Guilty Gear for Dummies
Guilty Gear for Dummies
There’s been an ongoing debate about whether fighting game developers are only hurting themselves by simplifying their games. I think it’s impossible to know for certain, since there are a thousand different variables that influence the commercial, critical, and competitive success of a fighting game. In my view, game complexity has to at least matter a little, and if taken to extremes in either direction, I think you can see negative outcomes. If a game is overly complicated, you risk scaring people off. If a game is too simple, you risk not having long term strategic growth. I’ve always thought part of the reason anime fighters (or whatever you feel like calling them) hadn’t made a bigger splash in the competitive fighting game scene was because they were pretty intimidating. It's not a stretch to imagine somebody looking at a Blazblue screenshot with nine different meters on it and noping the hell out of there. For whatever reason, nobody has seemed interested in making an entry-level anime fighter. People might point to the upcoming Granblue Fantasy Versus as an example of such a game, but I think Granblue is less a simplified anime fighter and more Street Fighter with anime aesthetics. Instead of referring to the subgenre as anime fighters, some prefer the term airdasher. It makes a lot of sense: mechanics (rather than aesthetics) are really what define fighting game subgenres. Years ago, I made a list titled:
Guilty Gear for Stupid/Bad People Like Me or:
Recipe for an Introductory Airdasher
I thought it’d be a fun thought experiment to imagine what you could remove from Guilty Gear Xrd and still have it feel like Guilty Gear. The game has a pretty long list of system mechanics. The glossary on Dustloop’s Guilty Gear Xrd wiki page has 40 entries:
Attack Level
Burst
Burst Overdrive
Blitz Shield
Blitz Attack
Blue Burst
Character Defense
Clash
Danger Time
Dead Angle Attack
Faultless Defense
Forced Proration
Gatling
Gold Burst
Guts
Hellfire
Initial Proration
Instant Block
Instant Kill
Jump Install
Low Profile
Lower Body Invincibility
Minimum Damage
Mortal Counter
Negative Penalty
Off the Ground (OTG)
Overdrive (Super Attack)
Purple Roman Cancel (PRC)
R.I.S.C. Level
Roman Cancel (RC)
Special Attacks
Stagger
Stun
Tension Gauge
Tension Pulse
Throw
Throw Break
Yellow Roman Cancel (YRC)
Ukemi (Teching)
Upper Body Invincibility
Do we really need all of these? Obviously, it’d be a stretch to say all of these are mechanics (or even things you really have to be consciously aware of), but there’s a lot going on under the hood. My list of things to change is not what I think Guilty Gear should be or want it to be, but I’d be curious to see what kind of audience it might have. Here is the list I came up with.
The List
Note: the original list had a bit of reasoning behind each change, but I’ve elaborated here and there to make each as clear as possible.
1. Remove blitz shield:
What is it? Blitz Shield is Xrd’s parry mechanic.
Why remove it? It’s unnecessary, complicates things, and it’s ‘guessy’ (is that a word? I have no idea). If certain moves/tactics are too strong in absence of blitz, you can nerf them on an individual basis to deal with its removal. One of the toughest things to learn in Xrd is defense, and part of the reason why is you have a bunch of different defensive tools at your disposal, and many of them are situational and hard to use well. I think a more approachable Guilty Gear would drastically reduce the number of defensive mechanics, and then make those that remained more versatile and easy to use. This leads us to...
2. Remove instant block (IB):
What is it? If you block something right as the attack would hit you, you recover from blocking a little bit sooner. This can allow the defender to punish things they couldn’t otherwise, and sometimes, IBing correctly is the only way to defend against certain sequences.
Why remove it? It’s basically an execution tax. Good enough players IB practically everything, so the game already has to be balanced around moves being instant blocked. Let's remove it and skip to the end.
3. Remove negative penalty:
What is it? If you don’t attack or advance toward your opponent for a long enough period of time, you lose all your meter and your meter gain is significantly reduced after that for a bit. It’s meant to deter running away and generally avoiding engaging with your opponent.
Why remove it? it doesn’t really come into play too often in real matches, so parsimony says chuck it. If unacceptable runaway tactics emerge, you can address them one-by-one on an individual character level. Also, running away is already more elegantly dealt with by the fact that the aggressor/pursuer is gaining meter constantly as they’re chasing the other character down.
4. Remove danger time:
What is it? Sometimes when two attacks clash, you trigger danger time. Danger time lasts for a few seconds and until it's over, everything combos into everything and you can do massive damage off of any stray hit.
Why remove it? Nobody likes it. I’m not even going to explain this one.
5. Buff (blue) bursts:
What is it? You can escape a combo or other defensive situation and reset things back to neutral.
Why buff it? The game is already very punishing, and one player getting momentum can often be the end of a round, so making burst better can help guarantee the person getting wrecked gets to play one more time. I’d increase the hitbox so any combo is interruptible by the burst (get rid of burst-safe combos, basically). Also, this would eliminate the need to memorize guaranteed burst points in combos, making the game more accessible. You could still have it so that on a hard read, you could still bait the burst and punish it, which is fine.
