“The damage is too high.” “Burst sucks.” “DP and Reversal moves are scrubby.” “The game is easy, and execution and skill don’t matter” — those are some of the opinions you may have seen floating around BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle. Indeed, the game does make some bold design decisions, but, according to accomplished BlazBlue: Central Fiction player PG|SKD, naysayers shouldn’t dismiss the game too quickly.
“In a nutshell, I think this game really rewards good strategy and application, so I think those are two aspects that make it a good fighting game,” writes SKD in a post on Team St1ckbug. “There is a high ceiling for deep, effective strategies. The game gives you so many options, the ensuing ‘Rock-Paper-Scissors’ can become really layered. Calling it ‘RPS’ is not really applicable at that point though, because the practical outcome is that a lot of wins come down to coming up with better strategies and applying them rather than winning the RPS.”
SKD goes on to counter a lot of the negative opinions and misconceptions floating around BBTAG. He said that the damage isn’t too high, unless it’s a Reversal Action punish or a non-mix-up starter. Tagging partners helps counter the high chip damage in the game, especially from Resonance Blaze mode. SKD does bring up Jin and this strategy (Jin can effectively spam his full-screen super to chip down an opponent’s health to 1) and recognizes that it’s a little too strong currently.
He gives a lot of advice about Cross Bursting, as some people believe that it’s too strong and others that it’s too weak, since it loses to anti-airs, assists, and Reversal Action. According to him, the key is watching the Cross gauge and understanding how much resources the opponent currently has. SKD also addresses the auto-combo system and the notion that some characters are watered down from their respective games:
“I see a lot of things like ‘I wish I could do Hyde’s 6B! How could they deprive my favorite character of his best normal?” The best normal in UNIST context is not going to be the best normal in BBTAG context. You may not actually need to, or want to use that normal, and that’s fine. Even if it was good, Hyde did not have an assist in UNIST,” he writes.
“You have to play these characters in BBTAG, not in their original games. To be honest, I do think that the characters were ported relatively well, and retain the meat of what made them ‘them.’”
It’s definitely worth to check out the whole article on Team St1ckbug as SKD addresses a couple more misconceptions. All in all, SKD professes that BBTAG is worthy of your “love, respect, and admiration” and is a good game on the competitive (and casual) level.
Source: Team St1ckbug website
