Review : Guilty Gear X2 for PlayStation2

The number of really good 2d fighting games that were not made by Capcom or SNK can be counted on one hand.

Guilty Gear X2 is one of those games.

This is origionally a Japanese arcade game developed by Arc System Works and published by Sammy Corporation. Well that is not exactly true. Guilty Gear was an arcade game that was followed up with Guilty Gear X and now Guilty Gear X2.
GG1 was ported to the PS1 and GGX was ported to Dreamcast and PS2 but the DC version stayed in Japan.

And to make things any more confusing it is not called GG X2 in Japan but Guilty Gear XX pronounced (Guirutee Geyaa Sex Sex). But Sammy USA thought it would be a good idea to avoid all possibilities of this game being mistaken for a rated M soft porn game or that piece of crap nudie bike game BMX XXX. So I guess the name change is good but it would have been cool to call it GG Sex Sex. (I am going to get weird search engine hits because of this paragraph.)

This is one of the better 2d fighting games out there.
The action is a combination of Capcom's Dalkstalkers and SNK's Samurai Showdown 2. The game play is standard Street Fighter style controls but contains some of the newer game play widgets like air blocking, dashing and guard cancels. The button layout is similar to Samurai Showdown than a Capcom game.

Where the game stands out is the fact that it is done in high resolution and take advantage of the massive amounts of RAM and CPU power that the PS2 hardware has. OK it is not the most cutting edge platform but the graphics and animation blow away the now ancient NeoGeo and the PSOne and it's two megs of RAM. The animation is fast, fluid and furious. The game is filled with glowing eye candy and super-rich, fluid 2d art. I didn't intend to invoke Spinal Tap but these go up to eleven. I can't wait to see what the next Castlevania will look like on the PS2 hardware if a 2d fighter can look this good.

The art direction is influenced by 80's hair metal as an design element as well as the music. Some of the background look like Iron Maiden LP cover art. I wouldn't be surprised to found out the artists who made this game had a big stack of Heavy Metal the comic magazine because there is more western sci-fi cyberpunk than in a stereotypical Japanese animated game.

And the music.. oh man. It made me want to grow a mullet and spike it on top and make sure all my denim jackets are acid washed. Let's ROCK! Japanese Hair Metal Style!!

None of the charactors are direct duplications of each other and the character design is one of the strongest I have seen in a fighting game in a while. There is no one that I despise and all the fighters have some form of weapon that they wield such as, a fire sword, scythe, yo-yo, magical hair, really big fan, really big scalpel, pool stick. Then there is Potemkin the big and beefy Russian guy who takes up half the screen and loves to mush people. Sound like any Capcom Russian wrestlers out there? One of the weirder character is the new young yo-yo wielding transvestite boy who acts like a sexy girl in a skimpy dress. Huh? That is a bit perverse for the US market but that goes without notice in Japan.

I thought that the difficulty of the fighters in Arcade and Story mode were a bit exaggerated. A game starts of way to easy and is then switched to really tough after a couple fights.

There was some funky Engrish about the "Thrice Damned Bio-Weapon" in the animated intro for the second game in the extras section.

Guilty Gear X2 is a very enjoyable game and is a great addition to any fighting game library. It show off how 2D games can look if they left old hardware platforms behind and use the latest tech.

I love how every fight starts with the announcer saying: Heaven or Hell, LETS ROCK!