Sep 19

Sep 19 Striving For the Future - Opinions From Top Players At VSFighting XII On Guilty Gear Strive’s Present And Future

Guilty Gear Strive is at an interesting point in its lifespan. Several seasons of DLC characters, new system mechanics and balance changes in, the game is almost unrecognisable when compared to its existence at launch in 2021. The nature of modern fighting games’ patching cycle means the game is always in a state of flux, ready to be shaken up every few months when the hand of god (more commonly known as Arc System Works) moves to hit the Edit button on their creation.

**VSF XII Grand Finals, and one of many Deus Ex Machina supers landed by Tiger_Pop.**

The current state of Strive was recently put on show at VSFighting XII, the largest tournament in Europe and an opportunity for the best in the region to prove their skills. While attending VSF myself, I was fortunate enough to speak to five key figures in the Strive scene on various aspects of its past, present and future:

ONi | Tiger_Pop - One of the best Happy Chaos players across the globe; winner of UFA 2022, Mixup 2024 and VSF XII itself (pictured above)
Sorani - The world’s most dedicated Millia main singlehandedly reminding the community how good she can be; 3rd place finalist at VSF XII
SJS | Precho - A walking encyclopedia of Goldlewis tech and a coffin-swinging nightmare in battle; winner of Install 2024 and 5th place finalist at VSF XII
bc | Jonathan Tene - A Zato loyalist (mostly) praying for his time in the spotlight again, representing the North American scene; winner of CEO 2022 and last year’s VSF XI
GekkoSquirrel - A content creation figurehead of Strive on Youtube and Twitch, and Slayer’s biggest apologist

The current version of Strive has been called one of the healthier and more balanced patches in Strive’s history; do you feel that’s accurate?

Starting off with some positivity, the general consensus amongst interviewees was that the current patch of Strive is fairly well-balanced, but not without its problems. Tiger felt that it’s a “good patch for everyone”, in which “the average power level is technically a lot higher than at the start of the game, but a lot more balanced overall”. This sentiment was echoed by Gekko, who summed up his feelings by stating “every character can perform, even the bottom tiers”, using the examples of Zato and Baiken (currently considered on the lower end of viability) as characters who can certainly still win - with Setchi taking Zato to 2nd place at this very VSF, there’s evidence to back this feeling.

As mentioned though, no patch is perfect - although generally regarded as a version in which all characters have a fighting chance, there are still some outliers. As a Zato player who has switched to Sol due to the sheer difference in their viability, Tene agreed that Zato is “still the worst, but not the worst by anywhere near as much as he was before.” On the opposite end of the tier list, Sorani noted that ArcSys seem to be “trying not to over-nerf strong options [...] but they messed up in a way, as some of the top tiers are still too strong or even more dominant than before”.

How do you feel the game has been affected by changes such as the changes to every colour of Wild Assault or the removal of DPRC, which makes a massive change to a legacy mechanic that’s been in the series for twenty years?

Despite being such a massive departure from how the Roman Cancel mechanic has functioned for Guilty Gear’s entire history, the response to the removal of DPRC - the ability to cancel a completely invincible reversal move, such as Sol’s Volcanic Viper uppercut, with a Roman Cancel to make it safe on block and remove its inherent risk to gain only reward - was unanimous: absolutely positive for the game.

To put this into perspective, current Sol player Tene sighed in relief and replied “Oh god, DPRC is gone. I’m playing Sol, and I’m still happy it’s gone. I think no reversal under any circumstances should be safe in any fighting game.” When even the players who benefitted from a mechanic are glad it’s gone, it’s clear that it wasn’t great for the game’s balance. Similarly, Sorani reflected that “it was clearly just an old legacy mechanic that people wanted to keep to keep ‘old Guilty Gear’ [...] but the DP characters were quite literally in a tier of their own [because of DPRC].” Gekko, quite bluntly, felt that “DPRC was just going to be part of the bullshit and it was just there, and now that it’s completely gone, I’ve re-evaluated how I’ve seen the game.”

