I’m going to start labeling these writeups differently. I feel conflicted, usually, like I should be writing more, that I should almost be writing a review or something. So now games I play and write about be will be labeled as part of my Game Journal. While I’ll try and still give a reasonable amount of context, I am going to write (especially for more well-known game) assuming the reader has at least some familiarity with the game.

Final Thoughts

I had this game sitting in my Steam library for years. It was gifted to me an eternity ago and I’m glad I finally got around to it. While the game is lacking as far as 3rd person shooters go, it’s gorgeous and the story, while heavy handed at times (with a few plot details that struggle under scrutiny), is chilling and memorable. There are many rich stories in games now, so while I won’t recommend it to everyone, it definitely has a lot to give to people who like to explore older titles.

Long nights were spent in the X2 days, wondering when a TRUE Guilty Gear sequel would come out to move the story forward. Even during it’s time though, Overture looked… not terribly promising. As a Guilty Gear fan I still wanted to play it. For years, I wanted to try and enjoy it, jank and all. So here we are, well over 10 years later and gosh I didn’t miss much. But I’m glad I played it now because it is a game that is more interesting as a relic than as a thing to actually play.

Guilty Gear 2: Overture is a Game that is Good at Nothing

Guilty Gear 2: Overture is an ambitious game. It is a clever game. An original game.

But it’s not a good game.

Overture does not look good, even by games of its era. Even by the scope of its gameplay. It’s combat is rough and rude, even compared to its contemporaries. It’s story is incoherent. Even it’s music lags behind games in it’s own series, dragged forward by only by a few exceptionally high points. There is really no single thing about Overture that is good. The assemblage is interesting, but execution only reaches about mediocrity for fleeting seconds.

I have no proof for this, but I feel like the single player campaign for Overture was developed linearly. The game puts it’s worse foot forward and steadily improves. An initial training area that looks like it’s from an old MMO, unclear tutorial instructions detailing mechanics that will take forever to put together. Voice acting that isn’t technically bad, but is so out of tune with the characters and the script as to be painful. I was for real baffled that Sin wasn’t actually supposed to be a pissed off angry man when Xrd came out because until now, I had only been exposed to the Overture dub.

When asked to perform to move by the game, you get to immediately feel how clunky and awkward the game is. Attacks feel soft and unresponsive. Inputs for directional attacks feel alien to anyone used to other character action games. Jump canceling into a weird Guilty Gear style 2d air combo jarring and unreliable… and with all of this, the tutorial feels like it takes twice as long as it needs to, simply because it constantly has to cut back to cutscenes.

It gets worse before it gets better.

I’m not going to recap the story, which is better done by checking here, but it’s thin, made up of grandiose smoke and mirrors, supported jargon and layers of mcguffin. A lot of video game stories do this and using these tools to stitch together a coherent story. Overture lacks this. Things happen for reasons that feel like they will become clear later, but they never do. Why are you fighting with crazy ghost army magic, what the heck is “the cube for” and why does anyone want it? What does Valentine and “mother” actually want to do? WHERE THE HECK DID IZUNA COME FROM LIKE HE JUST COMES IN ON STAGE 2 LIKE YO I GUESS WE’RE WORKING TOGETHER NOW LIKE IT AIN’T NOTHIN’ like this game is a confusing mess.

Like not just the story, the whole game, because as soon as Izuna comes to help you out and pulls out that Ghost/Servant stuff and you’re fighting with armies, you’re just FLOODED with mechanics, items, things to micromanage. It’s potentially interesting but completely overwhelming. Also the game needs to teach you how to drift. Not the Strive “RC Drift” type thing (though as a side note, Roman Cancels in Overture are called “Modern Cancels” which is almost charmingly… confident?). Like you gotta Tokyo Drift. Oh god it feels bad it feels so bad. The mechanic, which allows you to do sharp turns on this crazy mega dash the game lets you do, is TECHICALLY FUNCTIONAL and is something you could definitely get good at to be a skill differentiator in online matches, but it feels so bad, so unresponsive, and a slightly mistimed input either has you do something else completely, or has you smashing into a wall and sitting through a long recovery animation. It’s a mechanic I can imagine people who’ve mastered it liking, but is so miserable feeling early as to be seen as nothing but a failure.

Despite all this, you start to see a lot of the artistic creativity of the game. Valentine’s army of EGL gasmask troops, Sol’s weird mech army, fueled by a giant muscle bound bara man bound to gears, powering two giant lighters. They were clearly trying, and invested in what they were making.

The missions continue to get worse though. As you understand the mechanics more, the game begins to cheat, or change rules on the fly. Oh, you lose when you masterghost is destroyed, but Dr. Paradigm simply getting knocked out ends the missions? You tactically capture ghosts, only for those sensible moves to betray you when random enemies teleport in? Not only does the game not actually teach you how to play it’s multiplayer, it actively makes the experience miserable. Eventually the game realizes this isn’t what the campaign should be and it slowly transforms into a… very small scale and awkward Musou game. Sure, there is pain along the way, like an ill conceived ‘stealth item finding’ mission, but you also just get to simply fuck up a lotta dudes as Ky The plot, while never sensical or clear, leads to fun moments like Valentine’s weird fake ghost troops contemplating their existence and assured death, or finally getting to confront and fight That Man. Sin and Ky even get to have a heart to heart until you go together into a giant brawl where it’s impossible to see who anyone is and kinda sucks. It sucks, but it sucks in a cool way.

