Review:
BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger

Another button-mashing anime-flavoured fighting game? A challenger appears!

BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger is a traditional 2D scrap-‘em-up conversion of an obscure Japanese arcade fighter with anime-inspired visuals. This means the game will feature a bucket load of revoltingly cute-voiced animal sidekicks, an incomprehensible storyline, unrealistically proportioned torsos and a dubious obsession with mammary glands. A little bit like TV footage of the UK election. (Zing!) BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger hits all of those targets beautifully and gets bonus points for having a nonsensical name.

Like any other fighting game in history, you click past the very nicely produced anime title screen video and have your eyeballs seared clean out of your skull by a main menu that has been designed by the devil himself. It’s a strangely minor thing to call attention to so early in a review, but the colours, font, text and general design are so utterly awful that it’s a struggle to find the motivation to continue on from there.

Anyway, the game offers a pretty massive array of options and gameplay features – the usual two-player offline game, an online competition, an utterly useless training mode and a few others. There’s the straightforward fight-ten-in-a-row Challenge mode, the Score Attack which is largely the same thing and, best of the bunch, the excruciatingly funny Story mode.

Going into Story mode is a lot like sticking your head in a massive jar of Vaseline – it doesn’t make any sense and it’s guaranteed to have others laughing. A brief intro cutscene explains that something bad has happened to someone somewhere somehow and then you pick any of the token anime characters, like revolting animal (with breasts), androgynous male, petite woman (no breasts), over muscled man, bloke with enormous sword to compensate tiny genitals, robot woman, stupid child, man with oversized cloak, comic relief moron, vampire chick and the big-titted woman who has a PANDA in her HAIR. Yes. After this, you play through their chapter of the Story, making decisions at key points and fending off the attacks of the other characters, all of whom are weirdly aggressive, flitting between being pleasant and threatening to kick your head in with terrifying speed.