I played this because I’m a Blazblue and roguelike fan. The game’s marketing was so all over the place that most people weren’t even sure what kind of game it was going to be. I waited a while before giving it a shot and it was a middle-of-the-road experience that doesn’t make much of an impact.

You start each run by picking a “prototype” which is basically a moveset based on a Blazblue character. Blazblue is a fighting game franchise so its character’s kits translate well into a 2D roguelike. Beyond their movesets and likeness, the game isn’t really a “Blazblue” game. To be honest, I’m not sure why it was branded as such. The fighting game franchise ended its saga a few years ago, and it wasn’t that popular. Regardless, the characters all play very uniquely and are pretty faithful to their Blazblue counterparts. There are some flourishes on their movesets that will make fans of the fighting game happy to see.

Each run plays out differently based on what mods you get. The game doesn’t do anything differently from other roguelikes and the mods aren’t anything too crazy. The icons and naming conventions for these mods are fanciful and the game doesn’t really explain them to you. After a few runs, you’ll start to recognize the icons and what the room will hold, but it is a meaningless hurdle initially. You get upgrades for health and all the other general stuff, but you also gain access to new moves for your prototype. Some are more useful than others, but choosing your moves and what you want to upgrade helps the monotony of the levels feel more interesting.

The areas that you run through are one-way paths, so there isn’t much choice beyond choosing your upgrades. Each area is aesthetically different from the previous, but the room types stay the same. It gets rather dull, but the boss fights are relatively intriguing. The first time you encounter one, you might lose because understanding their attack patterns is very important. Some have more elaborate designs than others and there are some bosses that only appear when playing as certain characters. This was interesting to me, but it doesn’t seem to happen too often. A few of these “hidden” bosses are other characters from Blazblue, while most are specific to this game. While the boss scenarios are better than the hallway fights, they aren’t much to experience after the first time.

There actually is a story here told in memory fragments. The presentation for these is unique in their animation style, which is almost noir, and tells the story of the fall of humanity. You are a bot with the imprinted mind of a human, increasing your mind power to fight back against the “entropy particles” and restore humanity. This complex plot is nothing new for Blazblue fans as the story of the games includes time travel and alternate timelines. Here, you are just a drone working for a mega corporation. It’s a strange setup, but it works for the roguelike formula they went with. There are some other bots in the workshop with you, and the chatter with them can be lightly entertaining, but the importance of the scenario falls flat with this presentation lens. There just isn’t much to discover as the game is very linear, but also never seems to move forward based on your actions.

The presentation of Blazblue Entropy Effect has a nice style, and while it attempts to tell a story through its memory fragments, the importance of it carries little weight. There are some interesting aspects to it, but it does little to make you feel anything. Combat is relatively fun and the characters really lend to the replayability, but the environments leave much to be desired. Boss encounters are frantic, but once you discover the patterns, they become a chore to get through. The game is a confusing mash of ideas and seems to have the Blazblue IP slapped on for no reason. If this were a random roguelike title without the branding, I most likely would have missed it. The shock of seeing Blazblue again, made me interested and I guess that’s what the were going for? It doesn’t make sense… The game is inoffensive, but doesn’t do anything special with the roguelike formula. It can be fun, but if you’re not a Blazblue fan, you won’t get much out of the experience.