What Could This Be? Thoughts on Faust in Guilty Gear -Strive- (Prerelease)
In some fighting game series, a new entry means the developer rebuilding the game from the ground up. Street Fighter V is very different from Street Fighter IV. This is the norm for some series, but Guilty Gear has (up until now) kept things much more constant. Even when they gave the game a complete visual overhaul and switched over from 2D sprites to 3D models in Xrd, the underlying gameplay didn’t stray far from what had already been established. The upcoming Guilty Gear Strive is the first time we’re seeing really big changes to both the game as a whole and individual characters. A lot of my posts and videos are focused on fighting game fundamentals. This post is going to be a little more in the weeds/technical, so fair warning: this is a bit different than my normal stuff. I picked up the Guilty Gear series when Xrd first launched in arcades back in 2014 (I’m old!). It was clear that a lot of knowledge would transfer over from previous entries, so I started practicing Faust in Guilty Gear X2 #Reload before Xrd’s arcade release. The developers had stated that #Reload was their starting point for Xrd, and I figured it’d be good to get a head start, especially since losing in the arcade gets expensive really fast. Up through Xrd, they’ve taken this incremental approach to design, but with Strive they’re attempting to reinvent the series. I don’t want to bury the lead too much here. I played Faust during the Strive closed beta back in April and thought he was terrible. I didn’t concern myself with it too much— it’s an early beta and things could change quite a bit by the time the game is actually released. Just last week they did a stream with a few different Strive announcements and also showed some exhibition matches. The game is obviously much closer to release now, and they also gave seasoned fighting game pros some time to sit down with the game to figure things out, so these exhibition matches should give us more insight into what the final game might look like. After watching Nage (the best Faust player on the planet) vs. GO1… Faust still looked pretty awful (read: possibly bad, and at very least, not very ‘Faust-y’). What’s going on here? Let’s take a step back and look at Faust’s core design. His defining special move is his item toss, where he throws a random item onto the stage. These items have different effects (and a few can even be bad for Faust), but as a whole, they tilt the match in Faust’s favor. Letting Faust sit back and throw items uncontested makes things better and better for him, so you’re forced to approach. However, Faust has a bunch of long range moves and great anti-airs, so he can punish you for trying to approach. The Faust player throws items if they can tell you’re wary of approaching. If the Faust player thinks you’ll attempt an approach, they stop throwing items and wait to punish your aggression. This is Faust at his most distilled. To judge the strength of that game plan, you can really just narrow your focus to a few variables:
Ease of item toss: The more items you can throw and the more safely you can throw them, the better off you are.
Odds of good items: The items don’t all have the same probability of coming out, so the higher the probability that you throw a good item, the better off you are.
Strength of items: the better the good items are, the more effective your plan is.
Ability to punish your opponent’s approach: this one is pretty self-explanatory.
Ease of Item Toss
Ease of item toss can be measured pretty easily; it’s really just “how long does item toss take?” In Xrd, normal item toss took 23 frames (if you need a frame data refresher, I recommend watching Solving Problems With Frame Data and Reacting in Fighting Games). At 23 frames, this is nearly impossible to punish on reaction unless the opponent is right next to Faust (and even then, it’s tough). You're leaving yourself vulnerable for 23 frames, so if your opponent decided to attack, you’re going to get hit, but your opponent has to guess that you're going to do it. Figuring out frame data from Strive beta footage isn’t a perfect science, but we can get pretty close, and item toss looked to be around 45 frames (and it seemed about the same in the recent exhibition match). That puts it at roughly double the commitment it used to be. 45 frames is a really long time in a fighting game. This pushes it firmly into “consistently punishable on reaction” territory. It also means if your opponent guesses you’re going to throw an item and decides to approach, they can cover a lot more ground before you can attempt to stop them.
