Retronauts - 779: Guilty Gear

Episode Date: July 6, 2026

Heaven or Hell! Kevin Bunch, Diamond Feit, Patrick Miller and Irene Koh talk Guilty Gear, a series known for rock references, anime aesthetics and aggressive action.Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

This week on Retronauts, innocent until proven guilty. Welcome to Retronauts, the classic gaming podcast with the most guitar riffs per capita. And this week we're discussing a very rock and metal-tastic fighting game series. Arc System Works Guilty Gear. This is the franchise that I feel like really put the company on the map more than anything else they've done. And it really, like, established the sort of colloquial air-dasher anime fighting game, like template, the style of it. Really has generated really grassroots and fan base since it debuted way back in 98. And I'm very happy to be here with some people who are extremely knowledgeable about the series and also very enthused about it.

And I'm sure between one of us, maybe someone has seen some of Yilty Gear 2. So who do we have here? Let's start with our California delegation. Sure, I can kick it off. I'm Patrick Miller, aka Pat the Flip. Let's see, gosh, I started playing Guilty Gear with XX. Back in the day, it was an arcade specialty back then. Now these days, I do a lot of organization for the Exeter community,

as well as working in fighting games. I was on to XCO for about 10 years. And I'm joined here with, among others, my lovely wife Irene, who... Hi. I'm Irene Co. Also known as Coquette or in the fighting games scene, I go by Imoto, which means like Little Sister, because I feel like the perennial little sister learning things about fighting games.

I'm actually quite late to the fighting game part of all this. I'm a professional illustrator. And my first introduction to Guilty Gear was actually on Live Journal decades ago, where I thought Guilty Gear was like a Yaoie manga series, because That's all the art I ever saw for it. So I was like, that makes sense. So, yeah. You're not wrong.

There's a lot of that. True. And who's joining us from Osaka? Hello, this is Diamond Fight. And the existence of soul bad guy suggests the presence of a Luna good girl. Prove you wrong. I'm not sure. I'm not sure the series could prove you wrong on that one.

Anything goes in this series, as we'll talk about. Yeah. And, you know, if you're not really familiar with Guilty Gear, it's, boy, where to start on this one? I would say, Freddie Mercury kills his wife. Yeah. And that's like before the game starts. Yeah, that's all background. That's lore. Honestly, I would say, if you're not familiar with Guilty Gear, like, that's okay. I feel like this series really is like a cult favorite. Like, it's going on for a long time. we'll talk about. It has lots of entries, arcade, consoles, it's been at Evo. Like, it's, it's,

it's been out there, and it's got a lot of fans. But it's also like, it's not a streetfighter, it's not a moral combat. It's not a K-O-F. It doesn't, it just, it doesn't have that kind of reach. So, yeah, like, like, like, maybe you've just seen these characters online for 10 years, and you're like, oh, that's from a fighting game. I thought it was just, you know, two guys in love. Like, no, no, it's a fighting game. And there might be in love, too. It could be both things. Yeah. It's got really, like, sick character designs. It does.

It does. And I get it. Yeah. It's one of those games. Like, some games are niche because the things they do are, are, like, special and significant, so special and significant that only a small percentage of the population would love them. I think Gilty Gear is niche because it's got such strong, creative opinions that if you're into it, you're really into it.

But if you're not into it, then you don't really, it doesn't land as much. You don't understand what makes it so special compared to everything else out there. I got into Guilty Gear after a good amount of time playing mostly Capcom fighting games and S&K games, right, during the late 90s, early 2000s. And for Guilty Gear to hit for me,

I like to say it's a really good second fighting game for a lot of people, especially as someone who engages primarily in the competitive side of things. It was a great second game to get into because there's all these systems and mechanics to learn. and I was already familiar with most of that stuff from other fighting games, so it didn't feel super intimidating.

But if you just get into it for the first time, you're like, why is everything so glam and metal? Why, like, how do these attacks work? What is the deal with all these characters? Like, a street fighter or a tech into a Mortal Kombat, you can anchor your understanding of those games in, you know, martial arts movies, TV shows, stuff like that. But Guilty Gear is like, it's really hard to look at this and go,

oh, yeah, it's just like this. but with guitars. Yeah, the first time I experienced Guilty Gear was like December 2001, January 02, somewhere in that time frame. I had just coming off of my first competitive tournaments for Capcom versus S&K2, I was feeling pretty good about myself. I got invitation to a guy in the local Detroit scene, a kid. He did house sessions every Friday. I usually played stuff that they didn't have at the arcade. And the first time I was stepped in there, they were playing Guilty Gear X, which had just dropped on the Dreamcast.

And I did not know what I was looking at. Just this like match between, it was Potemkin and Milia Rage and, you know, Milia in that game. Like Potemkin, okay, he's a big bulky guy. He's grabbing you. I can parse that out. She is just flying all over the place. She's throwing projectiles. move in the weirdest possible ways.

She's attacking with her hair. It's just, I was just like mesmerized watching this, trying to parse out what the heck is happening here. I'm a weird one in which Guilty Gear actually is my first fighting game, which, you know, so many people, when I finally decided to get into fighting games, everyone was like, don't start with Exert. Like, don't start with Guilty Gear. It's too complicated. It's too much. It's just, there's so much going on. And I did try some others, but in the end, I was like, I'm just going to play Guilty Gear.

And I think it helped that my first Evo experience was, so my background is like first person shooters. I'm like the broiest sort of gamer when it comes to that kind of stuff. So when I met Pat and he brought me to Evo, my first Evo was that one year in Evo where the Marvel three finals had the spirit of Marvel get up on the stage, that random dude who asked for next, you know? and I just, I thought that was so beautifully irreverent. I was like, is this, is this what like fighting games are like? Because that's amazing. And I remember watching Marvel and I had no idea what was going on. I could not parse anything that was happening.

But everyone around me was screaming the move names together. They were doing the dark phoenix, you know, together. And I thought that was so beautiful that I did not even need to care about what was happening. And so I was not intimidated by guilty gear by that point. I was like, I guess this is just what fighting games are. Yeah, I had over time, like, tried to introduce Irene to kind of the more recommended, like, starting points for fighting games around, this would be around, like, I think, 2015 or so. And so it was like, oh, and Street Fighter 5 came out. We tried some Street Fighter.

There's, like, a video somewhere of me, like, trying to teach her footsies with Chunli. And I taught her some samurai showdown because that's another, like, very neutral heavy game to, you know, kind of get in her head, like, how, like, how much. movement works and how attacking and spacing works and stuff like that. And she bounced off pretty quick. Like the most that I got her to stick with something was like, Undernight Inbirth, she did a couple combo trials for, uh, who was it? Wagner. And she was having some fun there. She's like, oh, you know, messing around. I watched her just pressing buttons for a little bit, seeing the combo counter go up. But then she bounced off that too. And it wasn't until I kind of reluctantly introduced her to Exert and set her down to try a couple of characters that she really

got into it. I distinctly remember the day where I was like, yeah, I don't think I'll ever be able to do combos. And he was like, okay, sit down, pick this character, press, kick slash, hard slash. There, you did a combo. It's like, oh, this shit's easy. Anyone can do this. It is to this game's credit.

This whole series is credit that they do make combos pretty easy to like pick up, like, at least the very simple ones. You know, once you start getting into the really like convoluted setups and resets and everything, it gets a little trick. gear. It turns out that if you don't know anything about fighting games, all fighting games are hard and complicated and whatever, so you might as well just start with the one you think looks the coolest. So that was an important lesson learned. Yeah, I get it. Sensible. I was going to say my partner picked up K-O-F-14 when it came out for similar reasons. She's like, yeah, I like to play

things with a lot of characters and teams. Like, okay. I don't know exactly how I fell into Guilty Gear for the first time, but I'm confident it was X in an arcade somewhere. It could have been in Chinatown. But I know that during my first ever visit to Japan in 2001, I brought home a copy of the game on Dreamcast. And then we were playing that back in America on my mod of Dreamcast. And we're like, okay, we don't, we didn't understand everything that was happening, but we're like, you know, also because we didn't speak as much Japanese as we should have to play a video game. But it's like, we, we, you know, we figured out a lot of stuff. We got into it for a while. Yeah, when I got into Guilty Gear with X-X, so it was, I don't believe X-X had the American PS2 release until a little bit later.

We got it in arcades first. So I played it first at Sunnyvale Golf Land while washing out early of a Capcom versus S&K2 tournament. And a friend of mine introduced me to the game as a way to, he thought he was cool. And he was like, he saw that I was down. So he was like, hey, check this out. Like, look at Faust. He's throwing items. It's very much like distracting a young.

child with a toy, right? I was like, oh, this is cool, but it's not the games I'm playing. That's great. Whatever. I'll try this out. And then it showed up at my home arcade, the UC Berkeley Barcade. And that was where everyone started playing it together there. And it's like, I was like, all right, sure, I'll get into this.

And at that time, it was, the people who were into it were either the like set of people just playing competitively in the arcade and would play third strike, then we'd play guilty gear, then we'd play Alpha 3 or CBS 2 or whatever. or it was kids from the anime club. Like people who maybe hung out at the arcade every now and then, but we didn't really see step up to fighting games. I would see people had never seen touch, you know, step up to the other games play specifically Guilty Gear.

And they always picked Kai. And it was actually, it was really interesting to me because it's kind of my first time seeing the fighting games appeal to people outside the competitive set. I'd been playing for a couple years at that point. And we hadn't really had like anime club kids get in there before. So it's interesting to see that, like, who else was into this game and how they found out about it. Actually, one of my freshman year roommates or sweetmates knew about Guilty Gear XX and mentioned it to me when we were moving our stuff in because you saw my PlayStation.

And I, I didn't, like, it didn't occur to me that Guilty Gear of all games would be the game that other people connected to. Like, I could bond with people over Virtual Fighter or Soul Calibur or whatever, but, you know, this is maybe the only other dude at the campus who knew what Guilty Gear was. at all. And that kind of niche appeal makes it easier to connect with people, right? It's like, if I walk up to one of y'all on the street, I'm like, yo, you guys really like Imagine Dragons? One, I don't know what your music taste is, but you'll probably say no. And it's not like knowing who Imagine Dragons is makes you special, right? There's no sacred connection that's coming from that. But if you see someone wearing a Gildegar shirt and you're walking down the street and you're also wearing a Gildegger shirt, like, fate must have clearly put you too in the

same place for that to happen, you know. Well, the Imagine Dragons, like, uh, I hope they're not a sponsor on this podcast. Slamander. It's fine. I'm neutral. That's a neutral statement of Imagine Dragons. Does this not? Yeah, yeah.

All I'm saying is Imagine Dragons is not likely to show up as a reference, right? We're not going to get Strive Season 7, welcome to Dragon Imagine or something as a new character. Okay. I mean, you don't know. Actually, speaking of fate, my, I have a correction. I guess my first fighting game was actually the Sailor Moon fighting game on the Super Famicom, Sailing Mooness. And it caused so many fights between my sister and I. But I didn't find out until many, many, many years later that that was actually made by Arxis before they were Arxas.

So that, yeah, full circle there. Wild-ass game. If you go back and play that game, it's actually, it has some pretty interesting thoughts on what should be in fighting games. that would later kind of make their way into guilty gear in different forms, right? So you have guard cancel specials and dash cancels and stuff like that, which other games weren't really doing that much of when Sailor Moon-S came out. And eventually you'd see stuff like that show up, or similarly inspired McCandah show up,

like Roman cancels for the Guilty Gear series or Bikin's Guard Canceles, stuff like that. They've... I think the first Guilty Gear game also carries over the, like, infinite super is at low time from Sailor Moon, which is really like a weird thing to have, but they did it. It's repeatedly what I see from Arxas, especially the early Arxas work, is they are making fighting games kind of faster and more aggressively than they probably, quote, should have been. And so they end up making really interesting decisions that end up being deeply flawed once

players get their hands on it right. So Guilty Gear, you know, vanilla Guilty Gear is, competitively a wasteland because of a lot of different stuff. I actually haven't played the game much myself, but I've seen a good amount of infinites, you know, instant kills not being or a little bit maybe too accessible, that kind of stuff. Also, you win the whole game off an instant kill, which is pretty great. Guilty Gear X also similarly had a lot of issues of mechanic tuning. You have stuff like faultless defense cancels, right? So faultless defense is a blocking mechanic that lets you avoid chip damage. But you can prematurely cancel out of some moves within that lets you get loops and

infinites where you probably wouldn't want them. I played, so XX was my competitive introduction to the series. And once we kind of figured out what was up with the game, everyone realized that Slager's bite could be looped into itself over and over and over. And so I just had to deal with a bunch of Slayer bite infinites all day. And actually, the funny part about competing in that game back in the day was this is when anime fighting game distribution. and publishing in the U.S. was not taken for granted and a given like it is now, right?

If you talk to Guilty Gear players now, the Americans, the Western fighting game scene is actually a lot more sway with Arxis. I've talked to Japanese players who have told me that, that like, you know, Americans get all the good merch and they listen to the Americans too much on the internet, blah, blah, blah, but back then it's like we didn't, we got XX on PS2, but we didn't get reload. And so Evo 2004, I think, everyone had to play on the older. X-X version, even though all the Japanese players were used to reload. And even, like, I had a burned copy of reload, right? So I didn't care. But, you know, now we get, we get the games all at the same

time and it's great. But back then, there was a lot of disparity where you'd have to figure out, hey, what version are we playing? What version are you used to? What version are we getting here, you know? It was very strange. I remember, like, because at the time, you know, a lot of these companies were making things for the arcade first, which is great if you had arcades around that were getting these new games from Japan, which. which, you know, our local arcade had Guilty Gear X, then someone bought it off of the arcade, and they didn't have it anymore.

And then they closed, like, a few years later. They never got XX. In Japan, they got XX, and then, like, a year later, the PS2 port came out there, and then, like, we got that so many months after that, and that sort of continued with all of the XX games, because, you know, they really pulled a Capcom there and made, like, what, five additional revisions of it?

Yeah, there were what, two different versions of reload. There was slash and possibly, I don't remember if slash got more than one version. There's AccentCore and then Accent Core plus R. Even in the ExcerD days, and I think Blais Blue and persona as well, like, Arxas wasn't doing simultaneous releases across region. And that is always kind of held the anime, or at least the Arxas player community back a little bit when it comes to international competition. It wasn't really until Strive that they started doing concurrent release everywhere. and it's you know that was always kind of a sore spot competing because we're like well we can grind this game as much as we want but if we're six months late to the new version like we're

going to have just less time to do all this um which is why it's actually really nice now at least for the exord community like irene and i are pretty active organizers here we organize you know monthly in person events weekly net play events all kinds of stuff and it's gotten to the point where the japanese players are a little bit envious and they've started to participate in our rev tuesdays because they don't have the same set of local communities or net play events that they once did. You know, I think this is a good time to, like, provide a little bit of background about Arxas, because I don't know if we've really talked about Arxas on this podcast before. Not so much.

We definitely mention them in their Hoke-Donokan episode because Hocton Okin. But they did do Hocototan. They did. But I don't think we've done, we've divin dived into their history. So this company was established in 1988 by Minoru Kiroka. He is as far as I know, still the founder and CEO of the company. He described it in an interview as having barely any employees at the time. And they mostly did contract work.

Usually they were like ports of games to other platforms. A lot of stuff for the master system. The Genesis, like Double Dragon for the master system was their work. Battle Toads on the Genesis and, yeah, Sailor Moon, licensed work. Great game. I'm totally with you on that.

Fun fact, one of the one of their contractors on the Sailor Moon game was the creator of Elfin Lead. I did not realize that. That's really funny. It's like still on his website, too. He lists that as one of his work experiences. Very funny. A strange,

strange connection. Small world. I did like that. fighting up that a few of the folks who were on Sailor Moon did go on to work on Guilty Gear like the first one. Beautiful. Like Koki Sadamori, the designer, he went on to Guilty Gear. Daiske Ishwatari, of course.

He was a part-timer. I can see he was still in the university. And the other designer on the credits, Kasia Yukino also went on to work on the first guilty gear. That's cool. It's so hard to find, like, information about that. stuff because, you know, Japanese devs don't really credit that openly. So that's really neat to know.

And they started getting into original works in 1995 when the PlayStation came out. And I believe the first Guilty Gear was their second original work. I really should have written down what the first one was, but it's not really relevant because not quite a game. And, yeah, Daiske Iswitari, the lead designer for all of the Guilty Gear, projects up to strive as far as I'm aware. He's a very interesting guy. Born in South Africa?

Is that right, Diamond? Yeah. You dug that up. He's talked about this in multiple interviews. He was Johannesburg, I guess. So he was there as a kid during the apartheid era. And then I guess they moved back to Japan at some point. But yeah. Also, I encourage any listener, please look up this man's name and you'll see a picture of him. And he looks exactly like you think he does as a dude who's into lots of rock and roll and would make a game like Guilty Gear. Like that's that's exactly who you think he is. Look at him up. Yeah. When I saw him at Evo in, what was it, like 2019 or something like that, he showed up in white leather bell bottom pants, like flared pants and the coolest pointiest boots. And he just, he just looked straight out of his own game.

But the, I actually forgot about the South Africa part. There is a little bit of a nod to that with the character, Answer, who is also from South Africa. really? Yeah, he is a big music buff. I found an interview that he did around 2001 where he was explaining that he's like, he's not just into rock music. He likes just a very wide range of musical genres and he was known for just like bringing CDs into work and listening to them while he was doing stuff. Queen, that was one of his early favorite bands and I think that kind of comes through in Guilty Gear, especially Soul Band. bad guy's actual name being Freddie. Yeah.

He also counted Shinor Ringo as one of his favorite musical performers. I get it. Inspiration for Eno. Yeah. Yeah. I get it. Sheena Ringo's got a hell of a presence. Like if you see even if you just see her on TV, she's like,

oh, I want to learn more about this lady. Hello. As the kids would say, she has aura. Yeah. So, you know, after he graduated, from a university. He joined ARCS's full-time, and Kidoca asked him what he wanted to do there, and Ishwetari told him he wanted to make Guilty Gear. Kidoca is like, okay, go for it.

And he did a lot of stuff there. He was a composer. He sings on, I don't think he really sings at any of the guilty, the early guilty gear stuff anyway, but he's sang on like some of the albums that they've put out for Guilty Gear and like outside of it. He's an illustrator. He did the character illustrators. And he's done some voice acting as well.

Actually, in, in the updated version, I forget if this option was in the original one, but in the updated version for AccentCorp Plus R, you can toggle between, I think it's Nakata and Ishiwitari for the sole bad guy voice. So you can play with his original voice. And he's done like the Volcanic Viper. at like panels and stuff.

I think he likes hamming it up a little bit. He probably, you know, it must be hard to make a main character like that, voice him yourself and then think, oh, I found someone else who can do it better, you know. That dude can do everything. I mean, he made some of the music. Yeah. Like, I was thinking, there was a very funny, like, roundtable a few years ago where they got a bunch of different fighting game developers in Japan in an interview.

And they asked each of them to bring a treasured item as it. relates to, you know, the work or whatever. But Ishu Atari, like, you could see him sort of looking like real sheepish the whole time. And it was finally his turn. He's like, I think I misunderstood the assignment. Because everyone else brought like, you know, something related to Tekken, like old tech and concept art or, and he's like, I brought my queen, like vinyl. He's like, this is my most tragic. And they're like, no, no, no, no. Like, that's, that's appropriate. Yeah. Ironically, from what I've heard, he's not very good at Guilty Gear. Yes. I think he's, he mentioned that himself one time as well, which is really funny.

Just has to stay one step ahead of the rest of the dev team. He's busy being good at 10 other things or whatever. Yeah, he's a real like Renaissance man. Yeah, yeah, fascinating dude. It's funny you brought up, like, that you could toggle his voices because, I believe in that same interview or one of the earlier ones that are on schmoplations, I think actually, he gets asked about voicing soul bad. guy, and he explains that he really wanted the voice actor Koichi Yamada to voice him,

but he was too expensive for their budget, so he wound up doing it because, like, he didn't want anyone else to do it. That's so funny. He's like, well, if he can't, I guess I will. That's really funny. Yeah, I'll talk a little bit about that first game, because, like, it exists. Came out in 1998. It's a janky mess, like Pat was saying.

it's PS1 exclusive, but I did learn researching this that apparently their original design plan, like proposal that he put together, had it coming out on the Nintendo 64, the Saturn, and in arcades. And I cannot fathom this game being something that you would pay 100 yen to play, because it's just to get destroyed in like two seconds. Yeah, the interviewer noted that, you know, as the game exists now, if that had a exists in an arcade, that would be infuriating that your opponent could just use one move on you and then the match is over. Yeah. Sounds like fighting games to me.

Yeah, I was going to say, Fist of the North Star isn't too far off from that, right? True. Maybe he underestimated his audience. Although, I'm trying to think, is this a first incident of that? Because all I could think of prior to this is Art of Fighting 3 had that weird mechanic where if you win around with a super move or something, like, you've, you've, you, You can basically end the match, but you still have to, like, get them down. You still have to erase their health bar and, like, win with a certain move.

Whereas the Guilty Gear case is literally like, no, no, do this special move at any time. And if it hits, the game is over, you are the winner. Doesn't matter what round it is. Doesn't matter how much health they have. You've won. Congratulations. It's certainly the first time I've seen a mechanic like that, you know, there's, you have other stuff like ringouts in Virtua Fighter or like some of the Fatal Fury games. But in terms of a move that not only ends the round, but ends the match, I think they were, they were on to something there.

I'm sure they learn the lesson. They learn the lesson where it's like, this is cool, but also we maybe got to tone it down a little bit. Yeah. And I mean, if you think about it, it's, we have cinematic supers is basically taken as a given in almost any fighting game these days, right? The instant kill animations were kind of the closest that we had to that beforehand. And they were like trying to figure this out and like make it fun and you know, not completely overpowered system. Like in that same interview he was talking about how they were tweaking it like right up until it got certified by Sony or for release. And they just kept like, all right, what if we do it this way?

What if we do it this way? And finally the one that the way they've settled on it was like, well, your opponent will have the option to dodge the attack. But, you know, you can still do it anytime. you want to because you're just pushing two buttons together. Yeah, I get the feeling that a lot of, so with fighting games in general, from what I've seen both as playing and organizing, but also in working on them,

you kind of have people who love them because of the opportunity to see two characters doing a lot of really cool stuff on screen. And especially if you think about what set the fighting game genre apart from other genres early on, it was that the characters were bigger on screen than like every other game in the arcade, right? And so you have those people are really drawn to the aesthetics, the rich character fantasies, that kind of stuff.

And then you have the people who are drawn to like the combat, right? And the fun of playing with another person, of learning the systems of combat and the rules and the matchups and all the little intricacies that go into that. And those tend to be like two different groups of people with often very little overlap, right? So it never surprised me when I heard that Ishiu Atari was not so great at the game because that jives with most fighting game developers who I know who love the genre. and are kind of bad at playing it, right? Because they love it for its creative potential. When I look at Guilty Gear and all the mechanical, like, innovations and inspiration they've taken from other games in every subsequent installment, it's always in service of making a fight that looks cool that kind of matches like how you imagine the anime fight playing out in your head, right?

Instant kills obviously are like this major cinematic moment, right? And fighting games then didn't really have a whole lot of that except for like maybe fatalities in Mortal combat, you know. So seeing, seeing, and, you know, seeing them make the, the combat more fluid, adding air dashes and runs over dashes and fixed jump arcs. You know, all that stuff feels like it's in service of making the combat itself look more expressive, look more, you know, fancy, less like walking back and forth and pressing a button and seeing if your opponent gets hit and more like a brawl, right? And it's super cool to see that level of inspiration. but there's always a gap between like when they think they got it and when they get the version that's actually good for players to play like a real ass game on.

And like, I will say, like visually speaking, this is a very striking game. Like you mentioned that fighting games tend to have very large like characters. And I feel like the Guilty Gear series in those like 2D eras, they did have kind of the largest sprites. And like they weren't super well animated. They were very sizable. They looked really cool. They popped very well.

And, yeah, this game has a lot of mobility to it. Like you said, air dashes. I think, like, the double jumps were already here in this first one. I think someone might probably correct me, but if I'm wrong, but from what I was playing of it the other day, they sure felt like it. Might have just been the character. And this was like, this came together from a bunch of people who, like, a half of them didn't really have any game development experience.

They were just sort of come and do this. figuring it out, which is kind of why it took, like, a year and a half for this game to actually, like, go from, you know, the approval stage to actually coming out at a time when game dev cycles tended to be a lot shorter. They dubbed it Team New Blood, apparently, because it's like a bunch of new people. Largely made up of friends he made at college. And he originally, like, I thought this was interesting. Ishiwitari's original concept was just it being like a standard one-on-one fighting game, like a street fighter, where you didn't have like a lot of mobility and etc. But the programmer Hideyuki Anbe, he told Ishwatar like, look, this is not going to stand out very well. It's not going to be very successful unless you do something to like make it interesting.

And that's this is what he landed on. And I think it worked out eventually. Yeah, I will say that while Guilty Gear certainly established, like, a template for what a higher power, higher mobility fighting game looks like and how it functions and everything, they also, I have to assume, took a lot of inspiration from Capcom's work, right? A lot of the stuff that shows up in Guilty Gear, you actually see in, like, vampire, right, the Darkstalker series, which I think was at that point probably like four years earlier or something. my understanding is approximately that Capcom did the work on vampire and that is a big part of what got them the Marvel license, right? To do X-Men versus Street Fighter, Marvel superheroes, all that kind of stuff. And when you look at mechanically how those games work, a lot of it, a lot of the specifics of how the systems work and the level of mobility you get, I have to assume that they were, you know, playing those games and taking notes and getting an idea of what worked and what didn't or how to implement this kind of stuff, which is great.

I think you don't have to reinvent the wheel on that kind of stuff. The fact that they managed to turn it into something where all the characters feel like they're both playing a very different fighting game from each other, but they can all coexist in the same game is extremely novel. Yeah, I really love that about the series. Like, everyone kind of plays their own game and it works. I feel like, I feel like the only other game I've really had that same, like, notion from is the killer instinct from 2013. mean, K.I. took a lot of deliberate steps to make every character as different as they could. And they rely, you know, typically like when you're making a fighting game, the more you have characters disagree on what kind of game you're playing, the harder it is for players to have a good time

playing with each other. Right. Like if one player is playing a game that's all about zoning and space control and the other wants to, you know, stand right next to you and fight, like there is, there are games, of course, most games managed to make that work to some degree, right? But the degree to which two characters can disagree about what game they're playing tends to be somewhat limited because that's how you get cohesiveness essentially in how players play the game with each other. K.I., the core systems around combo breaking do a lot to make sure that no matter what, you're fundamentally coming back to this game all the time, right? But Guilty Gear kind of doesn't do that. Like, they have some things that they agree on. And I remember this actually being kind of a, especially once it got into X and XX,

the tension system, right? And negative penalty. So the way that you build meter and Guilty Gear is by being aggressive, by moving forward. We've looked at like how the memory values work out when you're getting meter in Guilty Gear. And basically what's checking to do is see, hey, are you moving closer to the opponent? If so, we'll give you a little bit of meter. Are you moving away from the opponent? All right.

we're going to decrease the variable that controls how much meter you gain per frame so that you will be rewarded less for doing that kind of stuff. If you run away too much, you get negative penalty and you lose all your meter. And at the time, I remember for XX, like, we were kind of scandalized because so much of especially Capcom fighting games at that point was, hey, what's the least that I can do aggressively and still build meter and try and win the game, right? With Marvel 2, I'm running away with the storm and whiffing her heavy punch like, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. And I'm off the screen. You can't touch me. And I built a whole meter

doing that, right? Third Strike was infamous for whiffing normals to build meter and players not engaging until they were at full strength, you know. And Guilty Year says, hey, we're not going to let you do that. Instead, we're just going to reward you for moving forward. And that ends up being kind of the common ground that everyone plays on, right? Is that no matter what, whether you're a character who likes to do stuff from full screen or a character who likes to do stuff from right next to you, you will invariably end up right next to the opponent when you're winning,

when you're doing the thing you want to do, right? Axel usually isn't going to get a hit from full screen and then stay full screen. He's going to turn that into damage and that requires him to get close. It's a very good summary, yeah. Thank you. I don't know how much else there is to say about this game.

It did get reissued in 2019. So if you really want to try it out, it's on like Steam and it's on the switch. It does sort of set the tone of the series as far as like visual design and the setting, which is all apparently inspired by the manga Bastard. That is so funny to me because if you look at the character lineup, and we should probably talk about the characters

because most of the characters in the original game have become like Star Wars or the series. Not all of them. Some of them went away pretty quickly, but most of the initial lineup have been like, you know, mainstays, and several characters are just straight up named for rock stars or bands. And Bastard does that too.

Like, Bastard, I'm pretty sure that it's the kingdom of Metallicana, and there's a dude named Bon Jovi who just like shouts to people. So the idea that you would have like, oh, yeah, here's my original character. His name is Chip's Enough. Like, that's literally a rock star from, I think, the 70s. Like, he's a little before my time, but like, I've heard of him. I've heard of that name before I heard of Guilty Gear. So like, when I first saw a Guilty Gear, I'd be like, that's just a rock star's name.

Are you allowed to do that? Axel Lowe Yeah, that's also That's very fun To me because in Japan, as I understand it, that's kind of like the nickname he has. Like a lot of foreign names get shortened When they come to Japan

Because Katakana is just, it just It just takes too long. Yeah. So instead of Axel Rose, it becomes Axel Rowe and like, I've had friends who like taught here And like, if you say Axel Rose, no one knows what you're saying,

but if say Axel Lowe, like, oh yeah, okay. I need to give a question. shout out to my old friend and coworker Jonathan Lowe, who was lucky enough to just welcome his first child into the world and decided to name this child Axel. And I DM'd him the moment it happened. I was like, dude, what are you doing? And he's like, you're never going to believe me. He's a third strike player, by the way. Like, he went to SBO. He qualified for SBO and represented the United States. He told me, you're never going to believe me, but I didn't realize that Guilty Gear Axel's last name was Lowe. And it's like, oh my God, what have you done to this child? I don't.

believe him. You could have named him Goku, man. I don't know that anyone will. Look, look. I'm a parent. I've named both my children somewhat subtly after video game characters. You can't just take the first and last name. That's not allowed. You can't do that. Or at least my wife wouldn't let me do that. Yeah, I remember the first time I saw someone play testament and I just thought, oh, come on. You're not even like, you're not even hiding this one. At least it's a word. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, so, you know, we've got Axelow, we've got Testament,

we've got the previously mentioned sole bad guy in Kai Kiske, Ptempkin, May, who, you know, a friend of mine who played a lot of X back in the day and double X, she was a May player. And whenever I see that character, I just remember, like, her refrain in my head, like, Block High to defend against flying dolphins. And I was like, Jesus, why is that still in my head? It's been 25 years. Amelia Chip, Dr. Baldhead, who is not long for this world in this incarnation, but he does show up in a much funnier way.

Zato One, who's like a play on Zatoichi, the like blind swordsman character. I never put it together until now. Oh, my God. I put it together yesterday, which was really embarrassing. Also, I'm like, oh, of course, because he's like, blind swordsman character. line too. Oh my God. Can we talk about Zotto? Because Zato is like, Zato doesn't have a weapon.

Zato has sort of like a shadow or like a demon or something that's like around Zato, which you could argue is basically like a symbiote. And as I understand it, the symbiose name is Eddie. Yes. Which is Eddie Brock, like Venom. Right. And later on we'll get another character named Venom who does not have a symbiote. And I would say that's the cool venom.

But still, it's just, it's so funny how many little things are here. And just unapologetic, eh, whatever, it's fine. It's fine. It's Eddie. It's not to one with Eddie and no, that works. It's fine. And then you had like the characters who don't come back, really.

I mean, they sort of show up again in XX, but like the console version, then eventually plus R. But you have Cliff, who's like an old man with a giant sword, you know, classic, classic trope. And then you have Justice, who's, who she's the antagonist. And she's sort of like. Oh, gosh. I don't want to call her like a big robot, but she does kind of have that, like, design to her.

It really does, it really does feel like a human-sized Evangelian. Like, they've got all, like, if you look at the close-ups, like, it looks like they're made of a bunch of different parts put together, but they also have the long hair, kind of like zero. Like, it's a cool look, but also, like, I think it feels out of place with the other human, like, distinctly human characters to have just straight up have. a robot that looks like someone should be piloting it, you know? Yeah. And she has a massive cod piece. It is by far the most interesting part of her character. It's an obfutator.

She has an obfutator. Yeah. I must say, when you beat the original Guilty Gear, like, at least one of the endings, like, Justice gives this whole speech about, like, how they, you know, they only exist to, you know, to serve war and how does that define them as an essential being? And you're like, man, this is going pretty heavy for, fighting game.

You know, it's like, I'm a bomb. You know, how do you, how do you make a bomb not explode? That's what the bomb is supposed to be. It's like, no, no, oh, my God, okay. And that's why Freddie Mercury has to kill his wife. Yeah. And then you have our hidden character, future Samurai Showdown guest Bikin. Which is funny to me because the first time I saw Bikin, I'm like, is that a last

Blade character? Because honestly, like, Bikin looks out of place in a good way. Like, Justice looks out of place because it looks like just, it should be from some kind of Mek game. And Bikin looks like, yeah, Samarai Showdown on Our Last Blade, you know, they've got the sword. They've got the attitude. I read that Bikin was originally supposed to be male and they decided, and probably each you watch her personally said, oh, wait, our lineups kind of dude heavy. Maybe we should just make Bikin a lady. And to communicate that, they just made sure to give her a huge rack. And like, going forward it only gets bigger. It's like, okay, well, she still kicks ass, you know, do what you want to do.

She's missing an arm. And it a high. Yeah. My understanding is that one of her, one of the character inspirations for her is, is Kenshin. Right. Yeah. Which also for Last Blade, right? That whole game series is what if we could get the Kenshin IP and make a, like, a

Kenshin fighting, two-d fighting game, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. She's this very interesting amalgamation of like, like, like, classic, like Japanese film character inspirations for samurai stuff and then just Kenjin. I do distinctly remember a lot of people making Mugan like edits of her sprite to make Kenchin in the early 2000s.

Hey, at this point, anything not to give that guy money, please. I know, right? Exactly. Yeah, I love how grubby she looked in the first few guilty gear games. I need to bring that back. They need to make her look absolutely like filthy and smelly. I agree. I agree.

She's got feral. She's giving feral. Yeah. But yeah, so this game apparently did well enough for them to make a sequel. It was Guilty Gear X. We've talked a bit about it. Came out in 2000 in arcades and on Dreamcast, and then PS2 the following year on PC.

And my particular favorite, for some reason, it's on GBA. It came out in 2002. It's really good. Yeah, I remember playing a lot of the GBA one at the time. Like, it's kind of a solid game. for being on GBA. So we use we actually use the Biken theme

Momentary Life as the theme for our weekly event Rev Tuesday. It's like the opening song. So every month at the end of the month, I run a beginner and immediate tournament. And for that one, I decided to use the advance, like, cute chip tune version of Momentary Life

is the sort of a tiny tunes version of Rev. Tuesday. Incredible. It's really well done. Like the game itself, is a pretty impressive execution of guilty gear on a GBA. And GBA had a lot of good fighting games on it, right? There is a good Super Turbo or Super SF2 Turbo. There's some KOF.

There's all kinds of stuff. But, uh, Oh yeah, there's tech in advance. There's a tech in one? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You can see like, you don't want to play it.

But you do want to see it just to see how they did it. Yes. But the, the Jeep, I remember playing the GBA version and thinking like, oh, oh, this is like, like a lot of stuff still feels just like it does on a bigger console, you know, it was good. I'm happy to say at a recent local, I was able to get one of our double X, like, plus our specialists to play some Guilty Gear X advance on the mister. And he was, he was fascinated. He's like, you know what, we got to get some of the other like plus our players. Maybe we can like get a bracket going.

I'm like, sure. why not? Let's get this unhinged version going. Yeah, this characters in this one, they're kind of retooled, I think, to play closer to how they do going forward. Because, like, there's a lot of weird move list, move-set things in the first Guilty Gear, and they sort of figure out what they want everyone to be doing at this point. They got rid of Cliff and Justice. They're gone. No one really misses them that much.

Nope. That is still the case. by the way, no one misses Cliff and Justice. People who play Cliff and Justice in PlusR need to just pick another character. Please, pick another character. I'm not going to disagree. One of our local guys plays justice.

I'm so sorry. I've had enough of that one. Pat might be Cliff's biggest hater. So if Cliff has no haters left, you're dead. Exactly, exactly. I have Cliff players show up in my DMs because someone got a kill combo on a chip who is not me. And it's like,

hey, I thought you would enjoy this. And I'm like, What made you think this? Baldhead just put a paper bag on his head. Now he's Faust. Faust. Faust is much cooler and can freight doors. He's great. I'm calling this, okay?

I'm calling it. The bald head to Faust is the biggest upgrade since Shikio became Mukuro and Last Blade. I'm sorry. And someone's in it's that easy. It's like, okay, it's the same dude, but he's going to dressle differently and you can't see his face as well. and he's 10 times cooler now. But in the case of Foss, he's 10 times weirder who, you know, I mean, he's a very relatable character because, you know, I don't know if the listeners know this or not.

I'm actually nine feet tall, but I have terrible posture and no one knows this about me. And that's, you know, I feel represented on screen by Faust, you know. You've got your giant scalpel behind you. Well, it's like the kids, you know, it's just not safe around the kids, but I used to have one. Yeah. Well, now it's up on your wall, like a decoration. It's where it is. It's safe where I need it to be.

It's all right. Yeah. You don't throw that away. But you know, they also introduced some more series mainstays here. You've got, you've got Jam. That's muggerl. Everyone's favorite martial arts cook. You have Anji, the Japanese guy who fights with, like, fans and butterflies.

He's kind of sweet. Johnny, who I absolutely loathe, and he's like a sky pirate. Correct opinion. Awful coin setups. Oh, he's so cool, though. He's so cool. And it's Noria Wakamoto. It's Noria Wakamoto.

You can't get mad at Noria Wakamoto. You can't. I will admit he does have the best round loss line, which is bad knees today, as his, like, excuse for losing. Excellent. Mood. And Venom. You know, you brought up Venom, but this is where you got his start, the cool pool playing guy with his messed up cue ball setups. So is Venom?

Actually, please educate me here. Is Venom wearing a mask or is that literally Venom's hair with dye? That's his hair. It's hair. Okay, it's hair. All right. It's pretty cool hair. It is.

The whole thing is, I mean, that's what I love about Guilty Gear X. To me, that's like, Guilty Gear looks cool, okay? It looks cool. It's not a bad looking game. It's a little rough around the edges. But, like, to me, the leap between Guilty Gear and Guilty Gear X is on par with, like, Street Fighter 2. Like the visual, like the visuals look so much crisper. All the characters have so much more animation.

And yeah, some, yeah, they drop some characters and one cared about. They changed one character from weird to fantastic. They add a bunch of newbies who are like, oh, wow, I really see what trying to go for. And it's like, it's okay that they're not all written. Like, I made jokes about Zato before, but like, if you look at Jam Kudadob. Like, to me, when I look at Jam, I think of Shao Fe from Fatal Fury, who definitely came first, but it's like, they're not the same. It's not a one-to-one character.

They just have a lot of traits in common. It's like, it's okay. It's okay to remix this stuff and make a new character. It's okay if we see your, you know, we see your inspirations. It's fine, you know, especially when you're making, you know, uh, Zhaffa doesn't walk around on one leg. Like, she's, she's not about that. Like, Jam is doing all sorts of different things.

I appreciate that. Yeah, this generation of characters is also where you see Arcsus start to get a little bit more comfortable with designing weirdos that have like specific gameplay mechanics to differentiate themselves, right? If you look at most of the guilty-year cast, a lot of it, like you have Sol and Kai, who are kind of like a Ryu and Ken of the game. And then you have Axel, and that's like, I actually don't know if he plays dramatically differently in missing Link, but he's like, Dalsam buttons, also we gave him a DP.

Chip, really fast, like, Soul Kai type character, right? A lot of those characters feel more or less like variations on a theme, and it's the aesthetics that kind of push them into new areas, right? But you look at Anji, Johnny, Venom, Jam, they all have like specific mechanics that differentiate them, right? Jam can power up her special so she can sacrifice a little bit of time to make her kick specials more powerful. That's cool. Anji's got the auto guard on a lot of his normals and attacks to make him a huge pain in the ass. Not so cool, but hey, that's Anji. Johnny with the, you know, he's got the E.I. Swordsman style, but he has the coins that power up his stuff. So he has to play with those first. That's a finite resource or venom with the pool balls, right? Putting, being able to put pool balls freely down on screen and having them collide with your attacks and as well as each other, right? Like a lot of this is stuff that you could not see them do in a street fighter or a king of fighter so much, right? They were really playing with the the big screen space, the larger than life attacks. Like, even.

stuff like not having attack buttons that are just called punches and kicks, right? Yeah, you have a punch and kick and you have slash and heavy slash. And I think it was an XX that you got dust, right? Yeah. This one, it's like you push both slash buttons and you get a dust. Yeah. But like they're, they're really leaning into the kind of the freedom you get of being able to depict a wide variety of combat fantasies. And they're so much better at exploring the combat design space and trying to figure out how they can create these like interesting ways to play a character that aren't solely aesthetic.

And also if you really want to play Cliff, he's on the PS2 version. So justice. And Robokai for some reason. It's where they introduced Robokai, who was the objectively like goofiest, like, choice to have a character in it doesn't really like come into his own for a few more games where they start giving him as like own unique meter mechanic, but he's here.

He's hanging out. And yeah, this is also where they introduce Dizzy as the final boss. Like, Testament is still the sub-boss, but, but, like, Dizzy, she's, she's kind of, she's an interesting choice for a final boss, I feel like, because coming to this from playing a lot of street fighter and a lot of K-O-F at the time, you're not expecting this, like, this girl with wacky wings, firing, you know, beams at you and stuff to necessarily be the end of your fighting game, but it really fits with, like, the aesthetics of everything else going on here. And I wouldn't be surprised at all if they looked at Gill and Street Fighter 3 with, like,

the red half, the blue half, like, oh, that's cool. What if we have a character in, like, one wing is good and one wing is evil, and they have different moves? And it's like, yeah, that's cool, but also you put so much work into each one of the wings doing different things. You actually made a much cooler character than Gill is. So I salute you. Like, this is way cooler. And crucially, she's not trying to hurt you, right? Like, most of her attacks are the wings hurting you. And she's like either getting deceived or, you know, she's like trying to stop them, right? Yeah.

Her attack detail animation, like the animation details are so crazy if you actually look at them. Like, they're like tapping her shoulder to make her look away while they attack. It's so crazy. Or they're just yanking her along. It's the classic angel, like the angel and the devil on your shoulder, except in her case, their wings attach to her body and they transform and do crazy, you know, combos and fire lasers and stuff. It's beautiful. It's beautiful. I definitely, I was super into Dizzy the first time I found Dizzy in the game. Like, oh, wow, this is an amazing character. Yes.

And, look, her whole plot is that, yeah, I don't actually want to fight. Everyone's coming after me because I'm a gear and, like, you know, everyone hates us because we brought about a devastating apocalypse. But I just want to hang out. So I'm trying to get out of here. Oh yeah, all her move names are like, I use this to go fishing or whatever. Yeah. So if you look at her move list, her entire move set is they're all named phrases, right? At this point in the story, I believe it's like, Testament is protecting her. And she's like, I forget it's like she's in a grove or something, right? Yeah.

And she's basically by herself. She befriends the local animals and stuff. And I think that's how she ends up with stuff like the ice fish and firefish and so on. But all her moves are just her describing how she would use. this for like a pretty innocuous activity right this is what I do when I get cold or something like that um I was I used this to catch fish I think is the ice spikes you know ice bike yeah um which is a pretty great I mean one it's it's a it's an amazing twist from you know having justice as the boss right which is very clearly trying to kill you but also every other fighting game

boss as you pointed out like you know you have S&K bosses at that time and they're all sadistic assholes. You know, Capcom with Street Fighter and stuff, usually it's going to be M. Bison or then you have Gill for the three series and so on, right? You fight through this gauntlet of badass crazy anime characters, and then you find this lovely young lady who I think is probably like two years old when you encounter her in Guilty Gear X. And she's not trying to kick your ass.

And also, she might be one of the hardest fighting game bosses you've ever found. And her theme song is just totally badass. Oh, yeah. Does anyone want to try to explain the premise of Guilty Gear because I can't? It's a lot. It's a distant future situation and the world, I guess, almost ended and, like, got rebuilt because you can still see some ruins. Like, I know in the original Guilty Gear, you've got the Statue of Liberty on the ground.

So, like, this indication that human society used to be there and still exists, but everything got ruined and there's a big, there's a big plot point which I just find hilarious that he would, he just said it out loud. He said, yeah, Japanese people are special in the World of Guilty Gear. I think it's like a Vulcan thing in the Star Trek movies. Like, yeah, like Japan exploded or something. So it's like, if you see an actual Japanese person in the world of Guilty Gear, it's like a unicorn. Like, oh my God, you're Japanese. Which is kind of funny for, from a Japanese company to make that, you know, given all the stuff that Japan has with like, you know, unique just and whatever. but it's still, I don't know, it's...

Yeah, if my understanding of everything is correct, it's set like a couple hundred years in the future as established Freddie Mercury kills his wife, but he's also like part of a group that invented gears, which are like sort of magical creatures that... They were basically using them as weapons. As you do, they rebelled. Caused this big devastating war.

That's why everyone hates gears now, and it's like hunting them down. Also, Freddie Mercury is like the prototype gear, which he doesn't like to, you know, share that information around. But come on, it's, he's been around for like 150 years. Someone's going to notice. Yeah, I'm not super boned up on the lore. But from what I remember, like, it starts with soul bad guy, aka, I think, I think his name is Frederick Bolsara, right? That sounds right.

Yeah. It's Frederick something. I don't remember what the original name of his wife is. and then Osika, right? The three of them are working on developing the tech that I think eventually leads to the presence of the gears, right? Who are these super weapon,

but super like sentient super weapons, right? Aria. There we go. And so Aria becomes justice. Asika becomes known only as that man, basically, until he returns much, much later. And Frederick also becomes kind of a gear, right? and so the forehead thing that he wears, that like forehead protector is to kind of contain him

and maintain his human form, which is why when he goes into Dragon Install mode, I think it like glows or disappears or something, right? So most of the guilty gear stories in each game, I think, have usually some kind of super powerful character who may or may not be a gear or attached to a gear or something. And the objective is usually like, chase them down and figure out what the heck their deal is about.

Which is why Dizzy is such an amazing, contrast. In general, I assume that a lot of this stuff is just kind of, you know, there's a lot of, when you look at Japanese created media, there's a lot of stuff that is like dealing with the kind of the reverberating effects of the nuclear attacks, right? And so in this case, like, oh, Japanese people are rare, but have superpowers. It's like, oh, what if we, you know, they were irradiated maybe, but it wasn't that bad and gave you like super strength or something like that. And that's why, that's why May, it's just, Japanese girl, and that's why she can swing around a 10,000-ton anchor, right?

Nothing special about her training. It's just she was born that way, right? And there are like story beats later on where it's where they actually, like, you know, there's a colony and exit of remaining Japanese people. And, you know, and there is a lot of other story stuff that moves this along. But often I find that the inspiration for, in terms of narrative pacing for Guilty Gears, is closer to like a Hollywood movie, especially as they get more talented and more more direct in how they animate stuff.

And so it's all these like kind of unfamiliar or complicated themes mediated through like a sequence where soul bad guy rides a missile into a big bat or something like that, you know, as you do. I just want to establish that guilt in the world of Guilty Gear, some of the characters are gears, but some of the characters are not gears. And it's not all the same. So please, you know, I guess read Wikipedia. And I think Disney notably is the Innocent Gear. right? She's not guilty

gear. She just wants to hang out. And then there are the valentines who have gear-like powers but are not gears. Yeah, it gets so convoluted. Which is probably why with XX they add in like a story mode to all this.

They're like, here you go, here's a story mode with branching paths. Enjoy the lore we've built. When, wait, XX is where Eno is the big bad, right? Yes. Yeah. My girl right there. I love her. Love her.

I guess one other thing about X, this is also where they introduce Roman cancels, which is a mechanic where you can cancel the recovery of a move that you hit your opponent with. It uses some meter, but it lets you do combos you otherwise couldn't. This becomes very, like, sort of part of the series' real mechanical identity going forward.

Like, what, do they still have it in Strive? I haven't really played Strive. Yes. Yeah. Every version of Guilty Gear since then has built on and expanded or changed the Roman cancel system. There you are. I do want to touch very quickly on the Guilty Gear Petit games. There's two of them. They both came out in 2001. They are on the Wonderswan color and they have these like small rosters, these like super deformed, stylized sprites of everyone. They feel like the S&K NeoGeo Pocket fighting games in terms of, of visual design, but they're not, I feel like they don't really play as well as the Neogeopocket fighters. They have an exclusive character named Fannie, who is a nurse.

Also, probably a queen reference. And her whole storyline is she's looking for Dr. Baldad, but doesn't understand that Faust is the same guy. She still has fans. I hear about people talking about her for like, especially for the kind of artistic side of gear. That's a crazy name for a character. It's a very weird name.

Yeah, I don't think there's no way they knew what that meant in Burton. Yeah. No. That character's going to get this episode, Braden R and the UK. But in conclusion, when are we going to get a Wunder Swan two-player core on Mr. So that I can annoy people with this game, too. It's all I'm asking. No one else has played this?

I'm happy to go along because... Deal free. Yeah. Let's get to XX. This is the one people really care for, I feel like. This in X are as far as the ones that... roster for this podcast. This one originally came out in 2002.

It has basically all of the returning characters from X, Dizzy Testament. They're both regular characters now. For new characters, we have Zappa, who is, well, pretty obvious reference there, but he's like a guy who's possessed by weird spirits. I hate fighting Zappa, but he's pretty cool. There's Slayer, who is maybe the coolest dude in a fighting game other than his, you know, throw loops or his bite loops. You have a...

He's like a vampire, and, you know, you beat him in a match, and he's just like hanging out and is like, yeah, okay, I guess I'm done. Also, very importantly, a wife guy. He's a wife guy. He's a real contrast to Donovan from Darkstalkers. And, you know, importantly, sometimes when he wins, he makes the Count Chalky. marshmallow and walked through it. You have Bridget, who's become sort of a trans icon over the years,

especially in Strive. She's great. Honestly, we're recording this in June. It's Pride Month, and we should really, like, Guilty Gear more than once has said trans rights out loud. So shout out to Guilty Gear for that. Yeah, I do appreciate that this

fighting game series in particular has, like, a very, like, positive LGBT community and treats their characters fairly respectively or respectfully, especially in more recent games. Yeah, Bridget in particular, I think, was to her original story in XX as presented is, I believe she's a boy who dresses like a girl because she's from a town where I think they kill twins or something, something like that. I don't quite remember. And they, you know, it was clear back then that they were trying to do something interesting with gender. And the degree to which it landed or not is hard to say, mostly because if you remember what talking about anything like that was on the gaming internet, the English language gaming internet in 2002, you weren't getting a whole lot of nuance. You weren't getting a whole lot of inclusivity.

And it was mostly dudes playing these games, mostly straight dudes. And I was on SRK. I was on a briefly checked out like the Roman cancel forums and stuff like that. Like, you know, you wouldn't really expect a whole lot of nuanced conversation here. And so I remember seeing Bridget and thinking, looks like a girl is a boy. Sure, whatever. This yo-yo mechanic is annoying. Like that's, you know, that's the extent to which I'm really engaging with this character.

So to take Bridget in strive much later and tell a story with a lot of clear thought and resonance to who they could bring in, right? And who they could get guilty here as a story and as an, as a, you know, an IP to connect with. I thought it was really amazing and shows how cool it is when you're working, when you can work on the same thing for 20 plus years, right? You get to, you get to go back and revisit your work and go, oh, I tried to do something then, didn't quite work the way I wanted. Now's a different time, it's a different world, we're a different team. We can do something very different with it. But yeah, I actually just on my Patreon, I just published an article about how many queer folks we've had come into our

Guilty Gear community and find it really like a really great place to kind of be each other, be themselves, and explore who they are. It's been one of the most rewarding and fascinating experiences in fighting games for me. And I credit a lot of that to Guilty Gear having a dramatically different take on aesthetics and character identity than most fighting games do. Bridget is a great example. Testament is a great example. But dude, even the guys in this game are showing a lot more skin than most of the ladies, right? And there's a lot of the glam influence, a lot of the metal influence that just lets you get away from incredibly, we'll say, kind of, you know, they're not retreading like standard gender tropes or anything,

you know, and it really, it reflects in the players that it attracts. Bridget is actually the first character I ever learned about in regards to Guilty Gear back in my live journal Fujio days. And like, I remember a lot of my friends then who ended up being trans, understood her character as like a sort of a clumsy attempt. And they always held out this hope that maybe they would redo it a little bit better. And they did, which was like the most amazing part, like 20 years later or whatever. And that was like insane to see. But yeah, shout outs to that. Yeah. And you can contrast that with Capcom, right? The Capcom of America Final Fight Localization.

Oh my God. They say, actually, poison looks like a lady, but she's a dude because it's okay to hit men, right? You're like, come on, guys. And that's the perfect example. Like, the fact that Bridget became, sort of became an icon over time and sort of transformed along with that reputation. And poison still kind of sits out there and Capcom just won't say anything. And it's kind of this coy thing. Like, there are fans who have embraced poison. But I feel like Capcom, a top level hasn't really returned the favor or addressed anything. And it's just, you know, all the stuff is born from, like you said, one comment made 30 years ago by someone who probably wasn't even authorized to speak on it. It's just like, oh. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, XX is super cool. The new cast is super cool. Slayer remains the bane of my existence. Well, Slayer and Bikin. But I think when I look at the XX characters, you can see even in comparison to the X characters, XX characters still have unique gameplay mechanics behind them. Bridget has her yo-yo, and the way that that works functions closer to like what we'd later see the drive button do in Blaislew. Zappa has his ghost possession, right? I guess the ghosts have Zappa more than he has them. But, you know, you cycle through activating different ghosts. Slayer has the teleport step dash.

Eno has the hover dash. Both of those characters, I think, heavily inspired from vampires. God, who is it? Dmitri and Morgan, right? Yeah, Dmitry and Morgan. Yeah, definitely. But you can tell when you look at these characters that they still have weird stuff going on, and it's not nearly as weird as the X characters.

So I look at this and I'm like, oh, they realized that they opened the Pandora's box a little bit too big with X. They're learning to dial it back a little bit, right? Eventually they go and go crazy again. But, you know, comparatively in terms of gameplay mechanics and stuff, these characters are still innovative, still fresh, but not nearly as out there as the X characters are. On the other hand, Eno. Or Eno, sorry, is it Eno or I know? It's Eno. It's Eno.

You know, I messed around with X, but like when XX started showing up at the house sessions, I was like, okay, this looks cool. And then I saw someone playing her and I'm like, okay, she looks pretty cool. And then I saw them do, they won around. She does the wind pose where she's like riffing on a eruption from Van Halen. And I'm like, okay, this is my character. I'm playing her. She's super cool. And she's super weird because I don't know that she's ever really good in one of the XX games.

She's very, like, technical and if you want to really get anything going with her. But, you know, she's fun to just, like, throw out music notes as like, and force your opponent to have to deal with that while you move in and, like, try and mix them up, which I always enjoyed. And she's also the final boss. Yeah. And final boss, you know, is very cool. She's got these, like, these patterns that you have to dodge where she just spews out projectiles. You see homage to that in a lot of her later versions as well. I think they basically include a super in strive that's kind of inspired by that.

But the interesting thing about Eno from a gameplay perspective is really just that the hover dash means that she can't run on the ground. Instead, she hops in the air a little bit, right? So it's very witchy, right? She, and, you know, it is inspired very much from Morgan, from Darkstalkers, her hover dash. Irene did a great illustration a while ago. What is it called? The creation of Eno. The creation of Eno, right?

It's, God, is it the creation of Adam? Yeah. Okay. I'm glad I didn't drop that one. I would have been very sorry. But it's Eno and Morgan, you know, touching, touching fingers in the same poses and stuff. But the thing about that about her hover dash is that she dispenses highs the way most characters dispense lows and mids. So blocking her is an incredible challenge if you're used to holding down back in a fighting game, which most 2D fighting games are used to do, right?

the classic advice is hold down back to block, block the overheads and the high attacks on reaction. And with Eno, you can't do that. You actually have to invert a little bit, which is incredibly uncomfortable when we first get used to her. However, her chemical love attacks, the like the ones where she spins around

and spits out, she like spins around and shoots out energy with her guitar, either horizontal or vertical. Sorry, strive players. They deprived you of both chemical loves. It broke my heart to see drive players asking why we differentiate between the, yeah, the horizontal and vertical,

because they only have one. But that input would basically be a super input in most other fighting games. And so that's kind of where a lot of her reputation for executional difficulty comes early on is she's hard to move because the dash puts her in very awkward places compared to the rest of the cast. And then a lot of her best attacks require you to really crank the joystick in order to get them out. But a strong, you know, is extremely scary. And the first time we play against you know, you're just like, what do I do here? You know, because physically, she's just forces you to hold your stick in a way that you don't expect. And like, you know, once she's hit you, like, even if you block it, like, she's right next to you. She's got the, the advantage. She can, she can grab

you. She could try and mix you again. Yeah, all her stuff is high, low mix. So everyone is, the 50-50s are the great equalizer. Yeah. That's why me, someone who hadn't played X-Act as in years, got into a tournament on a whim a few months ago and did okay. I actually won a couple matches. Hell yeah. She got much easier in Exert. I'm sure we'll get to that. But I always tell people, and I love the Eno matchup, so I always try to get more people to play Eno.

But in my mind, she's like the best bang for your buck in terms of like effort to results ratio because of her high-low mix just being so good right out the box. even just like her basic stuff can get you really far. She's so good. You know, I did just recently pick up Exert at that same tournament because it was free. And I'm like, what the heck? I can play Eno. And I didn't do as well because as it turns up, the local Exard scene is a lot better. Do you say you're in Detroit?

I was in Detroit. Now I'm in the D.C. area. Gotcha. Okay. But, yeah. She's fun. I really want to pick her up as I pick up that game more. She rules.

Hell yeah. Yeah. And actually, if you're used to XX, it's funny. So I played XX as my first real guilty gear. That was the one that got me competing. And then I went to college and I didn't play as many fighting games in college. I would check in on the series every now and then from reload to slash to accent core. But I didn't really go super deep in them. And so I didn't really pay that much attention to how each character's combat systems grew, right? They introduced slashback. They introduced more FRC points on everything. Eventually we got force breaks, like all these new moves and systems. And I kind of didn't play the later versions of XX enough to

really absorb all the stuff that's in there. I could just do mostly stuff that I did in XX and reload and be fine. And when Exard came out, they very notably reset a lot of the power levels of the base cast to not their advanced like accent core and plus R forms, but the XX versions, which is what I was more comfortable with anyway. And so I picked up Exeter and I was like, oh, I could do a lot of the same stuff. Like, this feels great. It feels like what I'm used to. But if you had been playing XX consistently up until then, you would have been like,

I don't know, I'm missing all these tools that I'm used to. I never had a chance to get used to those tools. I didn't miss them. Chip felt great. Yeah, you mentioned FRCs. That's, was it, false Roman cancels or force Roman can't? It's something. Yes.

I always heard false. Yeah. But basically this is like a mechanic where you can cancel, uh, special moves, certain ones, before they are active, before they come out all the way, it uses a little bit of meter. I think you can use it mostly as like, uh, kind of like in Fatal Fury, you can do like faint cancels. Yeah.

Faint cancels. It's, yeah, it's somewhat similar to that. It kind of depends on the move, but the idea is basically that for 20, where a normal red Roman cancel costs 50 meter, uh, certain moves on a character will have a FRC point where you hit the Roman cancel input and you immediately cancel. out of that move for only 25. And it lets you turn some moves into like movement options or mix-up tools. So with Chip, he's got the overhead kick as one of his fire punch recus series, right?

And that kick is normally, it will get you killed if they block it. But it has an FRC point. So you can go into it and then cancel out of it so you don't get the attack and then you can do whatever and it's safe on block. Or he has an FRC point on his leaf grab, right? where he kind of turns into a bunch of leaves, grabs you, slits your throat from behind. And if you hit the FRC there, which I think was only one frame window,

like you had to get it perfect, perfect in XX, then you could get a combo afterwards where otherwise you couldn't, right? It's this cool way to introduce an extra skill check and increase the possibilities of what you can do with a move on a character without giving you the unlimited possibilities

of a full Roman cancel, right? And like it introduces some deliberate skill stuff, right? Like if I'm competing, an XX tournament. I have to warm up by practicing my FRCs. And every day I wake up and I see, you know, for a combo breaker, I go, oh, what do I have today? Do I have this FRC? Yes or no. If I don't, I guess I'm not going for it, you know. Yeah. And I think there's also where they broke out dust into its own button and gave you like air versions. And I think you could do sweeps using it now, which is very convenient. Because sweeping is very weird and awkward coming back to X and

like the original game. And then, what was the other big thing? Bursts, of course. This is where they started adding in bursts because, you know, between FRCs and regular Roman cancels, you need something to like be able to survive that kind of offense. So now you can just burst.

And it's a very slow building meter, but you can usually get like what to a match if you're doing all right? Yeah, you're, unless if you burst relatively, we'll say, normally, right, then you should get two or three, depending on whether you win around or not and whether you're playing chip or not. There's a whole lot of really interesting rules that go into X-axis combat design around stuff like burst meter, stuff like tension, even stuff like damage, right? So, Guilty Gear was kind of one of the earliest games to really go heavy on what they call

guts, right, which is the lower health you have, the less damage you take from an attack. And it basically makes it so the first combo that everyone does looks really nasty. Oh, you lost 50% of your health. But then you eat that combo again at 50% and maybe it only does 20 or 30%. Right. And it's dependent on the character. So different characters of different guts values, meaning that what a health bar means is highly situational, highly contextual. There are dozens of little systems in this game that do a lot to kind of create the kind of combat. They want to see it from a visual perspective. They don't want to see people. running away, so they negative penalty you if you run away.

They like it when the life bars look close, so they'll turn up the guts threshold to make it look like the game is often a lot closer than it actually looks, that kind of stuff. It's this really interesting attention to detail to like the aesthetic experience of playing a fighting game that we didn't really see that many

other game developers at that time doing a whole lot of it. And now actually a lot of it is standard. And like, this one also had weight classes for each of the characters too, because I I remember Bikin has some combos that are like character specific, not because of like their, their hitboxes necessarily, but because they weigh certain amounts, you have to like know your routes for each given weight class, which is absolutely absurd. I respect that they went for it. The funniest bit is that the women are always one same weight class, the lightest weight class, always.

No men are in the lightweight class, at least later on. very funny. Yeah. I mean, it yields some interesting gameplay for us, right? Like as players, each person has to decide how specific they want to optimize their combos, knowing that the more specific your stuff is, the more likely you are to forget it in tournament match or something like that. All this little opportunities for like optimization potential, but also drop potential

are part of what allow players to differentiate themselves from each other at high levels of play even like with, you know, thousands of hours in the game, which is super cool. But it's obviously, it's not, it's not for everyone, right? Which is why they end up streamlining a lot of this stuff out. Like, I think character specific wake-up times are gone for strive, if I remember correctly, right? Like, there's, there's a lot of stuff that they end up streamlining out in later versions. And if you're used to it there, then you're kind of like, oh, man, but I missed this. Yeah, there was a, there was an interview I saw around when Excerd came out with Ishiwitari, where he talking about how, you know, how their thought process shifted over the years in terms of, like, ease of play.

Like, in X, and X, X, X. They were, they were fine with a move or, like, a combo being really tricky to pull off, and characters are just sort of bouncing off of the game or that character or even that whole mechanic because of it. And for Xer, they're like, well, I think maybe we should try dialing that back and make this a little more, like, welcoming. So they made it sort of easier to execute things. and then obviously in Strive they went, you know, further down that particular road. Mm-hmm. Probably to that game's success.

Oh, absolutely. Before we move on, I do want to note, you know, like, we've touched on the fact that this game had a million revisions. And they all do different things. Like, they all tweak the game balance. They'll adjust movesets. They'll add characters. They'll add mechanics. Like you mentioned, force breaks.

Those are like, I don't want to call them, like, X attacks. but they're basically X attacks. Yeah. And then added in like Robo Kai gets it as weird like meter mechanics where he's like overheating and whatnot and you have to like cool him off. You've got Abba, of course, another music reference order soul who I never really understood the point of, but he's there. Oh, he's a very different character. So this is soul when he's in the Holy Order as a knight alongside Kai Kiske. Right.

And he actually, he's completely different. Like he has a meter mechanic. You have to charge it up. Then you get more powerful versions of his moves. He's much more mobile than regular soul. And his weapon looks basically like a slab of concrete that has some like a handle sicken out or something. It's pretty cool stuff.

He is a perennial favorite among a lot of plus our fans, especially because he didn't come back for later games. But he, you would eventually would cease like a kind of similar take on the character in Sin, Kiske, in Excer. And then finally, the final revision plus R, which is also available on a few different platforms. I think most people just play on Steam, which has a rollback net code as of 2020, thanks to a fan effort that got officially incorporated and, you know, paid, which is nice. They also add injustice and cliff for the people who just want to be nightmares. You can have fun with that.

Have fun with Cliff's last stand. Yeah, and PlusR is an interesting one, because if I remember correctly, it came out like almost like a little bit before Excerd came out, right? So there was a major gap in time between AccentCore and PlusR. I, my guess is that it kind of worked as like a, hey, remember Guilty Gear, this game that you haven't played since video games basically all went 3D. Like, we got a new revision for you. Kind of like how Capcom did HD remix a couple of months. months before Street Fighter 4 released in the U.S. But if I remember correctly, Plus R wasn't done by the original team because most of the

original Guilty Gear team, Team Red, was working on Exard. I think they had the BlazeBlue team working on PlusR. And so Plus R has a lot of really opinionated stuff in it. It's kind of the like everything but the kitchen sink patch for XX. It does a lot of things to characters. It gives them so much more tools. in ways that feel a little weird if you're used to playing the rest of the XX series, right?

And because there was such a big gap between Accent Corps and the release of PlusR, a lot of people who remember XX fondly actually didn't spend that much time on PlusR. I know Japanese, like a lot of the competitive players in Japan on the XX series didn't really give PlusR the time of day because by the time it came out, they were all moving on to like Blaze Blue Street Fighter 4

or like all this other stuff, right? But because XX is the most, or plus R is the most recent version of XX. That is the one that like this new generation of players with the rollback, right? They're coming into plus R. And to them, this is canonical quintessential guilty gear XX. Whereas to the people like the old heads like me who are there for XX, we're like, dude, what is this stuff?

Like this is way different from what I'm used to. But this is the version that that people remember now because it's the version that's still actively being played. You know, I'm glad you brought it up, Pap. because we should probably mention this. You know, Guilty Gear had a chunk there of time, like five, six years at least, where it was kind of like the biggest 2D game because everyone else was basically not making 2D games. You know, like we did an episode of Retronauts a while back, Kevin and I and other guests,

talking about that sort of, you know, the dead years, the doldrum years of fighting games. And really during that time, Guilty Gear was one of the rare cases. Like, no, no, no, this is a 2D game. It's being actively supported. it's being iterated upon. And yeah, you're right. Once the decade ended and suddenly you had Street Fighter 4 come back and other companies getting back in fighting games, suddenly Guilty Gear had to sort of compete with older franchises again that it kind of didn't have to worry about for a stretch.

Yeah, I mean, you had Guilty Gear and it was kind of, I won't see it was the standard bearer, but like Guilty Gear and Melty Blood, you had, like, they kind of continued their development when, you know, after CBS2, we waited for a long time, then we got Capcom fighting jam, right? Like there was not great times for 2D fighting games unless you're willing to dig into the kind of niche stuff. If you were 3D, you're great. You had tech and you had Soul Calvary,

had virtual fighter, you had all that stuff. Guilty Gear is looking good. And then they lost the Guilty Gear IP, right? I forget it was during the acquisition or what. But for a long time, Arcsus couldn't make Guilty Gear games. And that's where they started some of their other stuff. That is, I believe that's why they started some of their other stuff.

That is, I believe that's why they started Blaze Blue, right? It's because when, you know, around the time the Street Fighter 4 came in and really re-injected people back into the fighting game scene, Arxas for the longest time, didn't have access to the guilty year IP. It's also why overture happened, right? Yeah. From what I remember, yeah.

And that's why you don't, like, you know, I forget what the exact lines were. Because it was like there were some characters that they could have access to you, but not all of them or something like that. I don't quite remember. But I want to say this is around the time of like the Sega Sammy acquisition. Because if you all remember, if you were tapped into the fighting game like Scuttlebut back in the day on the forums and stuff, there was a brief mention, a brief possibility that we might get a Sammy versus Capcom. And yeah, so we had thought like, whoa, are we going to get to see soul scrap with Ryu? And then it never happened.

That's crazy. I remember that. Capcom versus Sammy, aka Cammy. Oh, no. She'd been the face of the game. And if Capcom made it, it would just be her CVS tooth stuff again. She was really good in CVS, too sad about that. I do love her in that game.

XX, they made a ton of them. I think, yeah, I think it was like 07 for Accent Core and then 2012 for Plus R, which is like really lines up with that, with that gap as you were talking. Good time to like through some of their like really weird stuff from like the mid-2000s where they were just kind of riffing off of XX. So you had like Iska in 2003, this like a Thomas Wave console game. Which is like a up to four player, like kind of Smash Brothers style fighting game, but not quite Smash Bros. Because it's also like a guilty gear game.

And it has like the XXcast. Also has a very awkward, like, button to turn around. So like if you get past someone, you have to push that to turn. And it's very strange. It has like a stock system. So it's kind of like, God, what was it? Treasure did the Bleach DS games, which. I think might have been around then or a little bit later.

But there was also, oh, man, this is going to bug me. There was, I think it was a Genesis game. Was it Yu Yu-Hakishel? There was a Genesis Yugu-Hakashel. Was it a fighting game? It was. Okay. Yeah, I think, because I think that also might have featured, like, so two lanes and

four-player combat, right? The Bleach DS is my anchoring point for this style of. game because it's one, it's super cool. But basically, I guess to rewind a little bit, traditional two-d fighting games do not deal with more than two characters well, because they rely on character or opponent relative movement, right? So you don't really move left and right so much as you do forward and back. And the main thing that this affects is your blocked input, right? Because your blocking is away from your opponent. It's not a button, and it's not like just a fixed direction. And so if you want to, you know, this is why when you put Ryu and smash,

Like one of the most significant things they did was they made it so that if he's only fighting one other person, he turns around automatically. So you don't have to get used to turning him around and doing stuff in that direction anymore, right? Most fighting games do not deal well with more than one character. X-Men versus Street Fighter and tag fighters do with it okay by saying, hey, you have a point character and you have an assist character and you can tag in, but you never really have both characters doing the same thing. except in Marvel 1, you have the like crossover attack or whatever it's called where both characters show up for a time. But even then, one of the characters is considered the point and that is the character that you hold away from the block, right? But if you look at Yu-Hakisho and then if you look at the, you know, the BleachDS games, they allow four, up to four characters to run around freely on screen.

And they do it by basically just saying, hey, if you're holding in a direction, you're going to move in that direction, will give you a block button so that you don't have to worry about holding a way to block. And we'll, I think the best of my recollection, special move inputs are usually confined a little bit. So they're not, it's not as unclear, like what direction you would be aiming in to do this kind of stuff. It's a super tricky problem to solve to get more than one character, especially more than one player in a traditional 2D fighting game. It's what Smash does so well by not being a traditional 2D fighting game. when I was working on 2XKO and we were trying to figure out how to get this stuff to work and add as much interactivity between characters as possible, we did look at Isika and be like, okay, so we know this game is not a whole lot of fun to play, but why? Where does it fall apart? That kind of stuff. Yeah. I'm glad someone else here has played it because I played it for the first time for this podcast. I'm like not having a good time with it.

It's manual turning is tough, right? But what it does do is it lets you think, oh, man, what if I had two eddies and I sandwich you and I just do buzzsaw loops over and over and over and over and over, right? Like there's a lot of fun. Yeah, exactly, right? There's a lot of fun like theory crafting you can do. And then you try and play the game and you're like, oh, man, I'm not having as much fun as I thought I would.

It also has the Robokai mode, which is pretty cool, right? There's like, I think Robokai Mark 2 or something, you can customize the move set, which I thought was pretty neat. And there's like, I think he has a beat him up mode in the home version. Yeah, I think so. I didn't, I did note that the home version had a beat him up mode. I was just playing the Atomis Wave 1. Because there are, someone, some years ago, ported the Atomis Wave library to the Dreamcast.

So you can play Iska. You can play the really weird like Guilty Gear X 1.5 update that came out in 2003 as well that nobody likes because it kind of sucks and didn't have any of the same team working on it. but you can play it. This is also like in 2006, you got the portable ones, like Dust Strikers on the DS, which is like a four-player fighting game. I've never heard anyone say anything positive about it. I want to say it was a platform fighter.

Like, you're running around. I think so. And, yeah. And then there was judgment on the PSP, which is basically just a port of reload with a beat-em-up mode, because that's sort of what PSP was getting at that point. And then you finally get, overture, Guilty Gear 2

in 07, which came out on the 360 in Japan. It's an exclusive to the 360 until they finally did a Windows port like in 2016 or thereabouts. 10 months later it showed up in the U.S. It's not a fighting game.

It's like a strategy game, but also... It's kind of a proto-moba from what I remember. I haven't really played much of it. But I've been told that basically it's like, oh, this is a console moba,

like many years before it would really really. see that kind of thing. I assume that this was one. So from what I've heard, I think the timing on this one and the reason why it only has this subset of characters has to do with them being, with arcs is being locked out of legally making stuff with the guilty gear IP. But also, this is the time period when Microsoft is throwing money at Japanese studios to try and get exclusives for the 360. Right. So yeah, kudos to them for getting some Microsoft money to make something really cool and neat, even if they didn't end up, I guess even if they didn't

end up like chasing this any further. It did give them the ability to develop the characters and the game and the, the, the lore and the IP a bit to lead us to Exert. Like, yeah, this is like, the, the story stuff in Exert is pulling from what happens in Overture, which is maybe its greatest contribution to anything on this podcast. Yeah. Well, it's also a chance for them to learn how to do their characters in 3D, right? That's true.

So in this, in this time period, street. Fighter 4 is, I guess, releases like shortly after this, right? And that was, I remember that being quite notable because 3D fighting games had their own aesthetic. But, but anytime a game had started in 2D and gone 3D, it didn't really look that good, right? You had K-OF maximum impact. You had, I think, was the Sam show, 64, I think was the 3D one, right? Fatal Fury Wild Ambition.

Yeah. Like, these games were not, the characters in the art styles were not yet able to translate effectively into 3D very well. I think KOF is actually probably the best version. And so I have to imagine this is like an excuse for them to try stuff out in 3D and go, hey, can we do a convincing soul bad guy or Kai Kiske in 3D? Like do we have the team, the capabilities, the knowledge, the know-how to do all this stuff?

And, you know, based on they're not being a guilty gear three, I'm guessing the answer was no, right? But I'm sure that informed their work on exit. Yeah, because that's sort of become their house style as far as fighting games go, is this sort of cell-shaded 3D models that look like they could be sprites, but you're able to do like dynamic camera stuff with them. And it apparently takes a lot more work to make one of these than a lot of traditional, yeah, traditional 3D models. But yeah.

So that gives us a good segue into Excerd, which is, The game I'm really glad you two were on here for. It's not Guilty Gear Triple X as everyone was making jokes about it in the 2000s. But here we are. We got another fighting game. Yeah. Released in 2014. I remember seeing the reveal for this and it still hits, right?

Because it's got like a minute of nothing, but there's some text on the screen and you hear Sol and Kai talking to each other. They're clearly about to throw down. And then you see like a, you know, kind of a round. Start introduction animation. It looks like this beautiful 2D. Background might be 3D, but a lot of games were doing that at the time. And then they, I think they both do. They're the like standing heavy slash or something.

It clashes. And then you see the camera spin. And you are informed that this is in fact a full 3D video game that looks 2D. And I get, I get chills talking about even now, man. Like I was, I want to say I was, when did the reveal itself come out? Because I feel like I was still working at game developer magazine back then. I remember just marking the hell out. Like, oh, Gilty Gear is back, baby.

Yeah, and if I remember, like, that 3D modeling tech is what got them work with Bandai Namco to do with the Dragon Ball Fighters a few years ago, or a few years later, rather. Yeah. I don't know if they've actually come out and said this, but in the same way that Capcom did vampire to show off that they can do, like, really fluid animation in combat games, and then get the Marvel license. I think we generally assume that Exard was there like, hey, anime's getting pretty big with the kids now.

Wouldn't you like to see someone do a 3D animated game that actually looks 2D? Because cell shading brings in some of the aesthetics. It's evocative of traditional animation, but it is not that, right? Arxis is crazy for what they did. If you want to learn more about it, they gave a really good GDC talk like 10 years ago or they explained how it works.

A lot of it honestly is them, Exard was Unreal 3 game. They're working in Unreal. But essentially, they backported a lot of their XX engine code to the point where it, like, when you're working, when you're seeing how Exard works,

it essentially treats different poses as frames of animation, right? So they are getting in there and doing a lot of very specific work to, work with 3D models but make it look 2D down to the exact specifics of how the animation pipeline goes. And most of the reason that 3D felt like, well, the places in game development where we get to save expenses by working in 3D is that you get to animate much more flexibly on a movable set of bones, right, a skeleton instead of having to redraw every single frame, right? They basically took the skeletons and, hey, what if we basically redrew

every single frame. Even going so far as to like swap it, like you have traditional animation techniques like a smear on something to connote movement in a hit stop, right? They do this all over the place with like weapons. Normally in a 2D pipeline, you would just draw the smear, right?

It's fine. In Guilty Gear, they change the 3D mesh of the attack. They swap it out for the version that has the smear, right? It's a lot of work. It is so much work. But you can't deny the results, man.

This game still looks beautiful even now. And when I saw Dragon Ball, I was like, oh, yeah, no, this is perfect. They made this thing look like a moving comic, like, more than any other adaptation of the Dragon Ball IP I've ever seen. Yeah, it looks amazing. I agree. It's kind of like what I would imagine, the gold standard of any revival of an old game would be. Like, we all know that Darkstalkers is dead, depending on. Because of what Capcom says, like, they're not going to make it a, they're not going to make it as a,

We know this. But it's like, if they brought Dark Shrekers back and they treated it like Street Fighter 5 or 6, like it wouldn't have the same energy. Like you would need this style of like, no, the characters look like they're made of, the characters look like they're made of cartoons, but they're 3D models now. Like, because no one, I don't think, it seems like very few companies are willing to make a full-on 2D sprite-based fighter anymore, except for like, I don't know, like fan, you know, the smaller circles.

I mean, you have French Bride still doing it. Yeah. have some indie still doing it, but at the, at the like, you know, industrial scale, not so much. It's not particularly popular. So, like, if Darkrackers were to come back, I would, like, this is all I would really want, you know, like if they're not going to give me 2D, then give me this so I can at least feel like it's 2D.

Yeah. Outsource it to Arxas, Capcom. Come on, you can do it. I believe in you. I'm curious to, because, you know, Irene is the professional artist out of the four of us. Like, is there anything on Exxert's art style? I guess that surprised you early on when you started looking at it. Because I have a pretty lay perspective on this.

I'm like, oh, it looks like sprites to me, kind of, except really nice, you know. But as an illustrator, I'm sure there's things in there that must impress you. Oh, yeah. I mean, I think it has, the reason why it still looks good is because it has some of the best and most opinionated, like, art direction of any fighting game. I mean, obviously, like, the tech and the hard work they put into animating push that, but it's this beautiful capsule of sort of, like, late 2000s anime style that is, has this, like, really great exaggerated shape language, but not, like, so exaggerated that's, like, deformed. And it's, it's got, like, that really attractive high contrast, like, just, like, black line,

sort of like old, older anime style. Like, if you compare it to like strive, which is very like blown out in terms of lighting, a little, excuse more realistic, which is fine that like follows the trends of recent stuff. But because I am a child of the 90s, you know, Exeter art style to me will always look more striking, far more memorable. I was just amazed that they could translate that to 3D and do the animation that they did, like just hand manipulating the mesh to do 2D animation, or to make it look like 2D animation technique with mind-blowing. But, yeah, I mean, yeah, I mostly just think the shape language in Exert is just really well done. Silhouettes are super, super strong.

I also like how this sort of technique has translated well to their upcoming. I mean, upcoming as was recording, the Marvel Tokon game, which very much looks like, you know, cartoon comic book characters in motion, even though it is behind the scenes. It's actually 3D characters, you know. It looks great. Yeah. I think they have the best-looking games of anything, really, of late. And honestly, that's why I wanted to play Exeter more than the other game.

I was like, yeah, this one looks the best. It's a little sad that aesthetically that Exeter is sort of the step away from the old like grittier, like metal, that kind of look. But yeah, no, it's just, it's so good. That art direction is just incredible. Yeah, I guess if you're not pulling from 90s anime and manga anymore. Yeah. Yeah, when I see people who, you know, will tell me they liked Guilty Gear XX and then fell off of Exard,

often it is due to the aesthetics, right? And for me personally, like, I'm not, I'm not big on. metal. I'm not that big on rock and roll. And so the aesthetics and the references kind of miss me a little bit. I like the soundtrack. Um, but even then, like most of my favorites in the soundtrack are the XX, uh, like tracks that I, that I remember more fondly. Um, but for people who really were into the metal side of things, Exeter is where you start to see a little bit of that go away. You still have the same influences in character designs. And you have some like Bedman who actually, I think was originally supposed to be an XX character. And so he still has a little bit of edginess to him. Um, um, um, um, But then, you know, it's like you have the Valentine's you have. I guess Raven is kind of, he's an edge lord. We can keep one of those in. It's actually most of the UI that loses it. The visual flavor of the whole game is the UI just kind of.

Right. If you look at the XX UI, it's like it's very gritty. It's very heavy metal. It's very dark and gothy. They have the band stylization on the character names and they lose that in Exert. Which, by the way, this is a little nugget here for the. Exxard fans, that font that they use for the characters, right? It's called red. You can download it and use it. I use it in some of my posters and stuff, right? To my chagrin. It is, it is impact with

random chunks of letters of each letter taken out, but it is just impact. Once I realized that, I felt, I felt a little lied to. I'll be, I'm going to be honest. It didn't stop you. You know, I've learned to love it. We're learning all of Arxas's secrets today. But yeah, Exert, and we alluded this earlier, Exard was a, it was kind of a little bit of a resetting of the power levels of the cast. So it got closer to XX in terms of what was expected from each character in terms of moveset. The, you know, as with every other fighting game in that period, it had an input buffer. So you didn't have to be perfectly, you know, timing every single input to get what you wanted. For most of the time, there are some, there are different input buffers on different moves.

So sometimes it still has to do some really hard stuff. But it was generally more forgiving than, uh, the, uh, the way. XX series was. And notably, they ditched the FRC mechanic in favor of YRC, which ends up being one of the most divisive, well, I say that, but every, every Guilty Gear game is divisive in its own right. Basically, what YERC does is it lets you FRC almost any move at basically any time before the move is about to make contact. So there's no timing check like there was in XX for the FRC input. But you can just kind of do it. And also, Roman cancels in Exarch slow the game down.

So there's a moment where both players get to kind of look at it and go, oh, what's going to happen? However, the person, the character doing the Roman cancel has an advantage insofar as they're in the middle of doing something and they can act more freely, right? So what it effectively did was it kind of lowered the like strict timing as a skill check. It's still there, but it's a lot more niche than it was in XX where you functionally couldn't access some of your character's tools if you didn't have the FRC timing down. And it decreased your ability to play against Roman cancels because the moment they Roman cancel, you're slow down, they're slow down, but they're in the middle of doing something. You might not be in the middle of doing something. You might not be able to do something that you want to do because they Roman canceled.

And it kind of gives you this little window of power because you spent the meter to do the Roman cancel. cancel. For especially like the advanced XX players at the time, it felt like a step back, as new games often do, right? Because you're starting from a new set of characters, a new set of mechanics, you don't know how to use everything. And the ways that you used to express your skill are no longer relevant in FRCs and stuff. But kind of what I found is someone who plays both XX and Exard actively is that what it does do is shift a lot more skill into meter management decisions. So how do you build meter? How do you spend it? What kinds of things do you do to economize? Where are you willing to spend it on things that you might not get that meter back anytime

soon? Because the value that you get from not only YRC, the Yellow Roman cancel and regular Roman cancels, also you have blitz, which is a very strong defensive mechanic. That's a lot more forgiving than slashback from the earlier XX. Basically, meter will solve a lot of your problems in this game. But the moment you spend it, you might not get it back for quite some time. And And so you have to be really, really specific and really strategic about how you spend your resources in Exert in a way that, I mean, I'm not as good at the XX games, but Meeter does not feel like as oppressive an asset to play against in XX. So yeah, at the time, players definitely felt like it was kind of, you know, if you're used to the cracked out plus R, Exert felt like a little bit of a step back. over time, I think both games have kind of evolved to be cracked in different ways. There's also a good amount of overlap between the two who like both games for different reasons.

But they did also make some concessions to accessibility. They included the stylish mode, which was basically like simpler inputs and auto combos and stuff like that. So you can just pick up the game and start playing it. They have, you know, the input buffer did a lot to make things a little bit easier. Jacko came out in Exxert Revelator. And she notably has simpler inputs on everything, as well as the ability to summon minions from a little set of bases, which seems to have been inspired by MoBas. She has skills that appear on cooldown and stuff like that. And actually, this is something that I've never really heard anyone talk about, but I noticed playing Exeter to the arcades in Japan.

I think you can access a little bit of a tutorial mode without playing the game or without paying for it, which I thought was a really interesting way to go. get people just be like, yeah, maybe I will check this out. Yeah. It's not a bad idea, honestly. Yeah, this is like the initial release, like the original excerpt, had an excerpt, sign, I think is what it's actually technically called, but it has like a very safe cast. Like, Batman's the only new character initially. It's otherwise like Sol and Kai and Milia, May, Chip, Potemkin, Venom, Axel, Faust, Slayer, Zato, Eno.

Then they have Ram Lethal Vestal, Vestal, Valentine is like the boss and she's she's the gun one, right? No, Ram is two big swords. Elfelt is guns and roses. Yeah. She shows up as like a DLC character, as does a Sin Kiske, who's from two, he's a, he's Kai's son with Dizzy. He's, you know, part gear.

And then there's Lee Whitefang. Leo. Leo. Leo. Yeah. Leo. I had a typo. And then Revelator adds in Johnny.

and dizzy, jam, Raven from two, Jacko and Coom. Yep. And then XER Rev 2. It's the latest one from 2017. This one, excellent timing, because this came out like right after

Street Fighter 5 shit the bed. And people were just like trying out other games to see what else there was to play. And I think this got a lot of interest because it's so beautiful. I like to joke that in the fighting game community, we like it when street fighter players have a good street fighter

because then street fighter players are happy or happier. And we like it when street fighter players have a bad street fighter because then street fighter players learn that there are fighting games that exist outside of Street Fighter and go try other things. And Street Fighter 5 sure was a fighting game. And Exard definitely picked up a lot of new players. I won't say it's just because Street Fighter 5 wasn't maybe the game that people were looking for, but also because it just looked so different, right?

like Street Fighter 5 was Capcom going through the awkwardness of getting used to working in Unreal, right? And then after Street Fighter 5, they didn't go back to Unreal for Street Fighter 6, right? But Arxas was able to invest the time in making the art style work for them, right? And the tech work for them. And so it just looked so different from everything else out there, right? You know, mechanically, Exert is both a lot of XX, but also a lot of kind of earlier concession. to playability and approachability that yielded a really, really interesting and really complicated and ultimately like high skill

cap game, but also had a good amount of, of approachability for games at that time. And then like, the characters, they'll always be the crown jewel of guilty gear, right? Like no other game has ever shown characters.

I would say even Blaislew doesn't have characters that are, that hit like guilty gear characters, you know, um, it was, it was surreal for me to be actively playing, guilty gear at this point because having played in the XX days,

I never thought I'd get to see Exard or Guilty Gear in the Mandalay Bay Arena. You know, where I'd only like previously seen like UFC paper views. I'm standing there. I think I was in box seats one year. And I see Milia and Zato slugging it out in top eight. And I'm like, oh my God, I think we made it, guys. It was incredible.

And this is, Irene, I would get into T-Oing, tournament organizing, and streaming and teaching people how to play gear around later. It was like 2017, 2018, 2019 is when that really picked up for me. But a lot of it was because I saw where newer fighting games were going. I didn't like Street Fighter 5. I didn't like Dragon Ball Fighter Z. I was kind of disillusioned with where I saw fighting games to be going.

And Exeter to me was like the one game that really held a lot of the appeal that I found of kind of the older generation of fighting games. So I wrote an adjunct. essay called TLDR play Guilty Gear, which basically is me working out why Guilty Gear rules and also implicitly why I don't like Street Fighter 5, which up until then I was known as a street fighter player. I was the guy who played Ryu and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I like to consider, I like to call myself something of a born again because even though I played Guilty Gear back in the old day, I came back to it.

My heart was ready to play what felt to me to be like a real ass fighting game. And I saw so many people having problems because they came into fighting games from Street Fighter 4 did not expect that they wouldn't like Street Fighter 5. And everyone has that moment, right, where you're super into this game. Then the sequel comes out and you're like, it might take a year or two. I played Street Fighter 5 for two years before I was like, actually, I think this game sucks. And I don't want to play it. Yep.

And, you know, that was neither. I played Third Strike for longer than that. And I didn't like that game either. But coming back to it, I was like, wait a minute. I can just, there's a game here that I love. This game is great. And I'm getting my back blown out in net play like 30, 40, 50 losses in a row, but it doesn't matter. I feel great when this happens.

Like, Irene was actually, she was like, she saw me. She was, I think she was drawing in our old apartment. I was sitting, I was mashing some games on net play. And she looked at me and she was like, you know, you have a lot more fun when you're playing this Guilty Gear game. You do you play street fight. I looked at her. I was like, you know, I think you might be right. And I basically retired from Street Fighter 5 after that.

It's like, you know, I'm done, you know. Moved on to bigger and better things, really. Oh, absolutely. Can I just establish for the listeners, if you don't know, bed man is a man in a bed. He literally is in the bed. He fights the game in the bed. I just, it's not like some sort of clever name or like a rock. Maybe it's a rock thing.

I don't know. But like, no, no, no, no. He's a guy in a bed. It's a bed man. And he's the primary antagonist for, I think, at least one of the games, right? Like, he's one of the most powerful characters at, you know, at different points in the timeline. And his kid is actually really interesting. Basically, his deal is he has a bunch of special moves as well as an eight-way air dash.

And when he does a special move, he leaves behind the, like, deja vu icon of that move. He can choose to do the move again, or he can activate the icon and a show. shadow of him at that position performs that move again, basically. And he is essentially, when you look at him, he's like really weird. He's really weird. It's hard to understand his attacks. You don't really know what's going on. Learning the bad man matchup is a nightmare, even when the character is not considered that good anymore. But when you look at him, if you have played the Marvel versus Capcom games, you can look at him and go, oh, this character is like a whole Marvel team. He's got eight-way air dash. He's got essentially previous versions

of himself in time that can work as an assist, right? Which is why some of the players like G.C. Yoshi, who do the most with Bedman and Exard, I think do so because they're like, oh, I can play Marvel. This is fine. This is normal. He told me that's literally why he picked Batman for the eight wear a dash. Well, there you are then. And Diamond, you had a note about Nagay's Faust run that you really wanted to talk about. Yeah, I just, you know, I wasn't as into fighting games in general at this time, but I do remember in 2018 at Evil Japan that Nagay as Faust got really, I think, I think he made it all the way up to the grand finals, but didn't quite, couldn't quite take it. But because Faust is the way Faust is, and, you know, he was able to compete with all of the characters and do these crazy stuff, I just remember being really excited and everyone, even people around me who weren't really into fighting games, like, hey, are you watching this? And I was giving me other people to watch it. And I also remember that we had a really weird, because I was still working in. I was working the teaching job at this point.

And I remember somehow, somehow that just as we had a conversation about how students were not allowed to Concho, which if you don't know, you don't know, folks, Concho is a thing that Japanese kids, I hope don't do anymore. But for a long time, Japanese kids had this prank, quote unquote, where they put their fingers together, their pointer fingers, and they jab another human being in the, anus. And this is supposed to be hilarious. I don't find the humor in it. But if it's a cartoon man with a bag on his head, doing this move in a fighting game, it actually is hilarious. And yeah, we had a conversation that day about how the, you know, if you saw any student doing this, no, you can't just let it go, like, see if to stop them. And then somehow, as we had the conversation, he pulled off the concho, like, in the middle of grand finals. And we're like, oh, my God. That's it. He said the thing. He did it. It's one of Faust supers, I think, in Exard, certainly. Nagy had a great run. I was in his pool that year, but I didn't make it to him. I think instead, I lost to Sway, and Sway lost to Nage.

But he was in, Nage was in the Faust cost player, at least some of it at the time, because he had the bag on his head for some of pools. And the, you know, the kind of the defining mechanic of Faus is the item toss, right? So he can throw an item on the field, and it's random. The probability. are varied from item to item. So strong Faust will understand the chances that the dice that they're rolling every time that they throw an item. And before seeing Nage, I'd only ever played Elvin Shadow, who is historically the strongest

Faust. He's a venerable, you know, Faust player and Tio in, you know, he's based out Illinois. He runs the Frosty Fausting series of tournaments. He lived in Japan for many years and learned how to play guilty. gear basically by teaching English and then going down to the arcades on weekends and just grinding guilty gear forever. I, whenever I play Elvin Shadow, I like to joke that I think Elven Shadow knows what items he's going to throw before he throws them, right?

Because he always gets the most ridiculous luck, especially when he's playing me. And then I saw Nagay, and I'm like, I think Nagay knows how to throw the different items in the games, guys. I think he's telling the game what item he wants when he does it. To see him play Faust is nothing short of amazing. He didn't end up getting to Grans that year, though, because in, let's see, he made it in loser's side. He beat FOMO. He, Nagy beat Zade, Zadi.

But then Nagay lost to Lossol, who was the furthest that any American had made it in a Guilty Gear Evo tournament, I think, up until that point. He ended up finishing third. But that was, that was like Lost Souls, like, probably competitive peak. I don't know if he actually did anything like that after then. But I remember being in the arena then and seeing an American make it that far in top eight. And my mind was blown. I didn't think we could do it, right? And he did it.

I remember distinctly, you know, in the 2000s, American X, X, X, X players. Like, we were discussing. We were always at a disadvantage. And we almost always got our butts kicked whenever there was any sort of, like, a bracket in the game that had Japanese players show up. So now that we've reached a point where, like, American players can get pretty far. and win in these tournaments. It feels surreal to see it every time. And it was felt even more surreal when I got to play Lost Soul at Frosty Faustings

and I beat his ass and I think it was 2022. Love you, Eli. Hope you don't listen to this podcast. We'll send him a copy distinctly. Here's the link. Any final thoughts on excerpt? It does have a rollback code update as of January 20, 23rd. So it is very playable online now.

Yeah. And so Irene and I, we, I got into organizing locals for Exard because I flew to Japan once, played at Mikado, loved it, did not want to have to fly to play high level guilty gear competition. I wanted that in my backyard. And so I started running tournaments. I started, you know, teaching new players, organizing the community. We run beginner brackets and all this kind of stuff. And then COVID hit. And we were like, oh, man, RNet code sucks.

And we managed to keep on organizing locals for net play events for a solid two years using VPNs and regional restrictions and all kinds of stuff just to keep playing the game that we loved. But it was tough, man. Like I'm saying like we would try and play with SoCal, right? We're in the Bay Area. SoCal is only like 500 miles away. And that connection was unplayable. I will blame Spectrum or whoever it was for that one because it was real rough.

then rollback gets announced and Irene and I hear about it while we're flying home from her sister's wedding and we're in an airplane. I paid for the, you know, the Wi-Fi on my phone. Irene looks at me. I look at her and then I control myself because I don't want to get thrown off the plane. But that was, I was, I cannot tell you how relieved I was. Now, after, you know, it's been over three years of Rollback Net Code, we got players from Japan joining our weeklies, right? We've never gotten to get that kind of thing before, but it works.

It works and it's so good that we can, we can actually get a wider variety of people playing the game than we could back then. And if you've been listening, one, if you've been listening to this podcast and hearing people talk about Guilty Gear for two hours and you don't play it, I think you're probably a guilty gear player and you just don't realize it yet. And you can check out all of them. Like, strive is honestly a really good place for new players. to start and it's got a lot of new game, or that's a new-ish game excitement. It's like five years old at this point. But to me, it's still a spring chicken. Wait, what? No, it's, it just came out yesterday. It actually did come out, I think, on June 10th, I want to say. Whoa. Hell of a birthday present. But no, I think it was five years ago. It's not always easy to explain to people why we play one of

the older versions of the games. And I have to be honest, like to me, Guilty Gear Exard, one of our community members actually described it, I think, perfectly as like the Goldilocks Guilty Gear, right? You play plus R and it's a hell of a game, but it's one of those games that like the more seriously you take it, the more you'll have your heartbroken, you know? It's like, it's the bad boy at the bar. You're going to have fun a couple times, but the more you try to invest, the less fun you're going to have and the more you're going to end up regretting your decisions. A wise man in our local community who's very good at XX likes to say that, uh, Plus R is a game that's very hard and sucks a lot. As a plus R player, I tend to agree. And Strive, if you like Strive and if that's your introduction to the Guilty Gear series,

then you kind of don't know what you're missing out on. But to me, strive is not enough Guilty Gear. It would have been a great fighting game if it wasn't called Guilty Gear, but to me it's missing so much stuff that it doesn't feel like a Guilty Gear game, at least the way that I fell in love with Guilty Gear games. And Exxert is like this really nice moment where Arxas has some of the concessions to accessibility that make the game a little bit less hostile and more approachable for new players and people who want to take their time learning stuff. But it also has a lot of the kind of old game power and jank because they are building off of the XX foundations. One thing that I've personally learned from making fighting games is that the better you get at your job, like a lot of what you're learning to do is make a game.

that behaves more like how you want it to behave when players actually get their hands on it, right? You are considered a professional if you can make a game that delights players, but also doesn't do stuff you don't expect. Because when games do things you don't expect, then you usually have problems you have to go fix, right? And Exard, it just hit Arxis at this perfect moment in time where they were good enough to make a fighting game that was really cool, but not good enough to cut down on all the shit that

like kind of the real crack players like me like. And so it ends up being this really, really just amazing game, I think, that I don't think Arksus is ever going to make something like this again. So if you don't mind me showing real quick, you can go to playgillityure.com. We have a weekly calendar for Guilty Gear Exeter NetPlay events. There's new player events. There's discords. There's all kinds of stuff. We got a network that I dare say expands across the world at this point. Like, it's a beautiful game. And it's really fun to get into a game. where it's just a bunch of people playing an older game. If you are an older person yourself,

you might enjoy that the average age of the Excer community is a bit older than the Strive community. I love the Strive kids. Y'all are dear to me, but I need... People have described Exeterd as like the most employed fighting game community out there, and I think that's a really sweet compliment.

We all got our day jobs. Yeah, well, I used to, man. But yeah, it's like, We get a whole lot of people getting into Exeter for the first time. And if there's some people like Irene, they've never gotten into competitive fighting games before. But it's just got this, the scene's got this unique vibe to it. It is a little bit more grown. And thus, you know, we're just here to hang out and play the game and have a good time with each other.

It's a really hard game that's really hard to learn how to play and get used to. And it takes like, we measure the beginning phase of a player's development over the scale of years, right? You can, you can play the game for three years and still be. considered a beginner. But it's a really beautiful game. You've got to play some Guilty Gear, man. You know, I did put that down as one of the final thoughts of this episode, actually. It's good advice. Does anyone else have anything they want to speak to for their final thoughts? I just wanted to share a little anecdote because the last job that I had was in an e-sports facility here in Osaka. And when I first got there, they had Street Fighter 5. And,

I thought I might be teaching English lessons using Street Fighter 5 in some way because I already knew how Street Fighter worked. But we didn't go in that direction. And at some point, they lost Street Fighter 5 or whatever. They changed. And they had Guilty Gear, that Strive. And so, number one, the Guilty Gear Strive opening theme song is forever locked on my head. I will never forget it. It's always in there.

But number two, I really got a chance to see a lot of different people play Guilty Gear and experiment with it. And I really enjoyed seeing that firsthand. You know, I think, let's sort of somehow get at an arcade, which I'm not going to do. Like, this was the closest thing I was going to get to, like, to see random strangers come to a fighting game and get to play around with it and miss around with it. And we had a very large arena, allegedly the biggest e-sports arena in Osaka. I don't know if that's true. It's gone now. But I got to play Guilty Gear in that arena with a guy, and it was going to be for NHK.

And if you ever have a chance to play a fighting game in an arena, I say, do it. because I had so much fun playing a game. I really didn't know very well at all, but it was on the big screen, and we were just going to town each other, and it was just a light. I don't know if that footage is still on NHK or the internet. I don't know, but I remember that day,

and it was pretty special. Hell yeah. I read, anything? Just to add on to Pat's stuff, like we're very beginner-friendly, and me in particular, I run, like I said, a monthly beginner in a meaty bracket, And a little bonus, the winners of my intermediate bracket's called Only Mids to celebrate the middest of mid players, the intermediate players.

If you win, I draw your character in the color that you use and it becomes part of the promo for the next one. But it has inadvertently become the most prized possession in the entire Guilty Gear community for Exeter, which I really didn't mean for that to happen. and I just wanted to reward people for sticking with the game. I remember starting this because I wanted, because beginners and intermediates wanted sort of lower stakes or easier, a different environment to compete in that wasn't just them getting beat down by better players. And I remember being that. So I was like, yeah, I want to run that. But I think I've accidentally made probably the most stressful moment in most people's lives now. So if you'd like to be part of that, you know, check it out on Playgilticure.com.

Your swag is too strong. We like to joke, because I watch too much Naruto, we like to joke that Only Mids is the tune-in exams, the arc for the guilty-gear exer community. So you win Only Mids, you get your character drawn. That's like your coming of age in the scene, right? But also, all the salty old heads like me, we get together every month and we get to watch a bunch of children fight for our entertainment.

It is great. I highly recommend. It's usually the last Tuesday of every month on Twitter. dot TV slash K-O-H-K-K-O-H-Q-U-E-T-E. Well, this has been a Retronauts episode. Thank you for listening in and enjoying the Guilty Gear chatter. And, you know, we are Patreon-supported. So if you want to support us on Patreon, it's patreon.com slash Retronauts.

And what are our tiers again? We have our $5 tier with the Discord access and your weekly Columns, Diamond, as well as exclusive Friday episodes. We also have our $2 tier. $3.00. 4. Or $3, yes. Sorry. I have a Patreon with a $2 tier. I'm getting

mixed up. $3 tier for episodes a week early as well. And add free and at a higher bit rate. So you get all the good stuff. Diamond, where can folks find you? Beyond my rich notes work, you can find me around the internet by looking for Fight Club. F-V-I-T.

That's my last name. L-U-B, that's a word you already know. And you can look for Fight Club on most social media services or on my website, fightclub.me. It looks like something from the 90s. But I made it now because that's all the HTML that I know. Excellent. Irene, do you have anything you'd like to chill?

Where can folks find you? You can find me. I'm co-quette on most things on my website and on blue sky. I'm co-dot money. And in fighting game brackets, you'll see me as emoto. Yeah, that's about it. All right. And Pat.

I'm Pat the Flip everywhere. Twitch.tv.TV slash Pat the Flip. YouTube slash Pat the Flip. Patreon.com slash path to flip if you want to see my writing and some of my video work. I'm also Patreon supported. That's how I try to pay the bills these days. So if you want to drop by, I do a lot of what I would consider to be foundational work for grassroots fighting game community. I'm trying to kind of divest us a little bit from the influence of e-sports and publisher money.

because to me, fighting games are best when they're introduced or when they're enjoyed between people on the grassroots basis. So it's a lot of what I do. You can find more information about my work at Patrick Miller. Ninja, PGG dot events, and of course, playgiltygear.com. Because you know what you got to do?

Love your life. Be good to one another and play some guilty gear. Oh. Pats doing the Lord's work out there. I should add. My Patreon is patreon.com slash co. K-O-H. where you can help support my ongoing web comic that I just launched called Angel Arcade.

If you want to see some lovely young ladies playing fighting games together. The real pieces of work, man. It's a great comic. Pat, I just wanted to say, first of all, have birthday. I can't believe we were crazy on the birthday. But also, I didn't read it yet, but I was very intrigued by your book that you put out, not that long ago. Yep. From Masher to Master to you.

So I wrote, thanks for giving me an excuse to talk about this one. From Master to Master, people know it as the Shariken.com eBook because it was originally published through shariqin.com. You could sign up for their mailing list. You get a free copy of my book. From Master to Master 2 aims to teach people to play fighting games through more holistic lens. Right. So what I learned from writing the first book is one that people who read books about fighting games aren't usually very good at them. But two, that learning how to play a fighting game is actually kind of the easy part. The hard part is not doing a bunch of stuff you don't need to do to play a fighting game. game. So from Master to Master 2, which you can find at a Patrickmiller.itch.io, it's available on a pay-what-you-want-you-want-you-want-you-can give it to me for free. It is, it holds your hand through the process of becoming the kind of player who knows how to do a combo, who knows how to practice in training mode, who knows how to play multiplayer games, who knows how to go to a tournament and even maybe run your own tournament. I showed it to a friend and he was like, oh, this is a guide on how to be Patrick Miller. So if you want to be me, from masher to master, baby.

And it's got a whole lot of great art from Irene. So honestly, that's worth the 20 bucks alone. She's got, yeah, bad. I'm out there doing drop kicks. I'm painting the fence with with bison from Street Fighter. It's like literally painting a stuff in there. Yeah. So what you're saying is that, you know, now that now that my four year old has decided he wants to start playing fighting game. with Sailor Moon that I should read this to him for his bedtime. Absolutely. Send him to me for training when he is at age. Perfect.

And as for me, you can find me on a blue sky at Atari Archive.org, which is also my website, and my YouTube series, and the name of my Patreon, and the name of my book, which is still available through limited run as of this recording. So check it out if you enjoy the history of old video games. Oh, yeah. And with that, I think we can call it here. Thank you all for joining me. Thanks so much for having us.

Heaven or hell. Good night.