Historically, my relationship with the BlazBlue franchise has been strained at best. Initially wowed by its visual splendor, its gameplay complexity was impenetrable to me. As they had done previously with the Guilty Gear franchise, they stacked character-specific mechanics on top of an already steep list of system-level mechanics onto BlazBlue, making for a game with an incredibly steep learning curve. Even now, as someone with almost a decade of serious fighting game experience under my belt, mainline BlazBlue is too much for me to handle.

When news of a BlazBlue tag-team spinoff arose, I didn’t bat an eyelid. Having been burned by the first two entries in the series, I wasn’t ready to try again. However, after having spent some time with the demo, I realized that this wasn’t the same type of BlazBlue game that didn’t work for me back then.

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