Slick anime style in an action roguelite package - BlazBlue Entropy Effect Quick First Impressions

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SHOULD I PLAY BLAZBLUE ENTROPY EFFECT?

Play it if you love top-notch anime visuals or are a fan of roguelite platformers like Dead Cells, Risk of Rain, or Rogue Legacy. It’s an odd mix, but it works: ARC System Works’ fantastic animation style paired up with a punchy, evolving combat system and a cyberpunk world full of mysteries to uncover makes for a thrilling experience, even if it can be a bit confusing at first.

TIME PLAYED

I’ve played about two hours of BlazBlue Entropy Effect, which means I’m still very early on in the process of unlocking characters, skills, and worlds. However, I’ve gotten a taste of how its various systems work together. I’ve now unlocked a second character, tried my hand at the “mind training” sessions in the city arena, and started on the second tier of enhancements I can buy using points I earned during my training runs.

WHAT’S AWESOME ABOUT BLAZBLUE ENTROPY EFFECT?

• Incredibly slick visuals. I’m not usually much of an anime fan, but I’ve been blown away by the fantastic style and high production values in BlazBlue Entropy Effect’s animations and artwork. As I got more familiar with my first character, Hibiki, and her moveset, things continued to look cooler and cooler. Attacks and impacts feel great thanks to good visual feedback on everything that happens, bosses fill the screen and all look weird in their own way, and the fluid animation for all of this gives it the feeling of fighting game-style precision.

• Loads to explore and unlock, even in early access. Right now, I only have access to a selection of the planned characters coming to BlazBlue Entropy Effect, but I’ve still got plenty to keep me busy for hours. Each character I have unlocked adds a new biome to the rotation of training missions, there are tons of skills and augmentations I have left to unlock, and there’s a whole challenge mode to take on once I’ve got a couple characters ready for it.

• Each run is unique. BlazBlue Entropy Effect has a roguelike format, so every time I headed out on a training run, I was in for a different combination of training rooms, bonus rounds, extra challenges, and rewards. After completing each section, I typically got some kind of choice, either between power-ups for my character or between paths to take toward the boss of the zone. Sometimes I might need to use a round to rest and clear the entropy I’d built up, which can add weird debuffs and handicaps to characters, while other times I might want to press my luck with an “extensive training” section that was filled with more challenging enemies, but which would also offer up better rewards if I cleared it.

• Cool character combos. Each time I ended a run, that character and their upgrades was saved in a special computer system, which meant that I could inherit those abilities and powerups into the next character I took into the training levels. I could even transfer special abilities to new characters, doubling and eventually tripling up on the number of powerful skills I could deploy in combat. When I unlocked Noel, who uses twin pistols and has a minigun special ability, I was able to inherit Hibiki’s power to fire out a circle of spinning glaives that I had buffed up in my last run. There are endless possible combinations, especially since there are power-ups I can find that can completely transform those characters’ abilities mid-run.

• A mobile version is planned. While currently only confirmed for Chinese markets, BlazBlue Entropy Effect will make its way to Android and iOS devices at some point in the future. Stay tuned for more information about the mobile release.

WHAT NEEDS IMPROVEMENT IN BLAZBLUE ENTROPY EFFECT?

• It’s a lot to take in. BlazBlue Entropy Effect makes a decent attempt at tutorializing all of this stuff, but there’s so many systems at play that it’s still very confusing at first. It doesn’t help that some of the characters meant to be teaching you how things work can be unnecessarily cryptic, as though they’re auditioning to be in a Dark Souls game, but even if that weren’t the case, there’s so much information to take in that being a bit overwhelmed at first is more or less inevitable.

• Unclear goals. I’m still not exactly sure what I’m supposed to be doing, beyond running the test sessions, which I think are part of some kind of simulation that a mysterious supercomputer is running for reasons unknown. I’ve picked up memory fragments of some kind, descriptions can be vague, and characters often speak in riddles. It’s hard to shake the feeling that the game is being deliberately obtuse about things, which is frustrating when I’m already at sea trying to figure out how everything works. A bit of clarity would be helpful!

💬 Are you ready to jump into this anime roguelite, or will you be passing on this latest BlazBlue game? Let me know in the comments.