Want to give me a story recap? Why the low FPS intro's?

I've never played a Guilty Gear game before, and I know that the story in most fighting games isn't that important, but I'm still interested in being a bit more informed before jumping in too heavily. Story is kind of a good way to push me from one character to another when I'm trying to decide who I want to main. I did a bit of research online and got a vague sense of what's going on, but I could be wrong. Tell me if I'm mistaken on some point, or am missing something significant.

• Gears were created to be the next evolution of humans, but for some reason most are crazy and revert to base instinct and want to go and kill humans.
• Someone named "That Man" helped create the Gears and his first prototype was someone called Frederick, who ends up being Sol Badguy.
• Another Gear that was created was named Justice, but she was special in that she could control other Gears.
• Justice starts a war and ends up killing a bunch of people.
• Ky Kiske is appointed the leader of some order of strong fighters whose goal is to combat the Gears. Ky joins up with Sol and they end up killing Justice.
• Another Gear named Testament later tries to revive Justice.

And that's about as much as I think I understand. I'm not sure which of the characters aside from Sol and Ky are significant and why or the exact timeline events. Any help would be appreciated, and any information on the characters that are present in Xrd would be cool.

Aside from that, two questions: 1) Is there a way to turn off that stupid flashing logo that appears whenever you're playing a single player mode? The thing on top of the screen that says something like "Arcade Mode" or "Versus Mode" and continuously blinks. 2) Why are the intro's so choppy? It's so jarring going from in game smooth 60FPS to whatever the frame rate of the intro and outro's are.

Xrd itself has a complete story recap that you can read with character backgrounds, chronological events and everything. It also has a very extensive glossary for anyone wanting to know more about specific concepts, locations or characters in the game.

The continuous blinking is only in Arcade mode, and one cannot turn that off.

The intros look like that intentionally, to provide a more authentic anime look. You can read about everything that went into creating Guilty Gear Xrd's look from a translated developer article here.

If you have a physical copy, the manual has a pretty decent run down on the events of each game in the series.

Story mode also pretty much covers the history of the world as well as the origin of the Gears, but you've got to stick with it before it really starts to make sense.

If you are on PS3, switch it to Performance Mode to keep the framerate stable during the flashy cutscene bits. That is, if that's what you were talking about. Otherwise the choppy look is there to emulate 2D animation.

I'm sure the recap in the game itself is quite thorough, but I don't think I have the time to read through potentially hours of back story. I kind of just wanted a real quick summary of the key players and events. Also the choppiness is stupid, and definitely doesn't add to an "authentic anime look" in my opinion. I wish they gave players the choice to turn on or off the filter or whatever it is.

I highly doubt that it's any sort of filter, it's just the way the animations are keyframed, like all the other animations in the game, so there's not really anyway to have an option to turn it off.

I think it looks amazing though.

It took me less than an hour. I was unfamiliar with everything regarding Guilty Gear before I read the chronological events in the game, but I felt it did a great job of condensing everything important that happened in the series so that I could understand what was going on in Xrd's story.