Almost every single gamer has that one genre of games that they love, but try as they might they will never truly be great at them. Some folks love Call of Duty multiplayer but never really crack the top of the leader boards through all their effort. Some people love a good puzzle game, but struggle to really reach the later stages when the speed picks up.
For me, its fighting games. I can certainly learn enough to be competent, but never enough to be competitive. There is one series though that has always stood tall for me, and for whatever reason, one I seem to excel in more than say Streetfighter or Mortal Kombat. A series that at first, I didn't even like. It just didn't grab me. But two co-workers at the ole DerpStop started playing it, and I'll be damned if they are going to be better than me in a fighting game... Thus began my harrowing addiction to series, which after years finally continues in....
GUILTY GEAR XRD -SIGN-
Guilty Gear as a series actually tends to have an incredibly long and complicated story line spanning over the course of the games. In this edition, it takes place after the events of Guilty Gear 2: Overture (a game I have heard that is 2 scoops of terrible). Descending from seemingly the heavens, a tan skinned girl by the name of Ramlethal Valentine declares war against the entirety of the world.
Since she appears to be telling the truth and does appear to be a Valentine, the world takes notice and makes their movements against her. Enter long time series protagonist Sol Badguy. He is currently traveling with Sin Kiske when is contacted by Sin's father, Ky Kiske. Sol is asked to investigate the situation, but a mercenary he obviously demands a pretty penny for it around the range of a million "world dollars."
Meanwhile, as is with most Guilty Gear games, all of the characters also have their own substories loosely connected to the main plot. Characters like Millia, Venom, and Slayer are still dealing with the doings of the assassin's guild, May still fauns over the Jellyfish Pirate captain Johnny and her struggles with being one of the few surviving Japanese, and Potemkin still on his never ending journey to suck butts. (like, all of the butts).
Guilty Gear Xrd this time around did something very, very different regarding their story. Typically, in their story mode you play as you would sort of like arcade mode, but with more dialog, but depending on how you completed the fights, it would send you down various story paths which would allow your character get multiple endings. Naturally, not every single one of these would end up being canon to the story.
This time around the arcade mode functions as the main story sort of, at least in the context of the character you've chosen. You get a cutscene explaining what they are doing when Ramlethal makes her declaration of war and then it follows the classic Tekken or Street fighter Alpha style of storytelling. You fight till about midway till you are treated with a cutscene, you fight till the final boss where you get one more cutscene, and then an ending when you win. Most of them end open-endedly.
The reason for this is because then you are to go to the actual story mode. This needs a different name. Because while yes, it does continue the story from the arcade mode, there is no game play to it. None, at all. It is akin to getting to watch a Guilty Gear animated film of the events that take place after arcade mode for about 2-4 hours depending on how fast you read. Its well animated and fully voice acted, so it is a lot like watching a movie. It very much succeeds at fleshing out the story more. It was an interesting way to do things especially with such a tangled mess like the Guilty Gear is. But in the context of a game, its somewhat limiting. It's basically what Persona 4 Arena did only animated and with no fights.
The only other playable game mode outside of Arcade and Vs mode is the Medal of Millionaire mode. In M.o.M mode, it essentially used to be a survival mode, but now you sort of half this grid system where you pick and unlock your fights, and you have a bit of an RPG element which allows you to level your strengths and buy equipment or attacks for your character. I am not sure what the eventual end game of this mode is aside from an increasing difficulty and loot gathering of sorts. Its a different way to play the game, but having breaks in the action slows the pace down. Honestly more games need to do survival modes like Dead or Alive does them. Just a nonstop rush.
So lets get to the game, shall we? Guilty Gear Xrd is a 2d fighter. Two people stand on each side of each other, and you wail on the other one till their life bar drops to zero. In that regard its a lot like every other fighter. Not a great sell or ground breakingly original I know, but its all the little nuances and differences that make me really fall of this game. For example, almost every fighter has combo chains you can do, but Guilty Gear tends to be a little loose on those and gives you a pretty rapid attack speed. So that means idiotic troglodytes like me can dash in for a few light strikes, followed by a medium, heavy, and end on a special.
