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Review: Guilty Gear X [PC] |
Good day, ladies and gentlemen. First things first, let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way. *cough*
LOL GREEN SHIELD GAME WOW TEH FEMALE CHARS HERE ARE TEH HAWT OMG!!
Thank you. Now onto a look at the radical fighter in question, Guilty Gear X.
Though I was never a fan of the first Guilty Gear, I have many memories of it. Unfortunately, they aren’t good ones. I remember the fast pace, the flashy specials and supers, and of course the outrageous Instant Kills. That’s about it. The rest are nightmarish. Justice was brutal. The IK’s were, from what I remember, overpowered, and won you the entire match. The graphics were eh, and the backgrounds were ho-hum, looks like a rip-off from another 2d fighter. For a few years I prayed, ‘The potential was good, please let there be a sequel or two to this game (because it was awful and there was great room for improvement, God)’.
That day came when I saw Guilty Gear X for the Dreamcast. I saw it was fun and new at the time, but muttered to myself, ‘Eh, I’m poor, and the DC is nearing the end of its life. How am I going to cope’? Thus I was quite surprised to learn that Guilty Gear X made its way to the PC. It was perfect for me! I bought a copy, popped it in my CD ROM drive, patiently waited for the game to install itself. And after configuring the keyboard appropriately, I merrily clicked on ‘Start Game’ and was well on my way.
Disclaimer: Please keep in mind that this is a review from somebody who has seen the third game, Guilty Gear XX/X2, only twice or thrice in his life (yeah, it’s really sad, I know), so the observations and comparisons may not be the most accurate in the world.
The thing that first grabbed my attention was the graphics. High resolution! This is one of the main selling points of Guilty Gear X. The visuals are probably better than 95% of the 2d fighters out there. Only Third Strike and Garou struck me as being more visually pleasing. The sprites are incredibly neat and detailed, and so are the visual effects (energy, projectiles, hit sparks, the works). Eye candy everywhere! The backgrounds are slightly better this time around. While some are still plagued with blinding color coordination (Nirvana and Colony), others are absolutely adorable (the Grove, and the Mayship- with cute female pirates watching in the background, too)! It’s not perfect, sadly. Case in point: many of the characters are hilariously frame-deficient in their animations. All the blood, dust, fireballs, cue balls, dolphins, and other visual effects being liberally tossed about may prove to be overwhelming to a player of more traditional fighters.
What about the cast that comprises this hi-res affair? At first I was skeptical. Blah, Guilty Gear X has absolutely the weirdest characters designs ev-
Unf.
Well, such designs were to be expected of a game set in the future, including humans, gears, and everything in between. Limiting the combatants to your typical sword- and weapon-toting guys and gals would be boring fare. Daisuke Ishiwatari really should be praised for his work on this baby, making a practically all-original cast. Almost every character has a rock music reference associated with him or her. This is sheer, delightful genius.
However, the characters are not for everybody; they are most certainly an acquired taste. While they are a welcome escape from your standard striker, grappler, or shoto of the SNK or Capcom variety, some of them are really out of the ordinary. Behold! The high-pitched panty-flashing cook! The one-armed, one-eyed busty female Kenshin! The three-year-old final boss with boobs, a tail, and spectral wings! And one of my favorites: Faust. I presume he’s a mellowed-down, wackier Dr. Baldhead from the previous Guilty Gear. The stuff he does is amazing. He wields an impossibly large scalpel, throws out donuts, bombs, and meteors, and pokes his victims in the butt, or gives them afros! Damn it, ‘joke’ characters like Faust shouldn’t be this fun and effective to play! And yet, it’s pulled off magnificently here. A great improvement over the previous outing, if you ask me.
Who? Lovable me, the worst character design ever? You don’t say?
The gameplay is intriguing. The four-button P-K-S-HS layout is still there. Super meter is called Tension. Then there’s the Dust attack, the launcher for air combos. It is performed by pressing S+HS. To my knowledge, air dash and double jump are universal commands too.
Major changes include the Faultless Defense and Roman Cancel. The defense mechanism*wind howls* of choice is the Faultless Defense. The FD, or green shield as it is fondly called, is activated by pressing back+P+K simultaneously. This causes your defending character to be briefly surrounded by a green, glowing sphere, which prevents or otherwise minimizes damage from some attacks. The drawback is that this move drains your Tension considerably.
