Guilty Gear: Strive

Love the characters, art and music. Hate the gameplay with a passion compared to older games. I wish they just added Brisket and Anji to Xrd and cleaned up some of the messy mechanics in that game rather starting anew with a different system and a whole new slew of gameplay problems. The fast paced gameplay of +R is now nothing more than a past vision for the franchise that has since been forgotten, and everything feels kind of jank. May becoming more rushdown with her dolphin attacks still being charge motions? Hell yeah, let me breathe some cyanide too. The worse part is she's actually better in this game than in past iterations I've played yet I still don't like. I used to play her as a rushdown for memes in Xrd, now that's her key strategy. Xrd had its problems but at least it wasn't too fundamentally different from +R and if you stripped some of the bullshit, it would be perfectly functional. There are mods that do just that now. I feel like ArcSys knows they are the current top dog of fighting games after Capcom's various fuck ups, wanted to one up capcom with a slow game of their own, slapped the GG ip with it, and the fans ate it up. Anyone who dared criticized the ArcSys gods now gets a lengthy twitlonger on them by the rabid fans who feel not liking this game is a personal insult done only by scrubs who can't do a quarter circle or vicious transphobes who can't handle the news about Brisket. Well I'm proud to say I am not one of those two. I am not going to make a political movement about how Brisket being a girl is "destroying the sacred nature of the femboy mind, forcefully injecting estrogen into their feeble decision making skills". I actually am a Brisket enjoyer, she's one of the few things I like about the game. However, I will make a political movement about how wall splats are the most infuriating and confusing things to pull off and how every character feels cemeted into the earth by forceful gravitation, moving at a slugs pace and feeling more methodical than chaotic. I want an anime fighter not street fighter. Brings casuals into the game and makes the game more accessible? Sure, but man is it a chore to play even when you are winning. If I wanted a weird street fighter with anime fighting game elements, I'd play Under-Night. It perfected that formula years ago when Gordoodoo got nerfed. French Bread knows their stuff, they should really update that game or have them develop a new Melty Blood instead of having Type Moon make Fate/Type Lumina. Oh wait. We're in the anime fighter dark ages.
Add Slayer and ABA please.

The decision to make every track in this game vocal is the most drunken thing Ishiwatari has ever done.

Also this game's system is so fucked compared to Xrd and the older entries. It's odd to me that people can dog on SFV and still slurp this game up, considering this game was strongly inspired by SFV.

this is a game that i want to put more time into but i dont really care for it. good game though

I'd place it with Skullgirls as the best two fighting games I've played, out of... admittedly few.
I paid about 60$ for the deluxe edition, and I got a goddamn amazing soundtrack, hot everyone, absolutely beautiful visuals, and a very fun game on top.

It is abundantly clear now that Capcom and SNK are now behind the curve...

The only *thing* missing from Strive is an in-depth story mode like GranBlue has (or past Guilty Gear console releases had). Though, to be honest, if you're not grinding out matches with your friends in person... or using the online matchmaking, you're not actually playing the game whatsoever.

Top 11 Reasons This Is a Great Fighting Game for Beginners Who Want to Play Semi-Seriously:

1. The netcode. This is huge. As long as you have a wired connection, you're bound to be playing a match that practically feels like you're playing offline. I've been playing Smash Ultimate online for over a year now, and it's really hard to go back again after playing Strive's online. You can go online and actually learn the game and try things out without lag ever making you question whether you dropped the input or it got eaten. (Generally, anyway: there are some people who clearly are on wireless or connected from the wrong region, but those stuttery matches are few and far between.

2. The matchmaking. Connecting to the serves and actually starting matches is awkward and difficult at times, but the general structure is still really good. I like the 'floor' system where you're matched with people in your general skill level but don't have to worry about a constantly fluctuating ranking. (And your character-specific 'level' only ever goes up, never down.) It feels like a safe space to play the game in an environment where you're most likely to have fun while still offering chances for improvement.

3. The visuals. A lot of fighting games - a lot - didn't have a smooth transition to 3D (and especially not to HD) and even now many fighting games' effects and textures look very underwhelming. (Even Street Fighter pales pretty badly when you see the same characters rendered so much vividly in Smash.) But the anime style here is rendered vibrantly with a lot of detail; moves are flashy, backgrounds have a lot of neat details. And of course, most lovingly rendered are:

4. The characters. Each character is visually distinct in an interesting way, with some really great wardrobes (May's sweater! Leo's coat! Gio's pants!) Each character plays very differently from each other, too; even though the game categorizes each character by their archetype, characters even from the same archetype still feel pretty different. I-No's flying dash and projectiles make her extremely different from the speedy frame data of Giovanna, and Ky's ranged sword is very different from Sol's aggro damage output. (And obviously May's dolphin spam is totally different. Totsugeki!) It's easy to experiment and see who you want; there's only 15 characters at launch (a good number!), and the way things are it just seems like every player will have that one character that just clicks.

