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I recently ordered the Heavy Gear Blitz 2 player starter.
My friend has a lot of armeis including North and South.
So to play HGB I could technically rely on him.

I did notice the Heavy Gear Arena ruleset can still be bought.
Are all these minis useable with the system?

If I pick up the rulebook + 2 (or more?) of those special weapon sprues, that would allow me to field the Blitz mecha in Arena?
What do you guys think of the Arena system?

 Darthvegeta800 wrote:
I recently ordered the Heavy Gear Blitz 2 player starter.
My friend has a lot of armeis including North and South.
So to play HGB I could technically rely on him.

I did notice the Heavy Gear Arena ruleset can still be bought.
Are all these minis useable with the system?

If I pick up the rulebook + 2 (or more?) of those special weapon sprues, that would allow me to field the Blitz mecha in Arena?
What do you guys think of the Arena system?

I honestly have never played the Arena game, but do have the rulebook. Where HGB is a very traditional tabletop miniatures wargame in the vein of 40k, flames of war, dropzone, warmahordes, etc, Arena is much more like a Necromunda. You're building and playing a Dueling team, acting as the team manager through a competitive season, essentially Role Playing a modern race car team except with fighting robots, including gathering sponsors, picking fights with other teams, dealing with your pilots ego's getting out of control and causing problems in the next match, etc. Most of the HGB mini's can be used in Arena, though not all have rules in there (no NuCoal, no Caprice, no CEF, no Black Talons, no newer units like Northern Lions or the Peace River Argos, etc) though all the classic staples for the primary Terra Novan political factions are in there. With regards to extra weapon sprues, Arena allows you to extensively customize any setup on a Gear and swap or add weapons, so having extras can be nice, but not necessarily mandatory depending on what you want to do.

However, Arena is an older and more complicated ruleset, built on the *old* Blitz rules which were developed from the 90's era Heavy Gear RPG. There's a lot more detail, rolling on tables, complexity, etc, and currently has no ongoing additional rules support beyond what's already out there.

If you're looking for a dense ruleset to roleplay through a season of gear dueling in Khayr Ad-Din with a similarly minded close gaming pal, go ahead and check it out. Otherwise you may want to stick to just Blitz. My personal impression is that for most people, Arena would work better as a videogame, where a computer handles a lot of the stuff that players have to manually manage/track/roll for/etc, both in combat and out of combat.

Arena mostly doesn't work. It could have been a cool game, but... yeah, doesn't actually work.

A shame.
Guess i'll focus on Blitz then.

In the meantime I actually found a discussion about this on Dakka among a more generic Blitz discussion.
Yeah...
Too bad.

I will just echo the above. Arena was a cool idea and could have been a great skirmish scale customizable intro game for the HG universe. Unfortunately, it was let down by the rules both due to problems with the core fundamentals as well as worse than average even for DP9 planning/organization/editing.

I would recommend though taking a look at the minis for the line as they're mostly compatible and give you new sculpts/poses for core blitz designs.

The minis are indeed very cool. But I haven't picked them up atm as I was afraid they'd be unusuable.
Those blades, shields etc are useable in the regular system as well?

 Darthvegeta800 wrote:
The minis are indeed very cool. But I haven't picked them up atm as I was afraid they'd be unusuable.
Those blades, shields etc are useable in the regular system as well?

I haven't looked at the rules in depth for several years but at least with the initial kickstarter plastic edition of the rules most were useable as commander/veteran squad upgrade options. Alternatively, you can just use normal weapons instead from your extra bits and don't necessarily have to use the more exotic Arena parts.

 Darthvegeta800 wrote:
The minis are indeed very cool. But I haven't picked them up atm as I was afraid they'd be unusuable.
Those blades, shields etc are useable in the regular system as well?

All the Arena mini's are useable in Blitz, as are the swords/shields/etc, though not always as standard units or equipment, but the rules do offer the ability to upgrade models (most armies just 1) to Duelists who can take pretty much all those options even if their basic military versions don't come with the options.

Awesome when I painted my starter set i'll pick a few up that I like the look off as aces.
Many thanks for the info!

 Darthvegeta800 wrote:
The minis are indeed very cool. But I haven't picked them up atm as I was afraid they'd be unusuable.
Those blades, shields etc are useable in the regular system as well?

On some yes, but they also give you a small supply of stuff to upgrade models into duelists.