggest dub actors out there and they each brought their a game to this mellow Lee brought this elegance and snobbishness to Rachel that made her seem wise Beyond her appearance Jameson price gave tiger this stoic all business attitude Philly sampler who sadly passed away recently gave talcocker so much energy and charm Patrick sites as ragna nailed every over-the-top attack that he had to shout out and I gotta applaud David Vinson who probably blew out all of his vocal cords every time that he had to say I get to kill you again let's kill each other no one else can kill you the hero of a cargo everybody don't get me wrong I know there are some people out there who still prefer the Japanese track and that's totally fine but it's been my experience that the blaze blue English dub has been one of the most positively received dubs in fine game history and I think a lot of that is because this cast understood the assignment no matter what insane thing they had to say they gave it their all listen you heard the brief plot synopsis I gave well the full version is about 20 times more complicated with 50 more made up nouns and verbs so I guarantee most of this cast didn't know what anything they were saying meant but they still deliver those lines like they did and God bless them for that and they had to record a lot of lines for this because well it's time that we finally talk about that story mode again not really in terms of the plot but in terms of the structure because this wasn't just a massive story mode it was also a very different type of story mode every single character has their own story but those stories can diverge in different ways you'll be given choices to make which can determine where the story goes but you can also change your path by losing certain fights or finishing fights with supers and as a result each character has around three different endings that you can get and here's the crazy thing every single one of these endings contains some bit of information that is going to help you fill in this story imagine the plot blaze blue is super thick and hard to comprehend but I gotta say playing through each story and gain all the different endings was actually fun because each time Nikon ending I went wait so they said this thing here and in this character's ending they said that thing and those two things can mean this third thing play through the story mode gave me that satisfaction of putting a puzzle together when you get those two good pieces that finally match up in fact you even sometimes get important bits of information from losing a match and I don't mean these Story related losses that send you off in a different direction no I mean the fights that you're not supposed to lose every time that you lose a match whether you were supposed to or not you get unique dialogue and sometimes that can give you another piece of this puzzle which brings me to the other reason why I play through this story so many times each time that you get one of the Innings or you take a new route in the character story you'll see the completion percentage go up and if I see a completion counter going up it causes my brain to start sparking and I have to see it all the way through unfortunately you don't get 100 by fighting all the fights and getting all the endings you get 100 by fighting all the fights getting all the endings and losing to every single character and seeing their unique loss dialogue and what do you get for all that work well I'm happy to say there actually is a completion bonus in this game if you 100 a character story then you unlock a short interview with that character's voice actor that's actually kind of neat so this is granted the interview is with the Japanese voice actor and isn't subtitled so this really meant nothing to me but hey at least it's something that's more than a lot of other fighting games would do now there is something else you unlock when you play through the story mode although it's not really a bonus more of a necessity if you're playing through the story mode and you're getting confused by the tidal wave of new terms and vaguely referenced history that's being thrown your way then you will unlock a Mode called Teach Me Miss YG this is a feature where the game explains to you what certain terms mean give you context of the history they keep referencing it's the kind thing that series like this needs and how they convey all this information through sketch comedy of course how else would they do it yeah the setup for this is that lychee and Tao Kaka are meeting other characters who try to teach Tao but only after you sit through several minutes of them goofing around don't get me wrong there is a charm to this and hearing the characters actually explain historical events is more effective than just reading it on Wiki but it was a bit annoying that I went into this one to learn what hierarchical city was and they would only tell me after saying through a five minute bit about Noel's friend getting stuck in a tree guys I'm pointing retrospective together over here I'm on the clock let's get a move on it now won't you be in every character story mode at least once and gotten one of their endings then you unlock the true ending a true ending that leaves off on a massive cliffhanger a massive Cliffhanger that makes pretty much zero sense to you right now but hey that just shows how far ahead Mori had planned the story out I mean I'll admit yes a lot of the stuff you hear in this story mode is going to sound like pure nonsense flowing into word soup but after playing through every game story and then going back and reviewing This I Gotta admit so much in this story that sounds like gibberish actually was referencing stuff that would be explained two or three games later it's kind of wild how much was set from the start and even Wilder that arxus believed in this brand new game enough that they were willing to leave it on a big to be continued I mean they didn't know how audiences would react to this what if it bombed well luckily this brand new Venture paid off I mentioned that the game received very positive reviews but that doesn't necessarily always translate to cells I mean you can have the greatest game on the market doesn't mean much if nobody buys it well much to the Delight of arses people did buy it a lot in the first three years blaze blue Calamity trigger sold 1.7 million copies days wage if this was Capcom or Bandai Namco that would be a disappointment good thing this was Palmer Bandai Namco no this was Arc systems and for them this was one of the biggest successes they had ever had as I said their go to your games brought in critical praise and a die-hard fan maze but they never brought in much money and while all the numbers for their games aren't rarely available from what I've been able to tell it looks like blazeblue went on to sell more than every version of Gilda gear X and X2 combined and trust me that's a lot of versions just to give you an idea of what a big boom this was for arx's the last Guild a year game to come out before this was double X accent core and that sold 40 000 copies in Japan in its entire lifespan blaze blue Calamity trigger sold 60 000 copies in Japan in its first month and these sales can largely be attributed to all the points I've already laid out the designs the accessible combat the story but quite possibly the biggest boom blaze blue God came from something that was completely outside the dev's control but the secret to success for so many titles it's the thing that can make or break any release timing you remember how I said that was a risk to make this a 2d fighter when it was at a time when Studios were leaned heavily into 3D well just a few months before blaze blue climbing triggered released in arcades and on home consoles Street Fighter 4 was released and while it used 3D models instead of Sprites it was a return to 2D combat and it exploded people love this game and as a result 2D fighting games saw a massive surge in popularity people were demanding more 2D Fighters and Studios were ready to jump at this but it takes time to make a new game no way would anyone be able to get anything ready for at least another year but blaze blue had already been in the works and was released just a few months later making it line up perfectly to take advantage of this new fighting game boom I'm sure the game still would have sold well no matter when it was released but yeah there's no denying that Gamers racing to stores suddenly looking for 2D Fighters at the exact time that blaze blue was released East probably helped a lot and these Rising sales in this Sun's surge in the fine game genre was all arcsis needed to green light a sequel [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] Continuum Shift released in arcades in November of 2009 exactly one year after the last arcade release and only five months after the Home console release this was a hell of a turnaround how did they get a sequel out that fast well that was thanks to the magic of reused assets yes this is one of the things that I really miss from the day and age of sprite based Fighters the idea that we could get a brand new installment so quickly because you could just pick up the Sprites from the last game and put them in the new game you didn't have to rebuild everything from scratch lean to a stressful production and it gave the developers much more time to focus on balancing and improving the gameplay which the developers did a lot every single character got brand new moves giving them more options in combat and this right here this is one of the best things about blazeblue every single game from this point on would take what the previous game had made and added onto it each game gave characters new moves and mechanics wow rarely if ever removing something from them and when they did they would typically replace it with something else you remember how he said if you want to start a brand new franchise it's not a bad idea to make it accessible to large audiences and then make it more complex with each new installment yeah that starts here because of this it's almost universally agreed upon that this series got better with each installment you have someone watch the best Street Fighter you're gonna get a lot of different answers yeah someone what's the best Tekken you're going to get a lot of different answers yes someone wants the best blaze blue almost everyone is going to say the fourth one but that's not to say it's still not worth going back and replaying these older games I still have blast going back and revisiting these games and it was fun seeing how this series developed and grew over time now as for these adjustments to the mechanics one of the big ones comes from the burst now if you burst it no longer depletes your gauge instead each player has only one burst that they can use in the match but if you lose around then you can get an extra burst however that burst icon it isn't just used for defense you also now need to have a free burst in order to do your astral heat yes there is yet another stipulation to point off your insta kills you now can't use your burst throughout the match if you want to make it happen but they did ease up on a few of the other restrictions now you just have to be on point match for yourself not for both players and you can now pull up your astral heat when your opponent is at 35 Health which is way better at 20 Health the insta kills were just there for bragging right 35 actually makes them feel powerful like something that was worth 100 of your meter as for the remain bounces and gameplay changes there's a lot of small tweaks but the important thing to point out is that the combo system was reworked so that the opponents would be pushed back less allowing for bigger Combos and yeah you can totally feel that the level of crazy combo nuttiness definitely jumped up from the last game even someone like me who can barely make his thumbs work could feel the difference now when it comes to the characters as I said everyone from the last gamer turn but there were three new characters well more like two and a half new characters there's Tsubaki yayoi she's one of Noel's close friends from the military academy and a childhood friend to Jin and has a not so subtle crush on him she's professional and mature Beyond her