Let me start by saying that this game is jaw dropping. Every fighting game fan will love Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2 for it's deep mechanics, great art and balanced characters. If you like fighting games, you owe it to yourself to play this game. Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2 has a reputation of having one of the most deep and complex mechanics, but it's only as complex as you want it to be. It depends on how deep you want to go down the rabbit hole...
This is actually the third iteration from Xrd, following the Revelator update. In this new update we have an extended story mode, some new stages and two new characters: Baiken, a voluptuous revenge-driven female samurai from previous Guilty Gear games, and Answer, a business Ninja that is always on the phone and throws business cards like ninja stars. Nice! XD
The story mode is not exactly what we are used to. Instead of being playable, is actually several episodes of an anime series that is the story of Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2 (including previous Xrd iterations) and it's several hours long. So if you like good quality anime, just get ready and enjoy. Relative to the previous Revelator, action remains over the top, there's a new chapter and some characters gained individual episodes. Speaking of characters, there's been a re-balancing of the roster. While some characters got some buffs and/or nerfs, others got entirely new moves. All of this contributes for an extremely balanced game where no character prevails above the other. Just look at the competitive tier lists around the Internet and you'll see that between the character with most wins and the one with the least wins there's practically no difference.
The tutorial mode is actually very fun to play and really useful. Playing this game, you can treat it like your casual fighting game and still have a great time playing it, or you can dive deep into it and learn it's intricate mechanics, and that's when you start to realize it's complexity and that you have to invest a lot of time into it to be able to be proficient and competitive. The more you put in, the better you get and the more you discover.
You can also practice your moves with a very detailed interface on screen that shows you every input you make, including the movement of your directional pad/joystick.
As I wrote before, Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2 is a very technical fighting game. It uses five buttons (punch, kick, slash, hard slash and "dust") and has far more mobility options than many other games of the genre. You can double jump, dash towards or away from your opponent, including in the air, you can block on the ground and in the air, you can use a "tension" gauge to cancel normal attacks, to perform special moves and also an instant kill (you will loose your "tension" bar if you fail though) and the combos are just insane! Plus, every character has it's own approach to a fight so you'll have to really learn how to best use him and extract his whole potential.
I didn't play it online, but the word is that both this mode and the netcode is impressive.
Taken from trustedreviews.com:
Guilty Gear continues to set a high bar for online lobbies in a fighting game, however. Essentially a ‘virtual arcade’, where players walk in with their avatars and sit at a cabinet and wait for an opponent. This allows for a party of players to come together in a central hub. All pair off and play games with each other, in a decent, charming interface.
During the game, the latency is shown in the top right of the screen to the exact frame – meaning you can simulate this in Training Mode and nail your most advanced combos online. It’s very impressive and, crucially, stable and lag-free for the most part.
Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2 is an extremely complete fighting game, very well refined with a lot of modes, a great on-line experience (from what I've read) and it even has an anime series (the story mode). Graphics are awesome and so is the playability. It has a fame of being a hard to learn game. Sure it's mechanics can become quite deep and not easy to master but that's just if you want to go that far, because a few minutes playing/learning the tutorial mode are all it takes to start playing this game and have lot's of fun. But it sure deserves some effort for it's mechanics to be learned and extract it's true potential. It's your call. In my opinion, this is currently one of the best fighting games out there, if not the best. Just give it a go and you'll be hooked. It's a great game!