In regards to the changes to Wild Assault, the players’ thoughts were more complex and varied. Arguably, the biggest change was the heavyweight characters’ White Wild Assault (WWA) going from +7 on block to -3 and no longer causing a Guard Crush state, making it slightly less of a thoughtless invincible neutral skip with no risk. As a Goldlewis player herself, Precho actually felt that WWA is “still too good [...] they should have just made it not go as far, and the changes on block aren’t that important, but it is a good change.” Tene also felt that WWA is “still stupid and should be nerfed tomorrow”, and that being -3 isn’t enough of a frame disadvantage to justify its strength, suggesting it being changed to around -7 to be more consistently punishable by the cast.

As for the mechanic as a whole and the Blue and Orange variations, there was a consensus that taking power away from them, in general, is a good step to avoid repetition in a game otherwise incredibly varied in gameplan between characters. As precisely summed up by Tiger:

“It homogenized the game quite a lot - every Orange Wild Assault character is sort of, poke, you're in their face, gapless, Close Slash, you’re plus, whatever, just run strike throw. Blue Wild Assault, you do it. You guess setplay, whatever. White Wild Assault, you just send it fullscreen, you’re plus on block. Every character with Wild Assault just did the same thing, and it wasn't fun.”

**Johnny and White Wild Assault - two of Strive’s biggest problem children**

Since Season 3 was a big shake up regarding how the game’s universal systems interact, do you have any changes you'd like to see towards system mechanics like Burst, Positive Bonus, Tension etc in Season 4?

While this question similarly received a variety of answers, there was one connecting thread tying together almost every response: the Burst meter, and its place in relation to the universal mechanics of Strive. The prevailing idea was that Burst, and the mechanics related to it (Blue Burst, Gold Burst, Wild Assault and Deflect Shield) are powerful, but more importantly, too readily available. Tene’s description of this phenomena is that due to the rate at which Burst is gained while being hit, “you still win too much for losing; it used to be that you could only spend 100 Burst [to get out], but now you can spend however much you build to Wild Assault on offense.”

Similarly, Tiger simply felt that there was unnecessary crossover between offensive and defensive mechanics and meters between Burst and Tension - “Offense is what Roman Cancel leans towards, we only really ever had Burst back in the day so it was defensive [...] I think Wild Assault is still too strong because we already have offensive system mechanics”. Sorani also mentioned the interaction of the Risc gauge with Wild Assault, feeling that the gauge is “not adjusted for it [...] it’s punishing players for literally blocking a true string and building 100 Risc, which usually means they will die if they get hit.”

Notably, Tene compared ArcSys’ design direction towards the Burst meter to Capcom’s direction towards the Drive meter in Street Fighter 6, its most important universal system: “It’s like they saw SF6 gave you a million ways to use this resource. We want to do that too, but three years into our game, and overhaul the system completely.” There’s an overall feeling here that the universal systems of Strive aren’t quite in perfect harmony, and still need a little time in the oven, especially with the reworked Burst resource completely changing the game a few years in.

Any specific hopes for the remaining launch characters’ new moves, such as Sol seeing a return of Sidewinder loops or Nagoriyuki getting ANOTHER tool to mix his opponent?

One opinion that came up in response to this was horror at the thought of Sol gaining a new move at all, shared by Tiger and Tene. To Tiger, the issue is that Sol “kind of has everything”, so a new move would just be adding on utility to one of the most well-rounded characters in the game; they felt that whatever Sol gets, he should have some aspect of his kit nerfed as a countermeasure, which was an outlook shared by Precho too. Tene thought that Sol “really does not need a new move”, and that of all the launch characters who are still missing a new move [Sol, Ky, Leo, Chipp, Nago and Zato], only Zato is in need of one to help his viability.

