Fair Sim/RPG becomes lame fighter! Read all about it!

Japanese Game Front

Chimena Is The Main Character Of BBB
And An Exclusive Character To
The Blue Breaker Burst Games.

Characters Of BBB From Left To Right:
Chimena, Asha, Karmi, Naruta,
Hammune, Maya, and Yarm.
In The Story Mode, They Spell
Naruta's Name as Naruter.

Limited Edition Mini-Disc

I am used to playing pretty good games from HUMAN, but I then decided that I should play "Blue Breaker Burst: Bishou o Anata to" (simply dubbed BBB), a game that sat in my closet for god only knows how long. The only reason I even bought it in the first place is because I had the obscure RPG game simply called "Blue Breaker" for the Sega Saturn (versions also exist for Playstation and PC-FX). I was dying to know how they would turn an average RPG into a fighting game...a 3D fighting game at that. The change of genres and the transition from 2D graphics to 3D polygonal graphics was enough to get a gullible sap like myself to give it a try.

.........Man, what a mistake that was!

BBB is a mostly girl-centric fighter and the story deals with different girls who will eventually fall in love with Kein, the hero from the RPG (who is amazingly unplayable in this game). However, a new girl has been added to the love circle and her name is Chimena. The game has a heavy focus on her since she wasn't in BB. Chimena wishes to rid herself and the world of the sinister Dragon Lord, and to do so, she will travel to various areas gathering clues and meeting with other familiar (or not) BB characters. I hope this is enough for you to go by, because if you aren't impressed by now, odds are you won't be impressed at all. I also won't spoil the exact details of the story, but HUMAN and Hunex released this as a "compilation" of sorts in Japan by releasing the sequel, BBB:ENA quickly after the first. In order to know all of the story, you will have to buy that too. The sequel elaborates more on Chimena's story. However, if you are still reading this, I'm going to make it painfully clear why you won't want to buy either of them.

The game is practically a total trainwreck. The graphics are mostly crap, and only the anime artwork and opening movie look even moderately decent. Early/launch PS fighters like Tekken and Toshinden look better in nearly every way. The character models are pretty simplistic, everything is grainy, and the backdrops (despite being simple flat backgrounds) don't try to look appealing. It's okay to use backgrounds like those during the story conversations, but the battle backgrounds should have been better. The animation is mostly lousy too. Everything is as bland, generic, and unremarkable as possible. I will save you the time and effort right here by telling you that the sound is the part of this game that I found to be the best. It's not good, it's not great, it's just terribly average (though the opening movie sounds nice). I found the voiceovers to be pretty annoying. There are points in the story where this girl (called Sarge) keeps pounding the ground and yelling. Ugh...so annoying.

...So, this leaves us with gameplay. You have a story mode which allows you to select a "bride" to work their way to battle the legendary sword "Seiken" (excluding Chimena)...you heard right. You fight a floating sword. In this game's defense, the story mode had a very interesting concept (at least Chimena's quest) that combined RPG and fighting game elements. In Chimena's quest and hers alone, you can travel to the different parts of the world (from the BB RPG) and gather information and sleep at inns to restore your HP when you get wounded. Occasionally, as you walk around, you will fight Mamono (a generic ogre/goblin) and you must make important decisions. You can avoid fighting if you pick the right decisions. However, you don't buy equipment, you don't do anything else other than find people, talk to them, and fight the occasional fight. What a way to stifle potential. The other characters in Story Mode don't even have as much flexibility as Chimena. They just talk to people and go places automatically. You'll usually just sit around 5-10 minutes before you even get into a fight. All the quests were boring (bar Yarm) and you can't skip any of the dialogue. Instead, you can speed a character up when they run to a different location...why?

The story mode is just poor in general and the fighting mechanics make things that much worse. You can usually pummel an opponent by hitting nothing but Triangle...and IF things get hectic (which is unlikely since everyone sans the end boss is a joke), add Circle button into it. The only thing holding you back is the relatively poor hit detection, lag between input, a lousy assortment of varied attacks and completely bogus special moves. Speaking of special moves, I guess I should tell you another more interesting aspect of BBB, the magic system. You see, instead of having a special gauge, you have a bar of magic that starts full. Using the X button does different magic attacks, and if you combine it with Square, you unleash a super attack. Normal magic attacks cost one bracket of your magic energy, while super attacks take all of them (and take away your magic regenerating abilities). The game also has "weeks" and "elements". Norlis (light), Torray (fire), Colda (ice), Sogaia (land), Ogre (wind), Rodis (darkness), and an unknown element. During fights, you will fight in a certain week. There is a week for each element and each character possesses an element. If you use Karmi (girl of fire) during the fire week (Torray), her magic attacks will be extra powerful.

However, there is a problem with all of this; why are two characters of ice element and two of light...especially when there are seven characters?? You don't even have a character for all the elements! The only reason for this is that a lot of things were saved for the second game which leaves the first game feeling completely and utterly empty. There is virtually nothing here...however, system data is needed from this game for BBB:ENA, so if you are big BB fan, you will have to put up with this mediocre title to get the goodies in BBB:ENA. There are other modes typical to other fighters, but they aren't worth explaining. Don't let my images fool you. This is perhaps one of the worst 3D (or as some like to say, 2.5D) fighters on Playstation...dare I say close to (but not quite) Killing Zone. Thankfully, Hamster re-released the game at a much more modest price of around 1,500 Yen instead of the 5,800 Yen the original version demanded, which is unfair IMHO because this game almost seems like a tech demo from some amateur programmer's demo reel. I liked the characters in the original Blue Breaker, but this game fills me with scorn.

- Written by Vyse the determined -