Caladrius Blaze

Raiden, but freaky.

I rate Caladrius Blaze 3.5/5. Pretty good. This is a vertically scrolling, arcade-style, shoot-em-up action game set in a high fantasy world wherein the unrestrained use of an ancient, evil, demonic spell has corrupted a kingdom. Characters mostly use flying vehicles but also have their portraits displayed at the sides of the screen. As characters take damage (both your own and enemy boss characters) their clothes get increasingly damaged, eventually getting shredded to the point of becoming extremely revealing (fan service style) though the most explicit details are never fully exposed.

Notes:

*This game tends to assume you are using some sort of controller even though it works perfectly well with a keyboard. If an in-game menu tells you to press “A” you should just press either “Z” or the “ENTER” key.

*There are 6 firing buttons to bind (4 separate keys for firing your primary weapons and 2 other keys for firing bombs and a special move) and learning how and when to use them is key to understanding how to play this game well (beyond merely dodging enemies and enemy projectiles.


Good things about this game:

+ A Large number of characters are unlocked from the outset of the game (7 or 8 characters in total. I can’t remember whether one of them needs to be unlocked). The firing patterns of the different characters are different enough to help keep things somewhat interesting.

+Each character has their own dialogue with each of the game’s boss characters. This dialog ranges from being funny, silly to touching, metaphysical and highly philosophical depending on which character you play. The dialogue really is thought-provoking in some places, especially when it concerns issues of loyalty and faith. Caladrius Blaze’s dialogue and various endings and story is where this game truly shines, if you can manage to somehow overlook all the amazingly stereotypical anime-style voices that all the characters have.

+ Not a very frustrating game. You can continue after being killed an infinite number of times (doing so merely resets your score). Just press “ENTER” when the continue count down appears.

+ Fairly exciting boss fights.

+ Highly responsive controls.

+ Fairly interesting bosses and firing patterns.

+No major bugs or errors that I noticed.

+ Fan service clothes shredding!

+ This game also has a pretty good steam profile background available of a sexy anime nun, if that’s your thing (and it can be fun to display if you want to mildly ruffle some straight-laced feathers). And yes, she is also a character you can play.


Mediocre things about this game:

+/- Each key can be rebound though the process for doing so is somewhat cumbersome.

+/- The game’s important dialogue has English subtitles. However, shorter phrases characters say when firing a powerful weapon are in Japanese without subtitles. There is no option for English audio dubbing.

+/- The game’s intro animation is of such quality as to be worthy of a television anime series. Unfortunately Caladrius Blaze’s music won’t be for everyone. I found the music to be variously dull, overly frenetic and busy (yet with no strong musical theme) and sometimes outright irritating (as in the case of the game’s traditional (and very professionally done) anime-styled intro animation.

+/- Playing through the game repeatedly with different characters unlocks additional artwork and backstory and character profiles for you to look at from a menu gallery. I wish all this stuff was unlocked to begin with as playing through this game 8 times gets awfully repetitious and people who are such fans of this game shouldn’t be coerced (in any manner) into having to do this unless they really want to anyhow. The fun of playing the game with each character should be its own reward.


Bad things about this game:

- The levels themselves are only moderately interesting, most of them scrolling by in a fairly sedate manner (with a few exceptions). The smaller enemies (non-boss enemies) are also not particularly creative.

- Regardless of which character you play, the same bosses appear in the same order; they merely say different things to each character. There are 3 game modes but the chief difference between them, so far as I can tell is how many levels they include (the middle one in the menu has the most levels). Because of the lack of unusual modes to play and the bosses appearing in the same order each time, the game can feel repetitious after a short while (this is an arcade-style game after all), which is too bad because it really is fun and interesting to see all the character dialogue and some of it is quite good.

a shoot em up with a ton of special mechanics at your disposal which can be levelled up as you progress. such as the bomb , ultimate move , side elemental damage , forward canon. bullet hell kinda game play

Great game, but not so great port. Recommended only IF you don't mind not having in-depth graphics options, always requiring Internet Connection, and can snag it on sale for a good price. Otherwise, grab this on GOG if you want to play this in Offline Mode
https://www.gog.com/game/caladrius_blaze
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Caladrius_Blaze

I really dont care too much about the resolution being locked to 720p. what is a dealbreaker to me however, that the volume sliders are broken. The voice slider does absolutely nothing, instead the VA is tied to SE. Bullet/Shooting SFX is too loud and makes it hard to listen to the awesome BGM while playing. On the other hand voices will be too low if I lower SE in the options.

So yeah, i agree that this is a lazy PC port. It seems it only got updated once after release in 2017. I may check out the Switch/PS4 version eventually because I wanna play this game, but i really cant recommend this version unfortunately.

It´s another good shoot ´em up game.
Maybe not the best but it´s good in what is mean to. I personally don´t mind the graphics and liked the music and va !