Odds of Good Items
Item probability is also something we can measure. Let’s start with Xrd. I made videos on my old channel about Faust’s Xrd items, and as part of the research I did 2000 item tosses in training mode to get an idea of how common different items are (I am an insane person). You can look at the video description if you’re curious about the raw data, but it ended up being roughly a 50% chance of getting a good item. How exactly you classify items is partly opinion and can even vary depending on the match-up, but let's say those are our odds. I did 300 item throws in the Strive beta, and only about one out of every three item tosses was a good item. 300 isn’t a huge sample size (so there’s some margin of error here), but going from one in two to a one in three chance of throwing a good item is a pretty big change, especially if it's much more difficult/risky to throw items in the first place.
Meteor 21 / 7.00%
Banana 29 / 9.67%
Afro 29 / 9.67%
Chibi Faust 35 / 11.67%
Trumpet 42 / 14.00%
Hammer 46 / 15.33%
Bomb 41 / 13.67%
Weight 47 / 15.67%
Doughnut 10 / 3.33%
Total throws 300
Strength of Items
What about how good items are? Even if throwing items is tougher and the odds of a good item are lower, it could be balanced out by good items being REALLY GOOD ITEMS. Let’s take a look.
Meteor: Clearly good
Similar to previous games, meteors launch at your opponent after a short delay.Chibi Faust: Clearly good
After throwing the chibi, he marches back and forth until he hits an opponent. After the initial hit against the opponent, he jumps at them after a short delay for a final attack.Hammer: Clearly good
Similar to previous games where it controls the air space in front of you until it hits the ground and goes away.Afro: Neutral or slightly good
Whoever picks it up gets an afro on their head making it easier to hit them (and the afro can be lit on fire with certain attacks). Because Faust throws items toward his opponent, it’s more likely they’ll get stuck with it, so this item might slightly favor Faust.Banana: Neutral or slightly good
Heals whoever picks it up. Once it’s eaten, it leaves behind a banana peel which will hit whoever steps on it. Since the item is thrown toward the opponent, they’re more likely to be the one to have to deal with the peel.Bomb: Neutral
Faust throws a bomb that explodes after a second or two, and the explosion can hit both characters. However, unlike previous games, either character can hit the bomb to bounce it toward their opponent.Weight: Neutral
Faust throws a weight. Any character on the ground when the weight lands is knocked down.Doughnut: Neutral
Heals whoever picks it up.Trumpet: See below
Trumpet gets its own paragraph, because trumpet is the worst item Faust has ever had. Whoever picks up the trumpet summons an army of chibi Fausts to run across the screen. Because items are thrown toward your opponent, they are far more likely to pick it up than you are. In the exhibition match, Nage threw trumpet six times and GO1 picked it up five of those six times, gaining a huge advantage when he did so. In previous Guilty Gears, the worst items were food like Doughnut, since they locked you out of item toss as long as they remained on screen. Trumpet is several steps worse than that, since more often than not, your opponent will end up with something as strong as your best items.
Ability to Punish Your Opponent's Approach
This one is the toughest to answer. We don't really know how effective Faust's various pokes and anti-airs will turn out to be until players really have time to get comfortable with the character. Unlike how we looked at items earlier, there's not a great data-driven approach to solving this. It's just going to take some time. Since we can't say for certain, let's give Arcsys the benefit of the doubt and assume this aspect of the character will turn out fine.
So what does all this mean?
At the time of writing, we're still six months out from release, and a lot can change between now and April (and the game will continue to change even after release). If they want to make his items stronger, it wouldn't be too difficult. They could make good items a bit more probable, make trumpet land closer to Faust than to his opponent (or don't let the opponent pick it up at all!), and speed up item toss. All I can say with some amount of confidence is that based on available information, Faust's traditional strategy/style seems pretty weak. Throwing items is much riskier than was in past games, and the items you are able to throw are less helpful. Of course, Faust might just end up having a different game plan altogether that's really strong but doesn't really involve his items. It's important to remember that you're never obligated to play the same character in every entry of a series, so it's worth exploring the cast and seeing who's the best fit each time around. I don't want to be all doom and gloom. After all— Xrd isn't going away (and they're adding rollback netcode to Plus R!), but it's interesting to look at a game in development and try to understand what's going on.