As I mentioned just a line ago, there is dashing. I fucking love dashing. Sure, lots of fighting games have a dash but none of them feel so fluid to me like Guilty Gear does. You can dash front and back, you can do it in the air front and back, and the speeds vary depending on the character. So if I use a mainstay like my girl Millia Rage, she moves in and out like a lightning bolt for quick stick and move combos, and is incredibly difficult to pin against a wall. Meanwhile, someone who's a heavy hitter like May or Dumptemkin has a slower more lumbering movement, and it is similarly reflected in their dash move.
Naturally, at the bottom of the screen you have a tension meter. Which builds up as you fight, pursue, or really just stay active during the battle, once it fills up to half or full, you can use one of your really heavy damaging special moves. Each character usually has at least 2, but sometimes 3 of these moves. They tend to vary in type well and they can quickly turn the tide of battle. The tension meter can also be used for various defensive barriers which will allow you defend some of the heavier attacks.
But the other big purpose of it is the Instant Kills. As you can imagine, they do exactly what you expect them to. They instantly kill your opponent, regardless of when you did it or how much health they have when it happens. You are treated to sharp looking cinematic of the kill before you get "DESTROYED" in huge letters on the screen. Every character including the final boss is susceptible to them. But they are a gamble, by activating the mode that allows you to make and instant kill your tension gauge will slowly deplete. Once empty, it will start to deplete your health next. You can turn it off, but if you take a swing with it and miss, you lose your tension meter for the remainder of the round.
There is also a Burst Gauge by your life bar as well. This is the savior for me in this fighting game, and probably the only thing that keeps me competitive. With the simple press of a few buttons, your character will jump and flash. If the flash connects with an opponent, it completely fills up your tension meter. But more importantly, if you are stuck in the middle of a combo getting wailed on, it will counter it and blast your enemy back. I cannot tell you how many times this move has saved my ass from constantly getting air juggled or what not, but all these things together basically assemble everything I need and want to make a game exciting.
One of the biggest selling points for me is that Guilty Gear as a series is FAST. And I'm not talking about the Street Fighter 2 Turbo Edition breakneck speed ramped up to unplayable levels. Because of these game mechanics, the naturally flow of the game is incredibly fast pace. Even with some of the slower characters, the right set of moves allows you to keep some heavy pressure up. My aforementioned easy combo that I like to do is a good example of this because it doesn't require me to use specific moves to form a chain. Its a lot more free form, and I honestly like that better.
Something new to me personally though, is while I play this game, I can't get over how visually stunning the game looks. If you look at it at a glance, it will probably look like any other Guilty Gear game that came before it. It might appear to just be a pretty looking anime fighter with traditional 2d sprites. But that's where you would be wrong.
This game was developed from the ground up on the Unreal Engine. So while everything appears to be 2d anime sprites, the entirety of the game and its cutscenes are done with 3D models carefully designed to give the image of 2d. When you make kills or hit certain moves, the camera will shift around and spin to show you the full 3d image. It looks fantastic and I constantly find myself watching the game and reminding myself that everything is fully rendered. All of the colors and lines are bright and bold, and it just has a fantastic visual style to it.
And then, there is the music. Daisuke Fucking Ishiwatari. He's the main developer behind the game, but he's also the game's composer. If you haven't listened to some of the older Guilty Gear soundtracks then you are missing out. Daisuke is one of the few devs I've seen realize that if you make a game about kicking ass, your music should equally kick ass. And that's what his soundtracks do. They rock, and they rock fucking hard.
The soundtrack Guilty Gear Xrd isn't just a rip or rehash of the old Guilty Gear music although some of it is available. Each character has had new themes written for them in the vein of their previous theme. So when each level starts, you might her a notable scale of notes but then the song will change. This is most noted for characters like Chip and May. Even the main theme "Heavy Day" as goofy as it is in English, as just the right riff to make even the most anti-rock person put on a happy frown and bob their head a little. I could listen to that and "Lily of Steel" all day.
