BlazBlue Centralfiction

Tager. I don't even play him.

Play BlazBluze

Right now I’d consider us in the midst of what you might call a fighting game renaissance. It’s something that started with Strive during Covid, but solidified with strong releases in Street Fighter and Tekken drawing thousands of new eyes to one of gaming’s most storied genres.

Indeed, it seems like fighting games, or at least the online netplay experience, has never been as popular and accessible as it is now. Compared to these juggernauts, why would you ever choose to buy an “outdated” anime-fighter with an iota of the playerbase, and a community so sweaty that you’re more or less guaranteed to get steamrolled until you’ve grinded hundreds of hours to learn even the most basic of combos?

For me personally, BlazBlue represents the turning of an era in fighting games, when the developers weren’t as focused on growth and player experience, but rather exploring the uniqueness of the design space. And yet, BBCF is not a mish-mash of poorly implemented “cool concepts” like some of the other gimmicks of the era - it’s had years of stumbles to learn from at this point, and comes from a company that’s had many cracks at the genre.

Because of this, it easily stands as the most polished anime fighter out there. It is also my favourite fighting game of all time, occasionally wavering into my favourite game, period. I cannot overstate how much I’ve come to love this game in the past year; the way it weaves its mechanics, character uniqueness, combo structure, offensive/defensive options, complexity, and neutral is true genius.



What’s most apparent when you start your BlazBlue journey, is that offense is very oppressive and difficult to escape. This can be frustrating on a surface level, but it does mean that the easiest part of your character’s toolkit to access also happens to be the one that will actually win you the game. This game has a reputation for being “hard”, but you’d be surprised how often a simple game plan can steal a round from longtime players. The mental stack is heavy here, and sometimes they just aren’t ready for the fabled “DP every wakeup” Ragna winning a game with their pristine 5B->Gauntlet Hades neutral.

Strong individual tools make good offense pretty easy, but what is hard is great offense. Defence is usually the focus when you think of high level play, but I’ve come to find hard offense is a really underrated thing. Great combos are hard. Great conversions are hard. Great pressure sequences are hard. Great mixups are hard. If you’re trying to up your game, you will mess up your offense constantly. Gun to my head, one factor that makes me love this game: this is it - the fact that you make mistakes on offense.

Yes it is frustrating to drop your “Day 1” B&Bs 50 hours into learning a character, to feel like your opponent gets up for free on every knockdown. And maybe this is a part of the game that you really won’t vibe with, but struggle gives way for catharsis. The road to improvement in BlazBlue is often refreshingly obvious: it really is just your execution, a skill issue you might say. So hit the lab, grind those inputs out, and trust me, it will be so. much. more. rewarding when you finally land that shit in a match. It even gives you a new appreciation for the moments when you’re hit with some truly satanic scum mid-match; you understand that that person labbed the hell out of that, and you appreciate them for it.



Offense is a big deal, because you will need great offense to open up opponents who have honed their defence. Despite its aggressive nature, BBCF features a robust wheel of defensive options. Barrier and instant block give a lot of agency to the defending player and when used smartly, end your pressure in just a couple of attacks. Guard cancels can be very hard to bait and turn situations in a flash if you overcommit even a smidge. Burst is essentially a get out jail free card.

Yet, the most powerful thing comes in your wakeup options. Sure you have the generic option of flipping your character upright to get back on your feet, but you can roll forwards or backwards - hoping to create some distance or even steal the corner - for a little risk. To add another layer of ambiguity for the aggresso, all these getup options can be delayed to mess up with their attack timings and even punish them for running predictable setups.



At the intersection of offensive and defensive play sits this game’s lifeblood mechanic: Overdrive.

Gamers know, there’s no game you hate more than the one you play, and yet I have never heard a single person ever complain about Overdrive. It is integrated so ingeniously that it accentuates every strength of the game while adding so many possibilities. It is simultaneously:

- a unique install that highlights character uniqueness and fulfills their power fantasy
- a strong extender to show off flashy combos
- an essential defensive option to punish opponents who think they’ve cornered you
- a subtle comeback mechanic that creates extremely hype moments
- a burst giving you a second chance at life, but at a heavy cost

Being all of these at once, it seems hard to grasp, but BBCF specifically has added a new type of move in Overdrive, called Exceed Accel that smartly helps bring the mechanic down to earth for new players. It’s a straightforward super that can be done directly out of your Overdrive activation, consolidating many of its features in an accessible way.



Perhaps the thing most touted in online spaces about BBCF is its character diversity. Characters don’t just have different strengths and weaknesses - the same tools but on a sliding scale, instead the character you pick defines the way you interact the game.

It’s fantastic because you really feel a connection with your character, a sense of identity as a “main” of one of the colourful cast members. Even as a veteran, every new moveset you explore is a whole new world laid out in front of you, 36 ways to fall in love all over again with the game.

But of course the downside is, there are 36 characters you have to learn to fight against. I’m not going to deny the knowledge-check nature of this game, and given the smaller playerbase, some characters are a rare sight. Everybody approaching offense differently also means you need to approach defense differently. You can read up online all you want, but you will not be able to explain what something like Arakune’s “clone” actually does in the context of a match until you’ve been cooked by it.



