“Enjoy action-packed flashy combat with incredibly satisfying combos and responsive controls! Numerous characters, each with completely unique playstyles and loads of unlockable moves & upgrades! This action roguelike sets the bar for fluid fast-paced action.” – Steam Description

BlazBlue Entropy Effect X is apart of the BlazBlue franchise in name alone, this standalone game comes in the form of a fast paced hack’n’slash roguelite. Previous titles in the franchise come int he form of fighting games or visual novels and this is for the most part different, but it borrows some elements from both genres with varying degrees. You play as an ACER as you struggle to train your mind. Set in a futuristic dystopia on the brink of annihilation, BlazBlue Entropy Effect X has you playing “Ace” working under Dr. Mercurius in a central laboratory. You use a neural link to “dive” into the digital “Sea of Possibility” which is just you taking the form of BlazBlue characters to gather shards to save reality and uncover the truth behind the world’s destruction

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Diving In

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As you dive into the Sea of Possibility, you select one of 17 playable characters. 4 of which are paid DLC which can feel a little bad if you were looking to play as your favorite BlazBlue character and they are paywalled. I do, however, think they worth the price if you have your eye on one because you played them in another game. Once you’ve picked your character, you can start on the star of the show here: the combat. The combat in this game is fluid. It’s beautiful combination of learning a fighting game’s mechanics and a roguelite’s enemy mechanics.

You have a couple difficulties to pick through, starting with Easy and Normal. You play through a few different set paths with randomly generated rooms along the way. You’ll fight a cast of enemies each with different mechanics and avoid traps, or use those traps to your advantage in the fight. One of the characters I played the most could pick enemies up and throw them, sometimes I would throw them into other enemies, but most of my enjoyment was forcing them into the room’s traps themselves. How dare they lay those traps for me. Each run culminates with a boss at the end, but each run lasts roughly 20 minutes. This makes it perfect for a pick up and go kinda playstyle where if you only have time for one or two runs you can still make progress, set a high score, or more importantly build a super build to import later.

The ability to import skills from your previously completed runs really is something special and I think more games should reward players with a mechanic like this. You can find a build that you really enjoyed, maybe a skill that felt good to press but it wasn’t on a character who’s kit synergizes with that ability. On your next run you could take that skill again importing it from the previous run to start with it, on a character whose kit does synergize. The advancing the story does means replaying the same levels over and over so this step by step building of your character can really help with any monotony. You can also edit the difficulty a little adding or removing debuffs with your room choices during your run, letting you gamble how easy or difficult your run will be. There’s a lot of customization to be had in this game so you can challenge yourself as much or as little as you’d like. Once you’ve got a handle on the normal difficulty with your normal run tweaks, you push into hard mode and then you can add “Entropy” levels to further increase the difficulty. Once you complete a run with 100 Entropy, you unlock transcendence difficulty options. The difficulty scaling in this game can be extremely challenging and I think at the very least you should push into Hard difficulty as there are some builds than can really only come online there, but the came CAN be completed on normal difficulty.

Again, I want to stress this: despite the playable characters being mostly from the BlazBlue franchise, this game is completely standalone. This does remove your need to know the franchise’s story entirely, but if you wanted to know because that is how you select characters, there is a pretty comprehensive wiki that covers the story chronologically of the canonical events.

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Switch 2 Update and Platinum

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In August 2026, BlazBlue Entropy Effect X burst onto the Nintendo Switch 2. While it was already on the Nintendo Switch, the game felt like it was held back by the system’s limitations. Things like extremely long load times and general UI readability were not made with the Switch’s resolution in mind I feel. The load times have improved on the Switch 2. I still much prefer to play this game on the PC, but I have that option. If you have a Switch 2, I don’t think it’s a bad avenue to play the game and I would still encourage it.

The game also adds Platinum as a playable character. This does mark the first time a character added has not been apart of a paid DLC and I suspect it’s to capitalize on a version of Platinum being added to BlazBlue CentralFiction, the latest fighting game in the franchise, in the coming months. This version of Platinum plays similar to how she does in CentralFiction and it’s a welcome addition to the roster for BlazBlue Entropy Effect, especially at the price point of “free.99.” The update also adds another boss in Extreme Mode, Susanoo, for players looking to push further and tackle an even more difficult challenge with their builds.

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Collab Collab Collab

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The mark of any good Metroidvania is when Dead Cells does a collaboration. It’s like Dave the Diver in fishing games. That’s how you know your game has made it. Prisoner slid into BlazBlue Entropy Effect and the controls honestly made me wish for this style in Dead Cells. ArcSys has made a note that any collab events and story beats have nothing to do with the canonical events being quoted on the steam page with:

“All plotlines included in the collaboration content are completely unrelated to the original IP of the collaboration.”

I’d argue that, “No duh” but I know that a lot of the ArcSys games try to be connected in a lot of ways. So they wanted to mention it, and I feel like I should too. They also had a collaboration with ICEY introducing the titular character as a playable character in this game as well.

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• Graphics– Definitely one of the best looking side scrolling Metroidvanias I have seen in recent memory. It looks phenomenal and there are effects that give visual clarity to status effects. However, all these beautiful graphics and wonderful effects can quickly devolve into chaotic visual clutter in multiplayer.
• Gameplay– The gameplay for this game is so fluid, it feels so nice to pick up any of the roster and explore their moveset. If you’ve played the fighting games, you will have a general idea for how the characters will play and they are pretty faithful adaptations with some twists specific to this game. There is a lack of tactile feedback when you are taking damage, so there are a few times where I died having full healing flasks because I just didn’t know I was taking damage. There’s a little too much happening on the screen to be staring at my life bar to see if I need to heal.
• Sound– Great sound design, attacks feel punchy and you can tell when you’re connecting with an enemy. As someone use loved used Bullet to punch and grapple and throw enemies, I truly appreciated this.
• Controls– Even taking away the fighting game moves and expanding command list, there is a good and responsive Metroidvania here. Add in that you start with a few commands/attacks but expand into jumping attacks, follow up attacks, parry attacks and this all becomes as complex as you want.
• Story– The story is standalone so you don’t need to have any previous knowledge of BlazBlue and honestly, it’s probably best to not. You’re going to just feel disconnected from why there are BlazBlue characters in this game, but there is a thin story your can explore throughout the Acts.