The seemingly linear development means by the end of the game, the devs have kinda figured out what they’re doing. It’s clunky, but pretty fun. The last mission opens with ASW finally understanding their 3d presentation. The shots are weird and gorgeous, the writing is delightfully grandiose and nonsensical and the music fucking whips. Is it a good game now? Absolutely not, but at this point, Overture is a fun and stylish bad game. Little about the final fight with Valentine makes sense, but it’s cool and since Guilty Gear is supposed to be cool, this is a win.

Let it be said that after this point, ASW never struggles with 3d presentation ever again. Well, mostly.
Some of Xrd’s Early IKs were… not the best.

So I can’t recommend Overture like I can a lot of weird, quirky games. It’s not as lot of fun and of the whole package, only 4 missions really seem to really click. But I won’t stop you. Honestly, even though I didn’t play it, playing the Multiplayer might be the most interesting thing to try out. Still, despite all it’s failings, it’s fucked up to think ASW tried to do something this nutty and almost succeeded. I respect it.

Let me start off by saying thank you to Natsu, Renko, Floogle, and Renex. This is not my project. I gave my feedback and helped where I could, but these four, plus numerous testers, including speedrunners such as Wolsk and Tesivonius. So with that I’d like to present I Wanna be the Guy: Remastered.

So what’s different?

The team has rebuilt IWBTG from the ground up in game maker, moving the game to Yuuutu fangame physics, remastering all the audio, fixing frame pacing issues, controller support, reasonable sound settings and putting an end to needless crashes. The game also includes other more editorial improvements like enemy death animations, but these can be modified in a series of dipswitches available in the game’s options menu, which contains both accuracy options (We reworded the Zelda sword joke but the option, for the sake of preservation, is there if you want to restore the original dialogue).

So for new players, or players looking to relive past memories, there are almost no drawbacks to this version. All changes will feel either positive or will be invisible. Fangame fans will notice the new physics, but see that only as a plus. Some people like long term speed runners or super-fans of the original game might walk away with a few complaints, but even those players have viewed this version as a massive net positive. As much as possible was copied from original MMF2 source code. The game also includes some added content and secrets, possibly with more coming in the future! All changes come with my very vocal endorsement. No change is anything I wouldn’t have considered in an update of my own.

There are two types of preservation. One is raw preservation. That the games code is available and accessible and playable. That won’t change any time soon and the original version won’t go anywhere. But there is a second type of preservation, involving access and approachability. This version of IWBTG succeeds on those merits. It is as accurate as it can be to tell 99% of the audience what they need to know about IWBTG and its history while being a much smoother experience, user friendly experience. I’m glad IWBTG is at the point where the game design is the only user hostile aspect of it.

Also thank you for the team. Originally this project was intended for the fangame community as an attempt to rehabilitate the game’s image. Sadly, the weird, buggy, janky nature of IWBTG sets it apart from other fangames, leaving it oddly divorced from the genre it inspired. The team did a wonderful job making the game feel like a modern fangame and allowing it’s place in history to be appreciated. It is a rough, crude game, but I feel it is an important one.

So please, play this remake. I endorse it so much that It’s now listed on the IWBTG download page as an “official” version.

MY HISTORY WITH FIGHTING GAMES, THE FGC, AND HOW MY FIRST LOVE, GUILTY GEAR, HELPED ME GET THROUGH THE PANDEMIC

For the last few years I’ve been doing a year in summery of every game I’ve played. That’s a bit difficult to do now, since I’ve been writing up about games as I play them. It also is a problem that I haven’t been playing many game. In fact, I’ve been playing mostly just one.

I wanted to review Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2 earlier in the year but, like is the case with any good fighting game, I have no intention to stop playing it. So as the most important game in my life this year, I figured it would serve as both a great capstone for the year and an excuse to write about my history of fighting games.

This is needlessly long and needlessly detailed. I don’t know why anyone else would read it, but like many of my end of year lists, I’m writing it for me.

A Boy with an SNES

Mortal Kombat was released when I was 9 years old. I was a Cub Scout at the time and at my local mall for the Pinewood Derby. There was time before my car(or, more accurately with the secret traditions of the Pinewood Derby, my father’s car) would be racing, so I asked to go to the arcade. I was told I had about 10 minutes.

Some people remember everything. They can tell you all their friends in middle school, the names of every teacher they ever had, all the drama that happened throughout their youth. I can’t. I don’t reflect back often enough on these things to keep those memories fresh. But what I do remember I often remember vividly.

I remember that arcade. I remember where the Mortal Kombat machine was. I remember me, a socially awkward 9 year old, trying to peer around pubescent teenage boys who felt like towering giants to see a glimpse of the gory carnage that goes going on. Just the way the screen faded dark when a fatality happen made my stomach sink. Even the sounds of the game shook me. I wanted to play this game more than anything, but the line was too long so I watched and watched and watched.

I missed my race, but if I hadn’t, I doubt I would have remembered it as clearly as I remember those moments staring at a Mortal Kombat machine.

Mortal Kombat was the game I always wanted to play. My friends would also play Street Fighter and I’d tolerate it, but it never made sense to me. “Why would people play Street Fighter?” I’d ask. “There isn’t even any blood!” Young me had no appreciation for how gnarly it was for characters to puke in SF2. MK motions also agreed with me more. It was the game I could actually, to some vague extent, play. All fighting games back then made me feel clumsy. I was supremely uncoordinated as a boy, but MK made me feel the least clumsy, while appealing to me on a visceral level. I dabbled in other games sometimes — technically Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighter was my first tournament game during the 1994 Block Buster World Videogame Championship — but I’d always go back to MK.

