This is just tragic to look back on, knowing how the final product would end up making me feel. I really used to be one of this game’s biggest defenders pre-release, but it was all downhill after I actually got the game in my hands.
The pre-release season of Guilty Gear is upon us. After a short reveal trailer at Evo 2019, with a follow-up trailer shown just recently at Tokyo Game Show and another slated for CEOTaku, the community is ablaze with all sorts of speculation — what sort of mechanics might there be? Will all the fancy camera angles actually be a part of the game? What the fuck is Naoki Hashimoto actually saying?
Now, as is apparently tradition within the fighting game community (or at least just FGC twitter), many people are voicing concerns that the new Guilty Gear will be “dumbed down” compared to its predecessor, Guilty Gear Xrd Rev2. This isn’t entirely unfounded, though — series director Daisuke Ishiwatari has stated that unlike Xrd, which was focused primarily on translating classic Guilty Gear stupidity into the modern fighting game landscape, this new Guilty Gear title is a “complete reconstruction of the franchise”. On top of that, a recent Famitsu interview with Ishiwatari and co-director Akira Katano revealed that part of the design philosophy for Guilty Gear 2020 is making the game more accessible to newcomers, with Ishiwatari stating:
“What (we) think is, if a game needs to have beginner mechanics that help beginners because the game is too hard, then the game is too hard. So we want to design a game that doesn’t need beginner mechanics because the game isn’t too hard. Guilty Gear is known for having difficult to understand mechanics or just a lot of mechanics in general, so we wanted to put those mechanics aside and start designing the game from the ground up instead.”
And it’s hard to deny that Ishiwatari is kind of right on this one. Guilty Gear is known for being packed to the brim with all sorts of mechanics that can be initially hard to grasp — individual character weight classes, the GUTS system, Tension Pulse and other mechanics that affect how meter is generated and used, variable wakeup timings per character… the list goes on. There’s a lot going on, and people are worried about all of this stuff getting lost as the series moves into this new iteration. Now, this one might be a bit of a hot take, but: I think that the majority of people who are worried about this don’t actually know why they’re worried.
It’s easy to get carried away. Complaints of “they’re dumbing down my game” are easy to fall into, primarily because learning a fighting game is hard, and I think people don’t really want to feel as though all the effort they’ve put into learning a game is going to be wasted if the next game makes everything more approachable. Hell, autocombos are still heavily derided by a large chunk of the community for making certain aspects of any game in question “too easy”, and while I do think that autocombos as a mechanic are somewhat inelegant a lot of the time, the effect they have had on the competitive levels of a game has always amounted to basically nothing. So I think we should, like Arc System Works with Guilty Gear 2020, approach this matter from the ground up.
In truth, the way Ishiwatari and Katano are talking about their design philosophy for this new game has me pretty excited. A lot of talk from developers about “still being deep for the competitive players” regarding games with more beginner friendly mechanics can ring somewhat hollow, and Guilty Gear 2020 being branded as some kind of radical reconstruction of the series with no real explanation as to what’s actually happening can be a reasonable cause for concern. However, I think it’s particularly important to actually pay attention to what the two directors are saying. Ishiwatari’s first point in particular is very telling: if a game needs beginner mechanics because it’s too hard, then it’s too hard. Ishiwatari and co. have correctly recognised that adding “beginner mechanics” doesn’t actually help anyone to learn the highly complex and technical game buried underneath. That point alone tells me that the Guilty Gear 2020 development team isn’t trying to make a game that’s easy to play — rather, they’re trying to make a game that’s easy to understand. And truth be told, I think that’s a very noble goal, as well as one that actually attempts to address the issue of mechanical accessibility, as opposed to simply slapping autocombos on it and calling it a day.
Now, of course, I’m not entirely without my reservations either, and I think that much is still worth discussing. Guilty Gear has historically taken a very “kitchen sink” approach to fighting game design. What started as Ishiwatari looking at about four different fighting games and going “what if all of that plus some Queen” gradually evolved into this mechanical behemoth that seemed hell-bent on making sure its players were constantly second guessing what they thought they knew about the game. There are at least a few people, I’m sure, who would argue that incomprehensibility is the point of Guilty Gear. So what are we losing if we are to take this “reconstruction” statement at face value? I think it means we could lose the aspects of the game that force players to be ready to improvise at a moment’s notice. Guilty Gear has always, at least to me, epitomised the scramble, where nothing is predictable and you have to be able to think fast in every possible situation in case something goes horribly wrong. There’s a kind of beauty in the way the game forces people to play around it, and I certainly respect a game that places that much faith in its own design.
That being said, however, I don’t think it’s necessarily a guarantee that a desire to make the game easier to understand will take away that mechanical impetus for players to improvise. In fact, making the game easier to comprehend may open up more space for improvisation and quick thinking, depending on how open ended the new mechanics are. Guilty Gear as we know it forces players to improvise by introducing a crazy number of variables into any given situation. Guilty Gear 2020 may be able to achieve something similar by having a smaller, but more far-reaching set of variables that may even cause players to think on their feet in entirely new ways for the series.
So where does that leave us? I think what we can take away from this is that one key point — the primary focus of Guilty Gear 2020’s design is comprehensibility. This could fundamentally change what Guilty Gear is, to be sure, but by that same token, it could be a chance for Guilty Gear to show us how it’ll handle its world-famous brand of craziness with a more focused design philosophy. All we can do now, though, is wait. Perhaps with a healthy dose of cautious optimism.
After all, we still don’t yet know the smell of the game.
(is that what Naoki is saying? fucked if I know)