years but when Jin goes AWOL looking for ragna and Noel disappears looking for jyn the nol Tells Tsubaki that she has to hunt down her two friends and kill them she doesn't want to do it but she was raised believing the nol is always right and that she should always do her Duty so she reluctantly agrees well that and she is using an ancient grammar that's kind of devouring her mind one of my favorite things about doing these retrospectives is that it forces me to play characters I would normally never touch and I never had any interest in playing Tsubaki but after aggregating my hands on her she became one of my favorite characters to play she's got super easy combo she's got an overhead that launches you into the air and she has ex versions of all of her moves that are charged up by holding down your drive button giving her some really good variety then there's Lambda 11. she was another murakumo unit who had been salvaged by kokonoi The Mad sassy scientist that Taylor works for and while she does have her own backstory that's really damn tragic we all know why she's here they didn't want to lose any characters but new 13 was destroyed at the end of Calamity trigger so Lambda 11 is just new 13 with a different coat of paint and lastly there's the big villain in the game hazama he was the captain in the nol who had secretly been pulling everyone's strings behind the scenes manipulating them for his own plans because of course he was I I've seen enough bleach to know you don't trust a guy who looks like this once again I enjoy the entire English voice cast for this new game but I have to get a particular shout out to Eric Davies who made hosmo sound like a cross between a schoolyard bully asking if you're gonna cry and a 1980s Wall Street exec who's coked out of his mind oh a little upset I know how you feel someone just look and turn him into something horrible right before your eyes I feel for you I do but oh my God is this fun for me especially your despair So Divine after this game however Davies would be replaced by Doug ehrholtz but he also did a great job I seriously didn't even know they changed actors until researching this video osma also serves as the final boss in the arcade lighter and this is one of the most frustrating fights in this entire series because not only does osmo use snake whips to snatch you out of the air and whip and dip and zip all around the stage but you're not fighting regular Hasma you're fighting unlimited hosma mean as soon as the match begins he surrounds himself with a ring of energy and as long as that ring stays up he heals back his life and if you step inside that ring you get poisoned and you lose life so if you start attacking but he keeps blocking you're just going to end up doing damage to yourself oh yeah hazama is pure evil in both the story and in combat he's so evil that you do his Instagram with pretzel motions and if SNK has taught me anything is that only the most Sinister of villains use pretzel motions however those are the characters that got added to the arcade release the next year in July of 2010 the game came to home consoles and if you're wondering why it took almost a year for the game to move from the arcade to consoles it's because remember when it comes to the combat there were only changes everything else was reused assets the Home console release that's where the new contents started pouring in and before we go any further I should let you all know right now Continuum Shift gets a little let's say Street Fighter Tui with its releases there was the initial Port then there was Continuum Shift 2 for the PSP and 3DS and finally Continuum Shift Extend which is basically the complete edition and each game added brand new content sticking with the characters Continuum Shift came to consoles with the same roster as the arcade plus the brand new unlockable character moo 12 who okay at the risk of getting too deep into the plot right now let's just say she's another murokumo unit who has some kind of a connection to Noel and I won't spoil much more beyond that she's a very unique character and her drive places drones all around the stage that you can then manipulate to send out attacks also while hazuma is still the technical final boss of the game she now serves as the secret funnel boss if you manage to get all the way through the arcade without losing any matches then you get to fight her but you only have one shot to beat her and yeah you might need more than one shot she's pretty tough now that was the only new character at Lawns but they did release multiple DLC characters Platinum the Trinity who is a young girl that looks like a Sailor Scout but she's actually got two Souls inside of her a young shy boy named Sinner and a foul-mouthed trouble-making girl named Luna plus a third soul that lives in her staff glassfield who was another one of the six legendary heroes she's kind of whatever describes rap bad character her drive lights are summing out random new weapons to use which can make learning her a little bit difficult since you don't know what you're going to get next but each of her weapons are goofy and fun so I'm cool with it also I have to point this out platinum's default stage is called bascule and this is one of the best stages in the entire game for one simple reason it's the stage that gave us the hype dog yes this big mouth furball is going to constantly be in the background throughout the entire match cheering you on with his repetitive barks and I love it I mentioned that Maury said that he was a big dark joggers fan and that series left an impact on him this has to be a reference to the cheering dog in bishomone stage back in the old dark stalkers games this has to be an Easter egg of sorts but whether or not it's completely original or is inspired by darkstalkers the fan base loves hype dog this has become one of the most beloved figures in this entire game heck it's become one of the most beloved figures for Ark systems in general people love the hype dog okay speaking of dogs getting back to the characters falconhein our Helsing is next he's Rachel's Butler who is fiercely loyal to her and he's also a werewolf and his dry button gives him the ability to transform and guess what he was also one of the six legendary heroes yeah we're starting to fill in that legendary hero bingo card real quick aren't we and the final DLC character was Makoto nanaya another classmate of Noel and tsubakis and a huge fan favorite character she's perky inner Jag upbeat she's basically the power of friendship personified you may also have known she's a squirrel girl because yes animal people are a thing in this universe and she punches things incredibly hard when this game was coming out being the huge comic book fan that I was I couldn't help but draw very clear comparisons between her and Marvel's unbeatable Squirrel Girl Marvel vs Arc system works just throwing it out there make it happen Daisuke her drivability lets you hit the opponent with three different levels of punches depending on how long you hold the button down and all of her supers are hilariously over the top they are low with so much personality I love them also I have to point out that Makoto may have the craziest origin story of any character in this roster not in terms of lore or in game story no I mean in terms of development in an interview with four gamer toshimichi Mori was promoting an upcoming Blaze Blue Manga the blood Edge experience alongside the manga's author Mako Comal the interviewer brought the fact that komal had written a lot of romances between women and mangas before and they asked if Mori had any plans on any romance like that to blazeblue Lori then revealed that originally Tsubaki was going to be a lesbian who was deeply in love with Noel but he said he got about halfway through the script and said it just wasn't working out so he rewrote Tsubaki to now be in love with jyn but then he looked at Noel zubaki and said well now these two don't have anything in common why are they even hanging out so at the last minute he just sketched up the Squirrel Girl and threw her in there to basically just be the person who keeps Noel and shubaki talking to each other I love Makoto and I'm glad that she exists but it is Wilder thing that is how this fan favorite and very important character to the plot came into existence but looking back on it's kind of obvious that she was an afterthought and Calamity trigger she's just a goofy ditzy friend to the other two girls while in Continuum Shift and Beyond she's a badass energetic punching machine so it's kind of clear that Maury didn't really have any ideas for her until the second game but Makoto wasn't the only character to get some personality tweaking in this game imagine that when it comes to the gameplay this is when blaze blue really became blaze blue for me but that also goes for the characters in the first game sure some characters were here for fun but most of them were pretty serious I mean ragno was just every dark bad boy Edge lore that you drew in your high school notebook but starting with Continuum Shift this series added a much needed chunk of Comedy don't get me wrong there were characters in the last game like bang and Tao who were definitely meant to be funny but now almost everyone had a sense of humor behind them especially ragna he's now throwing out one-liners and he has a far more relatable I am so so done with everyone's nonsense attitude about him in other words they took Ragnar from generic edgy protag and turned him into anime Bruce Campbell and I for one I'm okay with that hey team Gothic Lolita you want to include me in the conversation well hello Mr Fancy Pants I swear I've never seen this little ragamuffin before in my life you gotta understand man I I never even saw these before once she'd finally come to her senses Madam Rachel rewarded my bravery with this everything I don't care I feel like this was the game that kind of got the tone of blaze blue because part of the appeal of this series is that it's a story about souls and gods and life and death and loss and angst and torment but it's being told by people who realize how weird this is and they're not afraid to take the piss out of it and nowhere is that more clear than in the gag endings yes story mode returns and we'll delve into that in a moment but every character now had multiple endings again including a designated gag ending and these gag endings are insane in the best way in the story mode you'll come to a point where you'll be given a choice and one of those choices will lead you to the gag ending and these are like 10 to 15 minute long skits there are some of the wackiest things I can imagine but they are hilarious listen I know they teach me miss lady stuff was supposed to be funny but never worked on me I just didn't really enjoy it all that much these gag endings on the other hand almost all that made me audibly laugh out loud I'd only plan on getting two or three of them to show off in this video but then I watched a 15 minute long skit about ragna on a ghost ship and I laughed so hard at I need to see all of them that's right Captain Jin of the HMS Nirvana lowly tuna fishing vessel Captain ragna did not attack your ship because he was after the Crimson grimoire he panicked because he was afraid of ghosts HMS Nirvana Rama just like Panic like the little city mirror he is when he found that you were a ghost although speaking of the comedy I debated whether or not I should address this but the point of these retrospectives is to give you an accurate summation of the series so there's no way I could ignore this when it comes to the comedy of blaze blue there is one joke that this series loves returning to over and over again oh hey you boobzilla miss lychee came to us with her wondrous breasts they're not nearly as big and fluffy as they appear oh or did you already feel your flat-chested chick quota for the series boobs are the foundation Society is built upon boobs equal power hey Puppeteer mask where are you guys so hung up on back-breaking boobs anyhow ah would you look at the time until next time magical girls I bid you adieu yeah if I had to describe the tone of blaze blue I'd say it's one part High fantasy one part mid-2000s anime one part edgy Street attitude one part Japanese mythology and one part the