Fighting game story modes like Guilty Gear Strive’s are a huge missed opportunity 

Players deserve a more compelling fusion of story and gameplay

orFor the past couple weeks, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Guilty Gear Strive. It’s a bit of a risky sequel, tweaking fundamental parts of the Guilty Gear series’ fighting system in ways that are already controversial among fans, but it doesn’t sacrifice what makes the series stand out among fighting games.

It looks incredible in action; it’s immensely satisfying to uppercut someone with Potemkin’s impossibly huge fists to chuck them into the air as the word “COUNTER” appears in bold font across the screen, catching them mid-air with the palm of his enormous hand, then exploding them with the gizmo embedded in that hand.

Watching a Chipp player combo me sideways, up a freaking wall, is mesmerizing. The Roman Cancel makes combos incredibly flexible, allowing you to improvise brand-new combos in the heat of combat. It ticks all the boxes of things I like in a fighting game, and I’m having a blast.

But when I hop into its story mode, all of that goes out the window. Instead of digging further into what makes Strive great, I’m essentially watching a CGI anime short series —one that’s surprisingly digestible at times, but also throws you into the deep end of its story from the jump. It either assumes you’re familiar with the various plot lines of the previous game, Guilty Gear Xrd, or are willing to pore over Strive’s robust in-game “character relationship chart,” timeline, and glossary. The latter isn’t worth it; while the plot uses a deluge of proper nouns and references to events like “The Crusades” (but not like, those Crusades), the story doesn’t really do much with all of its disparate ideas, instead providing half-baked platitudes about discovering who you really are.

The story mode in Strive is confusing and mostly a letdown, but that’s not the biggest reason it disappoints me. It’s that, like most cinematic fighting game story modes before it, it feels like a huge missed opportunity. Not just because this story mode and others like it squander what makes fighting games great, but because Strive has the pieces of a great single-player experience already — they’re just not put together quite right.

Source: Polygon