Review #193: Guilty Gear Judgment

 Let's rock!

 Guilty Gear is awesome. It's widely considered to be the progenitor of the 'animu fighter', and a very complex fighting game to grasp, and as the series grew, it only got even more complex. In all honesty, at a casual level were you don't have to worry about hitting those 1-frame Fake Roman Cancels, it isn't so bad.

 Judgment is the PSP port of the series, and it's a fairly interesting package. Japan got Guilty Gear Accent Core and Judgment, while America got XX # Reload(It makes sense, I promise!) and Judgment. While Accent Core is a latter update to the franchise, which added Order Sol and ABBA, it also added Force Edge attacks, something not everyone took kindly, so depending on how you see it, 'Guilty Gear X2 # Reload' might be the better game. You are probably wondering just what is 'Judgment', it's a verb. But it's also a made-for-PSP game, a beat'em-up using Guilty Gear XX's characters. And it sorta works.

 Judgment offers a Story Mode, Survival and a 2 Player mode. Story Mode is made up of 6 stages, the first four being comprised of 4 areas each, while stage 5 and 6 are only one are long. You can play as almost every character from XX, except Judgement, Kliff and Robo-Ky, but it does allow you to play as Judgmen't last boss... Judgment. The game has infinite continues, of sorts, every time you pick a your character, you can choose to start from any area, and you always start off with 3 lives, so dying is no biggie, plus, there's a fairly simple extra life cheat that you can just spam if it gets tough. Still, a fairly short game.

 I really loved seeing how each character was adapted into beat'em up form. They kept most of their special and super attacks, via simple quarter circle forward or back inputs. Pulling the ones involving quarter circle backward motions were a bit harder to pull off consistently, but it wasn't a big issue. While this sounds amazing, as the movesets are far larger than, probably, any other beat'em up, the game is very repetitive. There's about 5 different enemy types, and they aren't very creative. The stages are fairly lifeless as well. Sometimes the collision detection felt a bit off as well, but nothing too bad.

 Now then, if only Judgment was on the UMD, I'd suggest skipping the game, but Guilty Gear XX # Reload is one of the finest fighting games ever made. Ever. This is a bit of a straightforward port, everything is unlocked from the start(Justice, Kliff, the SP and EX versions of each character), and there's no Story Mode. You do get Arcade, M.O.M., Vs Player, Vs CPU, Training and Survival, which is all you need really.

 The game looks fantastic on the PSP, I doubt these sprites had ever looked so good before. The character sprites got shrunk for Judgment, but they are every bit as detailed in XX. The Soundtrack is excellent, as per usual, in both XX and Judgment, at least if you like Rock.

 Guilty Gear XX # Reload is a classic, a great fighting game that's great to have on the go. Judgment isn't anything special, but as a companion piece to XX, it's a nice little extra to play if you get tired from the fighting.
 8.0 out of 10.