Alright, let me stop gushing like a fangirl for a second here. Despite my salivation over this review, there are some negatives and some of them are pretty big. As mentioned before, Guilty Gear is a pretty long series, and as games that last over time do there is a pretty wide case of characters. So I have to say that I was a little more than disappointing when I saw that Xrd's roster was trimmed down to a scant 17 characters. This is more than the arcade version had, but considering how beefy the series is as a whole for characters, this is a surprisingly low number.
This is also marred by the fact that not all of them are available from go. That's not always uncommon in fighting games, but when you fire the game up, console exclusive Sin Kiske isn't available until you build of 200K of game money. You get 100 of it by just watching the story so i suppose it could be worse but that was disappointing. But what really aggravated me, as you might expect, were the fucking DLC characters. Elphet is a great character, she's funny, and fun to use. But the fact that I had to use a DLC code to unlock her bothers me. She was given away for free for first week, but anyone who didn't get it immediately gets to eat shit on that one.
And then after several weeks, the unlocked the final character Leo Whitefang for DLC. Naturally, as much as I hate it I wanted a complete roster so I went to download him, and he was fucking 8 dollars. EIGHT. That means to get the full roster of the game today, you need to at least pay 16 additional dollars on top of the price you paid at the store to complete the roster. I don't care how developers try to spin it, that is absolute bullshit. I hated it in Persona 4 Arena Ultimax with Margaret, and I hate it now.
The other big disaster of Guilty Gear Xrd is the game's network mode. Anyone who plays fighters knows that online mode is the bread and butter of any fighter these days. Xrd had problems with their network right out of the gate. Impossible to connect to matches, matches would drop after you got into them, lag would be game breakingly prevalent. But to make matters worse, the network mode is so clunky and obstructive, I couldn't even get into a single game to start. Make your profile, pick your character, pick your region, pick your continent, pick your state, pick a room, pick a door, pick an arcade machine, pick your favorite color, pick your favorite spice girl, pick your favorite quadrilateral equation.
Too many menus basically chased me out of playing online for a long time. To make matters worse, there doesn't appear to be any real option for inviting a friend to play in the server you are in. It's stupid. It should be: make you profile, pick your region, then ranked or unranked. That's it. Anything more than that is making your system far too complicated and only adds steps to the process that prevent me from playing the game. And newsflash on this one: if people can't play your fighting game online, people aren't going to play your game for long.
Supposedly they have been addressing the issue, because when I finally realized I need to go where there are servers with people on it, I was able to get into a room, then into a group of 8, and got to play a series of matches with relative ease. It had a nifty feature where it keeps a running count of the frame lag, but honestly, I wouldn't be able to tell how that many lost frames would affect the fight. Supposedly 8 frames is huge, and I was around 3 or 4. I managed to play a few rounds with some random and broke even so I guess that's not bad.
And seriously, going back to it? 17 Characters? How do you cut some of the series most popular characters, not to mention characters I love to play?! No Jam, no Dizzy, no Bridget, No Baiken, No Order-Sol, No Testament. I mean sure, new characters are nice but fighters are really made or broken on their diverse roster, and Guilty Gear has always done great with those. This is probably an angle where they will release more on DLC, or come up with a new ridiculously named version which I will buy, because I am a stupid.
Complaints aside though, the bottom line is that I think Guilty Gear is one of the top of the line fighters, and I think given the right audience could make a serious case to dethrone some of the most popular games. It's a technical fighter that does well at not being overly daunting to the new player, its got an amazing new visual style that manages to look clean and new while retaining the charm of the ones that came before it, it's got a soundtrack that rips a new asshole as you rip one into your opponent, and so on. It doesn't go out of the way to break a lot of the molds they've set, but what they do, they do well (for the most part).
