Okay, lemme give this a go while also trying to be fair. Also this is of course very gameplay minded. I have no real thoughts about BB's story, and the aesthetic is fine (outside some personal-taste qibbles), and honestly the music is real ass good stuff… but as far as GAMEPLAY.
For context, I think BB is kinda the "First Modern Fighting Game" and also solidified what an "Anime Fighter" (or less, though not completely misleadingly, "Air Dasher") "is as a gameplay genre. CT was the first mainstream 2d fighter with an input buffer, and it was the first one that really had to deal with the ramifications of that kind of design.
The input consistency that comes with buffers doesn't just make a game easier, it changed fundamentally how the game is played. It moves the bar of expectation. BB combos are longer than their GG equivalents, because they can be more reliably executed. The type of combo-video only relaunch combos and full screen carry combos you'd see people most of GGX2:Accent Core at the time was the type of shit that would become almost Bread and Butter style routing for Blazblue. Xrd, designed years later, had to do a LOT to keep things running away as far as BB did, in its goal to try and be a modern "GGX2 #Reload', but that type of routing still pops up. Now, the style isn't a problem -- it's just a fun observation -- but the length definitely is, for my taste, kinda a problem. And you see later anime games influenced by BB going even farther in that direction. While GG is thought of a lot as one of the first 'anime fighters', it sits on this weird line of being 'half Street Fighter' and 'Half anime'(again, using anime as a gameplay genre, not aesthetics), and I realized over time that my taste leans more on the SF half of GG. But anyways, BB…
First off, I just hate its normals. So many stubby normals, and the normals that aren't stubby and huge but massive. Some characters with classically good 'mid range buttons' pop up as the series progresses, but if you compare so many Guilty Gear far slashes to the equivalent BB button and the difference is crazy.
I hate that it's more of a 'flag' game than a hitbox game. Not that hit boxes don't matter obviously, things like Anti Air tend to become really binary in a game like BB, or the later modern games built in its shadow. Like this reaches all the way forward to SF6 which is a very "flag heavy" game (like 'extended hurtboxes vulnerable only to jump attacks for fireballs' levels of flag tweaking). I'm a big fan of raw hitboxes -- like you can have a few exceptions, but once the foundation of your game is "the anti air button always anti airs", you lose a lot of nuance in those interactions. Not that you have none -- SF6 tends to give AAs very narrow hitboxes so spacing still matters, and some BB Flag shenanigans can lead to funny stuff like Nine blowing up AAs with an air approach that's technically a projectile -- but BB generally has a movement toward very 'binary' interactions and play states compared to older GGs which are way more vibes driven to play. The binaryness of a lot of the interactions I think is actually whats appealing about it to a lot of people. It can reward a very structured, obsessive kind of knowledge.
Since consistent execution leads to overly consistent oki, BB introduced a teching system that I just hate. To be fair, it was smart of them to do something. They knew what was going to happen because of their system design and had to account for it… but it feels gross to me personally. Doing nothing is suicide and you have all these rolls, half of which will get you killed if you're not doing them with intentionality. It just extremely punishes casual players who don't understand it, and who can't just be like "Lemme just get knocked down and block" once they get punished a bit. I'm sure it's interesting as hell for people who love the game, but it's just too weird for me to like.
I hate block/hitstun throws. I hate having to be constantly vigilant of my opponent trying to do the laziest reset in history I should never get hit by. They're not interesting, and they're just there because people get upset when they whiff throws by doing them too early so now you've made their skill issue MY constant problem!!! It's the reason alone I've never bothered with Uni. It's one of those design patterns that are a red flag for me.
So for me, and this is 100% bias as a Guilty Gear first player, I see BB as "Guilty Gear, but we made things worse to be different". It's hard for me to get over. The games are so similar in the macro sense, but so unbelievably different in the micro sense. You do get people who play both, but a lot of people have extreme reactions because it's kinda a whole 'uncanny valley' thing. "You too closely resemble the thing I love, while not being the thing I love'. It's easier for me to play something like P4U than BB because while P4U has a lot of the same 'problems'(from my perspective) it's different enough that it doesn't feel like my loved one has been hit by the Invasion of the Bodysnatchers.
Also it's a game where you spend a thousand years in blockstun. I respect a lot of BB players for having truly iron defenses but lol I don't wanna do that for fun!!! But hey we're all different kinds of freak.
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