A game that's impossible to not find alluring, if you've ever had the optimism in your heart to believe that something this charismatic wouldn't eventually fall into the limelight it deserves. Deeply in love with a lineage that has never been able to capture the zeitgeist as much as it naturally should. It's also teetering on a mid-life crisis that I suspect has drained everyone involved with the series to some extent - it’s your Dad’s newfound obsession with motorcycles that wakes you up early in the morning from how fucking loud it is.

Guilty Gear has always had an infectious self-obsessiveness to it - the way you can sense its author let these characters and elaborate stories churn in their head for years, and the way its visuals bring said character's fermented personalities to life is incredible. Phrasing this very expensively produced game like it's a one-man passion project would be misguided, but it's hard not to feel excitement seeing someone's twenty year old notebook scribblings brought to life so lavished. Fleeting glimpses at a full spectrum of human experience within the cast as each hand-animated frame of emotion cascades in its character's faces. The soundtrack echoes a similar feeling; the in-character lyricism creates a bridge between the series' hieroglyphic storytelling and links it to the writer's spirit with excessive clarity and newfound sincerity. Bluntly think the composition is a lot worse than previous entries in the series; the songs barely even function as songs in-game due to often having intros that go on for as long as a full round. And yet, there's something oddly beautiful in how this soundtrack is largely comprised of 5-7 minute long theatrical anthems that you'll literally never hear the entirety of in a single match; the indulgent opportunity to write a musical about your OCs was chosen over creating a soundtrack that suits its source material...I get it. Twenty years of storytelling conclude with the stage curtains raised, resolution brought to a cast that had clearly been rotated in its creator's mind nonstop for longer than I've been alive. Real inspiring.

Despite that, a haze of low morale permeates throughout the community. At launch, the game was praised for its netcode; you could actually play this one with your friends from a different continent, and the fans didn't have to patch it in themselves! But after proving the necessity of rollback to its contemporaries, it's beginning to fall behind. It's sad that I played this game for the first time nearly four years ago, and its lobbies still constantly break on me. Makes the Open Parks feel like walking through someone else's property without permission. Someone dubbed "hackerman" by the community routinely snipes streamers by destroying ping and crashing games - and it's really funny seeing developers also refer to them by that name - but frustratingly still unsolved. And at the core of all of the maelstrom of discussion is the game's modem of modernization: its "casualization".

It might seem obvious at first, but who are these simplifying changes for? The classic high low mix-up system enriches every fighting game with goals of mindfulness; becoming aware of your opponent's tendencies during long sessions is a deeply rewarding process. But when you're starting to learn fighting games, and haven't tapped into that awareness yet - especially if you're playing short sets with randoms, rather than with people you know - it can feel random and frustrating. This is where Strive's simplification becomes a problem: Small health bars and a lack of strong defensive systems result in very turn-based defensive play that is oppressive even at high level. Strive puts more emphasis on the moments you lose a single mix-up taking a chunk out of your health, and makes stages smaller and air-dashes weaker. The neutral in this one feels claustrophobic with so few layers of approach, and so much to lose from a wrong guess; this isn't fun for me, but it's especially not fun for anyone new. Strive is trying to untangle itself from a set of system mechanics that series elders routinely used to bully any new Xrd player, but it seems that they've built a game that still leans towards people who know how fighting games work. Now that the game has had a few years, I can tell there really is a niche for this: I know a lot of people who have been fighting game loosely for years, picked up Strive, and actually got good at it. The first opportunity they've ever had to feel truly successful at a game wrapped in the same packaging as the other anime fighters they've loved, but this time they arrived on-time to grow alongside everyone else. So, is Strive just an expensive video game therapy session, telling its players the obvious fact that you can get good at any fighting game if you just...play it. a lot. I think the answer to this comes down to personal preference...so, I guess I just gotta say how I feel.

