I was first introduced to Guilty Gear and its developer (Arc System Works) way back in the early 2000s by a friend who showed me Guilty Gear XX. At this time, I was a fighting game fan, but I had only partaken in the typical Capcom two-dimensional fighting games like Street Fighter or Marvel vs Capcom. My friend introduced me to SNK games like King of Fighters, which had more unique characters, as well as their crossover game with Capcom: the Capcom vs SNK series. However, by that point, I had slowly become that guy who preferred the three-dimensional fighters like Tekken because I thought it looked better and the characters felt more unique in the roster. Guilty Gear XX changed my mind to the contrary almost immediately.

It was a surprisingly smooth-looking two-dimensional fighting game unlike any other I had played. The characters all had unique or bizarre character designs, with extremely unique movesets, and even rich background stories. Guilty Gear was the first fighting game that I played to really focus on a deep backstory to its world and characters. Back then, I was all about the different storylines and bizarre world of Guilty Gear. It’s part of why I was so enamored with Arc System Works’ next fighting game franchise of note back in 2009: Blazblue. I’m not nearly as interested in a fighting game’s story these days, but the point is that Guilty Gear XX singlehandedly made me an Arc System Works fan and changed my perspective on fighting games and what I expected of the genre. While I missed a lot of the fun of the previous GG game (Xrd), I jumped onto Strive pretty quickly.

The Short of It

What I’ve Played

• 100+ Hours

• Focused on 4 different characters

• More than 100 online matches

• Next to nothing in Story mode

Pros

• Smooth controls and gameplay

• Stunning visuals

• Great character designs and redesigns

• Mechanics work well to make a complex game easy to approach for scrubs like myself

• Fantastic Rollback net code keeps the connection solid

• Extensive story history is cataloged for those who wish to read it

Cons

• Background music, while dramatic, is not my flavor and the music in previous GG games was better

• Online lobbies and attempting to just play the game online with people are pretty badly implemented

• Interface is not ideal

• Simplification of mechanics reduces freedom of being able to build your own combos

• Load times starting up the game take a while

• Still missing basic features of fighting games that other Arc System Works games have

The Rest of It

Story

Uh, so…. Guilty Gear has an extensive and convoluted plot that has continued over the course of its many games. Strive is a continuation of the story of having Sol Badguy seek out and destroy his enemies in the post-apocalyptic future caused by the extreme advances in science and the creation of gears.

Frankly, I’m not interested in the story of Guilty Gear anymore, and engaging with it has not been on my to-do list. I did, however, look through their Timeline feature which does a decent job of catching you up to speed on the events that took place in previous games. It also has a story mode, as in previous games, that has a great deal of voice acting (I know because they use it in a lot of their trailers). If you want to play the story mode and make sense of this fantastical world created for Guilty Gear, be my guest. I’m sure there’s a lot in there. I just don’t have an opinion on it.

Gameplay

Guilty Gear has long had the reputation of having unique and weird characters in their roster that vary greatly from each other. This is in stark contrast to other fighting games in which some characters are very similar or identical in their playstyles. While the usual archetypes of rushdown, grapplers, zoners, and the like are all here, Guilty Gear Strive does a great job at making the characters all feel unique and fun to try out. There are plenty of recurring characters that have been in previous games, as well as some fresh faces in the core roster. Surprisingly enough, I found myself playing characters I would normally take no interest in trying in previous installments and having a blast. Part of this is simply the curiosity of a new experience, but a majority of it I attribute to the controls, mechanics, and overall feel of the game.

The gameplay of Strive is smooth as silk, as opposed to the stiffness I often felt plagued previous installments. Close-minded pro players of the past would say it’s because I’m a scrub who needs bigger buffer windows, with less accurate timing. They’d be right, but it makes a big difference in making the game fun and accessible. Guilty Gear has never been this smooth or fun to play. The movement of the characters and the combo strings all feel great during the action. The combos themselves are almost always high-damaging because Strive’s design has taken the perspective of “if it hits, it hurts.” With certain characters, you can melt an opponent’s health bar with just a few hits. This brought some criticism as it would make matches end rather quickly, and put pressure on the players to learn and adapt to their opponents’ habits quickly. However, I quite prefer it because it makes you a little more cautious about your movements and attacks. It also makes even the shortest combo feel effective and powerful, similar to the old days of Street Fighter II.

With all these simplification changes mentioned, it’s not as though the game is too simple for the players who like their fighting games complicated. There are plenty of ‘big-brain’ characters on the roster that require a fair amount of finesse and setups in order to make the most of their mechanics. If you want something simple, there’s a character for you. If you want something complex, there’s a character for you. Spend enough time in training and online, and you’ll quickly see that the mechanics of this game are quite deep, despite the fact that this is a simplified version of the franchise that is far more accessible than it’s ever been in the past. The only significant downside to the simplification of Guilty Gear is that there isn’t quite as much freedom in combo creation as there used to be. When it comes to most characters, there are a number of optimal combos for every type of situation, which is not quite how it worked in previous games that had numerous other systems and mechanics. Thankfully, there are still certain mechanics that allow for some unique interactions.

