This has been a great year for fighting games, especially those of the 2D variety. We’ve had re-releases of several classics onto modern systems, and now a whole new game is upon us: BlazBlue. It comes from the same company that made Guilty Gear, and at first glance would indeed seem to be the same game with the same engine but new graphics. Yet that’s not really true, as the cast of characters are all new and play very differently from Guilty Gear’s roster.

The premise of BlazBlue is the same as just about every other 2D fighting game you know from Street Fighter onward; you and an opponent select each one of several different characters, and beat the living daylights out of one another on a side-scrolling stage while spiffy music plays and each character yells things in Japanese while flinging anime-style fireballs. BlazBlue doesn’t so much reinvent this genre, as apply an incredible level of polish and intelligent game design to it. What the small cast of roughly a dozen characters don’t immediately show is that they all have a lot of depth in their design, and the game offers a lot of universal tools to help you both attack and protect yourself.

BlazBlue’s engine features are probably the most important part, albeit the least obvious at first. Guilty Gear veterans will recognize most of them, with things like double-jumping and air dashing letting you rapidly close on an opponent to attack them. Combos are also generally easy to do, including a few basic (albeit admittedly weak) ones that every character can do with the exact same inputs on their controller. But you also have some useful defensive options, such as Barrier (which is very similar to Guilty Gear’s "Faultless Guard"/’green blocking’) which pushes enemies back and lets you block moves without taking any damage. Each character can also do a Burst that instantly interrupts an opponent’s combo, but forces you to take extra damage for the rest of the round. At the same time, the game punishes excessive blocking through various means so you’re encouraged to get in there and fight. All these shared features ensure that all but the wildest abuses a character can do have some reliable counters, and that’s a very good thing.

But if the engine is important for its safeguards, the characters are admittedly the life of the game. Each one plays very differently, and most of them can do something unique with even simple motions plus their ’D’ or ’Drive’ button. Noel can use her Drives to launch a series of very easy but flexible combos, while Jin uses Drives to attack foes with paralyzing ice, and Tager can magnetize his foes in this same way to draw them in to his normally hard to use throws and heavy attacks. This is really just scratching the surface, as every character plays very differently from one another. Even better, BlazBlue has no equivalent character to the ’Shotoclones’ (Ryu and Ken from Street Fighter), which has resulted in nearly the entire roster seeing at least some play even in casual matches online. This is good, because the roster is pretty small.

Online play also works quite well, though I hesitate to call it perfect; there are times where extreme precision in your controls is required and I can’t help but feel that I’ve been let down by the game during online play on a few occasions. Still, it’s generally playable and well laid out, ensuring that you’ll get your money’s worth out of BlazBlue even if you don’t have a local fighting game group to play with (and many of us don’t). Combined with excellent graphics, a decent story mode, and music so good the game included it on soundtrack discs in all Special Edition copies, you’ll do quite well.