GG2 Overture: But the game is ACTUALLY REALLY GOOD

Guilty Gear 2 is an RTS and an action game: a buddy compared it to DotA, which the game is likely modeled after, except for the melee fighting. The RTS part is pretty simple, the action part is pretty complex, and together they are a little bit bewildering, especially since, as we said, the campaign mode doesn't really help you figure out how the game works. Once it's over, you're left with the mission mode, which mostly consists of campaign mode levels, except you can play as characters other than the ones the story obligated you to play as before. So that's not much help. If you want to figure out how to play Guilty Gear 2, the best thing to do is just go into Exhibition mode and fight the computer over and over again, working your way up from the lowest difficulty. Also, let the game run into demo mode and take a look at what the people in those full match replays do. Very educational stuff: also completely undocumented.

Don't bother going online until you have a real handle on the game: because there are so few people playing this game (mostly Japanese), it's hard to get a match and the skill level is very high. You are not going to have time to learn anything because you will be dead.

Let's take it from the top: the player character is a "Master" who both orders and leads an army of summoned monsters into battle. As in any normal RTS, you need resources (mana) to summon units, buy character upgrades and items, and you get more mana by taking over towers (here called ghosts) at key points on the map. The units have a simple rock-paper-scissors relationship, and with more mana you're able to summon stronger units. The match is split into five five-minute rounds and ends when one Master's lifebar is drained to zero, either by repeated attacks to the base (the masterghost) or the death of the Master (you lose about a third of your bar every time this happens). None of this is unusual in and of itself.

What shakes up the play and makes it interesting is the role of the Master. You're summoning and ordering your troops via a menu, but you control the Master directly. The Master can assist their troops in battle, take enemy towers, or directly fight the enemy Master. You can definitely draw a parallel to Dynasty Warriors here, but the combat is much deeper and summoned units don't stand around waiting to be killed like the ones in DW do.

There are two combat modes: one is the crowd-control attack mode that's pretty directly DW. Very easy to use, very effective against big crowds, but the damage is crap. If you really want to hurt something, you have to lock on to them, at which point you can move forwards, backwards, and in a circle around them: the movement system first seen back in Ocarina of Time all those years ago.

You can't really afford to overlook the lock-on mode in this game: it is the core of the fighting engine. It's also where all the GG elements are hiding: Sol and Ky have most of their usual signature moves, and surprisingly, they all work more or less the way they did in GGXX. Ky's fireball stuns enemies, Sol's dragon punch really goes through incoming attacks, and so on. Furthermore, there's a really meaty combo system here, with juggles and Roman Cancels (renamed to Modern Cancels I dunno why) and all the ultra-precision pinball wizard kinda shit you'd expect from GG.

Also, Masters can get around the map much faster than their troops can: dashing actually makes your character control like a kart racing game, complete with a drift button and the possibility of crashing into walls and such. It's definitely strange, but it's also the only efficient way to get around: you're going to quickly realize that the Master has a lot of work to do in this game, and time is of the essence.

As a result of all this, the Master is one of the most powerful and destructive forces on the map. You can't really lay back and let your strength go to waste: it's best to be all over the field, helping your troops out and screwing up things for the enemy Master. When you have a free moment, make your orders, but make them quick. Of course, the enemy Master is running around too, and you're frequently going to end up fighting them. Here, I should note that the awesome GG music that you've probably been missing starts to play. Player-versus-player combat is obviously different from Guilty Gear the 2D fighting game, but it's still about mind games and aggression. I would have liked to have throws, but oh well.

Different Masters are good at different things: for polar opposites, there's Sol, who's an absolute beast in direct combat who doesn't get a lot of mana to summon units with, and Valentine, who excels at swarming the map with small units but will lose miserably in single combat. The rest of the characters fall somewhere in between, for a bit more balance. Characters and maps are in pretty short supply here, and insult to injury, one character and one map are paid DLC. This was pretty uncool, but I paid up the character (map is unreleased here, far as I know) because this game probably didn't sell well anyway.

One of the things you notice after a lot of matches in this game is that even though the models appear subpar for this generation (likely owing to the number of them that the game often has to have onscreen: the framerate never drops), the character design and animations actually have a lot of the character that you saw in the 2D Guilty Gear: it's just that because the game is 3D, you rarely ever get a good look at them. Diehard GG fans will probably be able to pick out moves and characters that have been indirectly transplanted in from GGXX, like Zappa's dog (Zappa himself does not appear, sorry guys).

Anyway, the game's pretty deep, but like I've said, you really have to find it yourself. With better single-player modes, the game might have been able to communicate what it was about more easily, but as-is, it looks like only absolute Guilty Gear diehards and people with soft spots for neglected videogames (oh hi) will ever actually play it. Not to mention how active this fall has been for major videogames: GG2 is already effectively lost in the shuffle. Unless you buy it, because I told you to.

Comments

[Joe (ChaoofNee)]

Heh. I completely forgot this came out. I'll have to be a good, little obscure game-amassing elitist and pick this up.