Developer: Arc System Works
Publisher: Arc System Works
Platform: PlayStation 4
Tested on: PlayStation 4
Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2 – Review
Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2 is basically Guilty Gear Xrd Revelator but not really. It’s better and bigger, and rebalanced with quite some additions to hold the attention of newcomers and the interest of fans. Bigger isn’t always better, is a saying that’s often true for a lot of things in life. Usually in fights, the one with the bigger stick wins the game, but that’s not the case when looking at the character roster of Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2.
Story
Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2 isn’t exactly the second game in the series. It’s actually the 17th game in the series, so there’s a lot of lore built up over the years. For those of you having played the Revelator game, fear not, it’s the same story. The main focus, however, lies on Ephelt Valentine and Jack-O’s story arcs. When you’ve seen quite some anime, the catch to this story seems a bit overdone. There’s a threat looming to take down humanity and then there’s an evil entity that’s hellbent on making humans into the perfect beings by sacrificing someone to a deity to merge them with it. It might be a recurring theme, sometimes the writers mess it up, but here the characters are relatable enough.
There’s a full movie mode being the ‘story’ mode which is usually the main campaign but in this game it fully plays out the story that supports the lore of Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2. It has to be said, this mode alone takes up quite some time, so if you are really invested in the game you might as well watch it, but if you are just in it for giving an NPC a solid beating, you might want to skip it, even though it is very solid and makes you relate to certain characters all the more. There are however save points during this elongated cutscene, so you don’t have to sit through it in one sitting.
Graphics
Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2 goes for the 2.5D fighting approach and pulls it off quite magnificently. There’s the backgrounds that feel quite artistically sculpted and then there’s the clashing of the characters that look hand drawn. The moves are over the top yet fluid to a fault. Every combo you make your character go through looks like it’s one flowing movement and not a set of different moves stringed together with awkward poses or pauses in between.
Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2 is quite loud in its graphical design when it comes to the bigger moves your character or your opponent busts out. They are flashy and explosive and, it has to be said, they look as painful and do as much damage as you would estimate they would. It’s quite fun to see attacks that look devastating to actually be so. There’s nothing as frustrating as looking at a character taking an enemy to town on the pain train and only have the opponent lose a smidgeon of health. It’s fun to know that whenever you go ‘Oh that has got to hurt’, it actually did hurt your or your opponent’s character.
Sound
When it comes to fighting games, it’s difficult to make the characters sound unique and give them catch phrases and exclamations of pain/joy without them spewing them over and over again ad nauseam. This is what often makes fighting games a pain to watch with the audio on full blast. Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2 is not without fault on that front. It tries to rectify this by giving the player and the viewer an awesome music score to listen to, with the focus on the music, the occasional return of a yelp of pain by a character is easily forgotten, even if the same exclamation has been made several times in a row for the last match. The voice acting of the story mode is really well done and is one of the reasons to look into it.
Gameplay
Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2 is a fighting game. To get the maximum out of it you’ll have to master the tutorial, and mastering it is the right word. At first everything starts off easily enough, With the tutorial going over every button and what it does, but then the difficulty spikes to making combos and that’s where things get difficult, once you are required to make a combo with more than 6 hits, it might take out more out of newbies than it might feel worth. Even if you don’t manage to finish the tutorial completely, you can still fight enemies and play some matches against NPC’s to get a grip with the characters. There’s a lot of them so you won’t run out of fighting potential at any time. When talking about the DLC which is included in this version, we’re talking about two new characters, new stages and new moves. So even if you’ve played Guilty Gear Xrd Revelator, there might just be enough in this game to surprise you.
Every character that goes through the arcade mode shows off their story. Playing against other live players actually requires completion of the tutorial, not because the game locks the content behind it, but because you won’t get very far if you don’t master the full movements and prowess to get the maximum out of your character. If you do manage to plow through the arcade mode and learn the ropes, you might as well finish the tutorial and pick up a trophy/achievement. That’s just to show how difficult the tutorial is.
Conclusion
Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2 is a step up from Guilty Gear Xrd Revelator, with all DLC and extra characters. It might seem like a pricy deal if you’ve already bought Guilty Gear Xrd Revelator, but this game is equally as good. For newcomers to the series, don’t be daunted by the lore or the gameplay mechanics. The tutorial does quite a good job to get you in fighting shape, even though getting through it might be a challenge with the difficulty spikes in it about halfway through.
Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2 - Review,
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