XBand and the Original Online Warriors

Before people could argue about Wifi vs Ethernet, I was playing Mortal Kombat 2 over copper telephone cables. We were one of the test locations for the 1994 launch of the Xband modem for the SNES and Genesis. It must have been horrible, would I would n’t know any better. I was so excited to play other people. I was “Coolkid1” if I remember right and had an appropriate cool kid avatar to boot. This was my first experience being online, chatting with people, sending email (Xband had real email!). This was also my prototype for interacting with the FGC. Since matches were mostly local (to avoid horrible long distance prices) you could… meet people. We’d exchange phone numbers and chat. Eventually we’d meet up and play laser tag. I was the young dorky kid among a bunch of teenagers and gosh did I suck at Mortal Kombat but it was fun.

Eventually I’d lose interest. A new Mortal Kombat would come out and I’d do all the fatalities (or get my friend with better execution to do them), play a bit and forget it. Occasionally I’d try xband, maybe win one game being super lame, get salty online and quit. It made me feel bad. I realized I didn’t like fighting games. I was a cool boy who liked jRPGs and playing games for the stories, dammit!

MAME, MUGEN, Soul Calibur, and Finally Clicking With Street Fighter

It wasn’t until late into High School that Fighting Games started to enter my interest again. The exact order of these things were muddy but I remember playing Alpha 3 on MAME in highschool. This sounds insane to me to think a MAME had CPS2 decrypted and implemented before Alpha 3 was even out, but that was the pace of emulation back then. A friend in school showed me Alpha 3 on one of the school computers and the game seemed so much more dynamic and interesting than Mortal Kombat. While also having a fresher “anime” aesthetic, fitting my love at the time.

I never seriously played Alpha 3 but it was when I started thinking “Maybe I COULD learn to play fighting games”. I’d go to gamefaqs, find combos, try to do to them and fail over and over again. Eventually this spiraled into me finding MUGEN, exposing me to all sorts of incredible Neo Geo characters (the Last Blade cast sticking out to me quite a bit at the time) and allowing me to play all kinds of ridiculously unfair Dragon Ball characters. It was pressing buttons in a controlled order but I still wasn’t playing people. At the very least, though, I stopped feeling clumsy.

Then my friend Jordan got a Dreamcast with Soul Calibur, which started a multi-year feud. We’d spend hours fighting him and other friends in his basement. Mitsurugi was my first true ‘main’ in a fighting game, battling hi Ivy and Cervantes. I didn’t really understand fighting games but I, in a group of people who knew nothing, was winning and I was winning by… thinking. By recognizing patterns, parrying stuff and doing that… really silly version of okizeme new players do where simply doing a meatie is enough to kill most players. I had a taste of what it felt like to be scary at a game. Not even a large fish in a small pond, but a small fish in a puddle. It was something, though!

We also dabbled in other stuff. It was my first exposer to 3rd Strike, having seen for sale on Dreamcast. Both me and my friend bought had the same thought “Wait, they made a Street Fighter 3?”

3s has never been my game and wasn’t then, but it was my first taste playing a Street Fighter game against another person while having a vague understanding about fighting games. My hands worked. I could PLAY STREET FIGHTER! Then we decided we didn’t like it and went back to Soul Calibur.

Guilty Gear X2

Years pass. Friend groups changed. I’m in college and in contact with almost no one I knew in high school. I’m hanging out with my new college friends and we’re playing Alpha on someone’s old Sega Saturn. My friend John walks in. “THEY MADE A SEQUEL!” he shouts. He’s holding a copy of Guilty Gear X2. My other friend is also excited… Paul. Most people here would know Paul as the voice of The Kid in I Wanna be the Guy. While the kid is cute, Paul is a natural villain. The type of guy who gets voted out in Among Us even when he didn’t do anything. The type of person who revels in this fear. Another one of our friends turns to me and says…

“Paul is really good at Guilty Gear. Nobody has ever beaten his Zato.”

This fucking shook me. EVER BEATEN? Paul wasn’t some bad ass tournament player or anything. We were just going pretty even in Alpha. NO ONE HAS EVER BEATEN HIM WHEN HE PLAYS HIS MAIN? I could get huge win streaks in Soul Calibur but someone would ALWAYS put me down eventually. How could one EVER beat him?

I hated this. I hated this so much. I was good at fighting games now, dammit! I’d pick someone cool and get a win on him! I couldn’t let this stand! All men are mortal!

I got Sawbladed into the fucking dirt.

I went to gamefaqs and did research. I settled on Anji, who at the time seemed to fit me aesthetically and seemed neat enough but I never felt like I was doing enough damage. “Mike, you gotta combo into super”. I look up my super…Half Circle Back, Forward.

Excuse me? I’ve done QCF+Multiple buttons. Double QCF+A Single button. Maybe even Half Circles. But HCB+F… and I have to time this to cancel an attack in a combo? When I know I actually hit? I felt stumped, but I wanted to beat Paul. I couldn’t stand this.

I got desperate. I didn’t have a PS2 so I got a rom of Guilty Gear X Advanced just so I had some way to practice! I got better, I could do things but I was still the weakest. John would fuck me up too. Charge Stun Edge on wakeup followed by Stun Dipper might as well have been unblockable at my skill level.