Sorani commented on the fact that ArcSys “haven’t really done a good job with the moves at all; a lot of characters barely use them, or it doesn’t help their issues at all; it’s more of a ‘for fun’ mechanic”. She also made note of the fact most of the characters still awaiting moves also happen to be characters with invincible reversals, which makes the prospect “especially scary” due to the already existing strength of having those reversals at all, which could be pushed over the edge if the new moves aren’t designed carefully with this in mind.

On the other hand, Gekko agreed with the idea of Sol getting Sidewinder loops, laughing and saying “I don’t care that he’s broken, he needs to be better”. He also brought up that Season 1 characters feel somewhat underbaked in comparison to the later seasons’ additions, noting that they feel less complete and could possibly do with new moves to help them out, despite not being in the launch roster. Specifically, regarding Baiken - “just give us fucking Azami back because fuck you, it’s funny”. No bias from being a Baiken player there, of course.

**The roster of Season 4, featuring fan favourites and new faces**

How do you feel about the character selection for Season 4? Do you think guests are a good inclusion in Guilty Gear, with Lucy (from Cyberpunk: Edgerunners) being the first, and are there any legacy characters you think are sorely missing from the game four seasons in?

As one may expect from them being fan favourite characters, everyone was excited to some degree for Dizzy and Venom. To Tiger, who seemingly had a moment of self-realisation upon answering this question, Dizzy is particularly exciting because “she looks extremely annoying in all the games - I don’t like people having fun [...] That’s why I play Chaos and ABA, because no one has fun”. Sorani was excited for both due to the focus on careful setplay in their gameplans, similar to Millia, and hoped that “they will cover bad matchups, as right now the characters I play other than Millia aren’t great at counter-picking”. And inadvertently acting as the other side of Tiger’s coin, Gekko mused that “everyone likes them; I don’t like fighting them, but it’s Guilty Gear, that’s the point.”

Contrastingly, the inclusion of Lucy as a guest from Cyberpunk: Edgerunners garnered mixed reactions. Sorani was positive about the choice, but did wish it had instead been Edgerunners’ protagonist David, noting that “the Sandevistan [a time-altering ability] would have been super cool in Strive.” Tiger clarified that although they are a fan of Lucy’s inclusion, “I’m not necessarily a fan of guest characters because I think I'll get a character I like, it's because it's a way to introduce me to some kind of new media”, which is ultimately what crossovers are all about at their core.

Gekko, meanwhile, expressed a modicum of fear that Lucy’s skill with a Nanowire in the anime may lead to her kit being designed around it, ending up as a “far-reaching, pokey, zoning kind of character”, which Strive already has a fair few of. Finally, Tene’s response to the inclusion of guest characters in Guilty Gear after around twenty years was acutely self-aware as a player who began with Strive - “I don't feel super strongly about it either way. Also, I just got here, I can't say anything.”

Alongside Lucy, Unika is the first completely new character to join Strive in a while; are you excited for the upcoming Dual Rulers anime, and do you have any hopes for how she might play?

With Unika having the least known about her character - at least Lucy has an already-released anime to draw inspiration from - the focus for most was on how she might play in Strive. For Tiger, they felt the most important thing is that Unika “plays in a unique way [...] as a sort of all-rounder or rushdown character; not basic, but fun and simple”. This is the ideal middle ground for a character to get new people interested in the game, with a comparison made to 2XKO’s Ekko: “a fan favourite in the show, you can just pick him up, but there’s a lot of depth to him [...] they can be complicated later on, but easy to pick up.” In regards to the anime itself, there was primarily indifference: Sorani, Precho and Tene had fairly low hopes for it, but did say they would at least watch it. Blunt as ever, Tene granted us the absolutely golden line, “I saw that they revealed the anime, and I was like ‘It’s crazy that they’re doing this instead of buffing Zato.’”

