Teach me Miss Litchi!

BlazBlue Calamity Trigger, on the PS3 at least, came with a DVD explaining how to play fighting games, how to play BlazBlue, and how to play certain characters. BlazBlue Continuum Shift pushed the trend further by including a full tutorial in the game itself.

My question is, why has it taken so long? I recently got Tekken 6, my introduction to the series. It has a tutorial, too, but only for the story mode, which is very different from normal fighting mode. I've played Street Fighter IV which, also, does not tell you very much about the game at all. The problem, as I see it, is that fighting game developers assume that the people buying fighting games have grown up with them in arcades, and were around when things like cancels (which were, at the time, glitches) were just being discovered. They don't feel the need to tell anyone about cancels, kara-throws, combos, wavedashes or anything, because the players that don't know should find it out from other players. No wonder even some game developers think fighting games are just about who can react faster.

That said, BBCS's tutorial isn't perfect. It lets you choose what parts to view and what to skip, which is great. It covers everything from the basics of fighting games in general, to the subtle tricks in BBCS, and includes a specific section for each character. It even allows you to press a button, and the computer will demonstrate the action for you. What it does wrong, is demand that you do a certain action perfectly, and only allow you to do it once before moving on. This is not so bad for the simple things, but if you have, say "perform this combo, that can only be done by using two dash-cancels", it is a real pain if you just can't seem to do it. This was my problem, as I was using an XBox controller, which is completely terrible for fighting games, especially double-tapping a controller direction. No, I don't like arcade sticks either, but anyway...

They way I'd redesign the tutorial section, is to allow the player to press a button to move on in the tutorial. The player could skip something they find hard (especially useful for casual payers), or they could do the action multiple times to get the hang of it, and move on when they are ready. It wouldn't even be that hard. You could keep the code for checking that the player did what they were supposed to, but use it to tell them that they were successful. Then, you could just move the trigger to a certain button press. As long as you've followed good code practices, it should only take a few minutes.

Also, I'd remove Rachel's annoying talking. She's alright in the story, but in the tutorial, I'd like to get to the mechanics and skip her complaints about the person you have to beat up.

Aaaand, I would not give the player an achievement for completing every single tutorial. They should not need the extra incentive, and anyone who's played the earlier BlazBlue doesn't want to sit through being taught how to move forwards and whatnot.

As a side note, the BBCS manual is appalling. There's a page for controls and a page for the bars on screen, and that's it.