Mechanics

At first glance, Strive looks pretty straightforward, but it doesn’t take long to find all its complexity under the surface. Some core mechanics specific to Guilty Gear make a return, including Roman cancels, Dust combos, and specific blocking mechanics.

Roman cancels are a resource you can use to extend combos, set up combos, make an attack safe, or use as a method of getting out of a block string. For the price of half your ‘tension’ gauge, a Roman cancel is a powerful option that can completely change the momentum of a match. Depending on when you activate a Roman cancel, a colorful circle will appear around your character and time will slow down. Red appears when you activate during the active frames of an attack and can be commonly used to extend your combos for a kill, though the damage scaling on attacks following the red cancel is pretty significant. Purple appears if you activate it right after an attack. This can be used to extend combos as well, but the scaling is less significant as it is typically a little harder to pull off. Both red and purple cancels can also be used to make your attacks safe in the event that the opponent blocks a risky attack that would leave you open to a counterattack. The animation for these cancels themselves can also be canceled, which has its own properties that can change the way characters move on the screen.

In addition to the red and purple cancels, blue cancels occur when you activate it in a neutral position. These are useful for giving your character more mobility or slowing down the opponent enough to get a strong counterattack or combo started. Finally, yellow cancels appear when you activate it while blocking. These push the opponent back and give you an escape from their pressure. Some Roman cancels themselves can even be canceled with another move, allowing for crazy combos and uses. The amount that the game slows down during these cancel activations allows for some really unique and exciting moments during a match, especially with high-level players who make creative use of them.

As for Dust combos, you might be wondering what the hell that means if you have never played GG. It’s not that crazy I assure you. Simply put, Dust is another button at your disposal in addition to your punch, kick, slash, and heavy attacks. Dust is the button that hits the hardest of all of them. Traditionally, if you hit someone with a Dust attack, you can then follow them up into the air for a stylish air combo with high damage. That is still the case here. In fact, the Dust combos deal ridiculous damage in Strive because, frankly, everything does. The big difference with Dust combos in comparison to previous games is that they are much simpler than before. In the previous GG game, you could hit someone with Dust and either chase them up into the air or straight across the ground to the corner of the screen. In Strive, your option is only to chase into the air and do a combo as the characters fly from one section of the arena to the other. While in this brief airborne state, you can attack and jump a bit more before slamming the opponent down to the ground. Other mechanics, such as Burst and Roman cancels can be used here as well.

Lastly, the defensive options that have been a tradition in Guilty Gear make a return. Like any other fighting game, you can block attacks. However, there are several different types of blocks you can perform. A basic block is done by holding down the direction opposite your opponent. If you defend against a special move, you’ll take a small amount of damage and can die if you don’t have much health. If you block this way just at the moment in which the opponent’s strike lands, you’ll do a Just Defend, which reduces the chip damage and also adjusts how the characters move on the screen. A normal block usually forces the characters apart slightly, while Just Defend keeps the characters in place and allows more opportunities for a quick counterattack. Finally, there’s the Flawless Defense block in which you can spend some of your tension gauge to protect your character with a shield that manages to eliminate block damage and push the opponent back much further. Mastering these different blocks will elevate your ability to defeat opponents. However, Guilty Gear has several mechanics to make sure you don’t just spend your day blocking.

If you or your opponent do nothing or just hold back for too long, the game penalizes you with a warning and then sucks all of your tension meter away. You have to make sure to keep pushing forward and attacking at openings if you want to keep your resources. In addition to this, you’ll need to keep an eye on your RISC gauge. For those unfamiliar, this is a mechanic, in conjunction with others, in which the game encourages you to be aggressive over defensive. You most certainly should use blocks to protect yourself, but with each successful block, the small bar under your health bar fills up. As this small bar fills, your chances of taking high damage increase exponentially, because the next hit your character takes will be increased based on how much RISC you have. If you manage to avoid the fatal blow and get a combo of your own, you can escape death as the meter plummets back to zero. If not, say ‘goodbye’ to your health bar.

Online

There are specific qualities of the online that are worth mentioning, both very good and very bad.

First, the good: Rollback Netcode.

