Guilty Gear Strive Early Access showcase reveals key features of the game

After departing the open beta stage, Guilty Gear Strive will finally be ready for the masses on June 11th as E3 2021 approaches.

In a recent showcase on June 9th, the game’s Development Director Katano Akira and General Director Ishiwatari Daisuke greeted the audience with story elements and the opening movie of Guilty Gear Strive.

The die-hard fans of fighting games all over the world, especially those who follow Japanese fighting games, have been well acquainted with the name of Guilty Gear. The first game came out in early 1998. The Guilty Gear franchise is a long-running series with a very complicated storyline that gives off a 90s gothic fantasy, action anime vibe.

Since its earliest release, the franchise has seen countless releases convoluting the whole storyline as it progressed through all of them. The game has been widely praised as one of the hardest fighting games to master to date. The game features flexible fighting mechanics with a huge skill ceiling that a player can utilize to become better at.

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Features of Guilty Gear Strive

In the showcase, the opening movie for Guilty Gear Strive was featured and along with all the other info, Katano Akira and Ishiwatari Daisuke talk about a few characters, the updated gameplay mechanics and the game’s netcode.

While there are countless games in the Guilty Gear franchise progressing the storyline forward, one can easily get lost among all the titles. But for fans of the series, it is not that much of a feat. The developers intend to progress this story further with the near-perfect story mode of Guilty Gear Strive.

Apart from that, they also talk about how the gameplay mechanics have been changed for this particular game. Since its beta phase, they have studied meticulously how the fans gave their feedback. Depending on that data, they tweaked the much-needed changes for the future.

The series is well-known for retaining its original gameplay mechanics. Guilty Gear Strive is no different in this case. But this time around, the developers chose to make Guilty Gear Strive a modern, much simpler Guilty Gear game that gets rid of some of the complex combo routes one had to execute at lightning speed.

The reason behind this change is because the developers are willing to attract newcomers to this franchise while the old Guilty Gear players can relate to it.

They also mentioned the improvement in net coding, as fighting games don’t follow the conventional ways any other multiplayer games follow. While other games have dedicated servers of their own, fighting games rely on the smooth transition of peer-to-peer connection. Most modern-day fighting games lack such flawless connectivity between players. But in the case of Guilty Gear Strive, the biggest deciding factor is the game using Rollback net code that allows players to connect with each other without any noticeable delay.

Apart from all these, they talked about a few characters and how the story mode progresses. The showcase also revealed the release dates of Ultimate Edition, Deluxe Edition, and Standard Edition of Gulti Gear Strive.

The different editions of Guilty Gear Strive (Image via Arc System Works and Team Red)

• Ultimate Edition release date: June 8th, 2021
• Deluxe Edition release date: June 8th, 2021
• Deluxe Edition Steam version release date: June 11th, 2021
• Standard Edition release date: June 11th, 2021