After loading up the “Sofa” app with my backlog of Stuff to Play/Watch/etc, I thought I would start tackling some of the items in the list.  “Fighting games” seemed like a reasonably good place to start, since I only had two of them queued.

They could not have been more different.

The first one was the light-hearted party fighter “SNK Heroines” which features extremely simple controls, a small cast of characters swiped from various SNK titles, random items being dropped on to the play field during the fight, and the normally-extremely-masculine Terry Bogard with a bit of an image change.

There’s a story involving a parallel dimension and all of the heroines being kidnapped by a creepy villain and blah blah blah, but mostly it’s just an excuse to put characters in silly costumes and have them beat each other up.

Unfortunately I am not very well versed in SNK lore, so I could tell that there were a ton of in-jokes being thrown back and forth between the characters but not what those jokes WERE.  That detracted from it a bit.

Most of the random taunting was universal enough, I guess.

I played the Switch version.  I understand there’s a PS4 version, and I have to wonder whether it looks any better.  The Switch definitely had a bit of an early-Xbox-360 look to the models, which I guess is still impressive for a decade-old mobile chip.

Unlike most fighters, you don’t win by simply emptying your opponent’s health bar.  Rather, you need to beat them down until their health bar is flashing red and then hit them with a special attack to actually finish the round.

Special attacks draw from a second resource, which charges slowly over time and is depleted when using items or some attacks, so there were a number of embarrassing losses following rounds where I would  beat my opponent into the danger range, go to hit the “finish them!” button and… well, not finish them.  I eventually learned to manage this energy a little bit better.

Anyway, I played through the story mode a total of nine times unlocking various things and had a good time with it, once I learned that the “block” button was something you actually wanted to use.

Though seriously, the last boss in story mode cheats like a <censored for family-friendliness> and I strongly endorse knocking the difficulty down one notch for him.  You can do this on the fly from the pause menu and then ratchet it up again for your next pass through story mode.

With a little over six hours dropped into that, I felt like I’d gotten my money’s worth and decided to get on to the next game.

OK, so.  I went into BlazBlue knowing very little about it.

Full disclosure: to be honest, all I knew was that it had a cute squirrel girl.

Exhibit A:

Looking at the game’s menu, there wasn’t a button for “Squirrel!” but there were buttons for Tutorial and the usual assortment of arcade and story modes.  I figured I’d start with the tutorial, and I got my first glimpse of what I was in for.

“Novus Orbis Librarium” turned out to be one of the simpler things I had to keep track of.

After a little time in the tutorial, and feeling myself starting to glaze over, I figured I would get into the story mode and see how that went.  My reasoning was that there would probably be a number of fights and I could gauge for myself whether I needed to go back to the tutorial and practice more.

Less than five minutes into the story mode, I went looking for a pen and started taking notes.  It’s very wordy and loves to toss names and concepts at you.

I mean, I don’t know what a Mindeater is but I can kind of get it from context.  It sounds bad!  I don’t want my mind eaten, for sure.

I don’t know who Bang Shishigami is and I don’t know what a Phoenix: Rettenjo is.  More about this later.

My eyes were seriously glazing over at this point.  I hit the start button and saw that it had an option to save my progress, and that let me know how far I was in the story mode.

I was in chapter 8.  A quick google revealed that the game has 100 chapters of mostly text, with an ample number of side stories.  Estimates for how long it would take you to read were typically in the 20 hour range.

That is a lot of reading.  I dropped out of the story mode and went into the arcade mode.  By this point I just wanted to get my squirrel girl action on.

I got utterly demolished in the first fight.  I went to the options menu.  I turned the game to “Easy” and went back into arcade, where the first opponent again showed me the error of my ways.  Like, no pity.  I got absolutely bodied.  I think I landed a single hit on them.

I went back into the options menu and discovered that there was an option below easy AND that you could set the game’s controls to “Stylish” mode which is a bit of a euphemism for “mash A and your character will do a massive combo”

THIS combination of options was great!  I mashed my way through the 8 fights in Makoto’s story mode, and then noticed that there were chapters two and three of her story mode and then multiplied that by the number of fighters on the character select screen… and that’s about when I just gave up and took the game card out of the Switch and went back to Google to find out a little more about BlazBlue.

It turns out that what I’m playing is the fourth game in the series, and that there are all kinds of novels and manga and drama CDs and all of the games have long visual novel components to them and and and…

Look, I’m not proud.  BlazBlue broke me.   If I ever meet someone who is a die hard fan of the game series, I am going to drop to my knees and praise their obvious commitment.  I may even ask them if they can tell me who Bang Shishigami is, if I have a couple hours to spare.

I’m just glad I broke my “no physical media” rule guideline here.  I’ll get a little bit of money back and someone else will get to enjoy this insanity.