Guilty Gear Strive is quite wonderful. It has gripped me ever since online play was enabled earlier this week. It is finely balanced – each of the 15 characters offering a unique look, attitude and playstyle. And unlike previous Guilty Gear games, which have proven too complex for so many, Strive will show you the door that leads to its brilliance.
Guilty Gear StrivePublisher: Bandai NamcoDeveloper: Arc System WorksPlatform: Played on PS5Availability: Out now on PS4 and PS5, 11th June 2021 on PC
And what brilliance! Guilty Gear Strive has trimmed the fat from the series to reveal a bristling core, a responsive, stylish and vibrant fighting game that’s an immediate blast to play, but enticingly creative. Some of the complexity of previous versions has been shunted away, yes, but Strive remains deep.
Arc System Works has done a fantastic job of walking this tightrope. How do you keep veteran Guilty Gear fans on-side while also appealing to newcomers? The designers at the Japanese studio came up with a number of answers. Strive feels slightly slower and, as a result, more manageable, although much of the pace of proceedings comes from the sheer heft of the game. Strive packs a punch. It feels present, there on the screen, impactful with every slash. In this game a counter hit – that most common of fighting game mechanics – rocks the screen, slowing down time ever so slightly, the announcer declaring “counter!”. Even the word “COUNTER” pops in front of your eyes, in case you somehow missed it. You counter a lot in Strive – in most fighting games, really. But here, you really feel it.
Strive is less combo heavy than previous Guilty Gears, but flashy combos are still possible. Most of the characters are governed by universal mechanics, such as the Dust overhead, the Dust launcher, and the Dust sweep. There is a modest number of special moves and command normals to learn per character, and they all follow established fighting game input commands (quarter circle motions, hold back then forward, that sort of thing). Guilty Gear’s universal Gatling combo system has been changed to focus on stronger attacks – slash and heavy slash – rather than chaining attacks all the way from weakest to Dust. It’s another example of Arc System Works trimming the fat. Before, generally you’d need to nail a long combo to do lots of damage. Strive requires shorter combos to do significant damage. A slash into a heavy slash followed by an Overdrive attack is all you need to clear a huge chunk from your opponent’s health bar. As a result, Strive feels more at home in the neutral space – that is to say with both characters at the kind of distance where neither is at an advantage. Both are standing, no-one is in the corner, and no one player is pressuring the other.