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Guilty Gear Strive Review

It's no secret that Guilty Gear is a fan favorite in the fighting game community, with its gorgeous artwork and deep combat system

By Jingjing WangPublished 3 years ago 4 min read
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It's no secret that Guilty Gear is a fan favorite in the fighting game community, with its gorgeous artwork and deep combat system. The series got off to a middling start on the PlayStation but quickly improved when given a chance to shine on Sega's Dreamcast console. Fast forward 16 years later, through many sequels and spinoffs across both home consoles (arcade machines are still alive and well in Japan), as well as Japanese mobile phones - none of which have ever officially seen release outside of Japan.

This brings us to Strive , an iOS/Android-exclusive title which has been available worldwide since February 20th, 2014 . It actually started out as Exclusive (エクスクルーシブ Ekusukurūshi ) in Japan, a PlayStation minis title which was later released on the PS Vita.

A port is not an ideal way to start out, but it's certainly better than nothing. Guilty Gear fans have been dying to know what has become of their favorite characters for almost two decades now, and with Strive , we finally get some answers… sort of .

I can't help but suspect that Strive 's story mode - Tales Of Souls (テイルズオブソウルズ Teiruzu obu Souruzu ), as it's known in Japanese - played a part in Arc System Works shifting gears to focus on developing BlazBlue first, before returning to Guilty Gear at a much later date (perhaps even DX 2 will finally release next year, 22 years after the original Guilty Gear !).

This is due to the fact that we've already seen a considerable amount of Tales Of Souls gameplay before this point: Ky Kiske's story was revealed as a bonus feature in Xblaze: Code Embryo , then BlazBlue Chronophantasma Extend came with an even longer version of it in Animus (アニムス Animusu ) - which also served as a prologue to the console versions' stories. The content therein wasn't bad by any means, but certainly felt padded, and very un-Guilty Gear .

Strive has fourteen different character paths - one for each member of the main minus Kliff, who only has a cameo, and one for Jam Kuradoberi as well. Each character takes about 25 minutes to read (not necessarily complete) and are separate from each other - so you can't jump between them mid-reading like in BlazBlue . It doesn't help that Tales Of Souls has the most uninspired writing out of all the storylines I've encountered thus far either.

Tales of Souls is divided into two parts: "Festival Of The Dead" (死者の花祭り Shisha no Hanamatsuri ), which serves as an epilogue to Guilty Gear 2: Overture , and tells us how everyone came back from the dead; and then there's what we originally knew as "Xrd -SIGN-" (pronounced "Cross Tag Battle" for Japan, but it's just sign in the English localization). This section serves as an epilogue to Guilty Gear Xrd -REVELATOR- and starts out looking like it could actually be good, with an impressive intro that even features Ramlethal Valentine.

However, as soon as Baiken enters the picture it quickly turns into the same old mediocre writing we've seen time and again from previous titles: everyone is a one-dimensional character that spouts cheesy dialog at every turn. That includes Sol Badguy, who has always been portrayed as a brooding type with little patience for teenage antics.

In fact, Jam Kuradoberi only shows up at the very end of the "Festival" section, which is a big letdown because she's my favorite member of the entire cast. Then again, perhaps it's for the best that she doesn't show up at all in this game - considering how close she was to Johnny.

(Only half of every single character gets their own story ending)

Considering that each individual character path only lasts about as long as an episode of Dragon Ball Z , I felt like there should have been more focus on getting to know them better - especially since some of these people we haven't seen in years! The developers could have just as easily made Guilty Gear Xrd easier on newcomers by focusing on Jam Kuradoberi and/or Elphelt Valentine instead (who is new to the series) - but instead we got a game that feels like it's written by someone who doesn't care for these characters whatsoever.

Now compare this with BlazBlue: Chronophantasma Extend 's character paths (Tales Of The Abyss), which take about as long, if not longer than Guilty Gear 's (25 minutes each versus 15 minutes each), and offer far more depth in both their dialogue and path progression… Which makes it all the more confusing when I consider how Arc System Works achieved this with Xblaze , while seemingly ignoring all of their own design documents.

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