I recently picked up BlazBlue and, surprisingly, it seems a lot of other people did as well. It's the spiritual sequel to a fighting game series that, despite being well regarded in its own fanbase, is relatively unknown outside of said group, so how is it selling well?I

It's possible that it's due to the unanimously favorable reviews, the flashy graphics or its predecessor's "just out of the limelight" status, but whatever it is, it's one of the few bestsellers that actually play well.

This was always true to some point of course: Nintendo capitalized on the power of the Mario license in order to sell copies of the localized Doki Doki Panic, Square's multi million selling Final Fantasy VII is a spot of mediocrity on an otherwise fantastic series and Mortal Kombat, perhaps the worst 2D fighting game ever made, sold because of the blood and only the blood. Today, things are worse than ever: EA juggles at least four different games that are rereleased each year and rarely get any better, people complain when Square changes their classically dull battle system to something interesting in FFXII, Capcom rereleases Street Fighter II with better graphics and people hail it as the second coming of Guilty Gear X and somehow Tekken passes as a great game.

Perhaps it doesn't have anything to do with the game's merits anymore: people want a very specific thing from their games: an old, dated, familiar style that they simply want more of to indulge in their memories. No that change is always a good thing, SimCity Societies tears down the very rich gameplay background of the series (not a bad thing on its own) and then replaces it with easily exploitable checks and balances and Devil May Cry 2 experiments with more open levels and a larger focus on air combat, which sounds good on paper but turned out to be, quite frankly, boring as hell.

I'm talking about games like Treasure's Ikaruga, which despite its uniqueness was labeled by the press as too retro (whatever that means) for today's gamers just because, for all of its innovation, was part of a genre the press thought a relic of the past or the virtually unknown Deadly Rooms of the Death: The City Beneath, which had limited marketing almost entirely because the developers and the testers deemed that it was too difficult to market to anyone but its intended audience. In reality, TCB was a medium difficulty hold compared to some of the nightmarish concoctions the community has cooked up, and there after the semi-successful Journey to Rooted Hold proved that there are a lot of people that take to the game's unique and demanding logic puzzles, TCB's release can be considered a victim to its own pride.

Perhaps video games missed their chance to be considered the next great art form (though games like Metal Gear Solid and Persona 3 show that there are ways this media can engage a player beyond the act of simply playing or watching), and people instead want sequels. Maybe games like the freeware Facade are simply tangential to the industry, an experiment that reveals that a world of possibilities remain for video games, but is still cast off as an oddity.

But then again, somewhere, maybe in a meadow far away, BlazBlue can succeed.