BlayzBloo: Super Melee Brawlers Battle Royale (DSi)

BlayzBloo: Super Melee Brawlers Battle Royale, also known as the less deliberately silly BlayzBloo: Battle X Battle, is a simpler and less technical spinoff of the BlazBlue series of 2D fighters. Using a cuter chibi art style and fairly basic attack system for its 3D arena battles, it seems a bit like the game was either meant to be an easy gateway into the franchise or just a quirky spinoff for fans of the franchise. Unfortunately, either because of the limitations of DSiWare or because it was attempting to be a casual fighter, BlayzBloo: Super Melee Brawlers Battle Royale manages to mostly achieve vapidness rather than goofy fun.

 

In this 3D arena fighter up to four human or AI players can participate in a battle, but there are a total of five cast members, meaning most battles will likely have a bit of character overlap. Characters can freely run about the stage and jump, but when they wish to do battle, they’ll find their attack options remarkably limited. Each character has a simple normal attack chain, and while this can change a little when attacking in the air like how the vampiress Rachel Alucard gains a downwards umbrella slam while airborne, for the most part your combos will be a simple series of weapon swings. Should one hit manage to touch a foe, the rest of the combo will likely complete without issue before throwing your opponent onto their back to give them some time to recover. There is no way to guard against attacks in BlayzBloo: Super Melee Brawlers Battle Royale, so instead you’ll spend much of your time running around the little stages trying to land your basic combo, the only other standard attack option being what the game calls Drive attacks.

While each basic combo is a bit different, usually in speed and number of swings, Drive attacks are truly unique skills. For example, the serious swordsman Jin can freeze a foe in an ice block if they’re close enough, although the follow-up will likely be just unleashing his basic combo after. Poor Rachel is given a wind power for her Drive that barely moves characters around, but the antihero protagonist Ragna the Bloodedge and Taokaka the eerie catgirl with a shadowy face have perhaps the most helpful special attacks. Ragna’s is a slow and powerful strike that lets him recover some health should he land it while Taokaka is able to launch herself forward in an attack. The lady gunner Noel actually can form some mildly varied combos with her humble Drive attack, but Ragna and Taokaka both have a special edge, Taokaka especially so since character speed seems universal so chasing down other characters even in the small arenas can sometimes feel a little hopeless.

 

Unfortunately, these paltry techniques comprise the full breadth of your standard battle options. The typical battle becomes a contest to run up into your opponents’ faces to slash them up with the same attack, throwing in your Drive if you feel saucy, and trying to walk out of the way of their basic attacks when they charge towards you. While the different attack styles do mean you might have some degree of preference for which of the five characters you play as, it rarely feels like the actual substance of a character will influence your victory since your game plan so rarely is changed by who you select. There is a bit of a wildcard available though in the form of items. Appearing periodically in large chests you break open, items give you one more way to fight provided you’re the first to grab it. Grab the kunai and you can throw a fan of them to stun anyone hit, chuck a bowling ball to have a slowly-rolling damage source move across the arena, and throw the rather strange frog George XIII and eventually a lightning bolt will strike at its location. These items are quickly spent attack options but at least are something that breaks up the monotonous fights a touch, and there are a few more unique items like a mushroom that makes you gigantic so you can easily bulldoze the other players for a time. At the same time, too greedily going for item chests can come back to bite you, some detonating instead when opened while others might contain a time bomb that attaches you to for some guaranteed damage once its counter is up. They are a simple but appreciated disruption, the battle system not really valuing skill so throwing in some kooky random chaos can at least introduce a brief surge of excitement and novelty.

BlayzBloo: Super Melee Brawlers Battle Royale’s battles come in three main formats. A Life battle is the simplest, all four fighters vying to be the last one standing. You only need to worry about whittling down the other fighters’ life bars here, and even in stages where you can fall off the edge or get harmed by a stage hazard, there are no instant deaths. A 60 second timer ensures battles remain short and that might technically be said to try and motivate you to get in and defeat opponents, but the person with the most health wins if not everyone is defeated so aggression isn’t necessarily rewarded. Point mode better focuses player attention, characters starting the match with 50 points and losing them when they take damage. The points pop out of injured characters as Soba Noodles that can sometimes be grabbed by anyone nearby rather than the one responsible for damage, but theoretically, fighters could focus on someone with more points and the battle dynamic could shift as points change hand. I use the term “theoretically” because one element that holds BlayzBloo: Super Melee Brawlers Battle Royale back massively is the incredibly poor AI. Computer controlled opponents cannot have their difficult level set and they are fairly bad at understanding any game mode beyond Life. In a Point battle you can find them focusing down a character who has already been reduced to zero points, but it’s Flag mode where they show their true idiocy. Flag mode has players try to grab onto a small panda and still be the one holding it when the battle timer ends. It will be dropped if the player holding it takes considerable damage, but AI players seem to have a blind spot for the flag. All three AI players can spend their time fighting each other as you safely stand still in a stage corner waiting out the clock despite there being no advantage to fighting anyone but the flag holder. Even if people are trying to chase the flag holder though, it’s often not too hard for someone to just run around and hop to avoid attacks, making an already flawed mode even worse.

