GUILTY GEAR -STRIVE-

Review

Guilty Gear –Strive- is a brand new addition to the amazing line of 2D anime-like fighters which are setting the bar higher for every other fighter game; Guilty Gear – Strive has an incredible story, fight sequences, visuals, and lore.

After the pre-release Alpha testing and player feedback phase, I must say Guilty Gear-Strive- is shaping up to be one of the best and most polished releases of 2021. The lovely people at Arc System Works took every player's feedback seriously and polished the edges right up until the launch hour.

As a newcomer to the fighter genre, Guilty Gear did a great job of putting me at ease, with its gradual start and fantastic mission-like tutorial experiences.

Since fighters were not my poison, I thought I was going to struggle a bit to understand how the fights would go down and how each character would react. But I must say the tutorials and the missions were of great help; I was able to become familiarized with the franchise and all the characters that are involved. Getting to know each character and their strengths and weaknesses before getting into public matches can be a winning boost which I took full advantage of. Player psychology plays an important role; people that I encountered in the wild either went for defense attacks, attacked me only when I came at them, or attacked relentlessly, which surprisingly went in my favor. Here’s an open secret that most seem to ignore - blocking your opponent's attack is pretty important and can prove devastating if countered correctly.

Game mode: Guilty Gear-Strive- puts out a great assortment here with enough to please everyone, even for people like me who are new to the genre.

The game modes can be divided into two main categories: Single-player (which offers all the offline action including missions, Dojo, and fights verse AI), and Online Open Public Lobbies and 1v1’s Verses Friends (which I’m going to be playing for hours as soon as my friends get the Guilty Gear fever).

Online 1v1s were surprisingly smooth; I literally felt like I was playing on LAN with a buddy. The game also features a neat interface that lets you choose in which part of the world are you looking to get acquainted with.

The game modes are pretty streamlined and bring all the bells and whistles that make for a great 2D fighter, from its charming arena designs to its metal and rock vocals that fit perfectly with the intensity of each fight.

Fight sequences: Oh man, the fight sequences are awesome and breathtaking right from the get-go, especially in publish 1v1’s. After choosing the game mode you will be greeted with the character selection screen that lets you choose between 15 classic characters.

As I am new to this, I switched out every key bind with something relatable to me, which helped a lot. The game did a great job with the implementation of all of its moves, from punches to heavy attacks; each is fluid and well animated and performs as expected.

It doesn’t really matter which character you fight against, if you’re aware of each move and of your opponent's reach you have a great chance of going toe to toe with anyone using any character. I love a game where everything is balanced and no single character and its abilities are too op to handle.

Every move, every key combo is well thought out and mapped. Also a there’s a nit command list that shows commands for each character with gifs showing how each of these commands works for each character and their impact in the arena.

Story mode: The Story mode is basically a fully animated series played out in short episodic order without the gameplay, which seemed really odd to me at first, but I fell in love with it.

These short episodes are well-produced, voiced, and visualized, although some dialogue choices seemed a bit immersion-breaking to me, but I guess I should’ve watched it in Japanese for a better experience.

This short series is basically a standalone anime, which you can enjoy with a bucket of popcorn. Literally has everything that makes Japanese amines so good from drama to action to conflict.

World design: The game features some stunning areas and arenas, a proper nod to its anime origins.

Each scenario is unique in every way from environmental changes to structural changes. I would’ve appreciated a slightly larger arena space-wise, but it is what it is and it’s just fine.

Music and sound effects: Music selection is topnotch; I don’t remember the last time I experienced this much immersive blend of metal and rock in a game of this caliber.

The same goes for the sound effects, just topnotch and totally polished. From hits to minor grunts, I can’t find anything to complain about.

Voice acting: I appreciate a game that spends quality time and manpower on its voice-overs and scripting. Although as mentioned earlier, I found few lines and dialogue choices a bit immersion-breaking, but that could be just tied to translation.

None the less the game features fully-voiced English and Japanese settings; just a phenomenal job in both. The animation tied perfectly with both languages.

Review written by BiteMexD for Zeepond.com!