I honestly love all fighting games, and I’ve poured many (maybe too many) hours of my life exploring this world. If you’re into the genre but have never tried BB before, you’ll find your own things to love/hate about it I’m sure, but I 100% think it’s worth a buy.

If you’re still dipping your toes… it’s a harder sell for sure. The joy of BlazBlue is in improving, an arduous climb to a goalpost that’s always a little out of reach, and you have to be ok with that. You can discover this joy exists while learning the game (that’s usually what happens), but if your love comes exclusively from winning, you’re in the wrong place.

Instead, find love in picking a main for yourself
find love in the hours of training mode ahead of you
find love in in intricacies of every single matchup
find love in the cringe of your character
find love in the cringe of other characters (very hard)
find love in every game-winning combo that you land
find love in every game-ruining combo that you drop
find love in every wake-up DP and every reversal super
find love in the soundtrack (shit slaps)
find love in the fantastic pixel art
find love in the beauty of a community that has kept the game alive for 10 years


And if you’ve found that love, whoever you are, know that there is room in my lobby for you,
whether you have ten matches or ten thousand.

This fighting game right here was the last of its kind. The end of an era. No lootboxes, no MTX, no season passes, no P2W. Just pure skill and fun gameplay and characters plus their design. The best of the franchise, and IMO, better than GG and every other 2D fighting game.

The only issue is it heavily relies on matchups as it was from *that* era, but to this day FGs still suffer from that.

I was sceptikal even during a sale but this game is truly awesome.

where sol badguy

I suck ass and will never get better. Do not recommend
- someone who recommends the game

one of the best FGs currently out.
every character is different and unique, combos feel open and fun.
rollback netcode works perfectly.
if you can get past the fact that this is effectively a discord fighter, then i can't recommend this game enough.

game becomes peak when you're doing a taokaka mirror match and act like a gfuel addicted goblin until one of you out-jobbers the other

would recommend

fun game

The only good fighting game with skill expression.

Played this game for quite a while on linux/steamdeck, but now it won't launch in any compatibility mode. Update: I was able to fix the issue briefly by switching to proton layer 8.05, but the game launched once, and then wouldn't work again. I wish I would not have this issue. Devs please support this game a little bit on linux/steam deck it's a great game.

this game is good for getting into fighting games. Hibiki Kohaku

Solid but it comes with a CP folder so not cool

really fun game imo, i play as noel alot, shes fun

I played The first 2 blazblue games when I was a kid, and it was my first experience with a story where each character has different motives and stories that you can play, as such it does sadden me that not everone gets a full arc throughout the 2 continuations however I can say if you enjoyed the previous game in the series you will love this game, It does a really good job of ending the story, in a way that hits the player.
I would rate story wise 7/10 but nostalgia could be blurring the lines for me. Should be noted, this is the comment of just the main story of the game as I did not play all the bonus and arcade modes.

Unfortunately, this game is a broken, unbalanced pile of crap from developers who never spent a second thinking about competitive balance. Instead of fixing the roster, which desperately needed it, they didn’t have the brains for anything other than releasing even more brain-dead but powerful characters like Mai, whose release was a slap in the face to all the lower-tier characters that actually had to play the game instead of just spamming 5C.
This is a game where character balancing wasn’t even considered at the conceptual level. Take Hakumen, for example - he would be considered a defensive character in other games thanks to his low-skill parries that you can just hold and easily convert into 3k+ combos. But at the same time, he has unreactable overheads that cancel from almost any move, ridiculously fast and long air dashes, a projectile counter, fullscreen command grab charges with hyper armor and invul, an 8-frame low that reaches half the screen, confirms from practically any hit thanks to his massive range, and just overall absurd damage. In a normal game, a character like this would be considered broken and overpowered, but in BlazBlue, he’s just mid+ tier, while low-tier characters get no free DP, no range, no pressure - nothing. I mean, compare Terumi and Naoto. Or even Makoto and Naoto. They all share the same rushdown archetype, but there's a huge power gap. I guess the developers never had the awareness to look back at the characters they had already released, compare them to their new creatura, and actually balance them properly instead of releasing an unbalanced mess. I guess instead of balancing, they were too busy jerking off to ice-cream-covered lolis from their artbook. With that in mind, it’s hard to feel bad that Mori got tossed out and the series died, leaving ArcSys with nothing but their watered-down, soy-flavored Guilty Gear.
Also, the game is absolutely flooded with invul moves, which not everyone will like. On the bright side, the roster is pretty diverse-there are lots of characters, and each has their own unique gimmick.
Getting to know all the different character mechanics is pretty interesting at first. With enough practice, you can pull off long and flashy combos, even if they’re not always optimal - something you won’t find in every game. Visually, the game has aged really well thanks to its high-quality sprites, but the overall design, with its generic anime aesthetic and cringe-worthy "three belts on one character" look, leaves much to be desired.
Overall, I’d still say the game is worth checking out and even worth playing seriously - if you’re playing a high-tier like Susanoo, or if you’re fine with ArcSys spitting in your face by refusing to buff your trash-tier cripple of a character and are willing to suffer through it no matter what.
The only days I don't hate this game are the days I don't play it.

