Can't you see I'm blazing?
First things first, only 15 characters. Kinda. Here's my biggest issue with the game: The beta had all 15 characters. They announced 15 characters. The back of the box boasts about 15 characters. So why the **** do I have to download the patch to play as Anji and Ino? Why are there less content on the disc than there was on the beta? Why did they ship the game like this? English voices are also missing and part of the Story Mode is also missing. The disc is a glorified download key. The game shouldn't have shipped like this, and yes, this did sour some of my time with the game.
Mode offering is alright. You get the visual-novel styled Story Mode... and I won't lie, I didn't even check it out. This approach ArkSys has been taking with Blazblue and Guilty Gear with their story modes that have 0 gameplay isn't really my thing and I wasn't a fan of where they took the plot since Xrd, so... yeah, I didn't even check it out. But it brings a close to Sol's story, if that's your thing. There's a very basic training mode but the game continues its tutorial through Mission Mode, and it's pretty thorough, even going into some pretty basic match-up hints VS every character. So, yeah, Mission mode is a must if you want to learn the ins and outs. There's also a Training Mode, VS CPU and Survival. Lastly, Arcade Mode. There's no real ending, and the most story you get are a few dialogue lines with your Rival(if you trigger it) and the final boss. I don't mind having such a barebones Arcade Mode, Guilty Gear never paid much mind to it, however, the difficulty is bullshit. The difficulty increases the better you play and decreases if you lose, thing is... it won't decrease until you get to the next fight. I'm AWFUL with Millia and I was stuck against an Extreme difficulty Potemkin. I was stuck for like an hour trying to beat him. Why not let the player select the difficulty setting they want? It's so dumb. And the secret boss? Oh my god, the secret boss takes very little damage and hits like a truck. It wasn't a fun time.
Fishing is back too, and thankfully, no more random worthwhile rewards such as colors. ON the other hand, you only get 6 colors per character, so maybe that's why. Not to say that rewards aren't random, fishing gets you random stuff like always, but at least it's not the stuff you actually want... because there are no unlockables you actually want.
Gameplay has been streamlined a bit, roman-cancelling is back and so are bursts, but combos are shorter and the game isn't as fast. It's still fast, mind you, but not quite. The game looks amazing, and I really liked the new dynamic camera that zooms, turns and shifts around when powerful moves are landed, dust pop ups are landed, you 'break' the wall left-or-right and transition to another part of the stage or a round concludes. It adds a lot of excitement to the match. The one thing I miss... is that Instant Kills were completely removed. They've been a staple of the series since the very first game, so I don't know why they did it... except maybe because it was rushed?
If you can't tell... the game feels very rushed when it comes to content. A paltry amount of alternate colors, missing content that must be downloaded, not a whole lot of interesting unlockables... It's quite disappointing. That said, I think the rest of the game is top notch. It has the best soundtrack in the series, a lot of the music has lyrics, and I truly adored all the new redesigns as well as the two new characters. Still, I can't shake the feeling that with a few more months of development time and thus releasing a properly finished disc would've been SO much better.
8.5
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