GUILTY GEAR

I came into this one already knowing what it was, and that context is the only way to make sense of it. The original Guilty Gear, ported to PC in 2019 from its 1998 PlayStation 1 debut, is not a good fighting game by any modern measure. It is a historically important one, and there is a meaningful difference between those two things. The Gatling Combination chain system, the Charge Attack for building pressure, the Sakkai instant-kill mechanic that lets you end an entire match in one risky read, the seeds of the heavy-metal aesthetic and anime-fighter DNA that would define an entire subgenre of competitive fighters, it is all here in its roughest, least-refined state. If you can hold that framing in your head while you play, there is something genuinely interesting in the archaeology. The roster runs 13 characters in total, with 10 available from the start and Baiken, Testament, and Justice locked behind arcade-mode completions. Sol Badguy and Ky Kiske are the ground-floor picks, Chipp Zanuff is a speed freak, Potemkin is the grappler brick wall you would expect. The mechanical identities of these characters are present but underdeveloped compared to anything that came after GG1. Overdrives consume your Tension Gauge and hit hard, but the two-health-bar system per round creates some genuinely broken edge cases once the second bar is gone and Overdrive spam becomes essentially unrestricted. Testament's poison kills you outright rather than stopping at the magic pixel. These are not charming quirks; they are fundamental design problems that the team spent the following decade patching out across sequels. On PC, the situation is further complicated by one hard fact: this port has no online multiplayer. None. The Steam page confirms it, the community confirms it. You are playing local versus or grinding the CPU. For anyone drawn here because they want to play against people online, turn around immediately and go to Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2 or Strive. The original's multiplayer tags are technically accurate for local setups but are going to mislead a large percentage of buyers. The presentation sits right at PS1 quality: compressed audio, sprites that look decent static and wobble awkwardly in motion, sparse modes. It is barebones in a way that budget re-releases often are. So who is this actually for? Diehard franchise fans who want to trace Sol Badguy's origins, FGC historians who care about the lineage of anime fighters, or curious players who are aware going in that they are paying for a museum exhibit, not a competitive experience. If you fit that description and pick it up during a deep sale, you will probably extract some genuine nostalgia or curiosity value, find a couple of the instant-kill setups that players still talk about today, and then close it and go back to a game with rollback netcode. Going in blind expecting a playable modern 2D fighter is the fastest route to a refund.

Fred · Scout Team

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