authors barely disguised fetish this game loves its boob jokes Maury P loves boobs like the street fighter 6 devs love feet Mori P loves boobs so much that when researching this video I found an interview with famitsu where they actually ask him about how much he brings up boobs and rather than trying to downplay it he proceeded to pull out his boob tier list and started ranking all the characters in The Game and I'm not judging it's his game you can point here whatever he wants and hell I'll admit I laughed at a good chunk of these jokes but in case you're thinking about checking these games out yeah I figured I should probably warn you all not to play them around Grandma and Grandpa this holiday season then again I don't know your grandma and grandpa maybe they're cool with it use your best judgment now when it comes to the single player content this game introduced a new Mode called Legion Legion which first appeared in the PSP version of Calamity trigger but this was its first time appearing on a Home console version this is a really clever mode where you pick a character the new challenge other fires across a map and each time that you beat a group of characters you then get to pick one of them to join your team but every time that Warrior fires is ko'd that's it they're gone it's basically the fighting game equivalent of a Nuzlocke and I think it's brilliant it's a fairly simple challenge but deciding what carriers you want to join or which characters you might have to sacrifice saying them out there against a big team gives it enough strategy to make it a unique experience there's so many other games out there that could benefit from something like this I mean kof you're already a team based game this is an easy setup for you how did blaze blue beat you to this now as for the story mode itself once again every single character has their own unique story mode but luckily this time to unlock the true ending you do not need to finish everyone's story and to get 100 you don't have to lose all the the matches oh right you don't have to lose on purpose to get 100 completion I guess that really pissed people off last time no the hell you say um sorry as I was saying to unlock the true ending then you just had to get the correct inning for ragna Noel Jin Rachel Tsubaki hakuman and Hasma then the true ending opens however I will repeat you have to get the correct ending for them because as I mentioned there are three different endings for every single character the gag ending as we already talked about then there is the true Canon ending and then there is essentially the bad ending and while some of these bad endings are actually pretty cool you can't beat the game if you get them so how do you figure out how to get the correct ending well that would be thanks to the brand new segment help me Professor kokonoi yes the teach me Miss YG series does return but so does a brand new segment in the same vein where kokonoi will come out and try to vaguely give you hints about how to unlock the true ending as I said I wasn't really a big fan of Teach Me Miss YG but I actually dig these coconut segments they're Charming you've got a few good laughs in here and they're much shorter and to the point oh it's just a fun character I respect anyone in Crazy sci-fi fans he's saying who's tired of everyone else's nonsense now I mentioned that this game had multiple installments and each of them did provide something different first up Continuum Shift 2 was an update that you could download for the base version but it was also the version that was released on the PSP and the 3DS I decided to check it out on the 3DS because around this time every fighting game wanted to make a special version just for the 3DS but most of them would heavily use the bottom touch screen such as Street Fighter which let you just touch the screen on the bottom in order to do moves but Continuum Shift 2 is just regular blaze blue and it plays about as well as you could possibly imagine blaze blue running on a 3DS you could actually do the same combos in here that you could do on the Home console and that's actually kind of impressive but the biggest thing that I have to give the 3DS version is the thing that sadly I can't actually show you it's the 3D which is shockingly good laser blue already used multiple layers for its backgrounds so when they put on the 3DS they just made it so that when you raise the 3D filter it separates the layers and it looks great again I can't actually show you that because it's impossible to capture the 3d effect from the 3DS but trust me it's pretty cool but the big thing that's worth mentioning about Continuum Shift 2 was that all the DLC Carriage were included as unlockables and they introduced a brand new mode Abyss mode in this mode you have to make your way through the hierarchical city of kagatsuchi starring at floor 1 and going all the way down either for 100 500 or 999 depending on the difficulty that you said battling through enemies all the way down not argument wrong that doesn't mean that you have to fight almost a thousand opponents no as you fight you'll see a counter going up showing what floor you're on with your performance to sign how quickly you move through it then whenever you hit a floor divisible by 20 you're transported to a boss fight against an extra beefy opponent but when you defeat them you get to pick one of four Buffs these Buffs can be anything from increasing your stats to regenerating your life bar giving you an extra burst we can in your opponent it's kind of nuts how much they gave you to unlock then whenever you try to start a brand new run you can go into the shop and purchase any of the previous Buffs that you already unlocked to start your run with when I check this mode out I thought it was just going to be a fancy version of survival mode but I was delighted to find that I was wrong it's not survival mode it's Hades this is a roguelike one of the points to see how good of a run you can get by picking up Buffs along the way and unlocking ways to improve your future runs and I got hooked on this getting buffed was always such a rush and thinking of ways to make myself stronger for the next one was so addictive and I know some people might have problems with the fact that whenever you start a brand new run if you want to start it with Buffs you have to spin the in-game currency to unlock those Buffs but to me all that did was just rank up the tension and put Stakes on it sure I could now get these Buffs but if I didn't make it all the way through this ladder this time that meant I just wasted some of the in-game currency it's risk and reward and it made every Victory so satisfying and made every defeat just make me want to get right back in there and I want to point this out for a second I talk a lot on this channel about the importance of single player content in your fighting games but a lot of people hear that and they think oh but single player content is hard it costs tons of money and time to come up with a big cinematic story mode and at that I say then don't do a big cinematic story mode use your brain and count with some unique and interesting single player modes that use the assets already in the game and Legion mode and Abyss mode are perfect examples of that and the abysmo carried over to the final version of the game Continuum Shift Extend however for some weird reason they got rid of Legion mode I have no idea why you would remove modes from the complete version of your game when they were both available on the previous version of your game that makes zero sense to me but they did replace it with a brand new single player mode called unlimited Mars where you face off with super powered unlimited versions of your opponents this is the final challenge it's the mode made just for those who have mastered the game and are the true Ultimate Warrior okay [Music] which I am not you will not be seeing a lot of unlimited Mars in this video my apologies but the main draw of the extend version was tons of new story content including story modes for all the DLC characters a few Side Stories and even bonus dialogue in the pre-existing story lines that's actually wild that it went back and updated the story that was already in the previous games but I have to bring this up you can tell the team on the English side were being pushed hard to get the extra content out on time because in extend there are tons of problems with the translation and the dub that were not in the base game you'll see typos text boxes completely different from what's being said God damn it old man I know you're trying to hold back that laugh completely blank text boxes the grimoires were created to fight the black beast but we've learned plenty of ways that our smagus can be used for Less military applications and most bizarre of all multiple times I encountered the game just switching to the Japanese audio out of nowhere as you know the birth rate of males among the Kaka Clan is very low and The Village's population has never exceeded 100 there's no reason to think that will change in the near future [Music] [Applause] [Music] I said these story modes were huge so the english team being told hey guess what you have to write all that stuff you just wrote again plus extra stuff must have just been too much I can only imagine how hard they were crunching to get this out on time but there was one more addition making extend the true best version of the game an additional new character relia's Clover he's a sociopathic mad scientist who serves as one of the biggest villains in the franchise and he's obsessed with knowledge and specializes in building puppets and high-tech machines such as the murakumo units and in case you're wondering hey wait he uses puppets just like Carl and they even have the same last name yes this is Carl Clover's father and if you want to know how evil Aurelius is well remember how Carl kept calling his robot partner sister yeah I'm just gonna let you guys think about that one for a sec now with each game the sales figures did become a little bit hard to figure out but looking at the physical sales numbers it looks like the game sold about as many copies as Calamity trigger while costing much less to make thanks to all the reused Assets in other words this was another hit for Arc system works so they got to work on the next installment which would be their biggest game yet [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you blaze blue Chrono phantasma would release an arcade in November 2012 and it would continue arx's quest to make the weirdest title in fighting games history just like Continuum Shift Chrono phantasma saw several balance changes new moves in additions to the gameplay for starters you can now spin a quarter of your heat gauge to do a guard break and I love this Edition nothing feels quite as good as hating your opponent who won't stop blocking with a guard break and then comboing that right into a super but easily the biggest addition was overdrive this is a rechargeable ability that is triggered by hitting all four buttons this will send you into overdrive mode where your character would receive multiple Buffs but not basic stuff that you would expect like increased speed and strength no in overdrive mode every single character gets some kind of a unique buff that leans into their playstyle for example remember how he said tager has the ability to magnetize the opponent well normally after you magnetize them you have to hit the drive button to pull them into you but overdrive they're just getting vacuumed right into you at all times Makoto can hit her drive to do three different punches depending on how long you hold the button down when overdrive that punch is at max strength at all times really is normally burns up a special meter whenever he's using his puppet but an overdrive that meter gradually recovers I love the overdrive system because not only does it reward you for knowing your character inside out but I said that the drive system helps make every single character feel like they come from a completely different game and the overdrive system leans even further into that and in addition to this the overdrive also grants you another more basic yet still very satisfying buff while in overdrive all your Sue birds are enhanced into more powerful