I mean, when CT came out AC in the US was still fairly recent no? I could see why people would have rather played it back then over that.
Also GG players being elitists to newer players who wanted to learn BB, but im not sure if this was actually a thing.
2d has nothing to do with it, as long as it looks really good. Even in this day 2d games can sell boatloads if it looks pretty and is a quality game.
Another reason. The character design for GG is amazing, BB is cool but not nearly as unique. Also BB character design is more anime which will turn off a lot of western fans.
Didnât Blazblue sell over a million units? That really isnât bad at all, the only worry is that once GG Xrd comes back most people may drop BB.
So we have many reasons why BB wasnât accepted enough to become mainstream, but besides the new graphics engine, what does Xrd do to get attention? I think this title will be just as successful as previous GG releases, but it will still be a very niche fighter.
But who knows, maybe the timing is right? BB and P4A have no doubt brought attention to ASW and GG, and the new graphics engine might be just what it need to grab the attention of those people that donât like 2D sprites.
GG has cool character designs that some amount of time went into
BB looked at every possible anime trope they could find and turned it into a character.
Emo
Loli magic girl
Overly excited annoyance
loli emo (but shes 1000 years old so its ok guys!)
brother obsessed
dick who takes everything lightly and acts like he knows everything
wise nigga with a sword
big breasted oblivious women
prince type
guy who smiles because i am evil
they got them all.
You realize over half of those woefully inane descriptions can apply to GG characters too, right? 
Not going to claim that BBâs visual character design isnât comprised of archetypes, but GG characters arenât as original as you think.
GG has a guy controlled by a ghost, a transgender nun, and an ass-kicking Freddie Mercury.
I love it.
Other things that i think:
I remember people used to bash Guilty Gear back in the day, calling it âanimuâ with awful animations, but when we got BB people just started to miss GG and then they blamed everything to Blaz for not being Guilty Gear.
Iâm almost sure if we ever get a long BB hiatus (after all Mori is planning to end the series with 1~2 more games) gamers are going to miss BlazBlue in some form.
People just start to appreciate something when they lose it.
Itâs just TOO influenced by anime godammit. I love BB, but it makes me cringe when i watch some intros of the games with that formulaic anime song i heard in other shows.
Other than that i think the series did really good for a new IP, i canât remember many totally new IP fighters from the current gen (PS3-360 era) that made a really good fanbase. Skullgirls is other example that comes to my mind.
Lets just say that the 90â style anime design that GG has gets less flak than the BBâs late 00â style anime design and be done with it before the discussion degenerates further. Again.
Oh forget itâŚ
Anime = things people donât like
fucking Viscant was asked on Reddit how he can like Sailor moon when he says he hates all anime, he replied âitâs to wonderful to be anime!â
BBCT sold less than a million unitsâit was close, but it sold better than P4A and basically every guilty gear, assuming the data is right, but Iâm not sure it is because of how niche anime fighters are⌠but for 88 people to put out games that are selling between 0.4-1 million copies thatâs pretty awesome.
It will be interesting to see what kind of sales BBCP gets since the updates to BB didnât do as hot (but they still did pretty well)
One thing for certain is that BBCP looks sweet, xrd-sign- looks sweet, and fighting games are reasonably popular, it could be that BB and GG are about to kick off a golden age for arc system works (which would be grand).
BB was never given any time. People donât like to mention GG1, or the X series, or even a few of the earliest XX games, but those games do exist in GGâs history. CT came about and people expected a new IP with a new system to be immediately comparable to one that had been constantly refined for over a decade. So people never allotted BB growing time and sabotaged the game at every turn.
Then when CS2 comes around and the gameâs worked out most of the early installment kinks, players realize their mistake, but by then itâs too fucking late; no anime games in tournaments.
Since BBCPâs refined things even more and people seem excited about it, I hope this results in a fresh start of sorts. But for whatever reason, people donât seem to have the attention span to play more than one Arc game at a time, so I fear itâs going to be overshadowed by GG again.
BBCP has sold more than any of the previous installments
finally Hecatom will stfu about SF4, rofl
I know a lot of the GG heads around here expressed shunning of the game purely due to its aesthetics. Myself included. It was hard to identify with any of the characters - so finding a main was difficult. The art and personalities, just seem purely anime inspired, which doesnât seem to be as interesting to a lot of people. Going from the direction of GG to BB wasnât a shift people were willing to make, and SF4 was taking off, so it was easy to ignore the series.
