BlazBlue Continuum Shift follows Calamity Trigger by like 3 or 4 days I think, and directly follows up on pretty much every plot thread from its predecessor. Mechanically it’s much the same, a series of refinements and system changes that better get at what separated Calamity Trigger from its contemporaries, not dissimilar from the jump from Guilty Gear X to XX.

I still don’t really know how to critique it as a fighting game, honestly. The mechanics feel good. The characters seem like they make you play into their unique abilities much more (I was able to rush cpu opponents down with Rachel in Calamity Trigger, but that shit don’t fly here!). Beyond that, I’m kinda clueless, even as far as knowing what specific changes were made. But it still feels good, and it feels even more like blazblue.

As far as the story-mode goes, things have been improved a fair bit! Not only is there more to it (more characters will do that to ya), but the QOL is vastly improved. Now you don’t need to lose every permutation of every fight for 100% completion! Plus you can finally retry fights that don’t branch the path! That’s some good stuff, and both make going through the story more painless.

Even with all that though, I’m still a bit less impressed with this game than the previous one. Maybe it’s partly because it’s not a huge mechanical jump, but I think a lot of it comes from how the story is structured? This time each character has a canon ending, an alternate (bad) ending, and a gag ending. Sometimes there’s multiple alternate endings I think, but that’s the broad structure.

The bit that’s really different here is the canon ending, the true ending, for each character. In Calamity Trigger, at least as far as I could understand, the only canon storyline was the actual True Ending path that you unlocked after beating everyone else’s storyline. Sure it was confusing, but I really appreciated how they contextualized this fuzzy storytelling as “one of many possible futures”, and as a feature of the particular way the world of blazblue is built.

The new style results in much more concrete storytelling, which is much more parseable but also (I think) loses a bit of the unique burn the last game left going down? I wouldn’t say this is a downgrade for anyone but me though lol, but it still definitely matters to me.

That being said, it’s definitely a more full package and a more unique and polished fighter, and would be easy to recommend if, you know, there weren’t two more afterwards. Still, for the story it’s a good buy, and what’s here is good (even if I don’t love the less fuzzy storytelling and very early 2010s localization).