versions so even if you're picking up a brand new character and you haven't learned them yet use that overdrive and enjoy your new and improved overdrive finish or don't use the overdrive and hold on to it and save it to get the enemy off you because your overdrive is also now how you do your Burns yes they once again decide to Tinker around with the burst mechanic but you know what I think they finally nailed it you now have to decide do I want to get the opponent off of me or do I want to do extra damage fighting games are all about choices and overdrive is great for that there were also other tweaks to make the combat quicker but perhaps my favorite update for this game your heat gauge increases way faster real talk when recording this video it was hard for me to get some of those astral finishers in the previous games because my meter just would not build fast enough I actually got time over in some matches trying to get 100 meter because it just rose that slowly but now yeah there's no problem your meter Rises nice and quick heck I even got enough meter in some matches to do a super and then I still had enough by the end of the match to do the ends to kill and thanks to the quicker and smoother combat it makes comboing into your finishers way easier so yeah I don't know if you can tell from the tone of my voice but I like this game I love the combat I said that each installment of blaze blue improved the gameplay and sure I like Calamity trigger I am enjoyed Continuum Shift but once we hit Chrono phantasma I was head over heels for this game it was actually hard for me to put this game down and then move on to the next one because I just wanted to keep playing this but the combat wasn't the only thing to see a huge leap from the last game as I said Continuum Shift launched with only two new characters three of you count Lambda but Chrono phantasma featured several new additions first up is Azrael one of the big villains of the series he's an insanely strong criminal who's obsessed only with fighting and when it comes to the lore he might be the most OP character in the entire series like he's so strong he can rip through reality just by flexing his muscles then there's either yoin remember how he said that Tsubaki was using an ancient grimmar that was kind of eating her brain yeah this is her after becoming completely possessed by that grammar and turned into sort of a holy futuristic executioner then there's Amani Nishiki a dancer who leads a traveling theater troop and fights scarves and wraps that turn to drills they're very mysterious character constantly appearing in places that they shouldn't be with knowledge that they shouldn't have we'll talk about them more and we cover the story and speaking of the story our last character is bullet a character who the blaze blue fandom constantly dunks on for being the least important character to the plot yeah but it's important to the story is the source of constant jokes from the fan base but I gotta take umbrage with that bull was a member of a group of mercenaries and her entire Squad was wiped out but she hears that her Captain may still be alive at sector 7 and she's out to find him hmm how mysterious I wonder who it could possibly be so yeah she doesn't actually play into the overall plot I mean heck there's a moment in the story where she is hanging out with another character who is very important to the story and then the next time we see that character bullet is nowhere to be seen and she never comes up again so yes I understand all the jokes but I got news for you guys a lot of characters in these games don't play into the overall plot Bullet at least provides some backstory and depth to the other characters so hey I'm cool with her plus she's got a crazy unique Drive she puts a ring around herself and if you get inside of that ring when she's charging it she will instantly run in and gravel you also worth pointing out that new 13 returns although they lost Lambda who again was just new 13. so again not really a new character more of just blaze Blue's continuous game of robot musical chairs now those were the characters for the arcade release but when it came to home consoles they did add another character Kyra mooski one of the strongest fighters on the planet and the head of the nol's elite guards he is also a drunk party animal who hits on everything that moves so I guess you could say there's a lot of layers to him seriously suck a babe what's so great about this guy I'm way more Alpha than he is okay maybe not a ton of layers but there's something his Drive lets him take a stance and while in this stands all his attacks do brand new moves which can make doing his combos a little bit difficult but he hits like a truck so it's all good now that was the only new console character and in an interview with silkenera Mori made sure to say that Chrono phantasma would not have any DLC characters so that was it that was the roster you were going to get for this game so anyway the two DLC characters were kokonoi yeah remember her well The Sassy scientist finally jumps into The Fray summoning out weapons from portals and her drive sets up gravity traps that allow for all kinds of crazy mix-up heck there's even a trophy that you can get in the game that involves using your gravity devices to keep the opponent Airborne for most of the match by the way quick note I don't know who came up with the names for the trophies in this game but I want them to know I see you and I appreciate you these were great A Plus trophy names all around good job and the second DLC character was Yuki terami now who is Yuki teramin he's the big villain of the entire series he's the one who forced jyn to cut ragna's arm off as a kid and all this time he's been a spirit living inside of hazama but now the two of them have separated and he's free and he's ready to just be the biggest a-hole imaginable seriously his attacks are designed solely to make you feel bad they are so dehumanizing and his Drive Stills your heat gauge and adds it to his own giving him a ton of meter to burn through throughout the fight and you know what while we're talking about these brand new characters I'm going to jump around a bit because one year after this game hit consoles the updated Edition came out called Chrono phantasma extend and for starters the game brought Lambda back meaning that now you had new and Lambda together for all your robot sword spamming needs and also it introduced the brand new character Celica a Mercury Celica has a mountain of lore behind her that we are going to say for the next video but what you need to know about her is that she is a super sweet kind-heart soul with healing magic that doesn't want anyone to fight and they want everyone to get along doesn't really sound like someone you'd expect to find in a fighting game right well don't worry because kokonoi built her a robot partner who does all the fighting for her giving her some of the best animations in the game I love her astral heat where she heals your entire life bar back only for her robot to fly into the sky and then take you out when she's not looking it is load with so much personality finish [Music] so the combat's better the cast is great what isn't there to like about this game well I'll admit most people won't care about this but there is one nitpick that I have with this installment as I said I really enjoyed abysmo in the last game and it does return for this game but it's a little different now and yeah it's not as fun the basic premise is the same you're still making your way through a tower of battles gained various Buffs along the way but now the Buffs to your stats that you get remain whenever you start a brand new run you don't have to purchase them all over again which might sound like a good thing but it means that they just keep stacking forever so this isn't really a road like anymore where you have to figure out how to get the best run you basically just keep playing through it getting stronger and stronger until you can steamroll your opponents no problems so it kind of takes some of the challenge out of it and makes it just feel like you're grinding in an RPG but when talking about the single player modes we have to bring up the story and for Chrono phantasma the story mode received a massive overhaul gone were the days where every single character had their own unique story instead there were only three stories the main story a story focusing on sector 7 and a story focusing on the six legendary heroes and to get to the end of the game you had to complete each of them but hey we're going from 12 stories in the first game and seven mandatory stories in the second game two only three great that means this story mode will be easy to get through I'll be able to clear through this thing in no time holy crap folks I won't lie I looked that number up before starting this game just to try and gauge how much time I would need to spend recording and I thought no way is that real that's gotta be fake that's gotta be like the story mode in the arcade modes in multiple different routes right nope that's the story mode all on its own there are some bonus side stories that they added in extend and of course the gag stories return which are always appreciated but that main storyline is so long I didn't have time for any of that this thing is a beast yeah this game hit arcades in November 2012 but they didn't come to home consoles until October of the next year and it took another six months for it to be released outside of Japan and I can pretty much guarantee you that was all thanks to the tidal wave of text that is this game story mode and folks I'm not gonna criticize this story no I think the actual blood itself is just fine but the density of this story is intimidating and I'm not just speaking for myself I talked about this a lot in social media and I got so so many replies from people saying yeah Chrono phantasma is where I checked out heck even I started wondering if I should even bother trying to summarize this story because I understood Calamity trigger I understood Continuum Shift Colonel phantasma left me with several questions I had to ask around for the Andrews and luckily a lot of people were willing to help me out include some folks from the blaze blue wikis and they cleared up a lot for me but there's still some small Nitty Gritty details that I got no clue on and the extend version adds even more to the story such as backgrounds on some of the big characters some bonus gag grills and a brand new Mini Light novel called remix heart Gaiden which is based on the manga blaze blue remix heart this focuses on my not Sumi one of Noel's classmates who was actually born a boy but was then transformed into a girl through an ARS Magus only for their father to then kick them out of the house because they had this change and now Mai lives in the nol academy dorms and is worried about their Fringe learning their secret but over time it was thanks to these friends that she was able to learn that she didn't need her father's approval and she even came to not only accept but even love of the new life that she had I've actually seen a lot of love and support from Mai from the trans Community because even though her situation is very unique and is full of sci-fi Magical elements a lot of people find things about her relationships and her journey that they relate to so this game took the story elements of the previous games and skyrocketed it to brand new levels that were quite simply maddening at times but you want to know the really frustrating thing about this story mode is that there is a secret additional mode that you can unlock but only after finishing this Monumental story and this additional mode is actually really fun you see in the story you end up facing off against this giant monster called takimikazuchi and after beating the game you unlock Highlander assault mode where you can then challenge takimikazuji with any character and if you're looking for a challenge this is it in story mode take mikizuchi isn't all that bad but in this mode ooh man I lost count of how many times I die to this thing he's got huge screen clearing attacks that deal massive damage while your attacks barely chip away at him and eventually he just puts out there so many obstacles that are constantly