I kinda gave up for awhile before I started hanging out with another friend, Roger, who also enjoyed the game. He was super casual about playing it and that gave me time to breath. Despite that he was knowledgeable, suggesting characters for me to try and things to do. This is also the introduction of Patito. At the time Patito was too shy to talk, but we’d play Guilty Gear together at Roger’s. He had more fighting game experience than anyone else I’d been playing with but Patito, to this day, has a natural ability to mold to his opponent. Playing against Patito would always feel close no matter what your skill level was. So I learned. I picked up Ky and started beating people. Not Paul, but I could at least play the game. I still felt unsatisfied.

The Turning Point: Guilty Gear X2 #Reload

This went on for a whole year. I’d go back and forth being interested in Guilty Gear. Paul’s Zato was still largely undefeated (someone HAD to have gotten him in that time but he was still fucking people up). I was getting better, but barely.

I don’t know who told me about #Reload or that a PC version was available, but that’s when my life changed. Being able to go into training mode and practice things ON MY COMPUTER felt incredible. I joined Dustloop (actually before that I joined… gosh, what was it, Romancancel dot something??) and started looking up actual combos. At this time I was eyeballing Johnny and Baiken. Ky was a pragmatic choice but Baiken was a character that really appealed to me. Johnny too, but even at a low level I could tell he was too technical for me (Patito kept pushing me to play him anyways). I started engaging with the actual game systems. What was the point of a Roman Cancel? That thing that made me lose all my meter as I mashed buttons? Why would you spend all that meter when you could do a super? What, spending 50% meter to cancel a move animation was more important than doing a super??? Some moves can be “FRC”ed for only 25%???

… Well I started trying to learn two things. Baiken’s j.D frc while learning her corner dustloop. 2d Tatami j.sd air dash j.sd land f.s j.d FRC air dash j.sd

I spent months doing that over and over again. My first “Bread and Butter” combo. I started feeling hungrier. Looked for Dustloop locals. I remember cramming into a New York Zappa player’s basement to play. I probably never won a game playing at Phrekwenci’s place. There are also probably tons of player names I’d recognize if they were told to me now who played over there. But I remember specifically meeting and watching Marlinpie. At that time he wasn’t even 18 and was playing on the official PS2 Guilty Gear stick. He was at a level fair above everyone else in that cramped apartment and we all just tried to absorb whatever it was that he had.. I’d head there, sometimes with my friend Ben (tangentially related to the old Soul Calibur circle) who had also started working up his Slayer. We were hungry. Encouraged by one of the people at Phrek”s gathering, I started trying to play Johnny. His Bread and Butter was a bigger challenge than Baiken’s…

5k 5h mistfiner level 2 mid dash 5k6 5h DBT FRC j.ks j.ksd Ensenga

So many parts of this combo haunted me. Simply landing the kick after the mist finer was hard. My timing for the dash in and kick felt like it had to be frame perfect. It was nowhere close, but it felt that way. My sense of timing was still really coarse. The Divine Blade FRC was fast and it wouldn’t do a normal RC if I mistimed it like Baiken’s. I had to be perfect… and the jump install. the “6” the up motion during the kick… that took forever to actually do but I was hungry for I kept trying.

When Paul fell, Paul fell fast. Not for any lack of natural skill. To this day, Paul is a motherfucker who can find the cheapest shit in any game he plays… but because we were hungrier. The tides turned from Paul’s Zato can’t be beat to Paul’s Zato can’t win. The level of play of the whole group was elevating rapidly. I started switching characters to go easier on people, slowly learning the whole cast to some degree. I remember playing Dizzy against him for the first time and him getting ready to hurl a controller. “She’s already your best character!” She wasn’t, but it felt like that.

Eventually he quit. This made me sad… but at the same time I took perverse joy in it. I had gotten good at Guilty Gear out of spite and now it was with me for life. We were hungry.

Guilty Gear X2 Slash, Sticks, and my true entry into the FGC

Slash coming out represented a problem for me. The game didn’t have a PC version. But we all figured out swap magic and sometimes someone would lend me a PS2 to practice.

Back in the day, you couldn’t just pick up a ready to go arcade stick. Custom sticks were the cheap option back then compared to having to import a HRAP and then replace all its buttons. Ben and I got to wood working and soldering and managed to get two lovely sticks. Ben still uses his to this day.

Sometime into Slash I got a message on Dustloop from some guy named “LI Joe”. Slash had come out and he wanted to learn it. Came over with this giant tub of a stick. It was the official one that came with the Anniversary Collection of SF2. Joe, for not knowing Guilty Gear was pretty good! And he was friendly and nice and cool and everyone enjoyed being around him. Afterward he asked “You play anything else?” “Yeah, we’ve been messing with 3rd Strike”.

Long Island Joe’s Urien gave me a beating I have yet to experience again in any other game. I was laughing as he demolished me, throwing out Aegis Reflector combos like it was a combo video. Meeting Joe was super exciting and lead to me, months later, showing up at our locals at “Castle Golf”. I ended up running the Guilty Gear brackets and helping the event host “SweetJohnnyCage” (who eventually went on to host East Coast Throwdown) set up every month. At this point, I was… in the FGC. The little stories and friends I made at this point would be innumerable. I rarely traveled — to this day I’ve never been a major — but I’d still pop up in NY locals or Chinatown Fair all the time. Enough for footage of me to show up as “Melty Blood Aris” on one of Jiyuna’s recent videos (Disclaimer: I was there to play Akatsuki Blitzkampf).