Standing out from the group, however, Gekko expressed genuine excitement. While he felt that “Strive’s initial story was kind of weak”, the post-launch Another Story episode was an improvement in his view, and so he’s “hoping that they learnt the lessons from the feedback of the first and second, and they’re taking that into the writing”. A note was also made of its art direction - “we've obviously only seen small snippets but it did the thing ArcSys games like to do of tricking your brain into thinking it’s 2D. So I’m excited, I think it's gonna be awesome.”

With Slayer following the modern trend of modern DLC characters like M. Bison, Akuma and Lab Coat 21 being some of the best in the game, do you think the argument of DLC being ‘pay to win’ is valid?

With this question so attuned to the modern fighting game zeitgeist, answers were both passionate and varied. Tene felt that the balance of Strive’s DLC has been “all over the place”, citing examples such as “Chaos on launch was top 1. Slayer and Asuka launched, they were really good. But then Bridget launched, she was trash and they buffed her so she’s good now”. Similarly, Gekko mentioned Bedman as an example of a viable DLC character who’s strong, but not broken; although, he also made the point of “if you were looking at the game and you wanted to play Zato, you would be better picking Jack-O. You paid £5.99 for an objectively better choice.”

In Tiger’s view, a fair few of the base roster characters are on the same level as many of the strongest DLC, naming Sol as a character who’s been consistently strong throughout the game’s entire lifespan despite coming at no extra cost - “some DLC are slightly better,but I wouldn’t say pay to win”. Sorani, going into impressive detail regarding every DLC character, felt that the balance was mostly reasonable (other than exceptions such as launch Happy Chaos and Asuka) until Season 3, at which point it “all went completely downhill, as I don’t agree with any of the designs so far”.

In her view, Johnny, A.B.A, and Slayer all being characters with absolutely terrifying loopable pressure, 50/50s, Guard Crush moves and combos that can delete health bars off of one mistake is “everything wrong with Strive”. Precho was allied in this feeling, specifying Johnny and Slayer as characters with which “You don’t need to think; their offense is good for players who don’t want to actually learn fundamentals [...] if you try to press any buttons and guess wrong, you just lose the game”.

On that note, is there any character/element of the game that you feel NEEDS to be changed/balanced as soon as possible, such as a major buff or nerf to a character?

Without a moment’s hesitation, Tiger named Nago’s Beyblade (a colloquial term for his newly low-hitting Kamuriyuki special move), optimistically stating “If I could make a wish on a shooting star, I would revert it to be a mid again”. After some more thought, Asuka’s Mana Regen also came to mind as something that “should not be in fighting games”. In an incredibly quick answer, Precho replied “Slayer 2H, and rework Johnny [...] most characters are okay”. You may be noticing a running theme with these two characters, dear reader, but we are only just beginning.

Sorani, rather than a specific move, felt that Guard Crush as a mechanic needs to go. Giving the examples of Happy Chaos and Goldlewis both getting powerful 50/50s on block with their strike/throw mix thanks to Guard Crush, she argued that “even if you are correct, because it messes with your inputs, sometimes you will still be punished”. Conversely, Tene named several moves that he felt needed to be changed - Orange Wild Assault, May’s Mr. Dolphin, Ky’s Stun Dipper, A.B.A’s Hopkick (Intertwine and Tilt) - due to their neutral-skipping qualities; “it’s all the same move, right? [...] It’s like, I have 50 [Tension] meter, I’m the best character in the game now. Every character is broken with 50, but it doesn’t sit right with me…it sucks on a system level.”

And as the only player to mention needed buffs rather than nerfs, he admitted that “I don’t know what their direction with [Zato] is [...] At this point, they’ve taken away so many things that I enjoy about the character that you’d need to make him scrubby now to make him not garbage [...] If Zato does become good again, I’m not gonna like him anywhere near as much because he’s gonna be this new grotesque thing that I don’t know.” Hopefully, despite all doubts, ArcSys does find a way to make Zato viable again without sacrificing what makes him Zato; for Tene’s sake, at least.

**A glance into the utter chaos of the 3v3 mode.**

Moving away from core game balance, what are your thoughts on the 3v3 mode? Does it have a competitive future after further post-beta testing and balancing to be a proper VS series-like tag game, or do you think it’ll just be a fun casual mode to mess around in?

While the answers themselves were nuanced, there was a consistent one-word response amongst all the players: “No.” Gekko summed this up well, musing on “The fact that you have items and you can have three Sol Badguys running up with invincible Volcanic Vipers…they do not want this to be a competitive game mode, and that's fine.” Following on, Precho felt that the idea of a 3v3 mode could work if designed differently “without the items, more like King of Fighters [...] maybe it could be a side event at a major”.

Although the possibility of it being competitive was consistently shot down, there was appreciation of its existence as a mode for casual play. The rhetorical question of “When was the last time you played Strive’s story mode after launch?” was asked by Gekko as shorthand to note the game’s lack of casual content, before doubling down on this and his hope that 3v3 could change that - “I don’t have anything I can just go and do. There’s no Chao Garden [...] This is bullshit, but fun, and that’s all it needs to be”. Tiger was similarly positive, feeling the addition of a non-competitive alternative is “good for the game’s length of life [...] even if people only play it once every month, even less”.

Last question: If Daisuke gave you ultimate power to remove one character from Strive, not just removed but never in the game to begin with, who would it be?

Contrary to any narrative of Strive having a simple ‘Top 1’ that is the single worst problem the game faces, this question bore a few different answers. Sorani named Asuka, a character she was initially excited for as he’s (arguably) the overarching villain of Guilty Gear’s story, but in gameplay, felt that he’s a character that “doesn’t play most of the game and doesn’t have realistic weaknesses [...] a lot of Asuka is just there to make your life harder.” Alternatively, Gekko named Goldlewis, explaining that he felt Goldlewis was “an experiment by ArcSys to make a new unique control scheme to re-imagine how you use an arcade stick”, what with his Behemoth Typhoon special move literally following the half-circle motions used to input them, “but I personally think that experiment failed [...] having constant Guard Crush pressure is a problem”. Tene actually managed to find five characters he would love to remove: May, Happy Chaos, Goldlewis, I-No and Slayer - “I think every other character can redeem themselves one way or another, but those characters just need to go.”

It’s notable that one character was a commonality in the most passionate responses to this question, from Precho and Tiger respectively: Johnny. While Slayer was also mentioned by both, it was Johnny that brought out the most visceral emotions. In Precho’s view, Johnny “doesn’t bring anything to the game, doesn’t have anything special, he’s just annoying. He’s unfixable. Just make him not Johnny anymore.” She questioned out-loud why “they would give him a 15f dash that you can’t react to, he doesn’t need that”, before trailing off in utter confusion at ArcSys’ balancing choices.

Tiger, however, felt strongly enough about Johnny to monologue for two minutes about the state of the character and his effects on the game, which I will quote in full, as editing it down would be a disservice to their passion:

“Johnny. Johnny. Just Johnny. Yeah you know, I'm done with him. Every time I go into Tower; like he's half the reason I don't play Tower anymore. Like I go into Tower, it’s twenty Johnnys and a Slayer. I go to the next lobby, it's seven Slayers and another twenty Johnnys. Hey, I’m going to a bracket, fight against three Johnnys. I go flying, my first two predicted games are two Johnnys. Go to EVO, I have to fight against Johnny. It's just fucking everywhere. I don't want him around anymore at some point.

It just becomes a problem. Like, I don't even hate him that much. I just think for the well-being of everyone, we should no longer have him. He's not even that cool. I don't know why people think...he wears sunglasses and he doesn't have a shirt. I think I don't really get the appeal, I mean I guess he has a sword like half the cast but like, it's whatever. I don’t know, he’s fine? He’s just everywhere, it’s too much, he needs to go.”

Many, many thanks once again to Tiger_Pop, Precho, Sorani, Jonathan Tene and GekkoSquirrel for taking the time out of their bracket runs to give their thoughts.

See you next year at VSF XIII!