Game #898: Guilty Gear Xrd - Rev 2

 Rev up and let it rip.

 I fell in love with Guilty Gear before I even played it, as coming across its beautiful hand-drawn art ads on magazines, Gamepro in particular, was enough for my teenage self to know it was something I Wanted to play. Eventually I played Guilty Gear X on PC, and afterwards I followed the series with keen interest. I remember I was extremely excited for XX, and Xrd looked like a thing of beauty.... but, sadly, Xrd hasn't been my cup of tea. Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2 is, quite likely, the final instalment of the Xrd series, featuring two new playable characters and a few balancing changes...

 As far as modes go, it's exactly like the original Revelator which I've already covered. I think it has a few bonus Story Mode episodes, but as I've previously said... I don't really like GG Xrd's approach to story telling. It's hard to keep invested when there's no gameplay, and while I enjoy visual novel-styled games, such as Danganronpa and Phoenix Wright, Guilty Gear became a bit TOO anime for my taste, almost as bad as Blazblue.

 The two new characters are Answer and Baiken, two very technical characters which is an interesting choice for an update. Answer's design is alright, but nothing special, and he is yet another character that shares the 'overly talkative win quotes' trait that so many characters in the game have. I used to really like Baiken, she used to be really cool, and at first glance she looks even more badass now... but her entire design revolves around boobs, to the point that she has a ridiculously dumb walking animation. She was never this voluptuous before, and she used to be a 'serious' character, so this is nothing short of disappointing. And this is pretty much why Xrd never managed to entice me like Guilty Gear and Guilty Gear X, it's too anime, there's too much dumb fanservice, it feels like Blazblue 2.0, and it wasn't like this before, and I sure as hell don't like it. Thankfully, Guilty Gear -STRIVE- seems to be looking a bit more reigned in, as far as anime influences go, although Giovana, who is a fantastic new design, seems to have been given a dumb neutral stance, like Blazblue's Bullet.

 A plus to the game is the inclusion of the previous game's DLC, namely Kum and Dizzy. Dizzy plays pretty much exactly like she did before, while Kum is a very interesting take on the Shoto character. This also means that the character roster has grown to a respectable 25, and it's a more than fair way to end this chapter in Guilty Gear.

 Well, what can I say? It's the end of Guilty Gear Xrd. While the graphics were amazing from the very first entry, I gotta say that the new anime/Blazblue art-direction really missed the mark with me, which tainted my overall experience with it. The fact that I feel they ruined Ky Kiske, my favorite character didn't help either, although I'm more than happy with his new look in STRIVE. Personal taste aside, I won't deny that Xrd was top-notch where it really mattered: The gameplay, as it managed to play just as well as the classic games, sacrificing nothing, save for some complexity, in its change to 3-D.

8.0