The thing about "Childlike Wonder" is that it accounts for both the beautifully earnest, warm, yet often unsettling and traumatic experiences of early life. Despite the game's general lack of challenge, Rayman 2's world perfectly walks the line between lush, comforting sentimentality and supernatural peril. It captures the bizarre, wholesome yet visually disturbed imagination of an adolescent kid. Only a handful of minutes traversing the dimly lit, melancholic Glade of Dreams is enough to lure the player into a false sense of security, preying upon the childlike naïveté the game’s atmosphere promotes. This is used to toss them into a blind pit of jarring sounds and visuals crafted from the most chaotic recesses of a child’s creative mind. Whether they’re the unintelligible mumblings of a limbless marsupial-dog hybrid, or the horror of escaping the clutches of a toothed monster from within its maw, these striking visuals, much like the memories and thought processes of a child are seen as erratic or hard-to-follow in the eyes of a more jaded adult. This is why, in a meta sense, it feels almost poetic that this game has no definitive version, having been re-released on all but your TI-84 X Calculator over nearly two decades, each platform offering a somewhat different interpretation on the game's vision.

My Policy Guidelines

-----------------------------------------------------------

"I know Kino when I see it"

What I find most interesting about Guilty Gear is that if I wanted to not like it a lot of the underlying complaints I have expressed with the fundamentals of league could apply here. While league felt tactile and rewarding to press the buttons and play a game, while the controls felt great. The amount of over complexity to setting up and learning the game, the excessive roster size (meaning you cant really guarantee knowledge and awareness on every matchup), and the obscure systems you have to learn from external knowledge is something that both games share. So why is it a problem in League and not in Guilty Gear?

There's a few shallow but not altogether dismissable reasons why. League is a team game, unlike guilty gear, so your mistakes get intensified by others and the culture of mocking people for mistakes is thus more intense. League emphasizes that there's a lot of setup you need to do and understand before you can even hop in, runes, shops items, etc. And of the course the length of a game is radically different, League's game system is 30-45 minutes per game which means if you feel miserable or dont want to play, you're trapped with the game for much than you might otherwise want. These distinctions do actually matter in terms of interfacing with these systems and their general implications. Instead of being about self improvement its about improving for a team and struggling to keep up. The more isolated way the game presents itself here allows for improvement and enjoyment at your own pace. With all that said though I do think that its worth the comparison because my experiences with non-platform fighting games, like Street Fighter and Skullgirls has been seeded with a degree of extreme frustration. Not being able to execute the moves I want to feels painful and often it feels like the game itself is moving at a pace that I can't possibly keep up with. Functionally not much is experienced differently on the macro level of trying to learn a game and failing between these 2 systems of complexity, fast execution, and deadly reflex.

Where Guilty Gear succeeds where these other games fail is that the game itself is so amusing and so bizzarre that getting the inputs right 100% of the time doesnt really matter. They went above and beyond in terms of player expression here, you can play a robot who set explosive traps or a girl wielding an anchor as a weapon. This player expression is something I complimented league for to, but the difference is that you don't feel tied down to having to learn the game or enjoy it through just 1 character. The game itself is fun enough to mash buttons in and try to get cool tricks to happen on screen.

Guilty Gear realized that the best way to make a game rewarding to play is to make it fun for casual players to mess around in. Skullgirls has a character entirely built around the concept of using drills but most of their attacks are built up in large chains you desperately have to flail to input properly. Meanwhile Guilty Gear gives plenty of decent and easy to execute attacks in neutrals or diagonals, then you can just flirt around with the half circles and chains from there as it suits you. Making the early game play experience not about technical execution at all costs in order to have a good time and not feel like you're missing out on half your attacks is pretty important. As long as I can get the dolphin attack to pop up from play as May once every game or so I'm fine.

The aesthetic components of Guilty Gear are also great. The game has a young adult anime feel similar to Baccano in that all the characters have a distinct personality and set of goals. The large roster becomes a positive because it feels like you're learning about a world through character play.

Overall the momentum based gameplay is so entirely satisfying that it becomes impossible not to recommend. I can also completely understand why the trans community was so excited to see Bridget come out as trans to, shes really cute and has peak 'boymoder' vibes in these earlier titles. A lot of japanese media feels pretty comfortable just resting on a net level of gender subversion, presenting a girl as a boy or vice versa, that to see transition as such a legitimate narrative throughline in Strive is really amazing.

You don't have to play a game for 30 hours to know if a game is good, you don't have to become an 'expert' that 'ordains' an opinion onto a game. Sometimes you just kinda know. Even if I never become good at this game or series I'll still respect it immensely and be able to squeeze at least 20 to 30 hours of fun out of each title jumping around and doing the flashy attacks.

---------------
Talk to
PSI
Check
Goods
Equip
Status
---------------