BlazBlue: Continuum Shift

(image courtesy of 1UP.com)

BlazBlue: Continuum Shift is a videogame based around fights between multiple characters. It was developed by Arc System Works, and published in North America by Aksys Games. It was released for the XBox 360 and the Playstation 3.

BlazBlue, like most fighting games, has a variety of attacks that the characters can perform. Unlike many other games though, it does not distinguish betwene punches and kicks depending on which button you press. Instead, there are 3 different basic attack labeled A (light), B (medium), and C (strong), which will change entirely based on what direction (or lack thereof) is pressed in combination with the button. A combination of movements followed by a button press will activate special moves, and pressing the right combination of buttons together can provide a better defense, blow the enemy away from you, or even allow you to add additional moves to a combo. What really sets BlazBlue apart from other fighters though, is the fourth button: D. D moves, or drive moves, as the game refers to them, are very different depending on which of the game's twelve characters you're playing as. Their drive moves range from basic things like sapping health when attacks hit or shooting projectiles all the way to stranger things like controlling the wind or even moving a secondary character. Drive moves make playing each character unique, although that also means it's harder to learn how to use certain characters without doing some research.

As the second game in the BlazBlue series, Continuum Shift also fixes some of the balancing issues that were present the first game, BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger. The goal of any fighting game is to have a cast of characters that can face off against any other character without seeming under- or over-powered, and while Calamity Trigger was balanced relatively well, there were still a few characters who were obviously much better choices than the others. Continuum Shift's changes fixed many of those problems by lowering or boosting the powers of moves, and taking away, altering, or even adding others. While it's still not perfect, Continuum Shift's characters are certainly not as unbalanced as Calamity Trigger's were.

This balance is even more important than one might think, because Continuum Shift is doing something that many other fighting games have not dared to do: providing new characters, created after the game's initial developement ended, to be purchased by the players of the game. Without the existing sense of balance, it would be a foolish idea to try to introduce even more characters into the game, and Arc System Works is aware of that, to the point where they plan to release a patch after the final character is released that will balance the game even further. This is something that no other fighting game has done before, but other companies will certainly begin to do so in the future, as it's a great way to get players back into the game months after they've stopped playing. Whether it will actually succeed is something that will likely affect the future of fighting games, and if all goes well, it'll be for the better.