Hazama/Move List

Hazama can be a tricky-to-use character with a unique playstyle. Although his chains and slow speed are well-suited for a zoning character, he excels particularly well up-close, where he can make use of his numerous high-low-mixup and okizeme options to punish bad blocking. Unlike Hakumen, Carl, and Arakune, his “hop dash” is grounded and can be canceled at any time with normals, specials, or barrier, improving his short-range movement options, even enabling him to pseudo-wavedash. It should also be noted that Hazama has one of the “de facto” best meter gain rates in the game, as almost all of his combos go into multiple j.Cs, which builds meter extremely quickly.

His Drive is Ouroboros, named after his Event Weapon and allows him to fire a metal-snake-head attached to a spatial chain that acts akin to a projectile, allowing him to input followups to make him zip to the grappling point (even if it whiffs). However, all its followups save for the A version (which pulls the chain back quickly) will expend an Ouroboros counter, preventing Hazama from abusing it willy-nilly, and must be recharged without performing any followups for a set amount of time while on the ground. However, chains fired each have a "deadzone" hitbox when fired too close in the foe's face or when at a certain distance will make them do less damage and hitstun. Furthermore, B/C/D followups will cause Hazama's travel path to be different depending on the point at which they are inputted during the chains' respective flight paths, which requires some mastery to handle.

Although he is relatively slow compared to most of the cast, Hazama is excellent for applying pressure, as his drives make slow moves that would normally be safe at fullscreen (i.e. Jin’s projectiles) extremely risky, forcing opponents to play a close-up game even if their character is unsuited for it (i.e. Rachel). At the same time, however, Hazama can make the opponent’s rushdown risky as well, stuffing approaches easily with his Drive and his Fang Rising Leg (牙昇脚) (214D~B) special, which is invulnerable on startup and moves Hazama back enough to be virtually safe, and punishing holes in rushdown extremely hard with Snake’s Heaven Crumbling Wing (蛇翼崩天刃) (236236B), which can deal more than 7k damage in the right circumstances. At the same time, Hazama is able to punish opponents for playing overly defensively, poking them safely from a distance with his Drive inputs.

Despite this generally well-rounded playstyle however, Hazama’s slow walking speed and short air-dash-distance makes it difficult for him to catch characters fast enough to consistently get out of the reach of his Drive chains and throw out projectiles from a safe distance (as the said chains can be rather linear-plus-committal at best). He has a comparatively difficult time against Hakumen and Arakune, who are both capable of both negating his mixup game and his approach options by hitting his chains, countering, or air dashing (Hakumen) or onslaughting him with bugs (Arakune). Even then, his mixup options often require meter to either cancel into a Distortion Drive or with a Rapid Cancel in order to convert them into further damage, as well as having only very few mid-ranged pokes such as his 3C and j.B.

In BlazBlue: Continuum Shift II, Hazama gained several drastic changes that made him much less beginner-friendly. His normal bread and butter combos involving Tracing Fang (残影牙) have been removed, and replaced with complex OTG combos involving his modified 6C, which pins the opponent to the ground now allowing him to dash in and use 5C to start his air juggles. As with every character, Hazama’s style was changed to allow for better pressure when the opponent is trapped in the corner. Though in Extend, he seems to have lost most of his damage potential from the past two games, but even then this is backed up by a discovered loop that works in all versions of Continuum Shift that has been removed in later games.

His Overdrive is the Jörmungandr (ヨルムンガンド), it enables Hazama to not only rid himself of his chains’ aforementioned deadzones, but it also grants him his infamous life-stealing aura from his Unlimited Form.

In BlazBlue: Centralfiction, Hazama has two new moves, Snake Corpse (蛇骸) and Dark Swift Snake (蛇冥迅), which replaces Flying Sickle Thrust. The former option works as a solid offensive converter into his unique stance and its followups.