It’s unfortunate that I missed the opportunity to play Blade Symphony at its peak, since it always looked like a lot of fun. I’ve admired the little that I’ve gotten to experience of it enough to write a Gratitude on it nevertheless. Despite having a small player pool nowadays, the game’s still preserved in a free-to-play state at the time of writing, so you can always give it a try if you have a couple friends handy.
It’s another one of those arena fighters that tried to reinvent the genre, with some novel ideas which I would’ve loved to see iterated upon. Characters could utilize one of three ‘sword stances’ which determined which attacks they would perform; meanwhile, your mouse dictated exactly where your attack was aimed at, rather than simply performing a fixed animation. Swords would be able to ‘clash’ with each other in 3D space, and this meant they were not at all predetermined; the heavier stance would win when a clash happened, but you could still come out on top using a lighter stance if you carefully aimed your attack to slip past the opponent’s sword. I thought it was a really elegant combination between fixed fighting game movesets and free aiming and movement, and the few matches I got to try felt incredibly visceral.
It also had a really fitting soundtrack for its ‘oriental-not-quite-cyberpunk’ theme and setting, with unique blends of east-asian instruments, electronic ambience, and more western-inspired orchestral scores. I’ve picked out a couple highlights below.
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