What we have here is what I think will be the ground work for what will be a much better future version of this game. I am a huge fan of Arc System fighting games, and Guilty Gear is naturally their crown jewel. When the XBone announced they were getting Killer Instinct I got very jealous. Guilty Gear Xrd has completely washed that feeling away. It's just a damn good fighter and I've you never played it I strongly suggest you give it a try. I've already seen flash sales knock this game down to 20$ so there is no reason not to.
Honestly, it stuns me that this series isn't more popular. I've heard it referred to as the game StreetFighter players wish Streetfighter would be. I'm hard pressed to disagree with that.
Seriously, You have Dizzy in the story. Put her in the game.
And if Bridget is coming back, remove the gender sway.
That'll piss fans off.
Meanwhile, as is with most Guilty Gear games, all of the characters also have their own substories loosely connected to the main plot. Characters like Millia, Venom, and Slayer are still dealing with the doings of the assassin's guild, May still fauns over the Jellyfish Pirate captain Johnny and her struggles with being one of the few surviving Japanese, and Potemkin still on his never ending journey to suck butts. (like, all of the butts).
 |
| Ramlethal Valentine. |
Guilty Gear Xrd this time around did something very, very different regarding their story. Typically, in their story mode you play as you would sort of like arcade mode, but with more dialog, but depending on how you completed the fights, it would send you down various story paths which would allow your character get multiple endings. Naturally, not every single one of these would end up being canon to the story.
This time around the arcade mode functions as the main story sort of, at least in the context of the character you've chosen. You get a cutscene explaining what they are doing when Ramlethal makes her declaration of war and then it follows the classic Tekken or Street fighter Alpha style of storytelling. You fight till about midway till you are treated with a cutscene, you fight till the final boss where you get one more cutscene, and then an ending when you win. Most of them end open-endedly.
The reason for this is because then you are to go to the actual story mode. This needs a different name. Because while yes, it does continue the story from the arcade mode, there is no game play to it. None, at all. It is akin to getting to watch a Guilty Gear animated film of the events that take place after arcade mode for about 2-4 hours depending on how fast you read. Its well animated and fully voice acted, so it is a lot like watching a movie. It very much succeeds at fleshing out the story more. It was an interesting way to do things especially with such a tangled mess like the Guilty Gear is. But in the context of a game, its somewhat limiting. It's basically what Persona 4 Arena did only animated and with no fights.
The only other playable game mode outside of Arcade and Vs mode is the Medal of Millionaire mode. In M.o.M mode, it essentially used to be a survival mode, but now you sort of half this grid system where you pick and unlock your fights, and you have a bit of an RPG element which allows you to level your strengths and buy equipment or attacks for your character. I am not sure what the eventual end game of this mode is aside from an increasing difficulty and loot gathering of sorts. Its a different way to play the game, but having breaks in the action slows the pace down. Honestly more games need to do survival modes like Dead or Alive does them. Just a nonstop rush.
So lets get to the game, shall we? Guilty Gear Xrd is a 2d fighter. Two people stand on each side of each other, and you wail on the other one till their life bar drops to zero. In that regard its a lot like every other fighter. Not a great sell or ground breakingly original I know, but its all the little nuances and differences that make me really fall of this game. For example, almost every fighter has combo chains you can do, but Guilty Gear tends to be a little loose on those and gives you a pretty rapid attack speed. So that means idiotic troglodytes like me can dash in for a few light strikes, followed by a medium, heavy, and end on a special.
As I mentioned just a line ago, there is dashing. I fucking love dashing. Sure, lots of fighting games have a dash but none of them feel so fluid to me like Guilty Gear does. You can dash front and back, you can do it in the air front and back, and the speeds vary depending on the character. So if I use a mainstay like my girl Millia Rage, she moves in and out like a lightning bolt for quick stick and move combos, and is incredibly difficult to pin against a wall. Meanwhile, someone who's a heavy hitter like May or Dumptemkin has a slower more lumbering movement, and it is similarly reflected in their dash move.
