BlazBlue

Eric L. Patterson: So before we get to actually talking about BlazBlue, I just have to ask: is it just me, or have we suddenly entered some strange world where fighting games are having this huge resurgence? You've got Street Fighter IV of course, SNK is shockingly going HD, hell, even Mortal Kombat recently came back with a pretty big offering.

Heather Anne Campbell: I think it's because the online community is finally robust enough to support it. Fighting games, on their own, are a little ... empty. It's like playing with dolls; you've got really interesting little figures, and you can move them around, and pretend that they're doing something, but there's no real point to playing a fighting game by yourself. Having a competitor, a real human for a versus match--that's what makes a fighting game tick. So, before there could be a resurgence of the fighter, there had to be a large enough online base to support the release. The netcode also needed to be perfected, upgraded. Street Fighter II Turbo was nonsense. So was Anniversary Collection's online play. But now it seems like everyone's getting their sh*t together. Not to mention, one high-profile release can really get the blood pumping in a genre.

And by that, I'm talking about Street Fighter IV.

I think gaming is starting to rediscover its niches.

ELP: See, I'm glad to hear you say things like this, because I've been arguing since I first knew about online gameplay that fighting games had to be online. They just have to. It was often lonely being an SNK fan when your friends were Capcom people, and there's nothing worse in the world than having a game you love dearly but no real way to get honest use out of it. There's only so often I can beat up on brain-dead CPU opponents before even the best of fighting games starts to hold little value for me.

HAC: Yeah. I felt that way about Rival Schools. It felt like no one wanted to play that game with me. I wished it was online, but the Dreamcast wasn't ready for it, yet.

Do you think two-dimensional fighters really stand a mainstream chance? Or do you believe that this 2.5-D stuff is going to carry us into the next decade?

ELP: That's kind of what I was going to ask you next, actually. Fighters are back, but are the fans still there to truly support them? Capcom found a way to realistically bring Street Fighter back while still retaining the feel of the classic 2-D gameplay, but what about projects like SNK's King of Fighters XII, or the game we're here to talk about, BlazBlue? Are the efforts to pull these games into the "next generation" of gaming really going to end up being realistic?

HAC: I don't think it's a question of finding an audience; there will always be a small core group of enthusiasts ready to drop their virtual quarters into an online two-dimensional match-up. The problem, I think, is justifying the budget of these titles. There's something like ten times the animation in BlazBlue as there was in Guilty Gear; regardless of the process by which they achieved those frames, there's still a lot of work represented on that screen. If you're going to mainstream HD, 2-D fighting games, you have to set the bar of entry pretty low. BlazBlue has some fantastic effects happening in it, but the characters are a collection of Anime fetishes. The combo system is pretty complex, too; it relies on a vocabulary of gestures that hard-core fanatics can recall easily, but aren't immediately describable to a new player.

Not to bring it back to Street Fighter again, but I think the success of Street Fighter is two-fold: Character Design and Input Gestures. The character roster is broad, stereotypical stuff that's both a little boring and immediately iconic. Friends sit down for Street Fighter for the first time, and they say to each other, "Hey! I'm gonna pick the fat guy!" and "Oh, I love that green dude." People sitting down to BlazBlue for the first time squint a little bit and then say, "I guess I'll play the attractive looking guy with the sword, as opposed to that ... other attractive guy with the sword." BlazBlue isn't going to be a mainstream hit; it's designed for the audience that's already there. It represents very little to zero growth.

The other thing that Street Fighter did successfully was gestures--what I mean by this is that the moves were a psychological metaphor for what was happening onscreen. For example, there's a similarity between the input command for a fireball and the action Ryu takes onscreen. You press down, down-towards, towards. Ryu brings himself lower and then pushes his body towards his opponent, before delivering the fireball. Zangief's pile driver is a circular input because he's going to throw his opponent in a circle. Guile's flash kick, Blanka's roll--there's a symmetry between the gestures and the animation.

But BlazBlue doesn't have the same sort of metaphors going on in its input gestures. It's more a series of motions divorced from the action onscreen ... and as such, relies on a pre-existing vocabulary in the player.

(cont...)

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