Guilty Gear 2: Overture

Forget everything you know about the Guilty Gear series. What once was an incredible 2D Fighting game series, the fore bearer of Battle Fantasia and BlazBlue's fighting systems, is here, in it's next-gen debut a bizarre mixture of hack'n'slash action and a RTS. The only thing more bizarre then the actual gameplay is the story, which for the life of me, I could not understand. I understood the plot of Final Fantasy Tactics in one go, and even more impressively, I was able to catch the subtle undertones that James Cameron worked into Avatar. Yet I'm still unsure as to what exactly was going on with this game. First though, some background information.

BACKGROUND

Developed by Arc System Works, Guilty Gear: Overture is a bad joke that got carried a wee bit too far. Sammy Software, the same Sammy that merged with SEGA, ended up with the Guilty Gear license, how? Well, I'm not sure since any and all information on this has been removed from the internet, but I'll wager it has to do with sake and betting on pro wrestling. So what does Arc System Works do with their next gen Guilty Gear? They sabotage the license and purposely make a very different game in an attempt to get full control of their creation.

PLOT

As I mentioned above, the nuances of Avatar are easier to figure out then this game. It takes place 5 years after Guilty Gear, Sol Badguy (the hero, which is Ironic. Incidentally, a thousand forks when all you need is a spoon is NOT Ironic), is traveling with  Sin, the Robin to Sol's Batman. Ky Kiske needs their help to combat an invasion of dolls armed with giant wrenches that speak in a very flat monotone controlled by the evil Valentine (Basically BlazBlue's Rachel is a direct copy of this character).  Eventually, it becomes clear...clearish... that the insidious THAT MAN (No really, that's his actual name) is somehow tied up in all this and his name is spoken in the same tones as He Who Shall Not Be Named.

Exactly how Rachel ends up becoming a giant mechanized Emo witch that shoots lasers is never fully explained. Yeah. Don't skip the cut scenes or anything that way you too can try and decipher this plot. The Da Vinci Code is simpler to understand. Not the actual code, no, try and understand how it made over $200 million.

GAMEPLAY

This is why Guilty Gear: Overture is such a bad game. The first 6 levels are basically tutorials of all the many, many different controls you need to master. You control your "Master" directly, hacking and slashing enemy troops using combos straight out of the previous Gear titles. The goal is to use your master to help push your servants forward across the battlefield, taking over control nodes which give you more resources to get more servants and thus, push even further across the battlefield until you get the chance to take down your enemies "Master Ghost", which is explained as being a physical representation of their soul.

To complicate things further, your servants come in multiple varieties creating a Rock/Paper/Scissors match up that in the heat of battle, you will pay no attention to whatsoever. There's servants that buff, servants that have ranged attacks, those that are fast, totally average, tanks and those that I still can not figure out why anyone would use them. You can organize them into squads and direct them around to different points on the map which in later levels, you have to do in order to overpower the AI or get around the mosh pit that always forms in the middle of the map.

There's even items you can use in battle to give you an edge. Area buff items, personal buff items, direct damage items, health potions, mana potions, it's amazing the sheer amount of things you need to keep track of in order to make it through a level.

CONTROLS

 Gah! Trying to aim at a specific enemy, juggle your inventory, manage your servants and block when needed is a pain and will cramp your fingers. While the individual control really isn't that bad, it's certainly right along with lines of the Dynasty Warriors games, it's trying to jump from all the different actions that makes you get all jumbled up. Very similar to the classic console RTS control issue come to think of it.

GRAPHICS

For a Xbox game, it looks pretty good. For a Xbox 360 game, it's full of graphical glitches, drab environments, bad, jaggy polygons that make up the enemies and far too much lens flare. In fact, the enemies resemble characters from Tobal No. 1, the Square fighting game from the PS1 era. I kept flashing back to that game for some reason. It could be the jaggies, or it could be acid flashbacks. One or the other.

MUSIC

Best part of the Xbox 360? You can burn your CDs to it and play your own music.

ACHIEVEMENTS

There's some easy ones for going through the campaign, then some easily boostable ones for playing online (which NO ONE is playing at the moment. I wonder why?) and then you get the big ones. The Free Mission achievements. What these are is a whole mode where you can take any character through the campaign missions, instead of being stuck with whomever the plot dictates. You have to beat every Free Mission with every Master, including the totally useless Dr. Paradigm, the lizard-scholar floating in a bubble. Yes. Lizard-scholar that floats in a bubble.Meghan Fox has more range then this guy.

You're still not done. Nope, then you need to beat the Campaign on Hard, which yes, is actually hard. If you can get all "S" ranks on the missions then well, good for you! But you won't. Which means another playthrough on medium going for all S ranks.

If you can find this game, I implore you to buy it, bring it with you to the parking lot, drop it behind your rear tires, and then run it over as you pull out. Go back into the parking spot, running it over one more time to be sure (Rule#2: Double-Tap), bring it back inside and throw it at the stupid clerk that sold it to you in the first place.

And finally, because I can do this now, here's a gameplay vid of Guilty Gear 2 in action: