Guilty Gear isn’t a very long endearing series, although it is a very popular one. More like the rambunctious relative to SNK’s King of Fighter series, Guilty Gear turned the tide of fighting, featuring some neat fighting gimmicks, including alternate special moves not seen in many other fighting games. The multiple specials that allowed characters to execute some devastating (and equally cool looking) attacks separated the fighting series from the rest of the herd. PSP owners are now getting a Guilty Gear game with an added adventure mode.
Generally, the original story in the Guilty Gear series was about humans looking for a technological edge (silly humans), by using magic to infuse human DNA with animal DNA. The results came in the form of unthinking, mindless drones called “Gears”. In result of tampering with nature, an intelligent Gear arose from the experiments, named “Justice”. He claims humans are evil and goes through the motions of wanting to wipe them off the face of the planet. In response to the threat from Justice, the humans organize a group called “The Holy Knights”. The group will lead a war against “Justice” but “The Holy Knights” need “Crusaders” and a new leader. So a tournament is held to decide who the leader will be for the “Holy Knights”; their job would be to seek out any remaining Gears and destroy them. The original game, like earlier KOF games, had some good story concepts. However, after the original GG, each Guilty Gear game was comprised of a simple story just to feed gamers on the concept that a tournament must be held. As of course, in tradition of every other fighting game out there, the series’ story slowly faded in its depth. However, the gameplay and fighting scheme readily became more and more engaging.
Guilty Gear, though, is more-so known for its characters and fast-action fighting style. And like KOF, the GG series isn’t afraid to kill off characters for story purposes. Unlike KOF, though, Guilty Gear substituted a dwindling plot for even edgier characters, which continues to give the series some renewed life. This latest installment of Guilty Gear is based on Guilty Gear X2 #Reload: The Midnight Carnival. The game offers gamers some cool new features that include a Final Fight mode where players can walk around in classic beat-e’m-up fashion taking on multiple enemies.
There are 19 levels in the new feature, called Booster Mode. In Booster Mode players will do battle with monsters, optionally performing many of the characters’ wide range of signature and special moves. Fighting the monsters in the Booster Mode looks quite entertaining. The gameplay retains the fast and in-your-face combat from the normal versus mode, except there are multiple enemies to face off against and players will travel around in classic side-scrolling fashion. Players, of course, can choose from their favorite Guilty Gear characters, including, but not limited to, I-No, Sol, Ky, May, Axl, Potemkin, Johhny, Zato, and Chip. The roster expands well over 20 distinct characters, plus bosses.
Running on the PSP, the characters still looked amazingly smooth and retained their dynamic animations. Most of the time sprites take a downgrade or a pixel reduction when ported to handhelds or consoles (especially for Guilty Gear, given that the sprites are almost twice as big as those of other 2D fighters). Although here, every character is as detailed as ever and they look just the same as their arcade counterparts. The backgrounds are also well designed, sporting fancy 2D structures with 3D overlays. In some cases, stages are rendered in 3D, though used as 2D sprites. Regardless, they look nice, despite some of them being visually-enhanced rehashes from previous games in the series.
Pages