I mean, the series literally plays into every anime trope the West has been pushing back against since the genreâs decline in popularity some time ago. Furries, female mechas, adolescents etc. etc. Game seems like a love letter to otakus first, more than anything.
iâll take a swing at this also
**blazblue came out a few months in difference from when ggac+ dropped in the usa, but to be honest most of us already had the import
blazblue came out not to long after sf4 console was released, and there was nothing bigger then sf4 that year, and there wasnt going to be for a bit
im not too sure about everything wrong with the first blazblue, but i know it had issues in terms of balance i believe (with that girl with the guns or swords or some shit), and to be honest for everyone it wasnt guilty gear. why they wanted it to be guilty gear when they already had one of the best guilty gears already available to them, is beyond me. ggac was only about a year old on console before it was released in america, so there was still much to enjoy of it.
personal thing that turned me off was the super long ridiculous combos you would sit through. but whatever
majors and locals basically made zero effort towards anything outside of street fighter 4 until mvc3 came out. yeah some did, but overall there was zero balance to the community once sf4 dropped. shit was on streams for like 8 hours straight at tournaments, with little to no attempt to get other games on the stream. not even mike z helping on the development of blazblue kept anyones interest in it. there were some hype moments for the game early on when it did get stream time every now and then.
it may have been a bit too anime for many. gg is anime, but not the way blazblue is, and that shit kinda turned me off too early on. i didnt see anyone i cared for and was like yooo that character looks so dope, i wanna play this game. i mean thats changed over time, but that was an initial impression. like who are these fake ass gg characters, and what is the loli shit. currently i feel blazblue actually has really dope character designs, some of the best out there, if not the best, but to each its own.
i cannot emphasize enough how the american community just failed at helping to give games outside of sf4 any type of shine early on. some of the hypest guard crush streams were when they put guilty gear on the stream. it was so refreshing to see something not sf4, and it was hype as fuck, but it wasnt the norm to continue developing the gg community and interest in the game. it was just all about sf4. i mean kof 13 even got that treatment until it had two back to back evo performances that were the best top 8s that year. well it was garnering buzz before that with the west coast players and bala going around to random majors and putting on a show with clark.
it sucks that the first blazblue that im like wow i really wanna play that now, has no sign of coming to 360. lol. forever alone. im playing ac+r mostly these days anyways. but still, i cant help but wonder if in america at least, we gave the game more shine, could i have a 360 port right now. i mean the game basically got no love from any major unless it was a side stream, or maybe top 3 or grand finals on the main stream. it got no love from evo really. when it came to the main stage games we had mvc2 on shitty ps3 instead of blazblue in 2k10, and a nonsense girls only tourney. lol
not to be redundant, but yeah, blazblue might have had its issues as a game throughout its development, so what, look at umvc3 (or any game for that matter), but overall i think it was just the streamers and T.Os for locals and majors just really not giving a shit about much of anything except sf4 for 2 years, and even then marvel didnt take the forefront until 2k12, when people were truly tired of tuning into sf4, and TOâs were making umvc3 the last game of top 8 and giving it a teams tourney a lot more often too. **
the best thing for the âanimeâ community to do now is hustle up cash to try to give out big pot bonuses for gg, bb, p4, etc⌠as to try to garner more interest, and continue to keep it on stream. i mean you can usually tune into a secondary stream these days for your non capcom game fix. also to try to do more interesting things like another guilty gear invitational, maybe try to get up with japanese players either in japan or here in america and get people tuning in, because you know we love to just watch the japanese run through us in games, and just see them beast in a casual setting.
all those things arent cheap, but when more then a couple people are putting in on the idea, you can make good things happen.
Iâd like to see your data.
He was C tier in Slash and I think heâs finally fallen below S tier in the newest game.
@ElvenShadow whenâs FRCâs? Otherwise, sounds good. People are still going to hate it on it cuz anime, but it sounds like itâll be like it was during the 2003 to 2008 era. The game thatâs fighting alongside 3rd Strike and others for most entrants. I think 3rd Strike and Guilty Gear continued to bring the most entrants after about 2006. Hopefully this pans out well for tourney guys and casuals alike.
The thing with GG as a franchise is that it does seem to have a bit more âcredâ compared to other âanimeâ games among gamers. The trick then is figuring out how to take advantage of this and be able to use that to bolster the game competitively.
Only reason I want a PS4 for the most part. The game is looking more and more sick, and if Bozac is giving it a thumbâs up Iâm even more excited.