Guilty Gear Xrd -SIGN-

It’s been a little over 6 years since the last release of a Guilty Gear game that wasn’t an update patch to a pre-existing game, and well over a decade if you only count the arcade fighters. Guilty Gear Xrd brings the series into 3D and HD on the PlayStation 3 and 4 with a few old characters as well as some new faces. With its unique blend of rock and heavy metal inspired characters and its charming anime aesthetic, Xrd proves to be one of the best competitive fighting games out there.

A common trend amongst most new fighters released as of recent is to create a low skill floor with a high skill ceiling. Be it Persona 4 Arena’s auto-combo, BlazBlue’s beginner mode, or Street Fighter 4’s revenge meter, most fighters released nowadays tend to have a mechanic that makes them appealing to be able to pick up and play to those not familiar with the genre. Guilty Gear Xrd has none of that.

At its core, playing Guilty Gear means getting good at Guilty Gear. Despite this, the game offers a very extensive tutorial that goes into not only the absolute basics of how to play a fighter but as well as exercises for more intermediate skills like learning how to hit confirm, predicting block strings, and zoning. Each lesson has you do said fundamental roughly seven to eight times to makes sure you understand the concept. I really like this type of tutorial, as much of what you learn from it pertains not only to Guilty Gear, but any other fighting game as well. This is a pretty untapped thing, and it’s part of what sets Guilty Gear Xrd apart from other fighters released in the last few months as well.

Guilty Gear is a game with a sizable amount of depth and options, the one that stands out the most being the Roman Cancel system. A Roman Cancel, or RC for short, is when a player exchanges part of their character’s tension meter to cancel a move and return to a neutral state. This means a player can use an unsafe move that might have a good pay off if it hits and reset themselves if it fails. They could also use an RC mid-combo to extend that combo and increase their damage output. How does a player build tension meter? By being offensive and staying aggressive. Meter builds pretty quickly as a resource so learning to make the most use of Roman Canceling and all its variations is an integral part of moving from the bottom of the skill floor in Guilty. Xrd is a game with a lot of technical aspects to it, but it ultimately feels rewarding to pull off a combo or land a super, and this has a lot to do with the visual style of the game.

The aesthetics for Xrd are amazing. By combining 3D models with an anime-cel art style, the characters in Guilty Gear retain the look and quality of the high-detail sprites they had in earlier games. The attention to detail is insane, as each model is given a myriad of reactions and effects depending on things like attacks they’re hit by or characters they are facing. In particular I love that Ky’s hairband can come undone if he’s knocked down after meeting certain in-match requirements. Character have plenty of special lines of speech for different opponents which really fleshes them out as more than just models in an arena, and makes them easy to get attached to.

The music in Guilty Gear has always been good and enjoyable rock, and Xrd is no exception. Each character has their own individual theme to listen to while fighting, and some character have rival themes as well. Characters that are Guilty veterans also have their old themes in the game too, and can be unlocked from the game’s gallery along with special character art and voice tests. Overall, Guilty’s presentation is amazing and focuses on a myriad of tiny details that make the characters that much more enjoyable to play with.

Xrd is the first Guilty Gear game to receive an English voice dub, and it’s actually pretty good. Plenty of the casted voices fit their roles well. The gentle idealist Ky is calm and outgoing while more violent and reserved Sol is gruff and irritable. While the game offers voice tracks in both English and Japanese I found myself only swapping over to the Japanese voices once to simply hear what they sounded like. I think both tracks are great, but have a preference for hearing things in my native language.

Xrd takes a very interesting approach in presenting its story. Not to be confused with Arcade mode, which involves playing through a set of stages with some exposition in between, Story mode tells the events in the Guilty Gear universe that happens AFTER the events of Arcade mode. The game does so in a way similar to a movie, in that there are no fights or any input needed by the player to advance the plot. Guilty Gear’s story can be summed up as an eight hour long anime episode. It’s a little disheartening honestly, plenty of times the story does show scenes that could lead into fights, but these short matches quickly end, and are unsatisfying to view.

Guilty Gear Xrd’s story also suffers from the fact that it is the fourth main game in a series. It’s imperative to have knowledge of the prior games to even get a hint at what is going on. While the story does provide some explanations of special terms in the form of a dictionary, if you haven’t played Guilty Gear 2 Overture or the X line of games it’s going to get confusing fast. And if you are familiar with the Guilty Gear universe, it’s probably going to get frustrating when you start to see characters from past games pop up that aren’t playable. Xrd’s story is confusing, and relies on the player being familiar with games that are well over ten years old to sometimes follow what is going on.

The story is nothing but straight dialogue, which after a while becomes boring and dull. The entire thing is animated though, sort of. Every line is fully voiced and characters move their mouths in tandem with their lines, but everything feels stiff. There are a few memorable scenes near the end where the animators start to use dynamic camera angles and other cinema techniques to spice up the narrative that I wish that would have also been present for the first six or so hours of story. Even a pause in dialogue to describe scene or movement would have been nice, just something to make it feel like the characters were not spending most of their time standing around like statues.

Guilty Gear’s greatest weakness though is its online play. While matches run pretty smooth, assuming you can get paired with someone with a decent connection, actually getting into matches is a complete hassle and takes way longer than it should. For both ranked and player matches you have to choose what character you are going to play before stepping foot in a room. This is to circumvent character select, which works for ranked since most people will probably want to stick with their best character, but for player matches it’s annoying if you like to play multiple characters.

The way player matches work is that a host creates a room that can have up to 4 simultaneous matches going at any given point, I guess to keep everyone happy and playing. Sometimes a single match can get a rotation of players going though, where more than one person can line up to play against other people with the winner staying in and the loser going to the back of the line of players. So how does this affect character select? Well you can’t change your character if you are up to play, so the only down time you have to do so is by leaving the rotation and changing then getting back in. This removes you from your place in the rotation though, and it’s even more of a hassle because sometimes you don’t have the chance to leave the rotation if the two players queued up instantly hit accept to start their match.

Both Persona 4 Arena Ultimax and BlazBlue Chrono Phantasma had similar lobby style player rooms, but unlike Guilty Gear you weren’t locked into a character before your match started. While this seems like a small nitpick compared to the stability of a netcode, having to constantly back out of rooms and rotations just to use a different character is frustrating, and it makes online play feel unintuitive.

In conclusion, Guilty Gear Xrd is a fun fighting game, one filled with enjoyable music, attention grabbing visuals, and a learning curve a little bit steeper than other fighters. It’s held back by its odd separation of game and story as well as messy online protocol. Despite these few negatives though I can honestly recommend the game to anyone with a history or passing interest in it, as it is the same over-the-top and fast paced action showcased in previous Guilty titles as well.