Naturally, at the bottom of the screen you have a tension meter. Which builds up as you fight, pursue, or really just stay active during the battle, once it fills up to half or full, you can use one of your really heavy damaging special moves. Each character usually has at least 2, but sometimes 3 of these moves. They tend to vary in type well and they can quickly turn the tide of battle. The tension meter can also be used for various defensive barriers which will allow you defend some of the heavier attacks.
 |
| The marriage obsessed Elphelt is a wonderful addition to the roster. She is absolutely insane, she wants to marry any male she fights. |
But the other big purpose of it is the Instant Kills. As you can imagine, they do exactly what you expect them to. They instantly kill your opponent, regardless of when you did it or how much health they have when it happens. You are treated to sharp looking cinematic of the kill before you get "DESTROYED" in huge letters on the screen. Every character including the final boss is susceptible to them. But they are a gamble, by activating the mode that allows you to make and instant kill your tension gauge will slowly deplete. Once empty, it will start to deplete your health next. You can turn it off, but if you take a swing with it and miss, you lose your tension meter for the remainder of the round.
There is also a Burst Gauge by your life bar as well. This is the savior for me in this fighting game, and probably the only thing that keeps me competitive. With the simple press of a few buttons, your character will jump and flash. If the flash connects with an opponent, it completely fills up your tension meter. But more importantly, if you are stuck in the middle of a combo getting wailed on, it will counter it and blast your enemy back. I cannot tell you how many times this move has saved my ass from constantly getting air juggled or what not, but all these things together basically assemble everything I need and want to make a game exciting.
 |
| Some of the instant kills are very, very eff'n cool. |
One of the biggest selling points for me is that Guilty Gear as a series is FAST. And I'm not talking about the Street Fighter 2 Turbo Edition breakneck speed ramped up to unplayable levels. Because of these game mechanics, the naturally flow of the game is incredibly fast pace. Even with some of the slower characters, the right set of moves allows you to keep some heavy pressure up. My aforementioned easy combo that I like to do is a good example of this because it doesn't require me to use specific moves to form a chain. Its a lot more free form, and I honestly like that better.
Something new to me personally though, is while I play this game, I can't get over how visually stunning the game looks. If you look at it at a glance, it will probably look like any other Guilty Gear game that came before it. It might appear to just be a pretty looking anime fighter with traditional 2d sprites. But that's where you would be wrong.
This game was developed from the ground up on the Unreal Engine. So while everything appears to be 2d anime sprites, the entirety of the game and its cutscenes are done with 3D models carefully designed to give the image of 2d. When you make kills or hit certain moves, the camera will shift around and spin to show you the full 3d image. It looks fantastic and I constantly find myself watching the game and reminding myself that everything is fully rendered. All of the colors and lines are bright and bold, and it just has a fantastic visual style to it.
The soundtrack Guilty Gear Xrd isn't just a rip or rehash of the old Guilty Gear music although some of it is available. Each character has had new themes written for them in the vein of their previous theme. So when each level starts, you might her a notable scale of notes but then the song will change. This is most noted for characters like Chip and May. Even the main theme "Heavy Day" as goofy as it is in English, as just the right riff to make even the most anti-rock person put on a happy frown and bob their head a little. I could listen to that and "Lily of Steel" all day.
Lily of Steel: Fucking. Rock.
Alright, let me stop gushing like a fangirl for a second here. Despite my salivation over this review, there are some negatives and some of them are pretty big. As mentioned before, Guilty Gear is a pretty long series, and as games that last over time do there is a pretty wide case of characters. So I have to say that I was a little more than disappointing when I saw that Xrd's roster was trimmed down to a scant 17 characters. This is more than the arcade version had, but considering how beefy the series is as a whole for characters, this is a surprisingly low number.
