Guilty Gear is a very bare bone, yet ambitious fighting game. While the franchise is well known for its affinity for rock music, you can tell that the first outing was very toned down comparatively. The game just screams a company trying to figure out what they want to do with their franchise, and a lot of character and sound design reflect this. While it is jarring to look at the characters now compared to their later counterparts, nonetheless it is fun to see how they came to be. While I wouldn't recommend this to most people, fans may get a kick at looking at this older entry, and it certainly holds up better than most of its competitions first entries.

There's a certain joy to the fighting game that is completely broken in just the right way. A game where trying to take it remotely seriously is a terrible idea, where every character has an infinite or multiple yet is still wildy imbalanced and has some absurdly swingy mechanics that feel like they were made without much care or thought because this game is basically an ascended college project that's a bonus for buying Daisuke Ishiwatari's rock Album.

Guilty Gear isn't just busted, it's blatantly busted. Spend 2 minutes with any character in training mode and you'll probably find something stupid. Be it the weird instant kill mechanic, some moves doing obscene amounts of damage for no good reason, or Sol's DP being an infinite in the corner. LIke, how could you not notice that?

And I think the thing is, approaching guilty gear from the perspective of it trying to be an actually good fighting game is the wrong way of getting any fun out of it. Guilty Gear is way too focused on being the epitomy of rule of cool to care about anything else. The character designs are sick and they all feel great to play - the music is incredible, it has some of the best sprite work on the PS1 and the act of pressing buttons and doing all the dumb shit has a great feel to it all.

There's a great interview i've read from 1998, where Daisuke Ishiwatari and Hideyuki Anbe - who legitimately seem to have a huge chunk of the work on GG1 by themselves - and they talk casually and enthusiastically about things that don't work, that they were adding random bullshit to the game even in it's final stages of development, and it all sounds like they were basically throwing every idea they had in it. And I think that creative enthusiasm and Laissez-Faire attitude really comes across in the final product.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want to play Guilty Gear against anyone that knows what they're doing. Basically every guilty gear fighting game afterwards would improve on it and is just outright better. But the pure slice of creative kusoge that is GG1 is a great arcade mode playthrough, and a fantastic game to revel in the stupidity of everything going on. Sol Badguy may have 4 ways of infinite-ing me, but I'll have a smile on my face whilst he does it.

"Produced/directed/voice-acted/composed/illustrated/animated/programmed/written/PR-ed by Daisuke Ishiwatari."

Purtroppo, avendo potuto giocarci unicamente da solo e di recente, non ho potuto apprezzare lo scopo originario del gioco: quello di divertirsi con degli amici con quello che è, fondamentalmente, un gioco piuttosto sbilanciato per stessa ammissione di Ishiwatari. Anzi, ha fondamentalmente voluto che il gioco risultasse esattamente così, aggiungendo stronzate su stronzate (es.: attacchi virtualmente infiniti - in particolare per Sol -, avversario che rimane sospeso in aria vulnerabile per più secondi a seguito di specifici attacchi subiti) col solo scopo di divertire, a partire dalle mosse Instant Kill (Ichigeki Hissatsu Waza): mi pare di capire, uno dei marchi di fabbrica di quasi tutta la serie che, però, in questo capitolo sono eccessivamente fastidiose in quanto facilmente eseguibili attraverso due possibili condizioni dai giocatori (e dalla IA avversaria) e difficilmente bloccabili; conducono, infine, all'immediata sconfitta.

Assolutamente da apprezzare il sistema di combo, il character design e le animazioni dei vari personaggi giocabili, nonché gli stessi stili di combattimento: non sono mai presenti mosse che possono essere in qualche modo simili tra loro.

Molto bella la intro animata di Justice e interessante il background dei personaggi, per quanto venga a malapena sfiorato nel corso del gioco fuori dalle guide ufficiali.