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Review: Guilty Gear (alternate) |
Guilty Gear is one of those rare games that has made me angry. Not just “tsk, should have blocked that” or “grr, no fair” angry, but really furious. Furious in that special way where I start blaming the people who coded, designed and sold the game for my failures. Furious in that way where I plan how I’m going to destroy the CD, or return it to the shop, and maybe boycott the company who made it because they’re obviously clueless about making games.
Fuck, last night, after spending 45 minutes trying to beat the last boss with one character and eventually giving up, I was so mad my hands were shaking and I had trouble typing. (Of course, if could be the agony of using a PSX pad for any length of time) I also wrote an amusing tirade about how I’d happily stab the programmers’ families with acid-coated broken bottles, but I deleted it.
OK, that’s enough venting - the game.
While GGX’s gimmick was that the game ran in high-resolution, the original game was carried by the fact it was a PSX 2D fighter relatively unencumbered by the animation cuts and lengthy load times other titles seemed to always have. It’s true these other titles were ports from more powerful systems, not stand-alone games built solely to make the most of the PSX like GG is, but we’ll let that pass.
The quality of said animation is fair, but not great, with some nice effects, though it’s offset with plenty of two-frame attacks and jerky walks, poses and taunts. The majority of the sprites are small and the backgrounds lack animation and realism. The artwork is decent enough - though the cast of characters and locales are as wacky and ultimately lame as the sequel. The lack of the pool-playing guy helps, and Kliff (the little old Knight with the huge sword) is pretty cool - but everyone else is pretty much the same. It’s amusing that although Faust (serious contender for worst fighting game character design of all time) is missing, there’s another tall, stupid looking character in his place (hey hey hey, Dr. Baldhead) In fact, Dr. B might actually be Faust. Oh well. He still sucks.
Also reminiscent of GGX are the excessive special effects. Big splashes of blood, coloured hit sparks, giant projectiles and other flying junk. There are also plenty of attacks that just aren’t clear whether you should be blocking them high or low - nasty when the slightest failure to block leads to a horrendous combination attack. It goes beyond being an aesthetic problem and encroaches on the gameplay somewhat. Afterall — how can you block or counter something when you can’t even tell what it is? Adding to the stylistic visual problems, there are also hardware ones: namely frequent slowdown, and also a rather ugly zoom effect.
The sound is also similar to GGX … more of the same sort of “driving” “thrashing” hard rock. Not my thing really, but fair enough - it’s certainly different to other fighters, and does create a decent aggresive mood.
I was also quite pleased by the plot - the manual tells the overall story, plus each characters’ own - and there are nice little individual endings for everyone. It’s nothing amazing, but it’s certainly more original than “___ is gathering data for his army of clones”, or the “who gives a fuck anyway?” approach of MvC2 or CvS.
But as nice as the story is, a game lives or dies by how it plays. And Guilty Gear dies quite badly. Although not quite as insane as GGX (no Fucking Green Shields, Roman Cancels or Negative Penalty) it is still packed with so many gimmicks and features as well as an evil chain combo system - that the simple concept of one-on-one fighting is buried under something that is more like a shoot-em-up than a fighting game.
You have a weak punch and weak kick, and a weak and hard ’slash’. The game engine also affords a great deal of mobility - double-jumps; super-jumps; dashes; air dashes and running, and defensive options like air-blocking, guard cancelling and the “Perfect Guard” (blocking without block damage at the cost of super meter).
The offense side is where things get a little tricky. The engine is just far too loose. Jump in attack > WK, WP, WP, WP, WP, WS, HS, special (knocks down), crouch fierce > super - then maybe a couple of juggle hits on the end. Then there are the things like seven standing weak kicks > super … bleaugh.
Say what you like about Capcom’s VS. games, but at least in them you can’t do EIGHT JUMPING FIERCES IN A ROW AND HAVE THEM ALL COMBO.
As well as chain hits, you can two-in-one, juggle and OTG. - and there are even air combos. Everyone has a standard launcher (WS + HS) that lets you jump up after the victim and slash away at them.
The combination of these things adds up to a less-than-precise game engine. Pretty much everything you do can be cancelled or comboed in some ways, often repeatedly. Like GGX, it lacks that Chess-like attack-counter-attack feel that the best fighting games possess.
One thing GG is infamous for are the “Instant Kills” - an attack (activated by pressing P+K and then QCF + any attack) that if it connects, will end the fight for good, irrelevant of which round you’re in. It sounds pretty cheap, and I’ll admit I lost plenty of fights the first time I played the game. However, a quick glance through the manual is all it takes - Instant Kills are as easy to counter as they are to do, depending on your reaction speeds of course - and countering them leaves the attacker wide open.
Playing Guilty Gear against the CPU is hard. Very hard. There’s no difficulty option so the player just has to suck it up. The first few fights are fairly straightforward, but as they progress, the AI gets better (cheaper?) and it’ll use more tricks, strategies and combos. Then the difficulty curve spikes. The second-to-last boss, Testament is a ridiculous fight. Here all the faults of the game unite to really screw the player. Projectiles and attacks that look like … well, I don’t know what. Weird hit detection, ludicrous chain and OTG combos — all wrapped up in a zooming, pixelating orgy of slowdown. It’s no fun at all. I only vaguely remember fighting Testament on GGX; and although it was a super-crappy experience - at least it did it without the hardware problems.
And then there’s the last fight, against Justice; the rogue Gear rebel leader. Dear sweet Jesus. If you know anyone who’s played this, or you’ve played it yourself. I’m sure just the mention of his name will cause you to fall over backwards from your chair and start foaming at the mouth.
*falls over backwards from chair and starts foaming at the mouth*
It’s such a hellish fight, I’m not even sure it can be called “SNK Boss” syndrome. After all, Omega Rugal never had a huge beam laser that does about 45% damage when BLOCKED and 80% if it hits, as well as hundreds of huge-ranged, incomprehensible attacks and specials, as well as a 200% (probably) damage advantage. I’ve beaten him (it?) … primarily by just constantly chaining and attacking non-stop - but some characters seem to be really disadvantaged. (See the opening paragraph)
GG shares the sense of randomness that the sequel has - the way the AI is sometime insane, killing you in seconds, other times too dumb to block. It’s especially true of the last fights - Justice perfected me in seconds, then when I continued, the stupid thing barely put up a fight. Pity, automatic lamer-detection or just poor programming?
Being an old game - and one that’s supposed to be pushing the system it’s running on very hard - it’s understandable that there’s not much else on the disk. There is a secret last boss, who can be accessed by winning the game without losing once… but … yeah, right. Other than a training mode it’s pretty sparse.
Like its sequel, Guilty Gear isn’t really a bad game, it’s just overloaded with gimmicks and annoyances of both the visual and gameplay variety. It is a technical accomplishment, but lacks the sense of fun, of precision, of accomplishment and satisfaction the greatest fighting games possess. And Justice is horrible - I’m still having therapy.
