Guilty Gear Xrd -REVELATOR- Review

Coming into the Guilty Gear series for the first time, I was a little intimidated. Until last year, my experience of fighting games barely stretched beyond Mortal Kombat, which isn’t really a series renowned for its level of depth.

Guilty Gear Xrd -REVELATOR-, from here on Revelator, is the seventeenth(!) release in this franchise that began way back in 1998. It’s simultaneously a sequel and an update to Guilty Gear Xrd -SIGN-, from here on Sign, from 2014, focusing on the story arcs of Elphelt Valentine and Jack-O — and yes, Jack-O wears a pumpkin mask and uses pumpkin-shaped bombs in combat, because why else would you give her that name.

As someone who had never played a Guilty Gear game, it’s almost impenetrable, as the story mode opens with a cutscene that has a narrator talking over scenes from the previous game — a narrator speaking Japanese, over game footage in Japanese, giving you two sets of subtitles simultaneously with random English text boxes interspersed throughout. If you can get to the end of it and have any idea of what’s going on and who anyone is, you’re a better man than I. This is mad considering that Sign actually had an English dub.

Luckily the rest of the plot is fairly easy to understand, but I won’t go into it here. I will point out that unlike any fighting game I’ve played before, Revelator doesn’t have any gameplay in its story mode. It’s a series of cutscenes that you watch, like an animated film just split into scenes and offered as levels. The story darts between characters and locations frequently, but at any time you can pause to check the glossary to clear anything up.

My biggest issue worth mentioning is that the cutscenes seem to have a both a framerate issue and screen tearing. I say a framerate issue — the movements of characters are quite janky at the best of times, giving the appearance of a lower framerate. If in fact the developer had been going for an effect to mirror animated film by having everything play at 24fps, it was the wrong decision, as the effect ruined the experience for me. 2D animation at 24fps works — 3D? Not so well.

If you actually want to play some Guilty Gear, you have the Battle Mode and Network sections, which hold your arcade ladders, and your local and online multiplayer. The other option, and the one any new player will check out, is the Practice Mode. In here, Revelator offers perhaps the most in-depth fighting game tutorial I have ever seen, teaching you more than just what each button does and asking you to master some basic combos and prepare you for certain situations that something like Street Fighter never does — like how to use anti-airs and how blocking and crouch-blocking *actually* works.

Practice Mode also offers your standard training suite for perfecting your combos and the like on AI opponents, and a range of challenges for each character.

Being just an update to Sign, Revelator doesn’t radically change the fighting at all, instead being more in line with something like Super Street Fighter IV and just combining all the updates under a new name. It does however add a new control mode called Stylish which anyone familiar with the BlazBlue series will recognise. It attempts to remove the barrier to entry for players totally new to fighting games by making combos available through simple button presses and allow even your dad to pull off the coolest looking moves in the game.

The combat still encourages a more aggressive style of play, with the tension gauge filling up during the fight that allow you to use the more powerful special moves. You’ve got your basic four-button attacks: a punch, kick, slash, and heavy attack. You have throws, and dashes and all that — the stuff you expect. Then you have dust attacks, Roman cancels, overdrives, and instant kills. There’s a lot here to get your head around, and a lot to master, but it is a very rewarding experience.

With Revelator being an update of Sign, a handful of new playable characters have been added, expanding the story. These characters are Johnny — who looks like a cowboy with a katana, Jack-O Valentine — the pumpkin lady, Jam Kuradoberi — a girl with the most unrealistic hairstyle I’ve ever seen, Kum Haehyun — a new character for Revelator, added for this console version, and then fan-favourites Dizzy and Raven bring the roster up to 23. Each of these six characters come with their own Episode too — Guilty Gear’s arcade mode that has you follow one character through a series of fights while weaving in little nuggets of story between each encounter.

By far the most bizarre thing I found while playing Revelator was the Fishing Mode. In it, you play a small avatar who walks around a lake and can fish for either one or ten items. These items are things like new icons to use on your battle card online and new colour palettes for characters. You can get new heads and body colours for your fishing avatar too, as well as emotes. But, the best thing… is that someone shouts “Fishing!” through your controller speaker when you select the mode.

As a fighting game fan, having new systems to learn has been great fun and the design of the characters and the world is instantly enjoyable if you like Japanese fighting games and/or anime. With the detailed tutorial and introduction of the Stylish control mode, it’s far more approachable for new players, but the complexity of the story and how little it does to help people jump on quickly may rub people the wrong way.