This is also marred by the fact that not all of them are available from go. That's not always uncommon in fighting games, but when you fire the game up, console exclusive Sin Kiske isn't available until you build of 200K of game money. You get 100 of it by just watching the story so i suppose it could be worse but that was disappointing. But what really aggravated me, as you might expect, were the fucking DLC characters. Elphet is a great character, she's funny, and fun to use. But the fact that I had to use a DLC code to unlock her bothers me. She was given away for free for first week, but anyone who didn't get it immediately gets to eat shit on that one.
 |
| It's become common practice between me and a friend to scream at each other about eating cake when we play Elphelt against each other. |
And then after several weeks, the unlocked the final character Leo Whitefang for DLC. Naturally, as much as I hate it I wanted a complete roster so I went to download him, and he was fucking 8 dollars. EIGHT. That means to get the full roster of the game today, you need to at least pay 16 additional dollars on top of the price you paid at the store to complete the roster. I don't care how developers try to spin it, that is absolute bullshit. I hated it in Persona 4 Arena Ultimax with Margaret, and I hate it now.
The other big disaster of Guilty Gear Xrd is the game's network mode. Anyone who plays fighters knows that online mode is the bread and butter of any fighter these days. Xrd had problems with their network right out of the gate. Impossible to connect to matches, matches would drop after you got into them, lag would be game breakingly prevalent. But to make matters worse, the network mode is so clunky and obstructive, I couldn't even get into a single game to start. Make your profile, pick your character, pick your region, pick your continent, pick your state, pick a room, pick a door, pick an arcade machine, pick your favorite color, pick your favorite spice girl, pick your favorite quadrilateral equation.
Too many menus basically chased me out of playing online for a long time. To make matters worse, there doesn't appear to be any real option for inviting a friend to play in the server you are in. It's stupid. It should be: make you profile, pick your region, then ranked or unranked. That's it. Anything more than that is making your system far too complicated and only adds steps to the process that prevent me from playing the game. And newsflash on this one: if people can't play your fighting game online, people aren't going to play your game for long.
Supposedly they have been addressing the issue, because when I finally realized I need to go where there are servers with people on it, I was able to get into a room, then into a group of 8, and got to play a series of matches with relative ease. It had a nifty feature where it keeps a running count of the frame lag, but honestly, I wouldn't be able to tell how that many lost frames would affect the fight. Supposedly 8 frames is huge, and I was around 3 or 4. I managed to play a few rounds with some random and broke even so I guess that's not bad.
 |
| I guess MOM mode adds some RPG element to it, but I don't really know what the end game of it really is. Perhaps a challenge, I dunno. |
And seriously, going back to it? 17 Characters? How do you cut some of the series most popular characters, not to mention characters I love to play?! No Jam, no Dizzy, no Bridget, No Baiken, No Order-Sol, No Testament. I mean sure, new characters are nice but fighters are really made or broken on their diverse roster, and Guilty Gear has always done great with those. This is probably an angle where they will release more on DLC, or come up with a new ridiculously named version which I will buy, because I am a stupid.
Complaints aside though, the bottom line is that I think Guilty Gear is one of the top of the line fighters, and I think given the right audience could make a serious case to dethrone some of the most popular games. It's a technical fighter that does well at not being overly daunting to the new player, its got an amazing new visual style that manages to look clean and new while retaining the charm of the ones that came before it, it's got a soundtrack that rips a new asshole as you rip one into your opponent, and so on. It doesn't go out of the way to break a lot of the molds they've set, but what they do, they do well (for the most part).
 |
| Shame so many got cut from the roster. Hopefully we see more soon. |
What we have here is what I think will be the ground work for what will be a much better future version of this game. I am a huge fan of Arc System fighting games, and Guilty Gear is naturally their crown jewel. When the XBone announced they were getting Killer Instinct I got very jealous. Guilty Gear Xrd has completely washed that feeling away. It's just a damn good fighter and I've you never played it I strongly suggest you give it a try. I've already seen flash sales knock this game down to 20$ so there is no reason not to.
Honestly, it stuns me that this series isn't more popular. I've heard it referred to as the game StreetFighter players wish Streetfighter would be. I'm hard pressed to disagree with that.
Seriously, You have Dizzy in the story. Put her in the game.
And if Bridget is coming back, remove the gender sway.
That'll piss fans off.
