The next installment in the Guilty Gear series, Guilty Gear Strive, was announced and, boy, does it look pretty gorgeous. The games have always had a sharp, anime hand drawn style, but Strive takes things to a new level. But as familiar as it is, there’s been changes that have raised some eyebrows to hardcore fans. The games were always pretty technical, even by fighting game standards, but it seems the game will strive (no pun intended) to create a more simplified control scheme. How that will pan out is something we’ll just have to wait and see about, but why was it done? Well, it’s all about the views.
In an interview with Gearnuke, General Director Daisuke Ishiwatari said they’ve wanted to simplify the controls to help those watching the game’s have a better sense of what’s happening in a match. It’s something they’ve slowly been doing with previous titles, such as the recent Dragon Ball: FighterZ, and it seems Strive is an end point in that regard.
“So I think this is true for a lot of Arc System Works fighting games, but unless you are somewhat familiar with fighting games and more specifically Arc System Works fighting games its kind of hard to follow what’s going on on the screen. So you might look at a screen, look at a match for a few minutes and wonder what’s going on, what’s the situation. And it’s a very fast-paced type of game. So our biggest goal with New Guilty Gear wasn’t to make the controls easier by any means it was to make it easy to watch, that was a very high-level concept. So the viewer, they could just sit down in the middle of a match and know this guy is on offense, this guy is on defense, this guy is kind of feeling the pressure right now, he’s under pressure, you could tell that by watching the screen. That was a big part of the game. So making the controls easy might have been a derivative by-product of that, but that wasn’t necessarily what we set out to do. And I think the most important thing was to preserve the identity of Guilty Gear which is really letting the players and their imaginations come up with new combos, new set-ups and giving them the tools to be able to do that.”
How well this end up working at the end of the day is anyone’s guess, and odds are it’ll still be something that many players probably still won’t manage to get a good grasp on. Well, we’ll see what it’s like when Guilty Gear Strive launches in 2020.