firing at you it practically turns this thing into a shmup shooter but when you finally beat him oh it feels so good kind of shark bait didn't just put this in the game already unlocked in the extend version I would love to tell people to play it but I don't know if I could tell them to sit through a dozen hour long story mode just to get here again I have to stress this story is all right the plot is actually pretty intriguing the characters are great but you could have easily told this thing in half the time and far more coherently but massive Labyrinth of a story mode aside I still love Chrono fantasma the combat reached close to Perfection for me so many of the new characters are incredibly fun and you can still buy the extend version of this game not just on Steam like all the other games but on Modern consoles as well but after all of this where can you go well Maury describe chroma fantasma as being roughly 80 of the way through the story meaning we were quickly approaching that finale so the very next game was going to be the one that brought this epic tale to an end [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you ladies blue Central fiction launched an arcade in November 2015 and no I don't know why every single arcade release of blaze blue came out in November that's just a really weird coincidence or the entire secret to the Lord's hidden there somewhere either way I'm not figuring it out and yes folks you heard correct this game was the finale to the blaze blue Saga or at least the intended original Saga I don't know if you've noticed yet but in addition to all these games coming out in November they all share something else in common every single one of them has a subtile that begins with the letter c and that was intentional as these four games were referred to as the C Series and were meant to be one continuous storyline with the original plan to continue blaze blue on with a brand new cast of characters and a new plotline later on but uh uh yeah we'll get to that later for now let's see how this series went out in terms of gameplay guess what there were several small changes and rebalances once again shocking right however comparing the leap from the first game to the second game and the second game to the third game I feel like the changes between Chrono phantasma and Central fiction aren't nearly as big Chrono phantasma feels like a completely different game from Continuum Shift Central fiction feels like a really polished version of Chrono phantasma the only two big changes is that now when you go into your overdrive mode you can once again press all four buttons to activate exceed Excel which is just a really fancy way of saying a free super yes you're regenerating Super Saiyan meter also gives you a free super on the house now it's nuts and I love it and what makes this even better is the other brand new mechanic active flow this is a state that your character can enter when you continuously been playing aggressive for a period of time such as continuously attacking the oppon or constantly going in on them and once activated your damage increases but more importantly your overdrive meter recovers quicker so you pop overdrive do some major damage come out of overdrive but then you keep attacking and you'll charge that drive back up in no time listen I'll admit I'm a super Unga Bunga fighter I love going in and being aggressive in fighting games which is just my really nice way of saying I'm kind of stupid and I just like hitting buttons so if you give me a mechanic that rewards being aggressive I'm on board as for the new content this game introduced speedstar mode where you have to be a set number of characters in a limited amount of time but you could get bonus time by pulling off certain achievements again really impressive how blaze blue continue to come up with interesting single player modes that are really addictive all while using the resources already in the game itself and speaking of that Abyss mode returns and God it is weird this time I vote about eight hours into Abyss mode in central fiction and I didn't understand what I was doing until about halfway through that okay let me see if I can explain this without chewing through my own tongue there are now eight different Towers each with a hundred floors divided into easy medium and hard but now you have to equip a grammar before going into combat the grimoire will decide how much of a boost you can get to your stats and you can equip skills to those grimoires am I saying Grimace too much too bad because I'm not stopping you unlock new skills after each normal fight and new grimoire after every 20th floor boss fight as you fight you'll rank up your character which lets you increase your stats but you also rank up your grammar once your grimoire is maxed out you can then destroy it and get all the skills in their back but now those skills will level up into stronger versions of themselves problem is grimoires Can Only Hold skills up to a certain Rank and if you level a skill up too much it might rank up and then you might not have a grammar that can handle it so okay it's admittedly a little bit more complicated than the previous games and I'm really torn on it because on the one hand it relies way too much on luck now you don't get to pick your skills or your grammars they just give you one at random so you might have to grind like crazy to get a grammar that can accurately handle the skills that you have and to make matters worse they put way too many roadblocks in your way because there's one more Tower in here the Boss Rush Tower these are a series of fights against insanely strong a punch with flat out nutty abilities I'm talking stuff like only takes damage from counters their defense is so high that you can't damage them but they lose defense each time you knock them down or my personal favorite unlimited astral Heats really good [Music] I bring this up because you start out only being able to challenge the easy towers you won't move up to medium and get some stronger grimars you have to beat three of these bosses same goes for moving from medium to hard so you need strong remorse to challenge these bosses but you only have a small chance of gain the Grimace that you need in the tower that you're in meaning you have to just keep grinding through them until you get lucky so yeah the luck and grind factor is way too strong in this mode but that being said the Boss Rush mode with these busted abilities is a really fun idea and once I finally did get a strong Remar I was able to level up my skills to insane levels in the previous games the Regeneration ability was practically worthless the rate at which it would heal your life back was practically nothing but I got up to level seven in this game and now I was healing back faster than the computer could damage me building an Unstoppable force and then trying to take on the computer's immovable object was good old broken fun so yeah even with these problems I still got hooked on this mode and put way too much time into it again fighting game developers making single player content for your games is way easier than you might think just get weird with the resources that you already have and do something creative with it and I'll play it for hours no matter how busted it is but hey a lot of people aren't going to go for the big crazy side modes they want to stick to the basics like arcade mode and thank God Central fiction decided to get weird with that too thanks to some reality warping muggity monk that I won't go into right now almost every single character in this roster has not one not two but three arcade ladders with unique fights boss battles and endings for each of them the most important thing when it comes to your single player content in a fine game is figuring out a way to make your players want to keep using a character over and over no one wants to just re-challenge the exact same arcade letter or story mode over and over again with the exact same one character so giving them not only a bunch of different modes that you can use those characters in that I already mentioned but also three different arcade modes oh man I can't lie even when I had all the footage that I needed for this video I still found myself going I like this character I enjoy playing as them and they still got two more RK ladders I mean it can't hurt to go back in there again right just a make sure I didn't miss something important and what makes these triple arcade Liars even more impressive is the roster size including the DLC there are a total of 36 characters how big is 36 characters I mean that sounds like a thing holy yeah that is the power of reusing assets you want to get jaw-dropping roster size with three arcade ladders for everyone use what you already have as for the new carriers there's hibiki kohaku he's the serious and professional assistant who keeps the slovenly kagura in line but he's also a very skilled assassin and his drivability lets him send out Shadow duplicates across the field it's worth knowing that for blazebo's 10th anniversary arches held a character popularity poll and despite only being playable in one game hibiki came in third people love this guy probably because he's just an attack on Titan character you remember when Maury said they made these stories just by playing a bunch of stuff that he likes together yeah it ain't even subtle on this one then there's naoto kuragane who originally appeared in the manga spin-up blaze blue blooded experience he has a boatload of lore behind him but to try and keep this as simple as possible he's basically an alternate reality version of ragna I promise you that's the simplest way I can explain it he got sucked into this world looking for his friend Raquel and now he's living through the blaze blue izakai as he tries to find a way back home he's mostly known for having crazy quick attacks and dash cancels to extend his combos I remember a few years ago for a charity stream I picked nacho up for the very first time and I'll never forget that someone in the chat said quote say goodbye to your thumbs yeah that's a pretty accurate warning for Ronaldo all right then we move into the three big villains of the game starting with izanami who is essentially the god of death there is way more to her story though but we'll save all that for part two and she definitely wears that Grim deathly nature on her big sleeves with some of the creepiest supers and astral hits in the entire series then there's nine the Phantom one of these six legendary heroes who after spending a hundred years in the boundary kind of went nuts and is ready to burn everything down if you're a fan of this channel you've definitely heard me bring up nine before because she has got one of my favorite fighting game gimmicks of any character ever each of her three basic buttons are linked to an elemental attack then when you hit your drive button you do a unique attack based on whatever the last three elements were that you used she literally makes a witch's brew in the match with her attacks as ingredients that's genius and lastly there's Susan no oh the big final Baddie of the entire series and Yuki tarami's true form and nine might have my favorite gimmick but Susan Noah is a close second you see all those wash down there at the bottom of the screen those are his special moves and you can only use one of them when the match begins however whenever you attack the opponent a highlight will appear over the different locks then when you hit the drive button whatever attack is highlighted will be unlocked that may sound really complicated and it might scare some people off from trying him but all of his attacks flow and Link together so smoothly that even if you never unlock any of his specials you can still have a ton of fun with him and he can still do some massive damage and while we're talking about Susan no oh I have to bring this up he has got one of the best themes in this entire series it is a hard rock thrash metal song called must die you know your character has reached Ultimate Edge status when their theme is called must die in fact you know what I haven't brought up yet because I was waiting for this exact moment right now blazeblue has amazing music all around I mentioned that go to years Creator daisuki ishuatara did the score for