MotY post #7: Battlefield Manoeuvres! news - Blade Symphony

Hey guys,

Today, I’ll be talking about the last two major gameplay elements - the string counter, and the Shuffle and Dash moves.

In the bottom right, the Reverse, Balanced and Heavy stance string counters.

Each of Blade Symphony’s three stances can combo a different number of attacks, with a finisher move at the end of the combo string which usually has a longer or wider reach than the regular attacks. When you perform an attack, the string counters for all three stances are incremented by one.

Thus, it’s possible to use Reverse Stance to quickly execute two short-ranged attacks before switching to Heavy Stance to pull off its finisher, or to make the first two attacks of Heavy Stance then switch to the last two attacks of Balanced Stance (which are lunges) to pursue a retreating enemy, or to Reverse Stance if the enemy has closed with you.

Judgement switches stances at the end of the opening Balanced Stance attack, and charges up a Heavy Stance attack as part of the same combo.

Each stance has different attack in each string, and it is very advantageous to remember which string of which stance does which attack, so you can best decide which attack to do next.

However, you don’t always want to go all the way to the end of a string - you might want to repeat the first two attacks of Reversed Stance. To do this, you would have to reset the string counters. There are two ways to do this. The first is to simply not attack for a short a while - this is undesirable, as it leaves the initiative to your opponent.

A far better way to do this is to perform a Shuffle or a Dash. A Shuffle is a short directional hop, whereas a Dash takes longer to execute (as well as looking fancier), but covers more ground and allows you to attack sooner after performing it than a Shuffle would. Unfortunately, neither of these look particularly good in screenshots. Instead, we can offer a special treat of an exclusive 2010 Mod of the Year Phalanx themed Wallpaper! Enjoy!

So there you have it -- that’s Blade Symphony’s gameplay, at least in broad strokes. I hope this has given you a little more knowledge about how the game will actually work!