POWAR! Well, that screenshot didn’t turn out as I expected, but I’m sure you get the idea
The Roman Cancel, on the other hand, is pressing any three buttons to cancel out of an attack in progress. As such, it can be used to cancel out of high recovery moves, and has its uses in long-winded combos as well. As far as Tension-sapping abilities go, it’s worse than the FD, taking up about half a Tension gauge.
The infamous Instant Kills or ‘Destroys’ are still there. They’re just thrown in for show, I think. Basically, they’re one-hit super moves that serve as a finisher when you’re winning by a blowout, and in rare circumstances, as a desperation move. Most are slow, and you forfeit your Tension for the rest of the round. The IK’s range from lame (Ky) to funky (Venom, Baiken) to LMAO (Faust).
I love a game where you can rip the girls’ clothes and blow their hair up
Being a crossover game fan, I was greatly pleased at the fast pace and combo possibilities in Guilty Gear X. The supers, air combos, and specials were all tailor-made for my enjoyment. That enjoyment would prove to be short-lived. After a few days of playing this title, I realized that the system was a bit lacking in some areas. I felt that the combo and super system were a bit loose-ended (ooh, OTG stuff after a super, what). The two ladies at the link to the message board say it all. The AI was erratic too, it was either kicking your ass like a beast, or vice versa. I remember (while playing as Millia) losing countless times to mid boss Zato, but when I finally decided to select a different character, the mid boss barely put up a fight. So this is price for good graphics and characters’a bad case of the cheaps? *Waves to whoever programmed CPU Sol*
Ah yes, Dizzy. Next to I-no, probably the most fappable final boss ever. This Gear beauty is cheap, albeit not as soul breaking, as her momma Justice. She fights with her wings, her tail, and the fill-the-screen-with-shit attitude common of contemporary 2d fighting game bosses. Ice piranhas, ice spikes, wings with their own personalities that fire giant beams. You name it, and she’s got it. She’s a great boss in my opinion’challenging, not a brain buster, and she’s not brain dead easy either. And unlike the monsters, the middle-aged men, or the bishounen bosses of the Capcom and SNK fighting games that I’m accustomed to playing, losing against her rarely gets frustrating or boring. Aw, it’s certainly the cute factor that helps.
The sound. All I can say is, ‘wow’! It’s one of the best fighting game OST’s ever. Hard rock, the way fighting games should be. I’ve had the tracks on CD for quite sometime now, and they are very catchy and memorable. From the choir voices of Dizzy’s theme, to the church organ in Ky’s, right down the Oriental touch blended in with Jam’s and Baiken’s themes’it’s near perfect. It gets the adrenalin pumping and enhances the violence that occurs on-screen. There are a few misses here and there, but it’s tolerable. If the music didn’t drown out the hit sounds and explosions, the sound would be superb. The voice acting is commendable too, with each voice appropriate for the type of character that it is emanating from.
I almost forgot about the extras of the PC version. Aside from Arcade, Versus, and Training modes, there are a few nifty extras too. There’s the extremely challenging Survival mode (godly AI and Gold enemies at every multiple of 10, yay). There’s a Recording Mode, which allows you to record a combo or two within a fixed period of time. This data is then recorded to a file that you can replay in the same mode. The Options are a good feature too. It allows you to save your high scores and recorded combos onto your HD. It has that cool sound test feature too, listing the various Engrishy titles of the OST and offering them for sampling in WAV format. Before the game itself loads, you are prompted to configure the buttons for either your keyboard or joystick. Having only the former, I settled for keyboard-fu, and the control was surprisingly good.
All in all, a Guilty Gear X is a satisfying port. The one-player game tends to get boring real fast. It may not be the best fighter. It may not be a deep, technical one. Were this a review of the arcade or PS2 version, I’d score it a little lower. However, it is well presented, and easily beats the crap out of any (non-emulated) PC fighting game that I have ever played. For being a decent PC fighter, and not a clunky, slowdown-plagued, shitty translation embarrassment, it easily deserves a score in the early 80’s zone.
Now, if I can only acquire GGXX somehow. ; ________ ;
Postscript: Thanks to DarkPriest for clarifying some of the gameplay related stuff, and thanks to Zazzarius for providing the sprites. Want more Millia and Jam fan service? Come on down!