500+ hours i'll never get back

my main can combo into astral directly out of his jab, 10/10 game.

43 minutes in:
i fought against my friend with over 140 hours, and did not make it out alive

10/10

3 hours in:
i was thrown into the goop chamber

10/10

6 hours in:
terumi

10/10

ragna and sol yaoi

Blazblue Central Fiction is the best fighting game ever made, no doubt about it. Its fun, its fast, it as enough complexity to keep you interested forever, but its simple enough for a beginner to pick up. Due to the large roster and the huge variety between every character, I can almost guarantee you, you will find a character you like. This game also has awesome music. Play Blazblue Central Fiction.

Nice 2d fighting game and online works.

The game regularly goes on sale, but even at full price it's still a ton of content for what you pay for. Great gameplay, reliable netcode, fun characters. Worth playing for any 2D fighting game fan

i play this game with one hand

you know the rest.

Top tier anime fighter. Every character feels completely different (save for the clones lol). Susanoo is peak.

Its the Type//:Soul guy. Joking I really do like this game its one of if not is my fav 2d fighter game.

I waited long enough to see what the future had for fighting games to write a fair review on this game, years have passed since its release on steam and to this day Fighting games are more alive and there are a lot of interesting and good looking games out there, but I can say for sure, this is peak FG design, the characters are so unique, each and every single one feels like playing a different game.

Nothing comes close to this game when it comes to fighting game design and mechanics, yes this is a fair review and my conclusion is: This is the best FG ever.

Good game i'm not good at

Huge Fan

The blaze blue roller coaster ends here for now. If you played through this story than you know that this game story is as confusing as Kingdom Hearts. All the stories are connecting together for the final. If you grown up with the characters or just a big fan then you should get ready for the big sad. With a total roaster of 36 playable characters with one being DLC for seeming due to late into development. It would seem it be a step forward to leave a big mark in the franchise. To me it seems like a step back. Not really sure what happen during development , but there is a lot of things missing that were in the last game. For starters the combat is dumb down and moves sets feeling kinda clunky Vs the last 3 games. Some characters have straight up new kits like Bang which makes him unplayable for me. Idk why the need to change it up so much was for. Feel like that kinda killed the game for sure. Many modes that were in early games are now lacking or straight up removed. Biggest thing that got me was that this game is only in Japanese voice acting. I think that they rush this game to not do an English dub liked they normal did. It really stinks that the rushing a game that kinda rivals Guilty Gear got nurtured at the last second for a due date. If you want like new characters in this game than that’s good for you. Like smash ultimate they are all here, but I can’t really get behind the combat to really recommend it to play for fun. It’s just does not feel like Chrono Phantasma. If you were like me and here for the story than the journey has ended for now. Can it go somewhere? Sure it could but the story is kinda over for now. Time to get off the blaz blue roll coaster and jump on the Guilty Gear train because that one is still going strong. 7/10

the wheel of fate jammed and i'm stuck here forever it seems

feels so good to play, honestly the best in the series

I actually find myself enjoying this game, by playing the Type Soul Snake character and Peroxide Vessel character.

Price tag is not warranted, but the combat is very fun.

it got good once i stopped playing noel.
also grim of abyss is *the best* game mode ever conceived.

Great game, really expressive and fun.

chujowa gra, 10/10, nerf terumi

Extremely fun game, has a huge cast with many cool and unique characters, has a very fun story, many good single player modes, and as of 2022 it has rollback! Best way to play is to have a friend you can learn with, seriously one of if not the best games.

Dope Game For Real. It Has Bunch Of Characters With Interesting And Unique Mechanics

fast paced combat, unique mechanics, memorable characters, and a green haired snake boy stepping on people, 10/10 game

One of the worst FG experiences ever. go play literally anything else.

Facilmente o melhor jogo da franquia.

That feeling when you combust at 2500°C (Blaze that is blue) in the middle of a piece of literature in the form of prose that describes imaginary events and people. (Center of fiction)

honestly still wish they added dub voices, but i love everything about the series all the same

Pretty decent I always want to play this game for A long time. And it happened to be good the mechanics and characters design is something I appreciate a lot.

It's a good game!

the game is fun, characters are really nice the game isnt that hard but the player room system is kinda weird

Well this is it. This is the peak. With the lead director gone, blazblue is now getting the guilty gear treatment: Aka with its lead director gone its in copyright hell, or arc sys has it and wont capitalize on it, or the games wont be the same due to the lead director being gone. Either way this is probs the last game of this quality we are getting (And chronophantasma extended, in terms of content is better, with way more content). So pack it up boys. Blazblue had a good run. At least we got roll back so we can enjoy this classic for the rest of time...

A great 2D fighting game franchise.
Arcade mode is better than story mode.

Game is fantastic but for like 2 days performance was atrocious (ran perfectly before). Tried different fixes with stuff like triple buffering but didn't help and the game is still stuttering