the this game and if you know Daisuke ISO Atari you know his music goes all in there are so many amazing themes in this game Makoto's is this adventurous upbeat score this sector 7 theme has this smooth poppy almost mechanical getting stuff done Vibe asriel has one of the best threatening villain themes ever and bang shizugami has the ultimate put it on at the gym Saturday morning superhero theme there are so many winners in this game's soundtrack and again the fact that this game kept reusing assets and kept bringing back characters that meant they kept bringing back their score so by the time you get to Central fiction you just have wall-to-wall bangers all over the place now back to susano I should mention that he was an unlockable character but you could also buy him as DLC to get him instantly and considering that the wage will unlock him was to beat the story mode the long long ass story mode yeah nobody's going to judge you for just buying him this isn't like Mortal Kombat 11 where if you play the story mode for an hour then you unlock Frost but they still decide to try and sell her to you anyways no there's legitimate reasons to just go ahead and Fork over the cash now and speaking of that there were three other DLC characters as a robotic girl who comes from a spin-off game and has a mountain of lore behind her but the only thing that you really need to know in this game is that she was summoned by the Azure itself to be its Guardian then there's minatsume yeah remember her from the light now the last time she finally gets to jump into The Fray and she fights with a giant spear that deals major damage and has huge range and then the final character to be added jubei yes a character who has been in this story ever since the very beginning was finally playable Finn spent years asking for two way to be playable and I'd like to think that's why he was saved until the end I mean if you gotta go out might as well go out on the character everyone wants now once again there is a gigantic story mode and once again they changed up the structure but I actually dig it this time now you only have one story but after you complete a chapter of which there are a hundred by the way just to give you an idea of this game's length but whenever you complete a certain chapter then you'll unlock a Side Story these stories aren't long some of them are only about five names some of them are so short I could show you their entirety right now as I am saying this sentence but these Side Stories show you what the other characters are doing during the moments in the main plot it kind of reminds me of when a combo company does a massive crossover event and that's all contained within the main storyline but then you gotta tie-in issue over here that may or may not focus on something important and just shows you what the other characters are up to now as for the story itself it's close to As Long As Chrono phantasmas but it is far more comprehensive I mean granted that's not really saying much but I couldn't at least understand most of it and a lot of that has to do with the fact that this time we finally got answers to some of the biggest questions in the entire series things that had been bugging me since the very first game were finally explored here and that's great but there is one small issue that I have with the story this time and well honestly the entire game itself really you see blaze blue has been pretty lucky to not have any huge controversies each game sold pretty decently there were no big behind the scenes disputes at least over at arxus but this game was distributed by axis and yes that did confuse me for several years they were the ones responsible for the English dubs and on August 24 2016 just a little over two months before the game would be released on home consoles access took to Twitter and announced that because it would take about six months to do a dub they were going to skip it this time and just put the game out with the Japanese track and hey that's understandable I mean I was upset to not get the English dub but when these games are getting more competitive online scenes so everybody needs to be able to start playing at the exact same time and you run the risk of the conclusion this storyline being spoiled over those six months yeah that's two good reasons to skip the dub so that way it can just be released around the world at the exact same time what isn't understandable though is the fact that none of the English cast members were told about this yeah the English cast who had been with this game for close to a decade found out they were not going to be coming back from this very tweet which even if you don't care about the English dub you have to admit that's maybe the most dickish way of telling someone their services are no longer needed Patrick sites the voice of ragna the script adapter and voice director for Continuum Shift Extend and the guy who arranged for all the voice actors to be in the blaze blue anime in other words a guy who is kind of a big deal for these games took to Facebook after this announcement and wrote quote I'm disappointed by the news and I'm especially disappointed to begin it via tweet region after the cast would have been a simple enough courtesy for access to extend maybe they think we don't much care either way but many of us do I know I do tldr version blaze blue Central fiction isn't game dubbed I'm sad about I write about how him personally I found out and not putting any particular stock in a dub happening after the fact after all this time it hurts to be told that we're not so Central to the fiction after all damn a very personal appeal and some solid wordplay and the Cavs weren't the only ones upset at james.org petition was launched to prove to arches that they wanted the English dub to be add in a petition that ended up gained 6656 signatures God damn it guys you were 10 away from getting a very appropriate number for this series well as upset as people worry about this decision it didn't really translate to the reviews this game received generally the same positive scores as the previous games and while sales history for this game isn't available based upon physical copies sold and going off of steamspy's digital record it looks like the game ended up selling around 700 to 800 000 copies which sure isn't as high as the first game but it isn't uncommon for a game like this that just keeps changing and growing and building upon the previous game rather than trying to reset itself to slowly lose players over time but hey seven to eight hundred thousand was still pretty high for an arc systems game and it remains incredible popular in the fgc to this day you go to any tournament anywhere you're going to see a central fiction pool and arcsis realized the popularity of this game because after gilded Year's Drive saw a huge success largely thanks to their smooth rollback netcode they announced out of nowhere that they were going to go back and Patch roll back into the steam version now I don't exactly remember when the rollback got added to this game but checking steam charts I don't think it was around here not here I feel like it was somewhere around here so if you want to get into this game and you don't want to mess with the Endless Ocean of single player content you can still go online right now and play other people with some of the best net code in the industry so that's it that's the end of the main blaze blue story but it is not all there is to the blaze blue franchise because Mori said he wanted to extend blaze blue Beyond just the main series and boy he wasn't Keen about that because for a game with only four Mainline installments they pumped out so many spin-offs for this thing here we go lightning round first up blaze blue super melee Fires for the DS it's an arena fighter using Chibi characters that feel like they're meant to be a callback to teach me the sligee skits never played this one but it does look super Charming what I did play though was the next game blaze blue clone phantasma for the 3DS it takes the chibi Sprites of the last game and you just Mash away at wave after wave of these cannon fodder clones again this one looks Charming too bad the game itself stinks it is completely mindless way too repetitive it feels like something that you would put out as a free phone game and even then there's way better free phone games out there but if you do want to play it for any reason it is still available on the 3DS eShop at least for however long that sticks around next up for phones in the Nintendo switch eat beat Dead Spike son this is a rhythm game where you control dead Spike the giant face that ragna sends out as a projectile as it tries to eat up everything while dragging ragna behind him I did not know this game existed before doing this video and I still can't believe it's real but hey it does look fun and Blaze Bloom music is great so making a rhythm game around that does kind of make sense then you have blaze blue battle cards a card game for phones released in 2015. sadly the game has been taken down and can no longer be played but if you want a blaze blue card game then I will go ahead and mention they did get a spin-off tie-in with the competitive deck building game exceed but now we start getting into the big spin-offs on the PS3 and steam a light novel called X Blaze code embryo was released and you remember s yeah this is where she's from this is both a prequel to blaze blue and setting an alternate reality because nothing in blaze blue can ever just be one thing it follows Toya kaguri your typical light novel High School protagonist who one day discovers a mysterious conflict happening in his City where people are developing strange powers and they have to be hunted down by the robotic s from there s ends up moving in with Toyo to make sure that he's not infected and they end up meeting a ton of other characters they're all involved in this big battle between humans Sorcerers and monsters and S starts to open up and care about her new friends it's not bad but it is very by the books I mean you got a standard high school protag boy who's defying characteristic is he's nice and caring he meets up with a blonde girl with a giant sword who moves in with him as she tries to protect him in this new strange war that he suddenly discovered I mean this is basically just a Fate Stay Night fanfic right here although I will say that a huge chunk of the terminology from blaze blue does show up in here only slightly Twisted for this new world that you find yourself in so it was kind of neat going oh hey they're talking about that thing I understood that reference now there is one interesting thing about this game and that's how you progress through the story there are multiple possible endings but there's no decisions that you have to make throughout the game instead you'll occasionally get news stories on your phone and you have to check them depending on what stories you just decide to read will determine what path the game takes it's an interesting idea although I was reading up how you get these different endings online and it's said that to get character specific endings you must only read stories that are also being read by those characters but you don't know who's read what stories until after you've opened up and read those stories yourself so how are you supposed to know what stories to read how are you supposed to do this on your first try without a guide you don't know if you were right or wrong until after you've already read the article also have to point this out I didn't realize that's what you were supposed to do until I got halfway through the game and if you haven't read enough articles by that point then the villain shows up kills you and the game just ends it doesn't even cut to credits it just takes you right back to the title screen so I went online read what I did wrong went back to an old auto save and just started reading everything that I could got back to the halfway point and the villain once again still showed up and killed me I went to an even older autosave read every single report that I could even got trophies for all the reports I was reading and the villain still showed up and killed me and kicked me right back to the title screen so I looked into it and apparently several other people have