Skip to main content

why has she got a bushy tail?

Answers on a stamped addressed envelope please.
Look at the picture above and see if you can explain to me in an encyclopedia or less what's going on there? It is an in-game still from the madness that is BlazBlue: Continuum Shift Extend, a colourful, anime styled and completely mental beat em up I will now attempt to describe without the use of mind altering elixirs.

How best to summarise the experience without my brain turning to yoghurt? Never played a BlazBlue game before, was vaguely aware of the series much the same way one is aware of the concept of lunacy. Acres and acres of backstory contained within, I must admit I'm approaching the material at a disadvantage somewhat.

It's full of the perplexing narrative continuity that hardcore Japanese role playing games are full of. A meticulous bordering on frenzied attention to details. Rewarding to those who have followed it from day one? Maybe but newcomers probably won't get one wobbling iota of sense out of this, certainly I didn't.

Umm... yeah.

As far as the fighting goes its a fun dose of over the top pugilism with a cast of characters that range from the human to the why-has-she-got-a-bushy-tail variety by way of supernatural entities and fuck off swords. Not lacking for variety then and certainly appealing to every niche you can think of, perverted or otherwise.

Overall if this entire entry is more a summary of my brain's inability to comprehend what my eyes are telling it then maybe that's my bad and maybe I should just make the effort to find out what the hell is going down before my befuddled face. It's a fun game that enables you to approach it as either a clumsy newb or as a combo veteran with the finely tuned skills of a plate-spinning piano player. It's certain a nifty little addition to my Vita library even if its utterly bonkers.

Best stop here as I could literally go on for hours listing all the ways in which this game is clinically certifiable. Maybe I'm the crazy one for attempting to take something like this head on without first consulting the BlazBlue wiki that no doubt exists out there somewhere in the darker corners of the internets. Perhaps some official BlazBlue energy drink to equip my brain for the onslaught of backstory that no doubt awaits me there.

See above.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

my top 100 games of all time part 1

It begins! You know what? I'm just going to do it. No more procrastination, no more delay, no more shifting the ranking around to accommodate the latest greatest game I've played. No it's time. Time to deliver on a mission I set for myself back in the first glorious age of this blog before everything went dark for a few years. It's happening folks, I am beginning the Top 100 ranking of my all-time favourite video games.  These will be games I've played so if any obvious contenders are not there it's because I never got around to playing them or I did and then forgot about them meaning they probably wouldn't have made the list anyway. It's all entirely my own personal opinion of the games that mean the most to me. It is the sum total of my best experiences in gaming over several decades of playing them. So where better to begin my Top 100 game ranking than by err... the honourable mentions?

completionism 2025: mega edition

BEHOLD... THE MEGA EDITION! It's time o nce again!  With no further ado b ut actually with some ado I am going to recap my personal year in gaming. The scintillating highs, the cratering lows with all points in-between and beyond spoken for as well. It's that most holy of end of year traditions and let me tell you I am both up for it and down for it simultaneously. On reflection I've somehow said the same thing twice there. Alas now's not the time to deliberate on the foibles and quirks of the English tongue! No it's the time for gaming and a super mega f-tonne of it as well! It's been a busy year for me outside of the gaming habit but yet somehow I have managed to squeeze in another fifty or so games. If the old gaming backlog I complain so much about was looking considerably lighter at the end of 2024 then it's positively slender now at the end of 2025. The list is still mostly comprised of 'old' games but yet again more and more curren...

the art of the ending (or how Deadly Premonition sticks the landing)

Deadly Premonition was a funny old game, an earnestly idiosyncratic tribute to the sensibilities of its creators wrapped up in a Twin Peaks style murder mystery. Of course it's that last part that caused it to pop up somewhere on my radar in the early to mid part of the last decade, anything that even partly channels the weird sensibilities of Twin Peaks and David Lynch invariably gets my attention but back to the game. This is a murder mystery, a dream like odyssey through the unknown and a reckoning with oneself that I wasn't quite prepared for. Short form social media wasn't all the rage just yet when this game was released, yet  Deadly Premonition found a popular little online niche for itself that captured the imagination of much of the gaming public. A curiously beguiling mix of gaming oddity that shouldn't have worked as well as it should have. Indeed some would say it barely worked at all.  As to why it worked for me, well I think there is something to be sa...