BlazBlue Continuum Shift Review (Xbox 360)

When BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger was released it was hailed as the obvious successor to Guilty Gear, maintaining that series’ tradition for detailed character designs and a very in-depth engine. Unfortunately, what started as modest balance problems later became so severe that a major update was necessary. Yet instead of a balance patch, we’re getting a sequel in BlazBlue: Continuum Shift, and the result is quite good. $40 will net you a much improved version of the original game, with new characters joined by significant tweaks to the old cast and game rules, most of them for the better.

Like the game before it, Continuum Shift is a 2D fighting game built around an engine with several universal defensive options. Since each character the same strong defenses, most of their design is focused on how they deal damage and doing so in a variety of ways. Each character even has their own special gimmick, shown through a series of easily used ’Drive Attacks.’ Uses for Drives range from letting a character steal the opponent’s health to encasing them in ice for a short time, to more creative effects like magnetizing them so they’re pulled toward your other attacks. Yet Drives are only part of a character, and they all have a full assortment of other attacks to build combos with; mastering any one BlazBlue character will take time.

Keeping the theme of Calamity Trigger, this sequel has a great deal of single-player content. A lengthy story mode is offered for each character, as is a basic strategy mode called ’Legion’ where you recruit a team from the ranks of defeated (and progressively more difficult) AI foes. Tidbits like unlockable art and playful ’mini-shows’ are also present, ensuring that Continuum Shift will have some appeal beyond the hardcore competitive crowd. While the game goes out of its way to mock ’flowchart’ style players and beginners who have no interest at all in learning how to play, it also offers extensive tools to help you get better.

These tools range from Challenge modes that teach you complex combos, to tutorials that cover virtually everything; basic controls and fighting game concepts are discussed at length, and a passable tutorial for each character is also provided (though the tutorial assumes you’ll look up the character’s move list on your own). While none of these tutorials will turn you into a master player of fighting games in general, BlazBlue in particular, nor your character of choice, they are excellent building blocks to understand whatever aspect may elude you. As fighting games undergo a revival in recent years, tutorials like this will go a long way to bringing in new players.

Perhaps the most visible addition to this game is its cast of new characters, four in total: Lambda-11, Tsubaki, Hazama, and Mu-12 as an unlockable character. While this may pale numerically to Super Street Fighter IV’s roster additions, each character in Continuum Shift is very detailed and well designed. As they are one of the major features of this game, the next section of this review is devoted to them.