had this problem so I can't tell if it's a bug or if it's one of those things where once you get the bad ending you're just locked into the bad ending and the only way to get something new is start the game fresh from the very beginning so yeah I won't lie to you guys I didn't finish this one I woke up the rest of the game on YouTube but considering it's a light novel I feel like I got the gist of it and while I do think that this ends up being too generic I still found it to be mildly entertaining unlike its sequel X-Play has lost memories which might be one of the worst things I've ever played for these retrospectives and I want you long time fans out there to think about all the games I've had to play for these retrospectives in the past and then realize what I just said I complain about this game on Twitter and someone told me uh clearly you don't know what a light novel is oh I know what a light novel is I'm very familiar with light novels which is why I feel confident insane this is a bad light novel folks if you're defending this thing just because it's a light novel that's the equivalent of me saying Shaq Foo is a great video game because it's a fighting game and that's the only criteria I have X plays code embryo might have been kind of generic but it at least was an ear gradingly annoying and it was at least a new story X Blaze lost memory on the other hand okay at the end of code embryo s realized that she was a threat to reality so she left for some pocket Dimension between the boundary and her world but then all of her friends ended up getting hurt because she wasn't there to protect them so the pain of that caused her to lose all of her memories cut to some time later and a brand new protagonist just called me goes looking for her younger sister who ran away she stumbles into s's pocket Dimension and now she finds s or at least the embryo power that was within us but now she's an airheaded ditch wearing nothing but lingerie you then have to walk around these blank generic Maps picking up four memory fragments and after each fragment your tree do something that makes me want to eat my own game console so that way I don't have to listen to it anymore foreign [Music] [Music] yeah it's that over and over every time that you find a fragment then when you have all four memory fragments s now calling yourself nobody will quiz you on what she talks to you about and if you get the questions right then you can move on to the next floor if you get them wrong then you just take the quiz again there is literally no negative to screwing these up other than just wasting your own time you then move on to the next floor but in between these floors you watch scenes from the first game play out and these scenes go on as long if not longer than the rest of the game once I realized oh this is just the game that I already played through I'm gaining nothing from watching this I just started mashing my way through these cutscenes and I swear to you it still took me almost 15 minutes to get through one of these cutscenes and again that was with me just mashing the skip button non-stop this this is kind of disgusting like if you want to say oh I don't care if the gameplay is bad I don't play light novels for the gameplay then fine I still think it sucks but whatever it's not the point the story is I understand that but speaking of the story just think about this think about the fact that over half of this game is just watching the game that you more than likely already played and that's it the vast majority of what you're doing is just walking around a bland map grabbing an item watching a child scream at a lingerie model and then watching footage of the thing that you already played it's just that over and over well okay I'll admit I'm exaggerating a little bit here all the scenes from the first game are now being told from essa's point of view so you do get a new perspective on the whole situation and that also does mean that you do see a few scenes that did not get shown in the original game and there are some additional scenes between characters that you can unlock that are brand new and at the end of the game you do get a brand new bit of story that shows how s does end up coming back so if you are just the biggest S stand out there then sure I can see how you would enjoy this game I however am not the biggest S stand so to me this game was nothing more than just watching everything that I had just already watched and a never-ending conversation between an airhead and a screaming toddler oh and you wanna know the kicker you wanna know what really kills me about this game it's that out of all the blaze blue spin-offs this is the one that actually has Canon lore to it not only does this game explain how s comes back and therefore is able to be in central fiction but also the nameless protag the screaming toddler in question yeah that's nine that's right that's nine the Phantom and her lost sister that she's looking for is Celica this is actually a secret origin story for nine and I love nine I love Celica but no bit of backstory is worth saying through any of these exchanges well luckily our next spin-off game wasn't just a massive Improvement it was also another fighting game although when this new title was revealed at Evo 2017 it was not what people were expecting Central fiction had been out for a year and the final DLC had just been revealed so when people saw a big trailer startup with gin and ragna squaring off they thought oh is this an update to Central fiction no wait that's a that's a brand new stage could could this be a brand new game could could we already be getting the next blaze blue only to be greeted with this [Music] [Applause] listen to that crowd that is the sound of a stadium full of people collectively losing their minds hell look at that kid he's having a religious experience right now I remember the first time that I saw this trailer I'm not kidding you I legit thought was a joke like I fully expected Maury to just come up there on stage and just go ah I gotcha but no this was 100 real toshimichi Mori said that for his next game he wanted to do a tag fire and originally he intended for the game to just use blaze blue characters but because of how Wild and buried the playstyles of blazeboot characters were he said that would be too difficult to put them on teams together think about that for a second this series began with Maury saying they wanted to tone down the combat to make it more accessible and now four games in these characters were so insane that if you had to control more than one of them at a time your face would melt so he decided to make a completely new game with brand new combat and it was going to be a crossover between blaze blue and well really just any franchise he could get his hands on the game launched with characters from Persona 4 Arena under night and birth and the anime series Ruby all thrown through a pot to make one big anime gumbo now Persona 4 and undernight in birth makes sense I mean under night and birth was already a fighting game and arcs has helped to develop that Persona 4 got a fighting game spin-off that arxus made so yeah obviously those two could show up but why Ruby how the heck did this internet anime series that never had a fighting game before get thrown into this mix well honestly it's actually kind of simple toshimiji Mori just said in interview with Forbes magazine that he liked Ruby then Rooster Teeth heard about this reached out to him and yeah that's it it's kind of wild how often big video game crossovers happen not because of giant massive corporations coming together and working something out but just because two guys happen to say hi to each other now I'll be honest with you I do have some complaints about this game hell many people do blazeblue was a series that as I said had tons of single player content but this game only had the story modes and that's it but the big complaint that people were up in arms about was that this game was announced to have 40 characters wow that's huge and half of them were going to be DLC yeah I've seen some crummy DLC practices before but revealing that half of your roster would be DLC before the game even came out isn't a good look also this is a tag based fighter and a crossover and those two tend to have really large rosters so that way you can fit in there a good chunk of characters from all the various franchises so launching with only 20 characters was way too low I mean heck Ruby only has four main characters and two of them were going to be DLC you couldn't even put all four of them in the base roster and once again this game was reusing assets as it took all the Sprites from the other games and put them in here with the Ruby Sprites being the only exceptions and as I said I love reusing assets because it allows you to include more characters so why are there only 20. Central fiction had just come out two years before this and it launched with over 30 characters if you wanted to get someone into these games why would you suggest the game with a significantly smaller roster when the much larger game with far more content is right over there and still gain support however despite these problems I still love this game and is all because of the gameplay yes the inputs are simpler than they were in central fiction but it still is one of the most insane fighters in recent history you can pull off incredible combos with just a few buttons the amount of defensive and offensive mechanics are through the roof and the combat moves so fast heck this became one of the first fighting games that I ever Platinum because I just wanted to keep playing it I kept wanting to match different characters together and see what weird combinations I could come up with not just for mechanical reasons but also because this game made sure to lay on the fan service as so many different characters have unique interactions with each other and most of the fgcs seem to enjoy this as well the game built up a strong player base and even became the first blade blue game to be featured two years in a row at Evo and Beyond the combat blizzard I like blaze blue I like Persona I like undernight it's just fun seeing these characters together especially in the story mode which didn't just bring back the English cash for all the returning characters it even provide English voices for the characters who didn't get them in central fiction as well as for the entire cast of Under night in birth which to this day has never had English dub and the story mode is immensely simpler this time around and it pretty much only exists just for fun it's just here to be a good time seeing these characters together and I'm cool with that I mean I'm a massive Persona nerd so seeing Chia hanging out with ragna and talk about the power of friendship while ragna just looks at her like the hell are you talking about I love it plus I just had to throw this out there out of all the wacky nutty arcsis round announcers can't escape from Crossing fade is easily my favorite and I'm Legit mad this game is no longer talked about because for six months I kept laughing my butt off at all the memes people were making around it you win does look like the father on Fresh Prince can't escape from Crossing fate fight but here's where the wackiness got cranked up to 11. yes the game had a disgusting amount of DLC but after the initial storm passed they announced a second season in blaze blue cross tag battle 2.0 this didn't just see updates to the gameplay and brand new story content but also several brand new Fighters including multiple characters from brand new series you know head characters joining The Fray from Arcana heart syndrin kagura because of course Maury Pi is a cinnamon kagra fan and even the super Niche cult favorite fighter akotsky blitzcom including the blitz tank who I honestly believe might have gotten more people talking about this game than any other update for any game arxus has ever made even people who didn't know what Blaze Blue Cross Attack Battle was were saying they got a I'm sorry did somebody just say a tank real dog at the end of the day despite all the problems I have with this game I still love the combat and the final roster update made me want more if you ask me hey what one fighting game would you want to see another season of