Other random suggestions:
Auto FD in the air if meter is available: make defense a little easier and also make it more accessible by getting rid of scrub-killer stuff like air resetting somebody over and over again.
Auto FD to prevent chip death: why not? Makes the game more accessible, and using/not using meter to prevent chip death isn’t ever a strategic decision since meter doesn’t carry forward to the next round.
Remove/reduce YRC slow down, get rid of input eating: spending 25% to slow down time and mess with your opponent’s inputs is dumb. Slowdown on RRC is fine since it mostly just aids in easy combo execution and it costs enough to not be abused in the same way that YRCs are.
Remove instant kills: they have inelegant esoteric rules for comboing into them, and they don’t matter too often. PARSIMONY
Standardize wake-up timings: character-specific timings just unnecessarily forces memorization of a bunch of extra stuff. If oki gets too strong, nerf oki tools on a character-by-character basis.
Fast forward to the present
I originally dreamt up this list back on July 3, 2016. Only recently did I begin trying to flesh it out into a proper piece of writing. While I was working on that, Arcsys finally streamed actual gameplay footage of Guilty Gear 2020 (the proper title has yet to be announced) and to my surprise, they did a bunch of these things! If anything, they went further than I did. So far, we know they:
Removed blitz shield (the parry)
Kept instant block, but drastically reduced its importance. It's now only a way to gain more meter and no longer affects how quickly you recover from blocking.
Removed danger time (thank god!)
Removed the need to use FD in the air to block ground moves. My idea had been to make it automatic, but they removed the need to do so entirely, taking it a step further.
Removed chip kills entirely. Again, they took this way further that my auto-FD idea.
Standardized wake-up timings.
Significantly weakened oki (the ability to pressure or mix up the opponent after a knockdown)
Significantly shortened combos
Most of the other things haven't been commented on one way or another. The logic behind my dumb thought experiment about a simplified airdasher seems pretty similar to the logic that's guiding the development of the next Guilty Gear. What got me thinking about this in the first place back in 2016? I want to immediately point out that I like Guilty Gear Xrd a lot! Since its release back in 2014, I've logged several thousand hours of playtime. It's probably only second to Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 on my personal list of favorite fighting games of all time... but I actually didn't initially like Xrd all that much. Story time! I was living in Japan when Xrd first released in arcades. I had always been really interested in Guilty Gear, and Xrd came along at the perfect time. Marvel 3 had settled down a bit (new tech wasn't constantly being discovered), so I had time to try something new. I started going to arcades to try and figure the game out and pretty quickly came to the realization that getting decent was going to take a lot of work. Before really sitting down and playing Guilty Gear, I remember watching Novril's Guilty Bits videos and being blown away by how wildly different each character was from the next. The arcade experience definitely upended my romanticized view of the series (or least made keenly aware of how long this journey was going to take). Guilty Gear is a series that's been around for decades at this point. While different entries changed things up in different ways, if you had a history with the series, that legacy knowledge gave you a massive leg up. I was playing Xrd when it was brand new, but I was up against players who had been playing Sol Badguy for a decade straight. Saying it was rough would be an understatement! Veteran players' legacy knowledge was multiplied tenfold by the pressure heavy nature of the game. In Guilty Gear, offense is extremely strong and defense is difficult, so a beginner who gets knocked down by a seasoned opponent may well never get to play again. It felt like this against decent Sol players, and there are characters like Millia and Zato who make Sol's offense seem like a walk in the park in comparison. I eventually got over these hurdles, but I had a lot going my way. I had a long history with fighting games. I had friends of a similar skill level who I could play with. I knew what I was getting into, and I was fine getting destroyed for a while (because I knew the end result would be worth it). But for every player who sticks with it, there could be dozens who don't (for very understandable reasons). When you're new, you can easily end up just sitting and blocking Zato shadow pressure for 30 seconds straight. Millia can knock you down once and force you to guess a bunch of coin flips in a row before you (might) get to play again. You might get hit into the air by Axl, not know you have to FD to air block his grounded normals, and lose the match right there. The changes Arcsys is making to Guilty Gear 2020 make a lot of sense through this lens— they're trying their best to stop all those things I just described from happening. They want the losing player to at least feel like they're participating in the match.
Final Thoughts
When I was imagining what a simplified airdasher might look like, I never in a million years thought Arcsys would take the next entry in Guilty Gear in that direction. I absolutely understand the frustration that longtime Guilty Gear fans have with the direction the new game has taken— the game isn't necessarily being made with us in mind. On the other hand, Xrd will continue to exist. There's a fan project to implement GGPO netcode into Guilty Gear Accent Core +R. I understand people's mixed feelings about Guilty Gear 2020, but I'm happy they're taking a risk.