Design Blog

Sunday, June 28, 2009

Blazblue: Pushing Design Limitations Part 5

BlazBlue releases on the 30th of this month in the US so today I'll be finishing up my multipart design analysis of the game.

First I'll be rounding out the cast analysis.

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Carl Clover - Auto Maton

Carl's ability is rather unique in terms of the fighting game genre, though there was a character in Guilty Gear who had a similar ability. The gist of Carl's drive is that it allows him to control Nirvana, a robot that shares the battlefield with the other characters. This allows a Carl player to control essentially two characters at the same time. There is a meter associated with this however, which recharges when Nirvana is inactive and depletes when Nirvana is active or taking damage. Depleting it completely prevents Nirvana from being used for a long period of time while she recharges. While Carl's Guilty Gear counter part, Eddie, had a similar ability, Carl's is unique in how Nirvana occupies space and absorbs hits.

When inactive, Nirvana is like a piece of the background. she doesn't move and both players can walk right through her. When active however, players can no longer pass through her and Carl can even push her around by running behind her. Additionally, in this state she can absorb projectile attacks. Interestingly enough however she will not absorb non-projectile attacks for Carl, these attacks will hit both Carl and Nirvana.

The balancing issues here are rather interesting, as the dynamic of a fighting game is partly defined by the number of opponents that fight at once. Going against this trend opens up all kinds of opportunities for game breaking setups that need to be addressed when designing the character. The ability to attack both high and low simultaneously as well as the ability to attack a player from both sides at once are both dangerous results that can result in unblockable combos. For the most part Blazblue addresses these concerns by increasing the reliance on Nirvana by the player. On his own, Carl is an incredibly weak character having some of the lowest damage and health of the entire cast. Most damaging moves or combos rely on the player to use Nirvana for the damaging hits. This does however have the result of making Carl very difficult to learn to play while at the same time incredibly effective at high levels.

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Hakumen - Zanshin

Hakumen isn't necessarily an interesting character because of his drive attack, which is basically a set of counter moves, but more because of how that factors into his overall character design. When activating Hakumen's drive, the player can activate a series of counter stance which have differing activation times and effects, but only if the enemy attacks Hakumen during this state.

The real interesting part about Hakumen is how his super meter and special moves work. Hakumen does not have a normal super meter, instead he has a small meter and eight special "orbs". The small meter fills up automatically over time, and faster when taking damage or attacking and when it fills up the player gains one orb. Additionally certain counters using Zanshin will also give you a free orb. All of Hakumen's special moves and supers require varying numbers of orbs, from 1 all the way up to 8.

This turns Hakumen into an interesting defensive and offensive character at the same time. On the one hand, a Hakumen player needs to wait for the orbs to do many of his combos. On the other, he never stops building his offensive options. Due to his overall low speed and high average damage, Hakumen tends to be played as a defensive character however, though this works well in conjunction with his drive attack, which promotes an active defense.

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V-13 - Sword Summoner

Her name is actually pronounced "Nu" like the Greek letter. (Which incidently is the 13th letter of the Greek alphabet.) She is the last boss of the normal arcade mode game and has a somewhat strange drive attack. When activated, she summons a sword at a specified location that flies a certain distance forward. The drive button can be chained into itself twice, which shoots two different swords. Multiple versions of drive can also be chained together so a player can press drive twice, the forward and drive twice, then down and drive twice.

The result of this sword summoning ability is that her effective attack range becomes skewed. There is a blind spot for her drive attack right in front of her but generally she can attack players from entire screen lengths away. Combos with the drive attack tend to look very strange as Nu stays a modest distance from the enemy while assaulting him with swords from all directions.

Nu is considered to be one of the top characters in the game because of this ability. Despite the blind spot in her drive ability, it's generally useful because the risk/reward ratio is very good due to the high damage and pressure that the swords can achieve. The gameplay style that results from this mechanic is also fairly different from a standard "poking" character style as well since the swords can combo into each other, allowing high damage combos while staying safe from retaliation.

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And that brings us to the end of my BlazBlue segment. I hope it makes sense now why I'm so interested in this game. A combination of incredibly original gameplay mechanics coupled with colorful characters and a lot of extra features not common to fighting games before it make BlazBlue one of the definitive fighting games for the year.

There is still a question of balance of course, and to this effect it may not be surprising that many hardcore fighting game enthusiast find BlazBlue to be a poorly balanced game. The variety of spectactular new mechanics were likely very challenging just to come up with much less balance. However despite this, I think it's important for designers to push new ground like this in all aspects of their work. I think even if the game isn't considered to be balanced well at the moment, future iterations as well as continuing improving strategies will help push it to a level that casual and hardcore players can both appreciate.

Now if only my pre-order would get here faster...

Labels: blazblue, game mechanics

posted by Saikyo at 12:11 PM