Guilty Gear Review (フロスト五一)
A testament for all that is punk
Really fun fighting game, full of weird balancing decisions that clearly aim to make this the most extreme fighting game of its time. And it sure achieves that.
Every character has an instakill move that has no requirement to be activated. Every character has its own OP quirks and victory is determined by knowing how to abuse of them. However, there's a lot of misinformation on this title: just like you can parry any instakill move if you do a quarter circle in the opposite direction when the screen is red, most of the bullshit criticism people have on this is fake.
For instance: infinite combos do not exist except if you use the taunt tricks, which are somewhat hard to pull off; and this misinformed take came from the fact the reviewer who said it didn't know how to tech in this game.
Justice is a tough final boss, but you can kill him just fine if you understand your character's strong suits and use them properly. The game is somewhat unbalanced in terms of characters (Chipp doesn't feel like the combo fiend he is in XX, for instance), but it's definitely not offensive for a PS1 game.
And honestly, this title feels really soulful and personal. The OST rocks, the artwork is cool as heck and you can tell how much effort they put into the game just by looking at the cool intro animation the final boss has. This game SCREAMS individuality and I'm all for it. Also, the story is surprisingly good, especially considering it's mostly told through short cutscenes and dialogues during the arcade mode.
It has this constant theme of the failure of power structures and moral systems towards pragmatically dealing with reality; thus Sol Badguy, a punk that fights for his own reasons, is more of a protagonist than the romantic hero that Ky Kiske is — being ultimately ridicularized in his own ending, especially because of his blind faith in the organizations that brought the issues at hand in the first place.
Justice (together with Sol) are probably my favorite characters. Justice embodies the ideal of weapons and judgements being power structures above social resources. Humans create weapons to defend their own interests, not to protect people from harm, and that's why Sol's ending is so impactful. Showing empathy to such dangerous villain, he truly understands that Justice's misdeeds were caused by the same will that urges Sol to fight — the guilt of being a weapon in the hands of those who pull the strings in this dark universe.
Don't listen to the EVOcels, they only know how to talk on numbers and some of them didn't even try this game properly. This isn't a competitive fighting game and I'm fine with it. It's a fun fighting game, with enough depth to please any hardcore player, but a bit of a jank that stops it from fully breaking into the competitive scene. Which is fine, because it's a pretty fun singleplayer experience and the versus mode is still quite solid too. I REALLY LIKED how well written the story is for its genre and this is a pretty big showcase of Daisuke Ishiwatari's skills as a game dev.
Really well directed game, it feels that every choice is thematically coherent regardless of some issues.
9/10