Guilty Gear Strive's Success and Fighting Game Accessibility
A while back, I wrote a blog post about what a simplified Guilty Gear game might look like. While anime/airdasher fighting games are fun, they are traditionally more niche within the competitive community, with fewer tournament entrants than series like Street Fighter or Tekken. I thought that this niche status was at least in part due to their complexity/difficulty (whether real or perceived), so I wondered if some kind of simplified “introductory” airdasher would help expand their audience.
For my thought experiment, I used Guilty Gear Xrd as a starting point, and then speculated about what mechanics you could remove to simplify the game (while still having the game feel like Guilty Gear). I wrote this before the release of Guilty Gear Strive (back when Strive was still being referred to as Guilty Gear 2020). At the time, we’d only just started learning about the mechanics of the game.
When I compared my Guilty Gear for Dummies thought experiment with what we knew at that point about Guilty Gear Strive, the two seemed closely aligned. Maybe that’s not too surprising—anybody looking to simplify Guilty Gear would likely independently come to many of the same conclusions.
Let’s fast forward to the present day. Strive has been out for almost exactly a year now. Is Strive the simplified version of Guilty Gear I’d imagined?
Let’s not bury the lede. I think there are two points worth examining—
Guilty Gear Strive did simplify a lot, but I think they went about it in a pretty weird way, and they also made some things more complicated and less approachable. This is not a value judgment of whether it’s a good game or not, but Strive is not really simplified Guilty Gear.
I probably overrated the value of simplicity. Despite point #1, Strive has been a very successful game.
Strive—Not That Simple
Before release, it really looked like Arcsys was trying to make Strive more simple and accessible. We found out that they standardized wake-up timings, they allowed you to air-block ground moves without using Faultless Defense (FD), and they flat out removed more esoteric mechanics like Blitz Shield and Instant Kills. They got rid of Dead Angle Attacks and integrated their functionality into the Roman Cancel (RC) system instead, which instantly made sense and was a very elegant way to simplify without actually losing the mechanic.
However, some things went in the opposite direction. As soon as the beta tests began, everyone was frustrated with the gatling system. Charts were made attempting to lay it out for people:
You could argue that if you made the same kind of chart for an Xrd character, it’d look just as convoluted, but that’d be missing the point. In Xrd, like in most airdashers, weaker buttons can just chain/combo into stronger buttons (for the most part).
For example, In Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3, from weakest to strongest, your attack buttons are L (light attack), M (medium attack), H (heavy attack), and S (special/launcher). Most characters can just combo L > M > H > S. The timing is pretty lenient, and it’s easy to explain. Unlike Street Fighter, where you can get by without combos for a while, in airdashers, you really do need combos right off the bat, so making basic combos straightforward like this helps ease people into the game.
In Guilty Gear, the button strength order is punch > kick > slash > heavy slash > dust. Pre-Strive, you could start with your quicker/weaker buttons, and work up the stronger attacks to piece together a simple combo. This is easy to understand if you look at the default button layout on an arcade stick:
If you start with kick, you just drum your fingers across the top row of buttons from left to right and get a basic combo.
The Strive system is simpler in a sense—from a given button, you have just one or two options for what to do next, but you can’t summarize it in an easily remembered rule of thumb like, “just go to the next stronger button.” There are a bunch of individual special cases you need to memorize and internalize.
It seems like they wanted to limit the options in order to make offensive pressure less scary, but I think the method they used is inelegant and feels clunky.
Maybe Accessibility Doesn’t Matter?
If you made it here, you might be thinking, “Zissou—I get what you’re saying, but Strive seems to be doing really well.” You’re right! It’s not clear how well the game has sold to date and how that compares with their sales expectations, but the game is clearly very popular with players.
What’s going on here? Story time! A while back, I was talking with a friend who was into Smash (Smash 4 was pretty new at the time). I forget the exact circumstances, but it went something like this:
I remarked that I wished I could play Smash at a basic level.
He said he’d thought the same thing about Street Fighter.
We agreed that for a couple weeks, we’d practice the other person’s game while we tried to coach each other.
I taught him Street Fighter V with him using Chun-li. I basically followed the plan from my Think, Don’t Mash! videos. On the Smash side, he recommended I try using Dr. Mario, since he was a pretty standard character so it’d be a good way to learn the game. He explained that short hop > neutral air was a strong tactic. If you’re not familiar with Smash, to short hop, you press and release the jump button really quickly (apparently you have three frames, i.e., 3/60ths of a second to do this). I found it pretty difficult to do consistently.
Smash also has tilt attacks. These are strong grounded moves that you want to use pretty frequently. These are performed by pushing the analog stick just a little bit in one direction and pressing the attack button. If you press the stick too far, you get a smash attack rather than a tilt, and I found it very difficult to get tilts when I wanted them.
People usually bring up Smash as an example of accessibility done right, so naturally, I wondered why nobody talked about how hard it was to do some of these very basic techniques. I think the answer is that nobody cares. In fighting games, the most visible and iconic moves a character has are their specials. When people think of Ryu, they think of hadoukens. When people think of Mario in Smash, they think of fireballs, and anybody can hop in and immediately easily chuck fireballs. Sure, they can’t do short hops or tilts, but it doesn’t matter to them. They don’t even know those things exist.
What actually matters is that people believe a game is accessible. The actual mechanical complexity of the game might just not matter that much. Arcsys convinced the FGC that Strive was a good entry point for the Guilty Gear series, and that’s kind of all that matters.