When BlazBlue Entropy Effect X was announced for consoles, good memories of my time with BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle from some eight years ago immediately surfaced. This latest installment in the franchise is a 2D action title, instead of a traditional competitive fighting game, but I reckoned it would be a fresh experience that would be worth trying out.

BlazBlue Entropy Effect X is a rogue-lite 2D action RPG spin-off from the BlazBlue series of fighting games. You progress through procedurally generated stages, wipe out enemies, and advance as far as possible through six levels. One of its main rogue-lite characteristics is that you can’t save between levels. When your character’s HP reaches zero, you have to start over from level one each and every time. That sounds tough, but the game system offers several role playing mechanics that gradually make your characters stronger (more on those in detail below).

The levels are composed of ten different stages, which are randomly chosen from various categories. Most are combat stages, but they always reward you with something, be it new active skills, passive skills, a HP/MP increase, or exchange points. The rewards are random for every new stage, apart from the boss ones. There are also event stages that let you rest, use your exchange points for the previously-mentioned rewards, or receive a random reward without fighting. More complex event stages appear when playing on the Entropy difficulty setting and make the adventure even trickier.

You can also choose which type of stage to go to next, from between three different possibilities. This alleviates Entropy Effect X’s main drawback: since you have to go through the same levels and face the same monsters over and over, the game can start to feel fairly repetitive. But here the variety of event and combat stages helps make each playthrough different enough from the others, because the choices you make can represent a unique strategy.

Entropy Effect X contains a small story. You're called Ace, a researcher possessing the ability to dive into the Sea of Possibilities in order to extract Shards of Possibility, which are supposed to help your fellow researchers devise a plan to stop the end of the world. The Sea of Possibilities actually represents the levels you dive into, and Ace is one of the BlazBlue characters that's playable in the game. A “dive” is 20-30 minutes long, depending on how far you get.

The extractable Shards of Possibility are scenes from the BlazBlue universe. Everything is told in visual novel fashion, mainly featuring dialog scenes between 2D models with simple animations. Taking place in a dark underground facility, the narrative does convincingly create a tense atmosphere, but I felt like it progressed far too slowly given the genre, such that a player might have had enough of the gameplay well before they saw the end of the narrative. The story objectives are reasonable, however, so any player can achieve them without having to get too far into the levels, but none of the scenes are particularly memorable.

Let’s dive into the gameplay, since it’s Entropy Effect X’s main attraction. You can unlock and choose between sixteen BlazBlue characters to dive with, which is definitely a solid roster and favors replayability a lot. The big stars of the series are present: Noel, Ragna, Jin, Rachel, and Es, among others. Each of them has unique moves on the triangle and square skill buttons, but the best thing is that they can learn many more techniques on top of these while diving, and thus create a real movelist, just like in the fighting games. Noel can, for example, acquire her laser cannon Sleipnir, as well as additional gunshots when jumping; her aerial gameplay is just exhilarating. Each character has a unique attack philosophy like this, which gives a new feel to each playthrough.

Stages essentially feature standard enemies with just one basic move, but they come in numbers and you have to dodge and destroy them quickly to avoid losing HP, which you badly need to keep as high as possible if you want to last several levels. Given the marathon-like challenge that Entropy Effect X turns out to be, even basic stages become thrilling, because you're striving for the perfect clear. The challenge naturally drove me to outdo myself, so I found a lot of satisfaction in reaching seemingly unreachable levels. Every ten stages, you face an Elite enemy (boss) that you must defeat to access the next level. There are two possible bosses picked randomly for each level, but four in the Alpha Space, which is an advanced level that's not easily reached. Alpha Space levels are exciting as they require flawless reflexes, great precision, and fast decision-making, increasingly so as you advance through the levels. Entropy Effect X is an overwhelmingly fast, thrilling, and rewarding kind of gameplay experience.

To help you go further in the Sea of Possibility, Entropy Effect X gives players a few perks. First, you can increase your max HP and healing by spending hard-earned Dive Points at any time. Mind Crystals also help by providing useful passive abilities, like enhanced skill damage, revival, more potions, or increased Tactics. Those Tactics are elemental particles your avatar can equip, and they attack enemies at the same times as you do. Fire orbs, ice shards, round blades, hail… there are quite a lot of these powers and there’s a true sense of satisfaction in collecting and using them. Finally, the game lets you inherit a set of tactics and skills from another avatar you've already played, making your current one more likely to progress.

Normal mode is fairly manageable in a few hours, but what comes next is when the serious business begins. Once you beat normal mode, you can access Entropy difficulty, which scales from 0 to 50. To give you an idea of what these numbers represent, the challenge level is already considerably harder at Entropy 5. My eyes could barely follow the moves of the boss in Sakura City, so just reaching Alpha Space already feels like quite an accomplishment. I can’t even imagine what happens in Extreme Zone, the highest difficulty setting following Entropy 50; I’ve already reached a point where my progression margin has become thin and the retries less engaging.

I was pleasantly surprised by Entropy Effect X in terms of visuals. It didn’t seem remarkable in screenshots, but once you turn on the real thing on a big screen, it’s definitely pleasant to look at. Most of the characters have 2D models that are much more detailed and nicely animated than I expected, and certainly more so than most competing indie rogue-lite games. The Japanese voice acting, however limited in line count, is likable as well. The general aesthetics of the stages, notably some of the color schemes, are surprisingly fancy. 

BlazBlue Entropy Effect X is undoubtedly a good surprise to kick off 2026. The numerous characters, and wide range of skills & strategies, as well as pleasant visuals, make it a rogue-lite action title with staying power, despite you having to replay the same stages every time. It also represents a formidable, motivating, and rewarding challenge for a fair price, although the in-game progression may not retain your interest beyond a certain point.