I like Guilty Gear: Strive. I like it more than most of my friends who are critical of it, even! It just doesn't have my favourite parts of Guilty Gear - to play a game that is so endlessly in-depth that there are countless routes for improvement in every direction - but it captures the true core appeal for 90% of people, which is playing as the coolest cast of characters ever. I am not immune to this. I just miss when it truly embodied the term "anime fighter": dynamic poses hit in mid-air as both players push to break the game's speed limits. I wish Strive compartmentalized that feeling better, even if it was easier. Regardless, I still felt blessed to be able to share with a lot of my friends what's special about this series. Whenever I had the opportunity to teach someone the game, I'd keep doing really obvious tricks like roman cancelling moving specials into throws, and they'd be like "woah!!". It was cool to see the light in someone's eyes as they learned how to express themselves through a fighting game for the first time. An extreme sense of both passion and compromise runs through Strive's hulking mass - this sorta thing is still difficult to discuss, and its goals are impossible to obtain without crucial sacrifice. Strive both yearns and succeeds to bring people together, and it's hard not to get emotional seeing a series I've loved for a long time change people's lives. It's just a little too socially awkward to connect to every other person; a biomechanical beast wearing casual clothes.

Strive is. Fun. Imo, like very fun. It's by FAR the fighting game I've put the most time into, like legit. I main Bridget and Elphelt and I can say those are incredible characters with awesome momentum (even though Elphelt needs some serious buffs). It's one of my fav games and by far my fav fighting game

And it's outta love that I have to say arcsys please balance your game a little better. I don't even play competitively. I stopped caring about towers and Celestial, pretty much only play on parks now. And it's gotten to a point where I refuse matches against some characters out of them being unfun. Yeah no I won't go around saying Axl, Faust or Johnny are unbalanced, those are just characters I personally do not enjoy playing against but that are,,, fair. Even if Axl is the most obnoxious poopoo garbage character ever put in a fighting game and the game would be better off without him ANYWAY. Happy Chaos (ofc it's HC) and Sol are 2 other characters I straight up refuse to play against <3

Everyone knows why HC is poopoo garbage to play against, sure love paying massive price for fighting game to just press forward and block for 90% of the match, and ofc HC is straight up just a character that does not belong in Strive as in he does not have to play the game
And then Sol is extremely obnoxious in how he does not let you play the game because pressing 1 singular button during his pressure and getting counterhit means death, as his combos not only do impossible to understand damage (who looked at those numbers and thought it was ok) but WA gives him some of the best momentum in the game

So yea. I love the game, but these two are a problem that need fix. Until then I'll just hop on park and refuse every match against Sol and HC (and Axl and Faust and Johnny but those are skill issue)

This game was busted and sucked at the beginning where I just didn’t touched the game again till recently.
I can firmly say the game is pretty peachy now after some needed mechanic additions, move sets, and other balancing.
It’s a neutral heavy game and can straight up get got in two combos easily, like Samurai Shodown level of cut throat it can be. For beginning players, just get adjusted to the game’s core mechanics and STRONGLY recommend the mission game mode. Arc System for the most part been so informative in their tutorials where it’s just as good here if not their best.
The tower system is very cool and makes for less frustration for online sessions in comparison to other fighting games out there rn like the traditional rank ladder climbs. Kinda stinks when you’re in the groove and wanting to match up with a player again, but can’t because they or you went up a floor…
Primarily not getting the 9 or 10/10 as the narrative is just “aight” and single player content just isn’t there compared to BBCF, +R, etc.

When you boot up a fighting game, what do you want to get out of it? It could be a simple distraction, it could be to socialize with friends, it could be so you can larp as some kind of videogame wizard on a journey to fighting game perfection (that seems to be increasingly and concerningly popular). For me, when I boot up a fighting game, I want two things out of it. I want a skill based competition and I want to experience moments of player expression. When I say "player expression" I don't mean finding an opponent who plays a character in a way that completely disregards the typical values of their tool kit, rather I want a communication between players of what their habits are, what they are good at and what they are bad at. A good fighting game, to me, allows for a player who observes these habits, the strengths and weaknesses of what their opponent can and cannot do, to take advantage of these observations. You can probably assert from my score, that I don't believe strive does this well.