5. The inputs. I tried getting into Street Fighter V when it came out - and I revisited it before this game's release - but the biggest hurdle that I could never get past was that the inputs felt hard to me. The timing for combos felt pretty strict and a lot of moves required somewhat complex inputs. The game's especially awkward on a regular controller - with six attack buttons, you need to use the triggers during your combos, and inputs like full circles felt very unwieldy. Strive's inputs are generally pretty simple outside of a few command grabs, and with a few macros at your disposal for some of the more complicated commands, the game feels very simple to grasp. It's a great game to play on a standard PlayStation controller. Plus, there's built-in mechanics to make landing combos easier, like the 'counter' system where you can get a slow-mo effect that gives you more time to follow up if you interrupt your opponent's attack.

6. The music. Daisuke Ishiwatari's love of metal is a staple of Guilty Gear, composing metal music for the game and littering the games with all kinds of references to metal bands and songs. (I'm amused that there are literally characters named Slayer and Testament, and a character that looks like Axl Rose literally called Axl Low.) His soundtracks for previous games are good from what I've heard, but they don't come close to these songs, which are catchy and diverse and generally really interesting. Many songs jump between multiple metal subgenres in one track - chiefly power metal but also industrial, thrash, death, alt, and glam, to say nothing of non-metal stuff - which works great for the gameplay (always something new through an entire game) but is also crafted with an obvious love of metal. Too many composers use metal aesthetics as a cheap shorthand for 'epic', but Daisuke clearly understands what actually makes metal great - including its goofiness - and this game's songs are among the best metal music I've ever heard. Highlights are May's, Millia's, Ramlethal's, and Potemkin's themes. (Faust's gets the award for most batshit crazy.)

7. The movement. Apparently movement has been toned down from previous releases in an effort to not make things too crazy for newcomers, but I think many would actually welcome more movement. Part of the casual appeal of Smash is that the controls are intuitive and the characters generally does what you want them to, including movement, which is not something you can always say for fighting games. And even with nerfed movement, this game still has a lot of creative options for that - double jumps, air dashes, command dashes - and because you can also block in the air, nothing feels too committal and it feels like you're kind of allowed to do what you want. (Probably why Gio is such a popular low-level character, since she fuckin' zooms.)

8. Wall breaks. Gone are the days when you get stuck in the corner for a thousand years, since you get knocked into a whole new area when you get beat too hard and neutral gets reset for a bit. But the person winning still gets a lot off of it - extra damage, some frame advantage, a big meter boost - so it's not a punishment for winning too hard. Genius.

9. Roman cancels. At first, this mechanic makes no fuckin' sense, but once you understand it, it's actually a super deep option that's great in different ways for pros and beginners. There's four types: one hits your opponent midcombo so you can keep going even after a finisher, one cancels the animation of a whiffed attack, one knocks the opponent away while you're blocking, and another slows the opponent down. All are very useful - makes meter management very important - but it's the first, the red roman cancel, that I really like. For those who love grinding out combos, this is just another way to really extend that creativity; for those who don't this means that you can still get halfways decent combos (at lower levels, anyway) without having to bend over backwards. (Small combos do a lot of damage in this game, too, so you can get away with simple stuff.)

10. Burst. A similarly deep mechanic that's great for beginners. Getting your ass beat through a crazy combo? Well, you get 1-3 'get out of jail free' cards, blasting your opponent away in the middle of their combo. It's a great way to lessen the pressure for beginners, but at higher levels of gameplay, managing when to use your burst for the right moment gets really interesting. Sometimes you want to save it for your opponent's craziest combo, sometimes you want to use it when they've just won neutral, sometimes you want to use it when they're breaking free from your pressure. Really simple mechanic that goes a long way.

11. It's popular! Means there's lots of people to play, lots of resources to learn, lots of tournaments to watch. It's been very gratifying to see so many Smash players who don't normally touch other fighting games (myself included!) pick this up, and the game's sales have been quite high. I genuinely think and hope that this could lead to a bigger Smash/FGC crossover than ever before, leading into other games (especially now that Terry and Kazuya are in Smash Ultimate). Let's just hope the game stays good through the patches and DLC characters; ArcSys patches are infamous for being kinda random, so we'll see. (And I have seen some genuine concerns over Sol being a little too broken.) But hey, patches and a changing meta are part of what makes competitive games exciting.

Top 1 Bad Reasons To Play This Game:

1. The story. I'm sorry, but Guilty Gear lore is meaninglessly complex and the in-game charts explaining it look like the workings of a conspiracy theorist. I think I get the general thrust of the story, but it's not good enough to inspire me to learn enough to really find out. You can't even play the story mode - it's like a poorly animated anime. I know making good single player content for a fighting game is hard, but come on, you can do a little better than this.