BlazBlue Crosstag is a Comedy Game (And an Aside on Balance in Tabletop Games)

At the start of the year I talked a bit about Taking Yourself the Right Amount of Serious, and this is something of an off-shoot of that ~

If you ask me what my favorite fighting game is, without skipping a beat, I'll tell you it's BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle, a six year-old anime tag fighter smashing together beloved franchises like Persona, UnderNight, RWBY (yes, that RWBY) and of course the titular BlazBlue. From auto-combos, to unredactables, to ToDs[*1], there's a lot of reasons why people hate on this game. Its last major patch also added a completely busted character before the team proceeded to drop the game forever (kind of). And yet to me, it's perfect. The game is obnoxiously flashy, thumb-bleedingly fast and just downright silly sometimes. Where most fighting games I've tried feel like an extended, tense turn-based combat, matches of BBTag (even high-stakes matches against one of the best players in the region) feel like a beautiful slapstick symphony.

Maybe it's the people I play with, maybe it's the game itself. It might be a little bit of both, but on the whole it's something I've wanted to blog about here for a long time:

To clarify, BBTag is an anime fighter that is unlike any other anime fighter I've played. Instead of extensive and complex move lists, each character's special moves all boil down to pressing one of two buttons and doing a single corresponding directional movement - It's simple, intuitive and easy to teach. What this ostensibly allows for is an almost Smash Bros-esc party game accessibility while still keeping the fundamentals of a 2D fighting game's rhythm. Well, it would be if that rhythm wasn't perfectly (and hilariously) dialed.

Characters in BBTag are pretty much always dashing, and those dashes are stunningly fast on all but the slowest characters. Conversely most Distortion (read Super) Skills (of which each character has two, many using the same input), take whole seconds in a game of frame-by-frame reaction. What this makes for is an incredibly kinetic stop-and-go, like ripping across a race track breaking for the occasional hair pin turn. It also (in my opinion) gives the perfect amount of pause for laughter and commentary - If you blocked/dodged you get to watch this epic cutscene totally wiff spectacularly in front of you, and if you catch someone out when you really shouldn't have, you can both laugh about the bullshit robbery that just took place. Meanwhile the wild speed gets you right back into the action, always giving you a chance to come back with something crazy (or have you and your opponent completely wiffing around each other).

Truly though, the bullshit is the secret sauce in this game. BBTag is balanced in the same way that a candy shop is balanced - Everything you see is bursting with such wildly varied flavors and combinations, that to try to measure any against each other feels like a fool's errand. Every character has silly bullshit. Every character has a "you can do what" moment. Every character is bursting with flashy moves and high-octane personality. And you get to pick two to pair with each other. It's a hot mess (positive). 

What largely keeps the bullshit in check is that all the bullshit can be counterplayed and no bullshit goes so far as to make the game unplayable for anyone else. What makes the bullshit funny is it usually has the same effective counterplay across the board: Patience and observation. But in a game dialed to be obnoxiously fast before forcing you to sit on your hands between lengthy combos and Distortions, patience is a laughably hard skill to cultivate.

All this paired with the absolute hodgepodge of characters crossing over, makes for a game that's hard to take too seriously but deeply rewarding to master. In essence, it serves excellently as both an exceptionally unique fighter and an exceptionally comedic one.

THE THING ABOUT BALANCE

Many a carpenter has been crucified for saying that maybe "perfect balance" isn't all that important in a tabletop game, at least not balance as it's traditionally understood. I try not to wade too hard into the balance discourse because I find it largely dull and it often misses the point.

For me (at least) my goal in a tabletop game is not to be some alpha domineering power house who carries the party and can solve anything with force (nor do my designs particularly favor that playstyle), but I don't particularly play pacifists often either. My goal is to do cool and interesting things, and solve problems in flashy or spectacular ways. For the same reason I find Street Fighter a bit dull (though props to 6 for actually being my bullshit), I find a relatively "unbalanced" and "less serious" game like BBTag infinitely more compelling. The scenarios feel more varied and victory feels less reliant on the match-up or character strength and more reliant on my reactivity to the situation. More-over, a larger goal in BBTag becomes doing particularly silly and flashy bullshit to show-off instead of simply cowering in a corner.