Before I had spent a significant amount of time examining GG as a series very, very closely in order to determine what it was about it that simply did not 'click' with me, one of my earliest negative observations I made when I was playing accent core was the fact that it felt like I was doing everything on autopilot once I got to a certain level. It felt as if I was winning matches because I had completely committed to a working formula and I was losing matches because I had either broken the formula or was simply outplayed in neutral and then got mixed over and over to death. Not really an experience rich with 'player expression' as I had described earlier. What was more shocking to me, was the fact that when I sought to improve, while I was met with the usual process of assessing matchup knowledge and optimizing certain combo routes and setplay, at the highest possible level of play the overall gameplay loop was still identical. Win neutral, force situations and suffocate the opponent as long as possible. No reactive gameplay allowed. Passivity is never correct, never optimal. You will play aggressively and only aggressively because the risk reward is skewed to only one style of play across almost the entire roster.

Almost the entire roster. Pardon this upcoming tangent, but I'm a big fan of Street Fighter Alpha 2. One of my favourite aspects of A2 is how alpha counters are balanced. To those not familiar with this fabulous game, when in blockstun every character can input a 412 motion (back, down back, down) followed by a punch or kick to counter attack for 1 bar of meter when you would normally be forced to continue blocking. Accent core has a character who has defensive options that are heavily inspired by this mechanic. They feature a variety of creative tools and option selects from these alpha counters, lending them an overall playstyle that shifts between defense and offense that is unlike the rest of the cast (though to be completely honest, the offensive part of the gameplan is the same kind of aforementioned looping suffocation I'm not particularly fond of). Fans of strive who have not played accent core may even be shocked to hear that this character is in fact in strive! Though in a form almost entirely unrecognizable.

Baiken may be the best example of how this game seems to primarily kneel to the whims of the consumers rather than the players and competitors.

"This character is popular and will sell DLC on aesthetics alone, but in the past, people who do not actually put in the effort to play her complain that her defensive playstyle and unintuitive means of opening up the opponent are not fun. Thus, we must bow to the majority who want to play her purely based on aesthetics, isolating fans of her original playstyle, even though it will mean we reduce her kit to options that make her gameplan almost completely homogeneous with the existing roster."

It really appears a LOT of the decision making, beyond this one example, was a process based on selling copies rather than fulfilling a vision. Fluff has superceded substance and strive has chosen to reject the few things that made past guilty gears truly unique in favour of broad appeal. Neuter tool kits, homogenize the cast and leave nothing up to the imagination of the player. While I felt that previous entries left little room for nuanced gameplay, this is a whole new level of monotony.

Perhaps a virtue of the coin-op days was the fact that fighting games had to be designed with intention regarding the core gameplay because if all the game could offer was visual finesse, the consumer would only drop a single quarter on the experience. Now flash is all that's needed to reel in some sorry suckers and get them to spend $100+ on your game, dlc characters, colours and stages. I would certainly know, I bought this game full price on launch with the first dlc pass. They got me. Hook, line & sinker.

I'm not trying to belittle those that enjoy strive, but I do want to understand what exactly the appeal is compared to any of the previous entries. I've still yet to see a positive review of strive that argues for something unique to the experience itself. The closest I've come across is the idea that the game is "easy to pick up" and execute. Is this really a virtue when the gameplay itself is so one note? What's the point of having easy execution if the things you are executing contribute to a gamestate that itself isn't particularly deep?

Typically, I like to end my needlessly long reviews on a somewhat positive note. Either optimism for the future or an appreciation for the things a game has done well. I struggle so much to find anything with strive. I will instead thank you for reading this review, even if you just skimmed. I hope that strive may develop something unique and defining for itself someday.

I tried SO HARD to like this game, but i can't.
I feel NOTHING playing this, absolutely nothing. I lose? Whatever. I win? Whatever.
It just feels... off. I have more fun getting my ass kicked in +R than i do winning in this game.

I gave it many chances during my 60 hour playtime, i reached floor 9, i tried every character in the game but i doesn't click, it just feels like shit to me. I give up.

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