Reload Online

Early Guilty Gear was a game of massive skill and knowledge disparity. While there were good US players, most of us were limited to playing only a hand full of friends and knowing only a few matchups. The #Reload netplay hack was a game changer for me and I was so happy it existed that I ended up modding the irc channel for quite some time. While the game was one (and soon, two) versions old, the experience of being able to play a wide variety of people online and play matches I never got to experience was huge and gave me an edge in local events. This wasn’t much use to the actual good players. They traveled and got quality experience in at majors — but for me, a local monster? It was a god send. Before Hotashi became a terrifying Elphelt in XRD, he was getting bullied for being a scrub on the #ReloadOnline IRC channel.

I started to feel good about how I played. I had a shot against most people I played. I wasn’t consistent enough to win highly contested tournaments, but I could be a threat against most people. At the same time, playing someone like Marlinpie still made me feel like I knew absolutely nothing. And this is the level I kinda stayed at for quite awhile(Heck, this might still be where I’m at now).

Accent Core, Blazblue SF4 and the Dark Period

Slash came and went and Accent Core took the spotlight. I kinda hated it at first (I loved Slash Johnny so much) but it felt like it was going to be the Super Turbo of Guilty Gear so I stuck with it. My friend group (Including the before mentioned Ben and Patito) would play pretty much every week for a few years. We’d jump to stuff — Meltyblood, Blitzkampf, KOF, Hokuto no Ken, Super Turbo, even Arcana Hearts for awhile — but Guilty Gear was always what we went back to. Eventually Blazblue came out and we were universally disappointed in it (It might be fine now but CT kiiiinda blew), but SF4, despite feeling like such a compromised game, struck a balance with everyone. I was never super serious in SF4. At this point I rarely went to locals anymore but I kept current with my friends. I couldn’t keep up the same energy, but as long as my friends could play, I was golden.

… Then, sometime around Ultra, Patito left. Patito, who could play with everyone and be a challenge for anyone, kept the groups interest in fighting games alive. Without Patito to bridge the gap between players, only Ben and I were left and well… the old men got tired. There was a few years there where we barely played anything at all.

+R, Xrd, IWBTG and the Second Dark Age

+R came out and I had no one to play with. Finally Accent Core was back and Johnny was extra cool and I was hungry again. I started going to locals again. LI Joe welcomed me back as if I was never gone. I bullied his Eddie. A good time was had by all. I road this for a year, playing and improving, going to locals again, doing all right for myself. I was pumped for Xrd, but when it came out and I played it, it… didn’t do it for me. It felt like +R but less. What’s worse, I had no main. No Johnny, no Baiken! I tried Sin, and he didn’t agree with me. Millia and I-no almost worked but at a certain point I decided the game wasn’t for me and +R was already dead. The second dark age was on me, but at least it wasn’t completely detached from the FGC.

IWBTG hit big on twitch around that time. Floe’s playthrough and me taunting him during it was magic. The IWBTGG run at EVO is honestly one of the highlights of my life. It felt nice to be attached to the FGC even when I wasn’t playing

Finding Sanity During Lockdown: How Rev2 Filled the Social Hole in my Life

A long time passed without a lot of fighting game fun to be had. Ben and I would play Super Turbo sometimes… sometimes we’d hop on GGPO to play some weird stuff. Basically 5 years of not really seriously playing. I generally hated netplay. I could tolerate it barely during #Reload but as time went on I just hated it. SF4 was miserable online and Guilty Gear seemed like it would be even worse.

But then during lockdown, Patito and a buddy picked up Xrd Rev 2 on sale and were playing it. I already decided I didn’t like Xrd but thinking about it… why not? I don’t know what the game feels like offline anymore. If I got it, I could maybe play and not hate everything. So around May I started going in hard, learning Johnny again. I never played Revelator but didn’t like what I read about how Johnny was handled. I would be excited to play a high tier, but he seemed too straight forward, getting re-coins and knockdowns off of every combo. I put a few months into him. I was having fun and playing online more, but it didn’t feel right.

I don’t have super crisp execution. I can do hard shit, but I’m sketchy. X2 Era Johnny was perfect for me. People would drop his stuff all the time, especially his ‘one hit ensengas’, which were like a trickshot knockdown. Perfect execution with X2 Johnny was aspirational. You went for stuff and if you fucked up, it was okay. Xrd Johnny felt like you had to be perfect. He was good BECAUSE he got everything EVERY TIME. I felt like I was failing the character. I was doing okay but it felt like a bad fit… so who to play?

I always dabbled with Sol. I loved doing dustloops. He was just a fun character to mess with… but I always said I didn’t ACTUALLY know how to play him. I could fool around, but I didn’t understand yet how to actually open people up with Sol… but I was watching DEB vs Marlinpie and the way DEB used Sol and set up frame traps and got huge pay off spoke to me on a deep level. So I started screwing around with him, and the character I skipped playing seriously in Xrd slowly morphed into my main. I’m a glutton who loves when big chunks of the life bar disappear, I can’t help it.

