The Guilty Gear series reigns as the king of anime-style fighting games due to its gorgeous art style, and a rich, demanding, and lighting-quick combat system. Unfortunately, its oceanic depth and mountainous skill ceiling proved inaccessible to the causal player—until now. The $59.99 Guilty Gear Strive streamlines the series’ unique combat mechanics to make them more newcomer friendly, while retaining the older games’ creative richness. Strive comes with fewer extra modes than its predecessors, but there is a lot to love in this PC game, including astounding visuals, impressive character play styles, and snappy, lag-free online play courtesy of top-tier, rollback netcode. Strive is an approachable series entry that shakes up the Guilty Gear formula in the best ways possible.
Anime Fighter With an Anime Story
Unlike other fighting games‘ story modes, Strive’s narrative is presented as a purely cinematic experience. Guilty Gear’s story is a tangled web of evil machinations, world-ending schlock, and slick character dueling wrapped into what amounts to a season of anime episodes. Due to its non-interactive nature, the story mode avoids the genre pitfall of shoehorning fights into story situations for the sake of gameplay.
The story is wholly independent from the action; it’s a supplemental feature that adds to Strive, but is also skippable should you choose to ignore the drama. For the curious, Strive features a glossary and timeline of events, so you can piece together where everything fits in relation to earlier Guilty Gear games.
Fresh, Familiar Fighting
If you jump into Strive from Xrd or any of the previously released series entries, Strive may initially strike you as a slower and more limited game. Earlier Guilty Gear games featured lengthy combo chains, tight input windows, and relatively low damage. Mastering a character’s basic kit required a sizable time investment, especially if you wanted to learn the expansive canceling system that complicated and enriched combat.
With Strive, developer Arc System Works course corrects by simplifying the characters’ bread-and-butter move sets, limiting or outright removing how some attacks chain together, and adding command and combo input leniency. Strive also cranks the damage output to ridiculous, Samurai Shodown-style levels, so a basic heavy slash can chew through a quarter of your health (plus, an Overdrive special can easily do 50-percent damage if it connects). These changes radically alter how you play Guilty Gear, as they encourage a more neutral combat approach as you and your opponent vie for openings to dish out beefy blows.
Guilty Gear Strive’s Mechanics
Strive’s alterations and changes are considered and clever, and they give the game a wonderful freshness without damaging the series’ heart and soul. One of Guilty Gear’s defining mechanics, the Roman Cancel, makes its return here. Roman Cancels are flashy, meter-reliant techniques (they consume half of your Tension meter) performed by simultaneously pressing three attack buttons. When executed, a Roman Cancel, well, cancels your current action and puts you in neutral, letting you follow up with anything you want. It also unleashes a shockwave from your character that slows your opponent for one second if it connects. In this way, you can create combos by chaining together attacks via Roman Cancel that would not ordinarily flow together.
Roman Cancels are your windows to customizing your pressure game, and setting up zany mix-up attacks. In fact, Strive even lets you influence a Roman Cancel’s direction with directional dashes. For example, you can perform a Roman Cancel after a whiffed aerial, double-tap down during the input to slow your opponent, and return to ground neutral before they can punish you. Its an incredibly versatile tool, and one that only gets more complex and interesting the more you experiment with it.
There’s a tradeoff, of course: Roman Cancels result in a meter-gain penalty. This penalty prevents Tension from building, and it can last for several seconds. While that may not sound too bad on paper, the penalty can have a severely negative impact because meter is important. Fortunately, Strive pushes another mechanic to the forefront: the Wall Break.
When pressured against a wall, characters splat against the barrier, damaging it until it ultimately shatters. Punching opponents through a wall forces a scene change, and rewards you with a Positive bonus that increases your Tension-earning rate. Roman Cancels performed during this Positive state do not incur the meter penalty, which gives you a prime window for offensive pressure. On the surface, the Wall Break seem like a flashy gimmick, but the mechanic is highly rewarding and well worth incorporating into your offense.
Another classic Guilty Gear staple is Burst. This is essentially a free, combo-breaking technique that you can use during a match to interrupt an aggressive opponent’s offense. Performed by pressing the Dust launcher and two attack buttons, your character unleashes a shockwave that knocks back your opponent. Burst has an independent meter that fills as time passes and when you take damage, but you start each match with a full gauge.