DLC for I would say blaze blue cross tag battle without even thinking about it I wanted to see what season three was going to bring us because it feels like this was just one more update away from being the officially licensed version of Mugen we could have gotten all the weird obscure Fighters together Breakers Revenge Asura blade Rumble Fish Metro melee Melody blood you know melty blood would have been in there anything not nailed down could have been up for grabs in that season 3 of DLC and I wish it had happened oh well even if it's no longer gain updates just like Central fiction its final update did install rollback netcode into the game so that way you and all your friends can crossfaint without any hiccups online and that brings us to the final been off and the most recent blaze blue title in August 2017 Maury announced that a brand new RPG would be on the way for phones and mobile devices called blazeblue alternative dark wars and I don't know much about the development of this game not a lot has been revealed just yet but I can tell you it was not good because the game was announced in 2017 with an expected 2018 release date and it would not come out until February 2021. okay a three year long delay on a game that was expected to be developed in just one year not a great start but was the game fun at least I honestly have no idea this game never got a global release so all information that I have on is pretty much just secondhand accounts but from what I've gathered talking to people online you pick up blank protagonists to represent yourself while Bean is scoring around by the brand new character seal of sulfur and you then work for the mitcharui agency an organization that first appeared in the x-blaze games and after the events of central fiction multiple realities or possibilities as this franchise calls them are created and now you have to pair up with blaze blue characters from the main series The spin-offs the mangas the past the future Andros flat out alternate versions of themselves to stop these brand new threats these alternate versions can include things like young valkenheim Tsubaki from the future wearing hockerman style armor which was actually teased at the end of central fiction and evil versions of my and kagra this game looks nuts and it apparently had some big massive overarching plot to it that was going to mean a lot to the entire lore blaze blue and we're never going to find out what that was because yes after being trapped in development hell for four years this game was released in February 2021 and then shut down in January 2022 not even making it a full year Morgan took his social media and commented on the announcement saying quote from the beginning various difficulties have Arisen in continuing its operation we have been trying various approaches to making our users enjoy the service as much as possible but the results have not been what we hope for as our customers May well know we have been running the game for almost a year with various problems and both development and operation have been going through trial and error every day so yeah we don't know the specifics but it's clear that the production of this game was a mess and they just couldn't keep it going and you know that hit Mori hard he had huge plans for this game he even went on Twitter and tweeted out that the True Villain of the series was going to be revealed to be this guy who is this guy it's the generic protag man from explains yes the good boy every man protag was going to be revealed to have a dark gritty future self do you think Mori B likes the Fate series I think Maury P likes the Fate series so yes sadly dark wars was a bus but Mori did come out in Spring of this year and announced that there was more blaze blue on the way and in July it was announced that a brand new roguelike set within the series was going to be coming to mobile devices and for PC alright hey I mean it's not a fighting game but roguelikes are fun the gameplay preview looks pretty good and Mori made it sound like there was going to be even more blaze blue planned after this the future of this Series has yet to be written and there is still a universe of possibilities still open for this beloved series blaze blue Creator toshimichi Mori leaves Arc system works of course he did I forgot it's still 2022 that you were every game I do a retrospective on has to have a bad ending yes in September of this year some eagle-eyed fans noticed that toshimijimori's name had been removed from Ark system's list of directors and then a few days later Mori took to Twitter and confirmed everyone's fears that he had indeed left the company and that's about all we know yeah there has been no other information revealed about this so far but considering that Mori has been light on details and nobody else from Arc systems has comments on the situation and Mori doesn't have any future jobs lined up at the moment this doesn't exactly sound like things ended on the best Note normally when someone leaves for greater things or to pursue their own goals typically everyone at the company wishes them well they don't tend to bury it and go radio silent so we have no idea why Mori stepped down maybe he did want to pursue a different path but considering how much he loved this universe and these characters and now he won't be able to use them anymore I kind of doubt it and I hate to just start speculating but it could very well have had something to do with the fact that alternative dark war spent four years in production hell only to then be shut down before its one year anniversary yeah you spend that much time on a live service only for crash that hard that's not the kind of thing that you can just wash off your record I mean heck this wasn't even the first blaze blue mobile game that failed they already had a strike against them with that car game but it could also have had something to do with the changing face of Arc systems after the last blaze blue arc systems kind of exploded they were hired by Bandai Namco to develop the insanely popular Dragon Ball Fighters leading to success unlike anything the company had ever seen and that translated into cells for their other games as well I mentioned that Guild a year despite being their Flagship title never really sold all that well that is until Gilda Gear's Drive came out and sold a million copies in a year which I know some people might think that's not that impressive but for Gilda gear yeah that's really darn impressive it was the biggest Guilty Gear release of all time and was bigger than the last several Blaze Blues as a result of these increasing sales arx's CEO keoka announced that they want the company to actively pursue more fighting games based on existing IPS that are popular in the West and blaze blue definitely has Western fans but not as many as some other IPS that they could be pursuing Maury Parks this is now a western developer maybe Western audiences enjoy blaze blue we don't know and frankly we don't want to know it's an IP that we can do without again these are 100 just speculations based upon the evidence that we have available to us which is certainly not the complete picture but yeah decreasing sales years of work and money put into a failed project more you wanting to focus on pretty much anything that wasn't a fighting game while the company just wanted to focus on fighting games there's a good chance there was a lot of factors behind this now Mori has said that he isn't done making games and he wants his next game to be one that the blaze blue fans will enjoy but that next game would not be blaze blue arxes still owns that title and the characters mini Mori can't touch it so in a very wild roundabout Cosmic levels of irony way this story has now come full circle because arxus made blaze blue because they no longer own their Flagship title that they created and now arxus is the one holding on to the flagship title whose original Creator no longer owns it now again I have to stress this this just happened three months ago we have no idea if arxes has any plans for the future of blazeblue I kind of doubt it but as I said there is that roguelike already in the works which has not been mentioned at all since this story broke but still it could still be out there point is maybe we still do have more blaze blue on the way or maybe they'll just sell the title back to Mori and then he gets to make blaze blue again I mean he and Daisuke are still friends as far as I know and Daisuke knows a thing or two about what's like to lose a series that you put your heart and soul into so maybe they'd be willing to work something out but there's no way of sugarcoating this the future of this series looks very murky at least when it comes to new releases because here's the thing folks you can still get every single one of these games on Steam right now and as I said Central fiction and crosstag battle got rollback updates and still get featured at not just major tournaments but also pretty much any local scene that you can find the blaze blue fan base is still incredibly active you can still find people easily who want to play and even if the fan base dries up one day even if everyone just decides overnight I'm tired of this now guess what because these games are loaded with a metric ton of single player features you can still enjoy these games by yourself for days and weeks and months without running out of content the point I'm trying to make is that blaze blue is something special it is that perfect combination of memorable characters and fast addictive gameplay it's got the fan base that still holds it up and the credentials in the fgc to continue being a strong force on the competitive scene for years and thankfully because this game was made back before every single flying game out there had to be 100 Esports live service focus it means every single game is its own complete package that can survive without the company supporting it I've been looking forward to tackling this game ever since the start of the year and going back and doing this deep dive has given me an appreciation for almost every angle of this series from the music to the characters to even the lore and especially the gameplay folks I record more foods from this retrospective than for any other single video I've ever done normally I just spend about a week capturing photos for these videos and for this one I took two and a half weeks of non-stop recording day and night and yet I still had to force myself to stop playing them because I just wanted to keep going so yeah no matter what happens in the future if there's a new game from arxus a new franchise from Maury in this game's memory or even if there's nothing this series is kind of future proof it's easily available with Timeless combat and appeal mean as long as you're ready to jump into the series and pick up a controller then the wheels of Fate will never stop turning [Music] folks thank you very much for tuning in to another epic linked retrospective here on this channel again if you like what you saw here today then make sure that you click that subscribe button I mentioned it at the beginning of the video but we're trying to hit 50 000 Subs by the end of the year and oh man we're close we are so so close we just need that last little push so if you guys could help us out we would appreciate that so much and if you're already subscribed and you still want to help this channel then make sure that you give us a thumbs up leave a comment down below that stuff lets YouTube know they should be spraying this around and you can also spread around yourself and share it around the web wherever you think people might enjoy it that stuff really does help this channel out and if you want to get in touch with me then you can find me out there in the boundary of the internet on Twitter on Instagram on Tumblr all authorities arcade thank you guys very much for tuning in today I hope you all had a very safe happy holiday season thank you very much for all the support that you've given us this year and I will see you all in 2023 [Music]

Channel: Thorgi's Arcade

Views: 242,383

Keywords: Blazblue, Blazblue Cross Tag Battle, Arc System Works, Guilty Gear, Central Fiction

Id: SFzT4vSjWAc

Length: 132min 19sec (7939 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 30 2022