Guilty Gear X

Written by Nick Schmidt  on January 11, 2001

Import Review: High-res never looked so good!

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I headed for the Arcade mode, selected one of the 14 brawlers and was on my way. Of course I couldn't help but notice the insane visual quality, and clarity, of the game. If I'm not mistaken, this is the first high-resolution 2D fighting game ever, and boy oh boy does it look ever so sweet. You can definitely tell the difference between Guilty Gear X and any other Capcom fighter out there. There are no blotchy outlines on the characters, no massive pixels jutting out on the joints, and much, much more vibrancy and color than you've ever seen.

But that's just appearance, what about movement? With the high resolution, immensely detailed backgrounds, and crazy effects flying all over the screen, I expected the animation to take a severe hit. While it's not as good as Street Fighter III in terms of animated quality, it's certainly no slouch. In fact, I think I'd go as far as saying it's better than Capcom vs. SNK, that is fairly surprising. The frame-rate also never skips a beat. Man, got to love that, eh?

However, that's not even the best part; oh no. Thinking Guilty Gear X was merely just a fancy graphics demo and nothing more? Well, you couldn't be any more wrong if you shot a donkey square in the nuts. This game plays like a dream. It mixes a little bit of Street Fighter with a dash of speed, ala Marvel vs. Capcom 2, and then spices things up with its own unique playing style.

The first thing you'll notice is the "tension meter" at the bottom of the screen. Very similar to the "super meter" in Capcom's games, the tension meter slowly builds up as you attack. Of course when the meter is filled to a specific amount, you can perform all sorts of extreme combos and specials moves. But what's really cool and different about the tension meter is that it only fills up if you attack and become more aggressive. That's right, instead of "turtling" and defending, Guilty Gear X encourages players to get pissed and beat the crap out of there opponents. Of course the game does allow blocking (and air blocking, thank God!), but the focus just shifted.

Since the game would prefer you to be as lethal as possible, it only makes sense that it should penalize you for being a wuss. If you find yourself dashing (by the way, dashing is by far the best thing about the fighting engine. A quick double tap of the desired direction, and it zips you along. It's even compatible in the air!) Backwards too many times, or not attacking in a certain amount of time, the computer takes away whatever you had in your tension meter, ultimately leaving you nothing. Finally, a game that punishes the weak!

As for the instant kill moves, they are still there, except now you have to completely build up your tension gauge, press all attack buttons and then, and only then, can you attempt the move. If you fail, or the person blocks it, you are without the tension gauge for the rest of the match. So it's now pretty much a gamble, or a major act of desperation. Overall, I would definitely say this is the best 2D-fighting engine out there.

Musically, Guilty Gear X is fabulous. It features none other than cheesy, 80's metal. But wait! Before you go cutting of your ears in agony, let me just say that's it's actually done right for a change. "What's this? 80's metal? Done right?"

Yes, no horrible singers, just great music. It fits the style of the game so perfectly it's amazing. Especially the song on the music CD that comes with the game, I find myself listening to that a lot.

So everything sounds grand right? Well yeah, pretty much, but there is one glaring problem: No replay value. The one player game gets old pretty quickly, but the two-player mode is absolutely awesome. There's arcade mode, versus, training, and survival. You can open up several secret characters through the arcade or survival mode, but other than that there are no secrets to keep solo players motivate; although the survival mode is very cool.

The thing that really pissed me off though, is the extreme difficulty. Things were fine until I got to the bosses and realized how freakinС cheap they are. So like any frustrated gamer, I changed the difficulty to easy, but I still had major trouble. Oh well, maybe in the third game this will be fixed. C'mon Sammy, we want another sequel!