It's been a huge year for fighting games so far. With the release of Street Fighter IV in February, Capcom set the new bar incredibly high for the genre. And although some fine old-school fighting titles have been re-released since then (King of Fighters '98: Ultimate Match and Fatal Fury: Garou – Mark of the Wolves), most fighting fans were probably assuming the October release of Tekken 6 in October would be the first true challenge to SFIV's supremacy.
Um, wrong. In June the always scrappy ARC System Works, makers of the Guilty Gear series, released BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger, a new 2D/3D fighting franchise that got us all sorts of excited. So excited, that IGN PlayStation Associate Editor Ryan Clements, gave BlazBlue a score of 9.4, a tenth of a point higher than he reviewed Street Fighter IV. Megaton.
The Street Fighter series has a long history, but which are the seven best games the franchise has yet offered to gamers?
After Street Fighter II released in in 1991, it caused a fighting game explosion, both in arcades and in home consoles. But, as the decade ended, and arcades were failing, so too were 2D Fighting games. This is how Street Fighter IV completely revitalized the genre.
I'd say Blazblue helped too. Didn't care for Street Fighter 4, but Blazblue was amazing during that time. Sad that the series kind of went downhill after the first 2 or 3 games though.
BlazBlue was phenomenal. Platinum'd Calamity Trigger because I loved it so much. I remember buying Continuum Shift back in the day at launch for like $40. They did have DLC characters (Valkenhayne, Makoto, and Platinum at the time) and it came out to just a tad more than it would at full price. Didn't mind at all.
Great fighting game.
Continuum Shift was definitely my favorite. Spent way too many hours on that game, haha... Had the counters for days with Hakumen.
BlazBlue was the much better, more technical game..and a real 2D Fighting Game after all. But yes, since it was a big name..the characters were still popular and the game itself was good, SFIV indeed helped a lot. However, I am pretty sure the much better-selling Mortal Kombat 9 would have been done without SFIV as well..and that one truly helped to make the fighting game genre in general more popular again.
You’re sound dumb. Blazblue was not better than sf4. You’re just saying that because you’re a street fighter hater.
eyyy max xD
one of the very few streamers i can actually watch without it being cringe and awful ha.
The content of IV was severely lacking when it launched. It got better over time.
Arc System Works' CEO has said that BlazBlue is not done and the studio will touch it the in future to avoid competition with Guilty Gear now.
would love to see it celshaded like guiltygear/granblue etc. Just hope they don't ruin the combat mechanics
I cannot believe how good this game is. For me, this is the best fighting game I played since Marvel vs Capcom 2 on the Dreamcast.
What won me over with BlazBlue was the netcode. Kudos to the guys behind it. I never have any lag playing BB online compared to some matches I'd have in SFIV.
I have a friend who lives in Cali, in SFIV when we'd play, we'd get lag spikes occasionally, in BlazBlue, our gameplay is nice and smooth with no lag what so ever. So being able to deliver a lag free online experience for me is what gets my vote over SFIV.
Plus the fact they have a lobby system for the online versus just 2 people at a time in SFIV online. They delivered quite nicely with this game and hell, I kinda regret purchasing that SFIV CE now that I have BB lol
BB is pretty meh to me. The Story is awful and just begs to be skipped. The fact that in order to get 100% you have to lose every match is just insane. It's a mode that I'm glad that I never have to play again. The actual gameplay itself in BB is fun but it really won't last long for me. Once I platinum it, it's back to SFIV for me. I'm almost near a Platinum for BB already too. So it won't be that long before I just move on.
I think a lot of the praise of BB comes from the fact that for casual players, it's so easy to just pick up the game and start pressing a single button to do a bunch of stuff. Plus, the analog stick being mapped to special moves makes it very easy for casuals to just pick up and get rewarded for not doing much. Play against friends that don't know how to play? Doesn't matter. You can do a bunch of special moves and still have fun because you can do it all in one press. Obviously many of these techniques will not work against high level play, but I doubt any of the casuals are going to play it competitively like that any way.
Although from the looks of message boards, the cries for a patch regarding certain characters is pretty funny to me. A lot of cries because of Noels drive attacks are too funny.
I have sf4 but not BB yet and I already know the answer to this question. Guilty Gear was the best 2d fighter and now Blazblue is. Sorry, its just the order of the universe.