I won’t go into specifics because I, frankly, don’t know them. All you need to know is that before Covid-19, practically every competitive fighting game that came out of Japan used delay-based net code. This older net code format would slow down the game to a crawl if there was ever any hiccup in the connection between players. Unless you lived within a couple of hours drive from the other person, and you both had good connections, you were likely to see an online match slow down like it was in a time warp. In Dragon Ball FighterZ, I once saw my match get as high as a 23-frame delay, which basically meant the match and movement reduced to going at about a frame every few seconds. It sucked and was the number one reason I hated playing that game online, despite how much I enjoyed it otherwise. Covid-19 shut down in-person fighting game tournaments and forced Japanese fighting-game developers to acknowledge that people couldn’t play their games online around the world in a reasonable capacity.

Guilty Gear: Strive, was slated to come out with delay-based netcode originally until the internet exploded with people saying they weren’t going to bother picking the game up, especially because Covid prevented even the compromise of being able to play locally with others. That caused a shift in development and Arc System Works pivoted (thankfully) early enough to implement Rollback into the game’s design. Having spent more than 60 hours in online matches with people around the world and not just within a few hours’ drive, I can say this game feels great online.

Of all the countless online matches I have had, there were 3 where there was a notable hitch to the experience, and one of them was with a friend who I knew was on Wi-Fi. When he fixed it and actually got his LAN cables in place, the issue was gone. Even when he was on Wi-Fi, and the rollbacks were frequent, it was still more playable than 80% of the matches I had in Dragon Ball FighterZ. There’s no doubt that the Rollback switch was a great move and since then, more Japanese developers have followed suit, noticing how well Strive has done. If there was a single positive thing to come out of the COVID-19 pandemic for video games, it’s that it forced Japanese developers to accept that Rollback was worth the work.

Now for the bad: the lobbies and interface.

Much like other fighting games, a fair amount of effort was spent making online lobbies, their systems, mini-games, collectible items, etc. Too bad it wasn’t well spent. The lobbies are a weird pixel-art minimalist style that clashes dramatically with the look of the rest of the game. At least in GG Xrd and Dragonball FighterZ, the chibi characters made sense. Here, the avatars are just blocky interpretations at best. The lobbies themselves are also not great to look at and provide little entertainment or justification for their existence.

I would just rather have a few buttons on the launch screen that allow me to start casual matches and ranked matches. Or, I would gladly take the list format of older games that weren’t so ambitious as to create these interactive lobbies in the first place. I get that they’re trying to get people to meet and interact with one another online like a form of social media, but the fact that I have to engage with it just to play some private matches with a friend is rather annoying, especially when you consider that I’m already interacting with my friends via Steam, Discord, or whatever other platform exists. Give us a simple menu as an option. Get the matchmaking started and be done with it. Don’t make users go through some clunky interfaces just to play a person they already know.

Presentation

As I alluded to at the top of this review, games by Arc System Works have almost always been the harbingers if not the shining examples of how good a fighting game can look for a particular generation of games. After making a game as pretty as Dragon Ball FighterZ, they knocked it out of the park again with Guilty Gear: Strive. That’s not to say I think the look of the game is perfect, but when it comes to the character design, the lighting and particle effects, the backgrounds, the animations, and the way everything moves, Strive looks great. Small things like seeing particles fly off the Roman cancel spheres, or the way certain characters and their colors light up when someone like Sol does a fiery special attack look fantastic.

All that praise being said, there are some things I don’t like about Strive’s presentation. I think the interface during a match is too minimalist and pretty boring to look at, especially when you compare it to other Guilty Gear games. I know the approach to the design of this game was to simplify everything as much as possible, but this was a bridge too far. Thankfully, it’s just the interface and not something more important like lobbies and matchmaking…

I’m also not really a fan of the music. Despite enjoying the music that the creative director and composer Daisuke Ishiwatari has made in the past with other Guilty Gear and BlazBlue games, I have only listened to Strive’s music a handful of times. It’s not that the music doesn’t match the game or its style. The problem I have with it is that there are vocals, a new addition to the background music Ishiwatari has composed. As much as I like the guitar riffs and hard rock style, I find the vocals distracting. It includes a fair amount of English being sung or screamed by a person who speaks it as a second language. Don’t get me wrong. I love me some Japanese metal and hard rock in its own setting where I can enjoy the sound and occasional goofiness of someone trying to sing something they don’t quite know how to pronounce. I don’t care for it so much as music that is playing in the background as I’m practicing a character in Training mode or focusing on an online match. Instrumental music works better because it can loop without you noticing as much. If there were a way for me to just add music from other Guilty Gear games or get versions of the songs without vocals, my tune would be completely different.

TL;DR (Conclusion)

If you have never played a Guilty Gear game before, Strive is a great entry for new players to become fans. Its design is approachable and intuitive for new players, yet deceptively deep enough for veteran players to dig in as well. While there are some minor issues I have with the game in terms of its presentation, interface, and lobby systems, there’s no denying that this is the smoothest Guilty Gear has ever felt and I have had a blast playing it, both online and solo.