I started streaming again. Random lobbies are cold and kinda miserable. I wanted community. Just having a stream with people in chat saying ‘hey come play’ seemed like a super friendly way to meet new players. We started amassing regulars. Acquaintances started to show up to play who quickly became friends (Hi, Shay!). Then… new players start showing up. Hey, the IWBTG guy is probably nice to play with, right? So I start putting it out there that we have a good place for new players to learn. MORE people show up. Oh shit, we can run a beginner tournament… Oh god we have 100 people in our discord??? It’s amazing to play with close friends again. Patito fills the same role he did years ago. Ben is right back at it, pilebunkering the younger generation.

So somehow I stumbled into making a community. Somehow I stumbled into running online tournaments for new players. Somehow I’ve managed to tolerate delay based netcode because it lets me play people in a game they feel comfortable with. Having weekly streams has helped so much during COVID and creating a space that seems welcoming for not just new players, but queer and marginalized players has felt incredible. Not only am I playing to try and improve, I am playing to entertain and to help out others and am super proud of the little friendly spot I’ve built.

So after all this, how do I feel about Rev2? How do I feel about it, now that I can run off to +R with glorious Rollback Netcode? Well, two revisions did a lot for the game. While not as wild as +R, it feels wild in its own right. More importantly though, despite its annoyances, the RC system and generous buffer lets new players play the game without getting blocked out by FRCs. The game is fun like any other Guilty Gear, looks absolutely gorgeous and contains the players I want to play with. Everything else matters less, because at the heart of it, it’s still Guilty Gear.

Also I tend to play games for a character. +R gives me Johnny, while +R Sol doesn’t appeal to me as much. I get what I want in both games!

SO now it’s January 1st. I’ve run 3 beginner tournaments, a team fight, multiple show match cards and have one of the nicest, most fun Guilty Gear discords in existence. I’ll probably be trying to stick to Rev2 through Strive too. First release ASW games haven’t been kind to me, but at the same year once Strive has some time under it’s belt, maybe I’ll feel about it the same way I feel about Rev2 now.

Thank you everyone who has found themselves part of this community. I could write a whole article just on all of you but all I’ll say here is I’m happy to know all of you.

Happy 2021 everyone, lets get past COVID and play some Guilty Gear. This old man is washed up but isn’t willing to stop yet. Guilty Gear wasn’t my first fighting game, but it was my first love, and I didn’t realize how much I missed it now.

And so I had Sekiro. I had wanted to play Sekiro for awhile but my computer was slightly too weak when it came out and the idea of buying a game for a PS4 that wasn’t even mine felt bad. But I’m patient so I waited, getting to it finally as I always do: Well after the game has actually come out.

I’m going to say outright that I’m going to be making a lot of comparisons to Nioh. That said, I don’t think comparing these two games is, in most circumstances, at all fair. They are different games with different goals that share only a few things in common (Sengoku era Japan and Souls DNA… which… they only barely do??). But for me, playing these games back to back, it’s hard not to compare and contrast them. So while I am going to bring Nioh up a lot, it’s because Nioh is currently a very convenient lens to look at Sekiro through.

There is something uniquely bothersome to me about people recommending a game by saying “It’s like Dark Souls”. I look at whatever game it is and I get this feeling of “… is THIS what Dark Souls is to you?”

It’d be like someone saying “Hey, try this stealth game, it’s like Metal Gear”. I will be the first to defend Kojima games for their gameplay, but is gameplay what makes a Metal Gear game? Or is it multiple puzzle pieces interlocking together in a perfectly strange way? I feel this way about Dark Souls. Do I enjoy Souls combat? Yes. Do I crave it, in any way, without everything else that comes from a From Software game? Not really. I crave the entire “flavor profile” of their games.

So the irony of the whole Nioh/Sekiro comparison is, in the sense that most people speak, Nioh is MUCH MUCH more like Dark Souls. You could argue that, on a mechanical level, Nioh is a beautiful and even superior evolution. Sekiro… isn’t a Soulsborne game at all. It is less a Soulsborne game than Death Stranding is a Metal Gear game. Yet people (often jokingly) try and string together weird words like “Soulsborneiro” or ” “Seksoulsborne ” to describe them all. Why?

They’re From Software games.

I had heard a lot about Sekiro before playing it. Weird things about the posture system, how different and unfair the game was, how much the person hated it… but no matter what they said, they always said “You’ll like it, though”. I was always more skeptical of this then they were but mere minutes into the game I felt it. This was not a Souls game yet was everything I was missing in Nioh.

From Software knows how to capture mood. They know how to have a sense of place. Their worlds seem to not care about you, as if they were not built for you. But every merchant you miss, every side path that you forget, every weird, unclear bit of progression is designed like that because they care. They do it not because they hate you, but because they want to remove artifice from their worlds and draw you in.

By their standards, the world of Sekiro is the most “designed” for the player. The tutorial/reservoir area feels like something out of Metal Gear. The world is filled with grapple points and convenient grass but yet, as you sail over walls, bypass encounters and jump from rooftop to rooftop, the world somehow still manages to feel indifferent to your needs. Unlike recent From games, you are a major player in the plot. Wolf is an important character, but few in the world understand his significance. The majority of the world doesn’t care about you and because of that, you aren’t exploring a world crafted for you, you’re exploring Ashina, as it is and as it has been, in its final moments.

… Or so the illusion goes. From has always been incredible at this sleight of hand and it, as was exposed to me by Nioh, is what makes me endure the hardships of their games. It isn’t the reward of victory in itself — though the reward is great — it is also the promise of things to come.

Nioh confirmed something else I had already knew but hadn’t articulated. From Software games are not about their mechanics, they are about their content. Nioh, ignoring the tedious loot system, is almost in all ways mechanically superior to any From Software game. They build a system and build content to match it. From Software on the other hand builds content, and matches the mechanics to it.

