LogFAQs > #950718120

#23. Guilty Gear Xrd (PS3, 2014)



When I was in college, I would get together with that group of DDR friends to play other games sometimes. One of the more common choices was games in the Guilty Gear series. At the time, I was awful at fighting games, and lost way more than I won. It didn't matter though, because Guilty Gear was so stylish, so wildly fast, and it was just so fun to do things and see things, I had fun regardless.

Years later, when I got really into the fighting game scene, Guilty Gear was something I hadn't touched in a long time. But then Xrd came out, looking as stylish as ever, and I wanted to get back to this series. It was still a 2D fighter, but it was a 3D game with some very slick cell shading and playing on a 2D plane. Like, you'll never know it's a 3D game until there's something with a camera rotation, like a super move or a round finish.

Guilty Gear has a lot of characters that fight with a unique weapon or have some kind of unique gimmick. There's a lot of variation in the cast. I ended up deciding to use Faust, the doctor who fights with a gigantic scalpel and throws out random items. He creates chaos all over the screen for both players. It's great for someone like me who doesn't memorize elaborate or complicated setups, but instead tries to just out-react and out-space, and hopefully remain calmer in wild situations. There are others who are fun to use though, even the characters I barely know are fun to just do things with. Finding fun characters to connect with is definitely a big part of making fighting games fun.

I wasn't actually good at Xrd for a couple years (and I'd still argue that maybe I'm not good, but I am at least competent). There are a lot of systems at play, both on offense and defense. I'm still learning things about this game because of how deep it is, but also, it's okay if you never truly know it all, because there's so much. You can spend 50% of meter to cancel a move on hit or block to extend a combo or make it safe. You can spend 25% of the meter to cancel a move that doesn't hit (or cancel absolutely nothing) to cause a very brief pause & allow you to escape bad situations. There are bursts as a one-time get out of jail free card, blitzes to deflect moves, counter-blitzes to blitz back someone who blitzed you, dead angle to get out of blocking. Combos will do more damage on someone who's been blocking a lot but less on someone with low health. There are also different weights and gravities to consider during combos too.

When I was getting together with friends for games weekly in 2018 and 2019, Guilty Gear Xrd was the most common game we broke out. It was common to have games that just turned into everyone laughing too, the way this game is set up just leads to some silly things.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppvMgvC5ZzA&t=250s

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