Burst comes in two varieties. Blue Bursts occur when you are in a defensive state, such as blocking, stunned, or knocked down. If the Burst connects with your opponent, you blast them to the other side of the screen and create some breathing room. The second, offense-focused version is Gold Burst, which is performed when your character is in a neutral, non-prone state. When used in this manner, hitting an opponent instantly fills your Tension meter, and ignores any penalty you may have incurred by initiating a Roman Cancel or idling. Overall, Burst is an incredibly valuable tool, but it must be managed and used strategically due to its slow recharge rate.
Highs and Lows
Each character in Strive’s 15-person roster has a wholly unique fighting style and personality. Even returning characters, such as franchise poster boys Ky and Sol, are radically different from any of their previous incarnations. For example, Ky is the all-rounder, but his combo strings were shortened to be tighter and more concise; his swift strikes make him ideal for punishing overly aggressive opponents. Sol is a pressure-oriented beast with a solid attack variety that makes him dangerous from any range. In fact, his grapples and hard-hitting melee attacks make him a menace when unchecked. There are two newcomers, too: The hulking, vampiric samurai Nagoryuki, and the kick-happy brawler Giovanna.
Few fighting games match Strive’s visual detail, silky smooth animation, and dazzling marriage of 3D visuals in a 2D space. Arc System Works has mastered this artistic technique, and it shows in every idle animation, background, and character model. Of course, the soundtrack is superb. Japanese Rock may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it wonderfully complements the combat, and it’s a treat to hear hooks from older tracks sampled in the new ones. You can even purchase some of the older tracks with in-game currency, giving you plenty to listen to as you climb the combat tower.
Strive is lacking on a few fronts, however. The core game is great, but there isn’t much single-player content. Sure, there’s an Arcade mode, but the game lacks the M.O.M. Mode that appeared in past games. Strive offers a simple Survival Mode, instead.
If you tire of those modes, Strive’s Mission Mode features various challenges designed to teach you how to play the game. The earlier missions are rudimentary, but the more advanced tech is genuinely valuable and worth exploring, especially if you’re new to Guilty Gear or fighting games, in general. These missions go over momentum, instant blocking, punishing moves, the various Roman Cancel types and their applications, and even character-specific match up tutorials. Mission Mode is a great way to whittle away the hours if you don’t feel like dipping into versus play, though I do wish there were a few other modes available. Fishing is charming, but it is essentially a glorified crane claw for gallery art and songs. Cute, sure, but hardly engaging content on its own.
If you fancy multiplayer action, the bulk of your Strive time will be spent in the online lobby system. Once you create your blocky avatar, you begin your ascent through a multi-level tower, with each level representing a particular player rank. This useful segregation places you alongside others with an equal skill level. Thankfully, the rollback netcode is terrific, generally delivering a lag-free experience. Connecting to and verifying server data tends to take a minute or two when booting up the game, but once you’re in the lobby tower matches quickly load.
My only real disappointment with Strive’s online play is the lack of cross-platform play. I know many people who play Strive on PlayStation 4 or PlayStation 5, and not being able to play with them without purchasing a second copy of the game for Sony’s platform is a major bummer.
Can Your PC Run Guilty Gear Strive?
To run Strive, your gaming PC needs at least an AMD FX-4350 or i5-3450 CPU, AMD Radeon HD 6870 or Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 Ti graphics card, 4GB of RAM, and the Windows 8 operating system.
My desktop computer, a rig that houses an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 CPU and Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 GPU, ran Guilty Gear Strive ran at 60 frames per second (at Max settings) with no hiccups. As a Steam game, Strive supports Steam Achievements, Steam Cloud, Remote Play Together, and gamepads.
Worth the Buy
Guilty Gear Strive is an excellent fighting game that manages to bridge the gap between depth and accessibility in a way that doesn’t ruin the series’ core tenets—no small feat. Strive’s stronger neutral focus, slightly slower pacing, rich characters, and mechanically robust combat are second to none. It’s also a visual tour de force that’s accompanied by a stellar soundtrack and excellent online connectivity. An additional single-player game mode or two would’ve been welcome extras, but as it stands, Guilty Gear Strive is a superb fighting game you should pick up, especially if you dug Dragon Ball FighterZ or Arc System Works’ other titles.
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