Blazblue - Chrono Phantasma Review for Playstation 3

It you're staring at that title looking for it to make sense, just don't. Stop. It's not going to and it's never going to. BlazBlue isn't about making sense. It's about hardcore 2D fighting action, it's about meticulous mechanical refinement, and it's about giving voice to those folks in the back of your head who want to see a *** woman wielding mahjong terms and a big stick, fighting against a dude with a giant freakin' nail on his back. This is the point where I'd be getting into the story, but that's completely infeasible in this particular undertaking. There's just too damn much of it. I sat through a good two hours of the story mode before getting to a single fight, two hours which included this science genius catgirl musing on the nature of her coffee, These girls ordering coffee and snacks, and for whatever reason these guys jumping to an alternate dimension where everything's pulled the Last-Episode-of-Evangelion maneuver and become a high-school comedy for reasons unbeknownst to anyone. So you're not really doing the Story for fighting experiences, though there are a few to be had. You're not using the super-chibi recap segments for fighting, thats just for recapping the BlazBlue saga up to this point so you're not as completely lost as you could be. You want the Arcade mode, or the Abyss mode, or the score attack, or any other of the 31 flavors of fighting action. If you've played any fighting game from Street Fighter II onward, you're probably got the absolute basics of how BlazBlue works. But the devil is in the details, and as with most Arc System Works fighters there's about eleven billion of those to keep track of. Probably moreso than any other fighting-game maker out there, Arc loves to have completely unique mechanics for many of its fighters. Doesn't matter if it's Johnny keeping track of his cash on hand, Zappa's ghosts, Labrys' axe strength, Yukiko's Fire Amp charges or whatever. The fundamentals, as well as the system-wide mechanics like the new Overdrive mode, are often you can count on applying from fighter to fighter. You might find this a bit too complicated, but fans of the series revel in the new and unique ways this lets them formulate a strategy and knock their opponents down, as well as "solving" all the new characters added with this edition Litchi might be the most fun fighting game character I've ever used. And trust me, I've used a LOT. I realize these outfits are kinda absurd. I realize that there's rather a high barrier to entry, from a technical standpoint. But like they did with Persona 4 Arena, Arc have made a game that's accessible at first, does a solid job of teaching through the tutorial and challenge modes, keeps you busy with Abyss after Abyss to explore and raid for items, rewards your progress with unlockable character art and new colors, and before you know it you're actually fairly competent. Sure, your brain might run out your ears if you try to figure out the story... or you might lose hours of your life you could've been using to shine your pennies or clean your lava lamp... but that's a small price to pay for a delightfully absurd piece of 2D fighting, with one of the best soundtracks in the business. Well, that plus another *** of cash for all the DLC options, up to and including two cash-money characters. A bit distasteful, I know, but... honestly, you've just watched four minutes of a BlazBlue review. I don't think you're going to raise a stink about that.