By the same mark the wild and chaos-prone combat of Cyberpunk 2020 compels me infinitely more than that of Pathfinder/D&D - And I can tell you that 2020 is absolutely not balanced and absolutely is a mess - There's all kinds of obnoxious silly action hero bullshit combos you can do in that game, and it's equal parts hilarious and interesting. It's one of the reasons I adore chaos-prone board games like Thunder Road: Vendetta (with its wild crash resolution) and Cosmic Encounters (with its incredibly asymmetric abilities) that are more about playing to find out than heavy game balance.

To me good "balance" isn't about making sure there's never an optimal answer. Optimal play is often incredibly boring (I play MMOs and Gacchas, so I know more than most) and if that's what someone wants to do at a tabletop game then I firmly cannot relate. To me good balance is about making sure a wide variety of answers are viable and interesting. To me good balance is not punishing a player for doing something a bit sub-optimal if they think it's cool but supporting a wide ecosystem of silly options. And should an optimal answer appear, so be it - it's fine as long as it doesn't radically outgun every other option.

In the ongoing GRUNTS PSI campaign I'm playing in, a player was recently bemoaning the strength of psionic powers ((powers which took a lot of investment and a lot of set-up and situationally could be shut down fairly easily)) - The crux of his complaint was "Why wouldn't every player do this if it's that effective", and I think the simple answer (besides "this ability is actually pretty situational") would be "If all a player wants to do in a game is be maximally effective, then sure, whatever, play a psionic and pray you don't bump into psi-immune enemies" - But the question in itself betrays what that player's goal in play is: To be optimally combat effective.

Conversely most of us at the table are there for the flavor and the reactivity - My character in particular has gone pretty wide (while maintaining his starting gun), thus making each encounter incredibly engaging. I can't shell out as much damage as our cybered-up war machine nor our full psionic master, but I'm sufficiently deadly and effective in any scenario and can hold my own while trying (playing) out whatever cool plan I'd like. The game feels balanced because (even when playing with sub-optimal gear) I feel like I have many options to viability, many of which create interesting and emergent scenarios, none of which radically outweigh each other.

Bumps in balance are (in my opinion) good - it means you're making choices and having to play differently depending on what you pick. The thing to avoid is mountains and valleys, where the difference becomes so drastic that you can barely keep up with what the game is asking. Because ultimately sub-optimal tools give more room to show off player skill, player creativity and of course the comedy of play. 

[*1 : Hi non-fighting game friends :) I am by no means a fighting game expert, and could not tell you why you need 6 Ps to do an anti-air, but let me try to break these terms down for you:

Auto-Combos essentially means that you can mash the same button a few times and do a nice cool combo for a good chunk of damage! Neat! It's especially nice because if you complete the Auto-Combo you'll instantly burn all your Tag meter to call in your partner for a meaty hit, which (situationally) can actually not be the best. What this means is Auto-Combos make the game very beginner friendly while allowing interesting headroom for spicier play!

Unreactables are about what they say on the tin. Normally when being attacked if you block in a certain way (or counter grab) you can prevent (thus react) to any move. Unreactables mean that (because there's 2 characters on the field) you have no means of blocking the damage aside from not being there, countering with perfect timing or using an assist combo breaker. Not the scariest but certainly spicy.

ToD stands for Touch of Death. Essentially they're a combo which (if done perfectly) will drain a characters entire life bar with no means of getting out besides an assist combo breaker. They suck! They're also very high skill execution and there aren't a lot of them in the game (especially when compared to other older anime fighters). ]

[*2 : So ironically my second favorite fighting game is Tekken, a game which is incredibly slow and grounded. I think part of my love of Tekken comes from how well it captures the actual kinetics of what little martial arts I've done, and also how methodical each match feels. It's inexplicably meditative. If BBTag is a party game, then Tekken is a puzzle game.]