One of the main problems that the Guilty Gear series had was its esoteric combat systems riddled with bars and gauges, and Revelator goes to great lengths to remedy that. Mastery of the systems however allows players to experience one of the most exhilarating experiences in the genre. For a game whose characters and story feel so erratic and spontaneous, Guilty Gear’s fighting system requires a particular amount of finesse. In addition to a health bar, players have a tension bar which builds upon attacking and moving towards your opponent, allowing more aggressive players to have more options. In addition to a bunch of crazy character-specific special moves, each fighter also has access to three extra moves: the Roman Cancel, which stops your attack animation and momentarily slows time to allow for extra long combos, the Psycho Burst which is a combo interrupting back-off technique and a Faultless Defence, which allows you to block supers without even taking chip damage.
Every character has a natural combo of punch -> kick -> slash -> hard slash, though the ranges on each attack varies wildly. Characters have a punch, a kick, a slash and a hard slash, with an additional Dust attack that deals heavy damage but has a long windup. Mechanically, the systems resemble a much faster version of the SNK 4 button fighters like Samurai Shodown. And after all of that, the game still never takes itself seriously. Anchors, pool cues, yo-yo’s and 2 metre long surgical scalpels become devastatingly effective weapons. Heavy metal sets the scene on every vibrant stage. Guilty Gear is a series which plays it fast and hard, with an unabashed punk mentality, a crazy cast of unique characters and gameplay geared towards rewarding reflexes and aggression. While Capcom and SNK duelled it out in the 90’s for supremacy of the arcades, a humble guitarist-programmer named Daisuke Ishiwatari worked with Arc System Works to create a game which largely eschewed all the tropes the genre was headed towards. Guilty Gear is by far the most odd contender in the market for competitive fighting games.
Related reading: Matt’s review of the most recent BlazBlue release, Arc System Work’s other premier fighting game franchise. I’m sure people will complain about having to rebuy the updated version of the game, but let’s not think about that for a moment, and instead take the time to celebrate just how awesome this game series is. So naturally, Revelator comes along and fixes all that, adding additional characters, even more graphical flair and a few extra game modes to toy around with. The main complaints were that -SIGN- felt a bit barren and bare-bones for a fighter.
This was a game which looked awesome and felt great to play, the 3D polygons perfectly modernising the 2D of the previous entries. When the first entry of Xrd, -SIGN-, came out, it was met with divided reception from fans. After years of updates for Guilty Gear XX, this would be Arc System Work’s next generation for their flagship fighter. I had my qualms about Guilty Gear Xrd when it was first announced.