Guilty Gear Is Striving for Greatness
It’s been a short while since we’ve seen anything new of Guilty Gear -Strive- from Arc System Works. Info about returning legacy characters and new gameplay features came frequently in the months following the reveal at Evo 2019, but, let’s be honest, it was too much to ask for them to continue revealing content every few weeks. The team is in the process of adjusting the gameplay and presentation features in response to player impressions from prior tournaments and exhibitions, enough that it could have caused a small-enough delay in its development. This would slow down the pace of information. It’s not as if the game went MIA, so there’s nothing to complain about here.
Two new trailers with new character reveals were set to debut at Final Round and Brussels Challenge within a two-day period. Unfortunately, the world is currently in crisis thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic that can easily be spread through groups of people, so both tournaments were cancelled. In response, Arc System Works combined them and uploaded the video to their YouTube account at a good time for most territories around the world. It’s a shame the tournaments couldn’t proceed as planned, but it was nice that Arc System Works could upload the video straight to YouTube instead of waiting for tournament matches that would inevitably run late to finish.
The two characters revealed in the newest trailer are familiar to anyone who’s followed the Guilty Gear series for years: Millia Rage and Zato-1. They’ve been part of the series since the first installment — though this is a bit more complicated in Zato-1’s case.
Millia’s design is closer to her redesigned appearance in the Xrd titles, but not quite similar. She keeps the pillbox hat and black leggings, but is now wearing a medium-length beige trench coat instead of a simple yellow blouse and trades the ballet shoes for boots. She’ll keep many of the same moves, though some will work differently thanks to this game’s new systems. The developers are still in the process of making gameplay adjustments, so I won’t even try to guess what changes have been made to her move set. The trailer is also nowhere near long enough to get a feel for how differently she’ll play.
Zato-1’s design is largely similar to all his previous appearances, though the added detail on his character model and his shadows are immediately noticeable thanks to the new Unreal Engine 4-powered graphics system. To clarify what I alluded to above: He became Zato-1 again instead of Eddie, the “Forbidden Beast” who took over Zato-1’s corpse, in the Xrd games. It was a funny and peculiar occurrence considering Zato-1 was originally phased out after his Japanese voice actor, Kaneto Shiozawa, passed, which provided a plotline reason for why Takehito Koyasu took over with Eddie. They’ve clearly paid their respects long enough.
With this being the result of combining two trailers, the most surprising thing here is how short this video is. The previous trailers focused on individual characters for nearly a minute, best showcased in the Chipp and Potemkin trailer, so it’s a shame they weren’t willing to further show off these new and detailed character models this time around. It’s possible development reasons are to blame, like unfinished character animations they didn’t want to show. Arc System Works’ animators are the perfectionist type, the reason why they went above and beyond to make the Xrd games and this title sights to behold in motion. They’d sooner die before showing anything that could be interpreted as a blemish.
In other news: A closed beta test for the game will run between April 16th and the 19th on PS4 (the only system it’s currently announced for). Seven characters will be featured: Sol Badguy, Ky Kiske, May, Axl-Low, Chipp Zanuff, Potemkin, and Faust. That Millia and Zato-1 won’t playable here is further proof that they aren’t yet in a fully showable state. The heavily criticized in-game UI has been redesigned, though the developers always claimed it was never final, along with an updated character select screen. This being a closed beta means that not everyone who signs up will get in, and there will be plenty of competition to enter given that so many fans initially flooded the site that their servers couldn’t bear the load.
The closed beta was announced with another highly-requested feature: Rollback netplay, a reveal worthy of a mic drop. Fighting game developers absolutely should use rollback netplay when they can, since it allows for stronger online connections between players compared to what delay-based netplay offers. But the tone of previous comments from Guilty Gear series creator, director, artist, and composer Daisuke Ishiwatari implied that the team wasn’t seriously considering it. They were taking fans seriously the whole time after all. The closed beta will still feature the delay-based netplay, but rollback will be implemented for the final game.
The newest trailer provided no indication of when the next preview will come, and chances are nothing new will arrive before the closed beta in April. Notably, every character formally introduced for this installment thus far has been part of every game in the franchise, but they’ll have to break this pattern eventually. They’ll get around to confirming the identity of the mysterious guy with dreads from the first trailer sometime in the future, I’m sure. Seeing GG characters who didn’t appear in the Xrd titles wouldn’t hurt either.
About The Author
Geoff
News Editor | Geoff is some nerd who writes for a blog and thinks he's knowledgeable. He write a lot about video games, but is capable of writing about other subjects, too. Twitter