I love From Software’s content.

I was skeptical of Sekiro’s combat. Descriptions of the posture system always made it sound wild and unnecessary. I’d hear stories about people saying it is too harsh and punishing and others saying the basic combat is easy… and in a sense, it is. Sekiro is not a Soulsborne game. You don’t dodge and circle and defend and look for opening. You don’t have an invulnerable roll. Your block will eventually fail you. You can jump. You can jump?? Yes you can jump this isn’t a soulsborne game.

You attack. Your enemy reacts to your attack. You respond to their reaction. Your not a passive force, responding to the whims of an enemy. You control them just as much as they control you and with that, rhythms form in the combat. The combat is simple, but the flow is beautiful, quick and deadly.

You can’t easily fight a group, but relying on stealth kills would take forever. Instead you can hit and run, Separate enemies. You control the engagement with incredible mobility. You figure out what enemies go down the easiest, and which are slowest. You divide and conquer. This is not a soulsborne game, you have tools and abilities, some of them downright oppressive. Taking out groups changes it dynamic once you can swoop in, backstab one and use puppeteering to make him fight his friends.

In many ways the combat is more forgiving than souls game. You can’t be one shot, how neat is that? In fact, you can even use that death sometimes to get a drop on an enemy or even to heal. The balance between health damage and posture damage gets interesting once you deal with bigger enemies and bosses. Getting clean hits pays interest in the future as their posture begins to recover slower.

The combat isn’t particularly deep. Again Nioh, on a mechanics standpoint, would have Sekiro beat. But it’s not about the mechanics it’s about the CONTENT. Sekiro’s enemies make the combat feel incredible. The whole ecosystem of the game is tighter. Sekiro’s whole is greater than the sum of its simple parts.

Bosses take this further. You REALLY need to learn them. Their call and response behavior is probably the peak of complexity for modern From Software games. You analyze them and their attacking habits. You bait them. You force their hand. The timing element of defense elevates the ordeal. You were too slow to dodge, but maybe, just maybe, you won’t panic and will get all the deflections you need to not get posture broken. It’s tense.

What’s also odd is, unlike Dark Souls and most games, you don’t recover your posture/stamina/block gauge by not blocking. You block. This seems counter intuitive at first, but you give up mobility and action to recover. Blocking feels bad. You’re defended, but behind a cardboard shield. You’re a shinobi, movement is life. So when you hold your sword defensively in front of your enemy, you feel vulnerable.

It’s wonderful.

Sekiro is not a Soulsborne game. It has a story. It has characters. Yes those games have those things, but it’s not ABOUT those things. The sullen, bittersweet interactions between all the characters in Sekiro are wonderful. Instead of a game full of offputting, deranged people, we get real performances. I played the game with Japanese voices and am not sure why anyone wouldn’t because the voice work is incredible. The conflict for Kuro’s love and warmth for Sekiro vs the chasm of class between them is so sadly frustrating and sometimes tragic. While we don’t fall into deep monologues and epic stories, the relatively few character interactions drip with texture that implies a deep rich history behind anything. They speak like From Software worlds are built. Simple things like the few spoken lines from Lady Butterfly imply so much about her and Sekiro’s shared history with Owl. The sculptor speaks as tired man, holding on to his humanity. The Divine Child of Rejuvenation speaks as… a little gremlin child who has, through social pressure, been forced to shoulder a lot of responsibility and burden. You bring sake to Isshin Ashina, so you may listen to the drunken stories of an old yet powerful warlord.

And so like the combat, the story is simple, yet somehow, in its brevity, rich.

Sekiro is not without fault. Dragonrot is perhaps one of the worst mechanics implemented in a Fromsoft game. The mechanic, which sickens NPCs and stops their story progression through repeated deaths is the worst of two worlds. It is a mechanic that makes players afraid to engage with the game while at the same time presenting no real consequence. Dragonrot is trivial, the resources to cure it abundant enough that you can cure everyone when need be without worry, but rare enough that you’ll let your buds cough their lungs out until you need to progress something. Not understanding Dragonrot can be crippling, and understanding it can be immersion breaking at worst and boring at best.

Unseen Aid was a mechanic meant to try and mitigate the more punishing effects of death in From Software games, but ends up just being useless and confusing. 30% of the time you won’t lose anything when you die, but as people get dragonrot, that number goes down drastically… but… who is counting on something happening 30% of the time?

Some ending things are gated behind some obtuse requirements, like really specific eavesdropping. It’s not the end of the world and some people enjoy looking up spoilers for NG+. Upgrades and Skillpoints also are a bit annoying to manage and plan out. Some stuff borderline feels like a skillpoint trap, like the entire Monk line.

Also there is a part of me that feels the game is too hard. Not for me, so much. Owl (Father) was the only boss to give me significant difficulties and Sword Saint Isshin went down in 5 or 6 quick attempts. But playing it, I felt like.. am I enjoying this because it’s hard or because it feels good? And if it felt good at a lower difficulty, would it be helpful if the game was slightly easier? Some parts of the game ask a LOT from a players, which is especially frustrating when most of the game does not. A little bit more leeway to respond to attacks or in the health of some bosses would help so many more people push through without I think destroying what most people love about the game. Force the players to learn all the things they already need to learn, but just maybe… require them to maintain perfection for less time.

