Guilty Gear is one of those sagas that every time it releases a new game it never disappoints, it is as if they will always improve and implement mechanics. Always Arc System Works manages to impress us and give us one of the best fighting games in history. His latest installment for Ps4 and Ps5, Strive, recently came out, which with many changes to its formula, manages to impress the community and lovers of modern fighting games, but does it live up to the saga ?.
Guilty Gear and Its Past
In advance I say that Guilty Gear for me is one of the best fighting sagas in the history of video games, it is complex, different and above all fun to learn. Each game gives you an absurd amount of ways to approach it, each one in these games marks his own style if he learns to master it and play with his mechanics.
XX Accent Core was without a doubt one of the most balanced games in the genre. The brutal thing about this saga is also the variety and difference of the characters. Each of them has its own mechanics and a large number of differences, which can be advantageous if you master the character, and this is where one of the details that I like the most comes in, and that is that no character is useless. In fighting games, it is usually very common for some character to be broken or to be exaggeratedly better than the others, and although GG is not the exception to the rule with the occasional character somewhat more powerful than the others, it makes it clear to us that with any character you can fight.
Its Mechanics and Subsequent Games
The mechanics that most characterize these games in my opinion is the Roman Cancel, which serves to do exactly what its name says, cancel the movements in the middle of a combo, and although it may not seem like it, this gives you an infinite number of possibilities when it comes to chaining combos in these games. In general, the Guilty Gear usually have more than one type of cancel, they can be 3 and serve you for different situations even if they are done on the same button. This mechanic has been simplified a bit throughout the saga, since Xrd stopped the time when you canceled and gave you more time to follow your moves. This actually annoyed some fans, but it was still a very complex game.
And speaking of Xrd, although there was some disdain on the part of those who came from XX, in the end it ended up being a game as complex as ever, adding and modifying mechanics from the previous ones in the saga and adapting it to the new generation. Another thing that also characterizes Guilty Gear is its Instakill, as it sounds, a trick that allows you to instantly finish off your opponent with a single move. It sounds like a joke, but it is not that easy, these attacks can only be done once per game, and if you fail, which is very likely because it is a very fast game, you would lose the entire Tension bar (This is the bar with the one that makes the special moves and cancels them), and if they have played a game in this saga they know that this thing is used for everything. Although you can defend yourself without having the tension bar, you are very limited and it is very risky to use an Instakill if you know you have everything against you if you lose the tension bar.
Burst is another important topic here, because even though many games have similar things, they don't give it the same importance. The Burst is basically a move that allows you to move your opponent away from you, and it is a bar that is usually at the top of the screen and recharges during games once you use it. It is not that simple, because there are also tricks to counteract if your opponent uses this, so you have to use it wisely.
The News and Its New Title
With the new Guilty Gear Strive I felt that there was a slowdown, I am talking about the speed of the game, I feel that it is somewhat slower than the others. This is a very particular opinion of mine, but even so the game has many positive points, such as online to give a very clear example.
Another thing is that in Strive the damage is exaggerated, I don't really know why they did this, but it makes the games shorter. Strive is a more neutral game with much shorter combos than its predecessors. Even so, it has its own thing and it is still a very explorable game in its mechanics. I don't think it's as complex as usual in the series, but it makes up for it with a good online connection and the fact that many classic mechanics from the series continue in this new installment, such as cancel, burst and a long etc.
In this game there is no recovery, this was a trick that you used in the previous ones to get rid of the combo that your opponent is doing to you in the air if he fails at some point or if a certain time passes without touching you in the middle of the combo. Here is like in other games like Mortal Kombat, Tekken and others, where the aerial combos are irresistible, but the positive is that as I said the game does not let you do very long combos either, so do not expect them to make you a great combo air before you hit the ground.
Another new function that I forgot is the one of the walls, when you hit your opponent against the other end of the screen, that is to say the walls, you can break them if you do it a couple of times. It is something new in Guilty Gear, I think it is interesting because it is something new for the saga and gives it another air. As long as it's not as over the top as it is in Injustice, that's fine with me.
Conclution
In short, I think that Strive is a good game, it is excellent in many sections, graphics, music, a good number of modes, as it always gives you incredible freedom with your characters, I think much more than in most fighting games. Although it is not half as complex as its predecessors, I think it is a game that suits the saga well, it has a certain fame and all the charisma to attract a new audience, and this is positive for any franchise, especially one like GG that does not have the same visibility that Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat or Tekken have. I look forward to his new characters (Hopefully Johnny and Testament), and see what Arc System has prepared for us with this game in the future.