Review #685: Guilty Gear 20th Anniversary Edition

 This one being the guiltiest one of them all.

 I've liked Guilty Gear ever since I first saw an ad for it on a Gamepro magazine. I wouldn't get to play it until much later, and it'd be the sequel Guilty Gear X, when I managed to get my hands on the PC port. Which wouldn't run well on my PC, since apparently it couldn't deal with GG's giant sprites, so I'd get invisible character sprites and/or flickering. Regardless, it was love at first sight and I'd eventually make my way back to the very first game as well as play most of the sequels that came out. Guilty Gear 20th Anniversary Edition reunites both the very first game, as well as the final iteration of the XX series(I guess Xrd was too much for the Switch to handle?) in one small and disappointing package.

 Let's start with the extras, first of all, the game's cover is terrible. An odd complaint, maybe, but Guilty Gear has always had brilliant hand-drawn cover art by the creator himself. This cover is as generic anime as it can get. Then there's the artbook, which contains mostly black-and-white background art as well as some early designs for Bedman and Ephelt. Lame. It's hard not feel as if ArkSys didn't much care about this game, they were probably too busy scamming people with Blazblue Cross Tag. That said, even if they didn't care about it, Guilty Gear is still a fantastic fighting game series, and the games speak for themselves, window-dressing be damned.

 I've been on the lookout for Guilty Gear since I really wanted to own the game again, so I'm glad that Guilty Gear finally saw a rerelease. As far as fighting games go, even for its era,  Guilty Gear is pretty barebones. There's Arcade Mode, VS Player and Training mode, and that's that, there isn't even a difficulty setting option. Unlocking Testament and Justice isn't too bad, since it simply requires beating the game once, but Baiken is a whole 'nother story, requiring beating the game using no continues. And it's harsh, man! The CPU loves to abuse the Instakill mechanic, which was in a very early infancy for this game.

 The game is a bit rough, but I like the gritty sprites and subdued color palette. The core of what makes anime fighters tick was set in place with this game, with dashing, air-dashing and even air-combos being in vogue. Which Capcom did first, true, but Guilty Gear is much faster than anything they had done at the time. All in all, it's a good game, but every iteration that came afterwards would improve upon it. That said, no other game in the franchise looks like this one, so it's worth a look or two.

 Accent Core Plus R is a much better package, and easily worth the price of admission alone. It's got modes up the wazzoo(Arcade, Story, Survival, M.O.M, Mission, Training, VS Player and CPU as well as Team VS). It's also got way more characters than the original release, and you can pretty much double the roster with the unlockable EX versions of every character, which changes a few of their moves and properties. For instance, when I first played Accent Core on the PS2, after a few years of abstinence from the franchise, I was surprised to see my boy's, Ky Kiske, forward+HS changed. Using his EX version restores that move(At the cost of losing the Shoryuken's follow-up, but then again, my Ky never had that in the first place!).

 While it's true that the series got very complex by the time of Accent Core, with a lot of different mechanics I don't even dare get into, there's still a lot of fun to be had by mashing buttons, honestly! The games are so fast paced that it's very easy to make simple combos just by mashing, so I'm pretty sure anyone can have fun with the game. On another note, and this holds true for both games, playing with the joycons doesn't feel very good, the buttons don't work as well as a digital pad, and I've never been a fan of Nintendo's analog sticks, although I settled with the latter since I had no other choice, so it'd be better if you invested in other joysticks if you want to take the game seriously.

 I liked Guilty Gear 20th Anniversary Edition, but that's because I've always like the franchise. For a anniversary rerelease, this package leaves a lot to be desired, with a very underwhelming presentation and extras. ArkSys could and should've done better.
 8.0 out of 10