The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I had heard some great things about BlazBlue. Second coming of fighting games! (Okay, less that. That was Street Fighter IV.) A really, really great and unique game! I was really tempted to buy it and try it. But no, I told myself, that would be a waste. Then I got Gamefly, and rented it. Now I’ve tried it.

Gods, it is just so complex.

I mean, I don’t know. I turned the game on and tried to play, and it seemed like nothing I was trying to do actually DID anything. I would hit buttons and my character would fly about the screen in odd angles, but never seeming to attack or anything, and just generally being ineffective. I picked another character, and the same thing happened. I just had no idea what I was doing at all. It was completely obtuse: normal fighting game knowledge only barely prepares you for this game, if at all. None of the button mashing I normally do to figure out how things work was working.

So I turned off the game, frustrated.

Then people on twitter were like “You need to watch the tutorial DVDs!” I worry about a game that requires watching long tutorial DVDs in order to be comprehended, but I pulled them up on Youtube nonetheless. I was immediately further demoralized. These videos show some really, really advanced shit. They talk about deep strategy where I was still needing to figure out how to, you know, attack people. I scoffed at the whole thing. “Ridiculous. Over-complex. But that’s music’s good.”
So I looked up some music on Youtube, and was listening to this track, which I think is pretty great, and I go “okay, I’ll give it another shot.”

So I boot the game back up and pick Carl Clover, because I like his song. And suddenly, I realize the DVDs were actually effective. I suddenly understood what I was trying to do. I mean, I wasn’t great at it, but I was pulling off combos. I was making some rudimentary versions of Carl’s combo loops that he can pull off with his sister. I was beating the computer. Impressively, the videos did what it was supposed to!

Then I sent it back to Gamefly.
Why?
Well, if I had to watch tutorial videos just to understand it, there’s NO WAY IN HELL I am getting my friends to ever touch this game for more than five minutes. Besides Jonathan, sometimes, none of them are going to be willing to invest the amount of time required to comprehend this game. BlazBlue is completely a commitment, not a game. I felt like, at least, Guilty Gear could be played on a mashy level with some amount of effectively, but this game? Not at all. There’s no casual enjoyment of this game. It is all hardcore.

So it’s not really useful to me. But good on it for existing. There has to be a core fanbase that is obscenely happy with this game. And hell, if I could get it for like 20 bucks or something, I might pick it up again and see if I can figure out Carl Clover further. But really, there’s so very little reason to train with it when I’m never going to have competition, so back it goes.