Blandia

Blandia is a weapon-based fighting game developed and published by Allumer in 1992 and ported by Ving to Japanese computers. It is a sequel to the game Gladiator, and one of the first fighting games with a weapon based system.

This article will cover only the original Arcade version.

Why It's Bland

 * 1) The game's music is terrible, being very repetitive, being mostly just 3 second loops that repeat over and over and over to the point of making people insane, and not to mention it is also extremely generic too.
 * 2) The character designs are extremely generic: 3 gladiators, a samurai, a barbarian and a elf girl, the bosses aren't any better.
 * 3) While the stages look decent, the characters look awful ( indepedent of their designs), specially the ones with armor.
 * 4) * The animations of the characters are also horrendous, with barely any frames, worst yet if during the chaos of this game you grab an enemy just at the time they landed a hit, the animation glitches.
 * 5) Speaking of characters, there are only 6 characters (and one of them is a clone) which even for the time is a miserable amount, and 2 of them have their move sets cloned, the 4 bosses are only playable with cheat codes on an emulator.
 * 6) The controls are simply wretched, special moves are extremely unresponsive despite most of them using simple combinations,
 * 7) * There are also some that use strange combinations too, this is most notable with the character Jurane.
 * 8) * The controls feel really stiff and clunky.
 * 9) The game has also a lot of poorly translated words, like "powor" instead of "power" or "damit" instead of "d*mn it".
 * 10) The difficulty is a nightmare.
 * 11) * Enemies never stop harassing you with attacks, which leads to the player to get desperate and resort to button mashing.
 * 12) * Some enemies resort to use attacks that invert your controls.
 * 13) * The A.I. spams special attacks like crazy, attacks you can barely use due to the awful controls.
 * 14) * The enemies also block everything.
 * 15) * there are times you will be trapped in a corner without being able to defend yourself or escape without taking damage.
 * 16) * As expected the bosses are incredibly cheap. especially Xeldus and Gildus.
 * 17) * The A.I can spam attacks that the player can't, for example; Jurane's spells take 4 seconds to charge in the hands of the player, however the CPU can use them and even spam them with no need to charge.
 * 18) Sound effects lack impact and are unsatisfying, attacks that should hit hard produce a pathetic sound at best.
 * 19) The core gameplay is just abysmal.
 * 20) * The hit detection is a complete chaos, hurt boxes and hit boxes can sometimes fail, and you can have 2 character attacking at close range at the same time, yet both of them miss.
 * 21) * As previously said, special moves work when they feel like it, no matter how many times you press the buttons to pull off the special moves..
 * 22) * The moves are awkward and lack range, and feel unreliable, you never feel comfortable attacking.
 * 23) * If by miracle you manage to use the special moves, you will notice that the time of activation of this moves are completely screwed, some take strangely way too long, while others are much faster, and example is Mcgill, who takes ages for a simple shoulder charge.
 * 24) * The game has a removable armor system that is completely pointless, since not only 2 characters do not possess any armor, but the armor doesn't seem to do a difference nor in combat nor in the damage characters take.
 * 25) * The recovery in some special moves is way too small, allowing easy spamming of them, or at least in the case of the CPU since the player has a lot of problems using them.
 * 26) * Due to everything said before, the gameplay reduces to just unsatisfying button mashing.
 * 27) The final boss has a second form, and is just him turning into your character, which is just a lazy idea.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) The backgrounds look nice.
 * 2) Decent endings.
 * 3) It was one of the first weapon based fighters.
 * 4) The computer ports were a little better.

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