Archview #59: Blazblue : Continuum Shift II

 Well, it's better than Guilty Gear Advance. In some ways, anyways.

 Blazblue Continuum Shift II is the 3rd revision of the Blazblue fighting game series. Unlike most fighting games, there's a whole lot of story to Blazblue, and it ain't half bad. It's also a very fast 2-D fighting game with a lot of flash without sacrificing substance.
 The story is a bit too convoluted to go in-depth while avoiding getting mixed up in it's many unique terms, needless to say, it's a popurri of anime cliches and tropes, but for some reason, it has a huge fanbase. The story is not bad, and most characters are certainly interesting, but they are not as unique as Guilty Gears's, this time the anime roots are very easy to spot, with a disappointingly large amount of needless fanservice.

 Firstly, there are loads of Modes, the classic Versus and Training modes are present, then there's the Arcade mode, self explanatory, Score Attack in which you have to defeat Unlimited(Overpowered) version of the characters on the hardest AI setting, a pretty good Tutorial mode that teaches you the basics of the game, Challenge Mode that tasks you with performing combos with each character, Legion 1.5 that is a grid-based affair, in which you add defeated characters to your roster as you beat the stages on the grid and  Abyss which is the Survival mode, with a few perks like leveling up your stats as you go. There's another mode, easily the most time consuming, Story, in which you follow each character's story with branching paths. Be warned, there's a lot of reading involved with little to few visual aides besides the character cut-outs.
 If that wasn't enough, playing through the game scores you points that can be used in the Gallery to purchase various art pieces or unlockable colors and the Unlimited versions of each character. As for the touch screen, it's only use is to display the movelist, and frankly, it's pretty handy. As good as all of this sounds, the game suffers from slowdown, not present in the console version. Playing in 3D is even worse, as the slowdown gets heavier.

 The graphics took a heavy hit, stages are no longer tridimentional, and the sprites lack a lot of detail. While it's hardly a deal breaker, and if you aren't familiar with the console version you won't even notice, as they still look good. What doesn't look too good are the images from the gallery, if you zoom to much they get very blurry. The music is fantastic, and sounds almost as good as the console, voice acting is avaiable in both japanese and english but the quality isn't too sharp. Sound effects also sound a bit off, hits don't really sounds like hits.
 As a whole, it's functional. While there is a lot of content, the slowdown can get a bit unnerving, and the anime-influence may be hit or miss. Frankly, there are better fighting games on the 3DS, and the PSP has a superior version of this very same game, making it a hard sell.
 5 out of 10.