by: Michael Barnes

I’ll make this quick if you don’t want to rifle through the rest of this review to determine whether or not the version of BlazBlue: Continuum Shift II for the Nintendo 3DS is worth your time and money.

It isn’t.

Particularly not when the handheld already has a best-in-class 2D fighting game that bests its console counterpart in Super Street Fighter IV 3D and a worthwhile alternative in Dead or Alive Dimensions. Both of those games survived the micronization process intact and leverage the 3DS’ functions to their advantage. Sadly, this portable edition of the venerable BlazBlue franchise does neither.

As a fan of both Calamity Trigger and Continuum Shift on the 360 and PS3, I was immediately impressed at how much content has been brought over into the port. For all intents and purposes, everything you can do in Continuum Shift you can do in Continuum Shift II—including the requisite arcade ladder, outstanding tutorial modes, the Abyss and Legion campaign games, and a range of training options. But dig in past the menus bursting with content, and the limitations start to appear. The fact that there is no online play is utterly ridiculous- it’s local only. Both of its genre competitors have excellent internet play; there is literally no excuse why it isn’t on offer here. Did somebody not get the memo that this thing can get on the internet?

Sloppiness and compromise also begin to appear once you get into a match. On an HDTV, Blazblue games have vibrant colors, crisp lines, and highly stylized animation. On the 3DS screen, Continuum Shift II looks murky, lo-res, and the frame rate feels terribly low. But that low frame rate also means that it doesn’t take a huge dive when the 3D slider is pushed up- too bad the 3D effect is rudimentary at best and makes the already poor graphics look foggy,

Gameplay and mechanics are a 1:1 transposition from the full console games, and even though that’s a good thing, Arc System Works apparently was unaware that the 3DS had an analog circle pad that has already proven to be a great fighting game input method. Fighters are controlled strictly with the 3DS’ tiny, clicky D-Pad and there is no option to move control to the circle pad. It boggles my mind that recording camera controls are keyed to the circle pad. I guess that’s so you can record yourself failing to execute Ragna’s Inferno Divider and Hell’s Fang attacks over and over again.