Guilty Gear Strive, a fighting game with style, substance and afros!?
I’m not quite a noob when it comes to fighting games and the genre as a whole. But after my first night with Guilty Gear Strive game, I may as well have been. I’ve always been a Tekken guy. I’m awful at it, but I’ve grown up playing it with family and always loved my time with its entries. So when Guilty Gear Strive came up due to its 2.0 update, I thought maybe it’s time for something different. And I’m glad I did! That’s not to say there hasn’t been disappointment, but more on that later. I want to also thank Arc Sys for the code allowing me to check out Strive’s 2.0 update.
Substance Without Guilt.
Guilty Gear Strive is a 2.5D fighting game with flashy attacks, anime-style graphics and a killer soundtrack. Best of all, though, it has an absolutely stacked roster of characters.
Guilty Gear Strive is set shortly after the events of Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2. Sadly, I have not played it as of yet. After Guilty Gear Strive though, I plan to play my way through as much of the series as I can. Guilty Gear Strive has its own past events segment with GG World. For someone new to the series this is perfect. Personally, though, I want to learn more about the world of Guilty Gear through the games instead.
I’ve only watched a portion of Strive’s story, as sadly it’s just a cinematic with no input from the player. It’s not the first in the series to do that, though, which has me worried for my future series play-through. Like most other fighting games though, I just wanted to start swinging giant weapons and hands at other people. So straight to Arcade mode I went, and for the majority of my time, I stayed.
Not So Mortal Combat.
Guilty Gear Strive 2.0 isn’t just an update but rather a complete mechanical overhaul. Nerfs and buffs have been given to various characters. The Wild Assault mechanic from Season 3 has been removed and replaced with a new Counter Blitz mechanic. The latter, I’m sure, after my time with the game, could be incredibly powerful in far more competent hands than mine. Being new to Guilty Gear Strive after its 2.0 update is a double-edged sword, though.
The roster has so many fantastic characters to choose from, ranging from “normal” like Sol Badguy, Ky Kiske and Giovanna, to “strange” like Faust and Bedman. In turn, it makes the decision of who to play/main that much harder. Luckily though, the devs at Arcsys thought ahead and have given each character a difficulty level based on their ease of use. With absolutely none of that in mind, though, I went for the rule of cool and chose Baiken. What followed for the first few hours could only be described as pain. I’ll be damned if I said I didn’t look great doing it, though.
Tekken Advantage.
My first night with Guilty Gear Strive was spent getting absolutely destroyed. The likes of Faust and eventually Nagoriyuki in my first arcade mode run were massive roadblocks. After that, I decided to learn some more of the mechanics of the game by doing missions. Missions in Guilty Gear Strive act as a sort of tutorial for the different mechanics. These range from the basics like blocking attacks to the more difficult, like counter-punishing your opponent’s invincible moves and mid combo cancels. After working through as many of them as my skills allowed, I felt disappointed that it’s not a more common practice in fighting games as a whole, or at least from what I’ve played personally.
Online Injustice.
After trying my hand at the “offline” game-play between the arcade and missions, I finally decided to give the online a try. This is where my disappointment in the game really comes from. While the online is far from dead, I did have a lot of difficulty finding matches with people on my own “skill level”. I was either unlucky enough to have people who had been clearly playing for a long time before the 2.0 update, or I was getting people who were far less experienced with fighting games as a whole than I was.
Now, none of that’s to say I disliked the online in Guilty Gear Strive. Far from it, in fact, as I still enjoyed my time when I got people with whom I could have a good back-and-forth match. This is where Guilty Gear Strives Ranked mode truly shone. I sadly haven’t put much time into ranked mode as I would like, as I overlooked it during the majority of my playtime. I typically don’t care much for ranked modes in online games. Knowing what I know now, though, there are a lot of ranked matches in my future with Guilty Gear Strive.
Getting into Gear
Overall, as a newbie to Guilty Gear Strive, it’s definitely gotten its claws into me, and I’ll definitely be putting more time into this in the coming year. It’s also given me the itch to hunt down older games in the series and give them a proper look. After years of just brushing it off as an “anime-style” fighting game, it’s time for a change. Guilty Gear Strive is a perfect entry point for casuals and grizzled vets of fighting games alike. I can’t wait to see where they take not just Strive but the Guilty Gear series as a whole next. Thank you again to Arc Sys for the code, and who knows, maybe I’ll run into one of you in a match online someday!
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