 

While solo play does allow you to set up battles with whatever rules you like, there is also a five stage challenge where you play each mode once and then face two special challenges. Most characters will have a Point battle against three Jins where the player’s own points are constantly decreasing, but the Jins don’t understand this so it’s not too different from a normal point match. The final battle is a one-on-one battle though, and not only does the AI handle these better, but BlayzBloo: Super Melee Brawlers Battle Royale is perhaps better when it’s a not trying to be a battle royale. With only one character to focus on, players actually need to pick when they try their simple combo better since they can’t just run into a crowd swinging and land easy hits. It’s still not going to be a nail-biter as your options are still incredibly plain, but there is a bit more tension involved when players are guaranteed to be constantly engaged in trying to take out the other fighter. Stages are definitely built around the bigger battles though, often fairly open and their gimmicks not too likely to impact a one-on-one fight. The graveyard for example has graves open and anyone who doesn’t pop into one for cover will be hit by a lightning bolt, and one level in the Lost Town has a lever you can hit to make the ground drop out either to the left or right. In a four player fracas it’s likely someone could fall for these, but two-player fights will likely be a bit too focused to fall for a trap or find it not too hard to run to a grave when availability isn’t a problem.

THE VERDICT: BlayzBloo: Super Melee Brawlers Battle Royale could have worked as a quirky side mode in a standard BlazBlue title where players could dabble in its shallow fighting format and then move along to something more interesting, but as a standalone experiment, this 3D arena fighter is remarkably lean and not helped by AI fighters with little understanding of the game they’re playing. One on one fights can have a tiny bit of substance since the focus is tightened, but four player fights are messy and bland as everyone attempts to land the same generic combos that involve little strategy or thought. Items do help break up the monotony, but they’re not substantial enough to redeem this fairly empty fighter.

 

And so I give BlayzBloo: Super Melee Brawlers Battle Royale for Nintendo DSi…

A BAD rating. A touch above terrible simply because one-on-one fights can actually involve a tiny bit of tactical play, BlayzBloo: Super Melee Brawlers Battle Royale leans heavily into casual ideas without really understanding how to realize them well. Having a simple attacking system means it’s easy for anyone to jump in, but even novice button-mashers want to be able to bumble into impressive moves. When there is so little variety in your attacking methods there’s very little to do besides run up and attack, and while spacing yourself to avoid enemy attacks and find your moment means it’s not entirely mindless, it’s not the kind of substance that keeps players coming back. Even one more additional attack option could add more of a spark to play as people actually begin to make choices, and Rachel actually almost hits on this with her umbrella slam being a good deal different from her normal attacks. However, she gets the weak wind Drive attack so she still can’t pull herself up over the other four characters in terms of true battle options. If the focus was going to be on more unusual battles over the techniques you can utilize, items could have been emphasized more or stages could have had wackier gimmicks. Instead, fights feel fairly similar between those sudden short injections of something mildly exciting that go away all too quickly in the already short battles. Really though, making the AI at least competent outside of a one-on-one scenario would do wonders for adding some life to the game. Getting together a gang of four players who own this title to ensure four intelligent human players can actually engage with the concept of something like Flag mode feels like a rarity, so having some computer-controlled opposition that knew what the rules were would be a strong step in the right direction.

 

BlayzBloo: Super Melee Brawlers Battle Royale’s mercifully brisk battles at least means each battle quickly concludes, the idea of a longer game of panda keepaway where no one else is even trying certainly an unfortunate hypothetical. Overall the game feels like it doesn’t understand what it’s trying to make, especially since the AI struggles with the battle premises itself, but this wasn’t the only attempt to have a BlazBlue spinoff in the 3D arena fighting style. BlazBlue: Clone Phantasma would release on the 3DS, the more powerful hardware allowing for more characters and content, but it doesn’t seem to have learned too much from the failures of this title. Perhaps instead of throwaway spinoffs the idea should be treated as a serious diversion, but instead BlazBlue fans and newbies alike get a game with a goofy name that is far less amusing than its wacky title and cartoon looks imply.