Sekiro is the first From Software game to make me sympathetic to the idea that these games should have an Easy Mode. While my feelings matter much MUCH less than the people who want these things, when people ask for it in Dark Souls games I always have this feeling that… the difficulty is the glue that holds the game together. That without resistance, you see how flimsy parts of those games are. Which doesn’t mean people can’t want it or don’t deserve to have it, but more that I don’t get it.

Sekiro though… Sekiro feels like a game that needs this. It lacks the difficulty smoothing features of other Fromsoft titles. No co-op, no overleveling. Just uncompromising gameplay. Which is a shame, because I feel like Sekiro has the most to enjoy outside of challenge. The characters, their interactions, the sheer joy of moving and grappling through the world. Moving or heck, even combat in Soulsborne doesn’t feel stellar. It’s the feeling, mixed with the reward that makes it feel good. But Sekiro? Gosh just -doing- shit in that game, even when it’s easy, feels great. An easy mode would feel no different to me than DMC or Bayonetta having an easy mode. You can Git Gud later, if that’s your thing.

… I say this, and mean it but at the end of the day, my convictions can’t be that strong. This game felt tuned for me. I slotted right into place like a jigsaw puzzle. It intoxicated me… though again, I think it still would of it were 10%-20% easier (Whatever that would mean). As maybe the most divisive modern From Software game, I’d gladly like it a little less so others could like it more.

How do I rank this compared to other modern from games? I don’t know. I don’t know if I even can. Tied for second with Bloodborne but two different to truly be compared to everything else?

Anyways, with all that said, Genichiro is little baby. Get fucked, chump.

Recently Sekiro received a large feature update. Most of this is good or at least harmless additions to New Game+. Costumes, the ability to refight bosses, boss gauntlets… all excellent content for people who wish to find new ways to engage with the game after experiencing it how it was first already intended.

One feature isn’t like that. Remnents are a cross between Dark Souls Messages and Bloodstains, pre-recorded bits of gameplay. It is a complete port of Dark Souls-esque features over to Sekiro.

This is not a Soulsborne Game

It’s inclusion is crass and thoughtless, bolted on vestigially, like giving someone an artificial appendix. It matches not the tone, the world, the aesthetic, or the gameplay. I can’t know this for sure, but I can only assume it was forced by Activision, who decided the game was not “Soulsy” enough.

Souls games are not truly solidary experience. Despite their primarily single player nature, they strive to make the world feel alive. You can connected, through the hazy stream of time to others. Ghostly figures wander about, miming actions from eons past. People can drift into your reality to help or harm you. Souls games are lonesome. NPCs act so offputtingly that it is often hard to truly see the ones around you as friends… but other humans live around you and the proof of their existence follows your every step.

Dark Souls pays a visual price for this interconnectedness. Online Souls gameplay is visually busy with the marks over other players marring the landscape, like litter in a beautiful park. But Dark Souls gets a lot in return for this. That feeling of connection ties into the games thematically, artistically and mechanically. The game is designed with the assumption that others will help you. They are balanced around this… and even then, they felt like a distraction in Bloodborne, the most beautiful and sophisticated Souls game up to that point. I played Bloodborne mostly offline because the classic Souls elements felt like cruft.

Sekiro, despite it’s great characters, is truly lonesome game. In fact, it is because of these characters that Sekiro is a beautifully lonesome game. Only by having these people who you can truly care about and love, can you feel truly apart from them. You are a shinobi. When you are fighting there is no one else. Even those Wolf may have cared for at some point may become enemies, both sides accepting the fatalism of their occupation. Contrast between the warmth of being around Kuro and Emma or even the sculptor contrasts with the cold, snowy, lonesome trek through Ashina. Sekiro not only doesn’t need interconnectivity, it actively acts against it’s tone. It’s beautiful world gets marred by the most visually noisy messaging symbol in any Souls game… and for what?

Sekiro is an honest game, where Dark Souls lies. Granted, Dark Souls wants to be caught in its lies and so it builds these community mechanics. Dark Souls forces you into uncomfortable encounters. In Sekiro you choose your encounters. Dark Souls attacks you when you’re not paying attention. In Sekiro, you attack when the enemy isn’t paying attention. In Dark Souls, knowledge of what comes next and what traps await you is paramount to survival. Sekiro doesn’t try to trick you in that way. It reflects in it’s death penalties. True death is too costly to spring on the player as a joke. In Dark Souls, bloodstains offer hints on what is to come next so you may prepare yourself, but are still entering the unknown. You see only the player’s actions unfold…. but do to do the same in Sekiro, where the context can be so varied? What can that specter tell a player that is of any value? How can one show a player how to fight a boss and how can you even find the time to view one? What surprises are these supposed to protect new players from? I can only honestly think of one real “Cheap shot” in Sekiro and it is a glorious and precious moment that should not be ruined.

The system offers nothing because it was not designed for this world, or this play style. It is a cynical add on that does nothing but degrade the quality of the work. It’s a price paid without purpose. A thoughtless, ugly inclusion to add to a game over a year from its release. Can you ignore it? Sure. Is it the end of the world? No. Does it ruin the game? Absolutely not… But does it make the game worse for no gain?

Absolutely, because this is not a Soulsborne Game. You need to design these types of mechanics to match the game you ACTUALLY MADE.

So please, if you play Sekiro after reading this, PLEASE PLAY IN OFFLINE MODE. You will lose absolutely nothing of value and will play a better version of the game.