BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger Portable Review

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BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger for the PSP released in North America on March 9 on UMD (with its digital counterpart still to come). While the revised BlazBlue: Continuum Shift is slated for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in the summer, PSP owners can get in on the action now.

The PSP version is an amazing port of the next-gen game. It looks great and plays flawlessly, depending on your personal level of comfort with the PSP's directional pad and buttons. The game's full Story mode is presented along with all of the voice acting. Multiplayer is limited to ad-hoc, but the PSP version picks up Legion Mode, exclusive to this version of Calamity Trigger.

Legion Mode starts the player out with a single character and presents a map to be conquered. Each node has a set number of enemies and diffilculty, which also vary by the amount of characters the player can bring to the battle. Winning allows you to recruit one of the defeated enemies to your army and some territories bestow bonuses. Life bars regenerate when characters are not being used, but otherwise persist. You win when you capture all of the territory.

It also helps the player learn different characters as he or she will use different fighters as they are added to the army. It's a double-edged sword, though, as succeeding in combat and ultimately Legion mode requires a minimum amount of proficiency with and against each of the game's 12 characters. This mode is quite fun and will also be coming to the console versions of Continuum Shift. The only problem with it is that the territories are the same every time you play. Some randomization would have helped keep it fresh. The same holds true for Score Attack mode, which presents the player with the same order of fighters each time.

Both of thess modes are severely hamstrung by this because if a player has issues fighting against certain characters, it can be extremely difficult to advance. The game would have been better served with a never-ending mode against random opponents.

Regardless, the PSP version of Calamity Trigger is definitely worth checking out if you're a fighting game fan looking for some 2D action on-the-go. It isn't as fully-featured as I'd like, but it lets me practice combos and learn new characters away from my consoles.

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