BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger

The game has its own whimsical jargon, so super moves are known as Distortion Drives and the super meter is titled the Heat Gauge. Heat is expended on Distortion Drives - most characters have a choice of two - but alternatively Heat can be used for Rapid Cancelling. For Guilty Gear vets this is essentially the same as Roman Cancelling, and for everyone else, this is a technique similar to Street Fighter IV's "Focus Attack Dash Cancelling" - whereby half the super meter can be used to cancel out of an attack animation, allowing for more technical combo possibilities.

But perhaps BlazBlue's biggest triumph is the new Drive system. In essence the Drive button does something completely different for each character. For Ragna, the Soul Eater Drive allows him to make attacks which absorb health. For nodachi enthusiast Hakumen, the Zanshin Drive acts as a parry, which if timed correctly will instantly throw the opponent for good damage. Jin's Frost Bite Drive meanwhile has the rather annoying ability to encase an adversary in ice. But thankfully we've yet to see him perform a spinal decapitation.

More tactical Drives include Tager's Voltic Battler, which uses the power of magnetism to make his throws less escapable, and Rachel's Slipheed, which affects the direction of the wind - keeping opponents at a distance and knocking projectiles off course. To succeed in BlazBlue it's important to adapt each character's unique Drive into your game plan. But the greatest accomplishment of the Drive system is that it offers a high level of diversity, often exceeding games which field far more characters.

Although BlazBlue is less frantic than Guilty Gear, it offers far greater scope for lengthy combos than Street Fighter IV. In order to give defensive players a chance to tackle rushdown maniacs, Arc System have furnished BlazBlue with a variety of Guilty Gear-style defences. Aside from blocking, players can activate a Barrier which gradually drains the Barrier gauge - the advantage being that chip damage is avoided and the opponent is pushed back. An Instant Block, similar to Just Defend in Mark of the Wolves, is also achieved by blocking when an attack connects and confers a slight frame advantage. Finally, a single use Barrier Burst can be used by pushing all four buttons in a crisis situation. This will save you from certain doom but you'll take 50 per cent extra damage thereafter.

That pretty much covers the arcade aspects of BlazBlue and in this respect, its reproduction on the PS3 is more or less perfect. But Arc System rises above the tradition of the lazy arcade port by including a wealth of valid extras. In addition to the arcade, versus and score attack modes, BlazBlue has a story mode which is similar in quality to that of Battle Fantasia. As the player battles each opponent their character's story unfolds through various cut-scenes, complete with passable English voice acting. Ragna comes across as an apathetic anti-hero whereas Bang fits the anime convention of overenthusiastic idiot. Bang also gets his own super-activated theme song, which was written by Hironobu Kageyama. Go figure.

Despite being only available in the US and Japan at present, European BlazBlue importers can enjoy very stable netcode courtesy of PlayStation Network. Lag is noticeable, as it is with all online fighters, but various behind-the-scenes trickery keeps its impact minimal. BlazBlue also includes a hefty number of matchmaking options so players can adjust everything from the number of rounds to allowing use of the Astral Heat finishing moves.

However, BlazBlue isn't the most balanced fighter for high level play. Certain matchups like Tager vs. V-13 can be somewhat one-sided as the game tends to favour the three best zoning (long-range) characters - notably V-13, Arakune and Rachel.

But despite some minor balancing issues, BlazBlue is an outstanding achievement by Arc System. Guilty Gear fans get a game which takes their way of fighting in a new and interesting direction, while casual players will discover a fighter which not only looks spectacular, but allows them to perform impressive combos without being overwhelmed.