Recent reviews by Meophist

Guilty Gear has always been a complex and probably rather daunting fighting game, but it's a game that can be learned in parts and pieces. You can play well with only using a fraction of the available mechanics and moves.

To start, Guilty Gear Xrd -REVELATOR- is primarily a 1-on-1 versus fighting game and is roughly the seventh game in the series storywise(GG→X→XX→Accent Core→Overture→SIGN→REVELATOR). Although the other games aren't necessary to enjoy the story, SIGN at least is recommended. That said, if you want to ignore the story altogether, that's fine too. It's pretty optional.

In terms of play, Guilty Gear is a high mobility fighter, allowing a wide variety of movements even in the air. Although some characters are more limited, this allows quite a bit of freedom in movement once you get used to it. Many characters have their own special forms of movement, such as teleports or limited flight.

Although there's a large number of moves and mechanics, even for a fighting game, it's possible to do well using only a small number of them. Many you can avoid using until you're more used to the basics. The high number of moves and mechanics can allow for a great amount of diversity in play, two players can use the same character in a completely different manner while still each playing well.

The large amount of freedom in how you can play is the primarily reason why I like this game. The way people play feels very expressive and unique to that player.

Special commands are, in general, relatively simple, although they still require the typical hadouken and shouryuuken style inputs, as well as charge inputs for some characters. One that one will likely need to get used to is their HCB+F or 632146 input, which is common for the supers, although this is as complex as it gets for most characters.

Story bits in this game mostly comprise of the Arcade Mode opening and the endings for each character, as well as the Story Mode. The Story Mode doesn't contain any gameplay and is actually available on Arc System Works' Youtube page so you can just watch it there, although watching it in-game can get you currency which could be used to buy extra colours and such.

The game has a deep learning system consisting of the tutorial(learn basic things that most characters can do), Combo(learn the commands and some combos for each character), and Mission(learn a variety of things for specific situations, from very basic stuff to more advanced stuff). It works well in theory, but I do feel a greater variety of situations to use the things you learn could be useful. There is, of course, a Practice Mode as well.

There's lots of reasons to like the Guilty Gear series, with its anime-styled visuals, rock-inspired sounds, wide variety of characters with strong personalities, and its free-form gameplay. This game is relatively light on its single player content, but I do think the multiplayer is a lot of fun.

Thank you for reading this review.