Guilty Gear: The Pioneer of Anime 2D Fighters

Anime fighting games are a young genre in the gaming industry. Despite being and extremely niche genre, many people around the world enjoy them dearly as most of their games cater mostly to their primary and hardcore fanbases. This essay will discuss the birth of Anime fighters and how Guilty Gear was the first 2D Fighting game to be considered an anime fighter from a brand new IP and thus creating the genre. It would discuss the history of the most influential fighting game that set standards for the genre ( Street Fighter 2) to specify the differences between a traditional fighting game compared to an Anime one, the rivalries between French Bread/ Melty Blood and Arc System Works/Guilty Gear, and tournament scenes for Guilty Gear X. The essay will also emphasis in detail the importance of the release of Blazblue and how it influenced the genre in the absence of Guilty Gear but most importantly emphasize how a genre of a game despite how small can thrive with the support of a hardcore community rather than just a mainstream audience.

In 1991 Capcom released Street Fighter II: The World Warriors. Being a sequel to the first Street Fighter, it naturally brought many improvements to the series. However, these changes would prove to be the most influential in the fighting game genre. The inclusion of a full character roster with unique character archetypes while taking double dragons formula and perfecting it. The received critical success and has been regarded as one of the most influential games of all time. This game, alongside Mortal Kombat and Fatal Fury also sparked a renaissance of arcade games, ( mostly from the fighting genre), and created a competitive culture within their community. The fighting game community, or fgc for short, was born out of these arcades and has been existing ever since.

Later on in the 90’s, fighting games started becoming even more popular with titles being released like Tekken, Soul Calibur, and the Marvel vs Capcom games. Fighting games at this point in time have become a household genre in gaming as they kept getting more popular. However, despite the fact that fighting games as a genre got exposure and some franchises got popular it does not mean the fighting game genre became popular. There were many titles that did not get mainstream, in fact most fighting games didn’t. What this caused is that many fighting games that were beloved by many such as Bushido Blade did not receive any future support with future installments because they just weren’t profitable enough for big triple AAA companies such as Square to invest in. However smaller companies , such as Arc System Works at the time did not have much to lose because the games they created/published only catered to their fan base rather than the mainstream audiences. This is why when Arc System Works created and published Guilty Gear in 1997 it became a success for them despite it not seeming like it was a huge success if you look at the numbers. The release of Guilty Gear was the birth of Anime Fighting games. It was the first of its kind when you considered that it was a franchise that was meant for tournament play by the fighting game community and it was its own in house IP created by Daisuke Ishiwatari. With the many sequels and iterations of guilty gear that would spawn in the future, Arc System Works would be the biggest influencers for the Anime Fighting Game community.

Released in 1998, Guilty gear received a lot of praise for it’s fast paced action, unique art style and characters filled with many references to a lot of real metal and rock bands, and a great soundtrack. The gameplay was different than in something more traditional than street fighter as it had different movement options, had more unique mechanics like Roman canceling which allows more creativity when it comes to combos, and it had a unique roster filled with many different character archetypes. Guilty Gear also included a very detailed story mode that explains a lot of the lore behind the characters. To this day in the most current version of Guilty Gear ( Guilty Gear xrd Rev 2) the story still has not been resolved and has followed the same path since 1998. Many people have criticized that the story is too convoluted and confusing to follow but the fact is that for a fighting game, it is well put together and interesting. The games success as the first in the franchise allowed Arc System Works to get on the map in the fgc thus allowing for Arc to release multiple sequels in the future.

Guilty Gear X, the sequel to the original Guilty Gear, was released in 2001 for the Sega Dreamcast. It offered a lot of improvements to the first game naturally but the biggest ones are: the introduction of new characters, better and more polished gameplay, introduction of new mechanics, Increase of graphical fidelity that would be used for the next 10 years, and a continuation of the story. Most importantly however, this game had a much bigger competitive tournament scene than the previous game did and it grew into what it is in the latest installment Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2. This is significant because the tournament scene for the Guilty Gear franchise was one

of the biggest contributors to the growth of Anime Fighting game community because it was the most popular and well respected Anime fighter especially at the time. Some of the greatest and most notable players for the Guilty Gear franchise during this era are: FAB, Mike Z, Ogawa, Dogura, Chonari, Daigo, and Kazunoko. The most notable tournament series for the franchise at this point in time were Evolution( the world’s most prestigious fighting game tournament held annually in Las Vegas) and Tougeki ( a Japanese held tournament filled with players who mostly played at arcades.)( An interesting note is that even to this day most players in Japan who dedicate time to get good at this game play at arcades and have been playing there for years. In Japan, many arcades have their own power rankings for regulars that attend. )

Even though the fighting game community is technically a community, no two communities from different franchises really interact with one another. Competitive Tekken players usually don’t play King of Fighters for example. This is even more apparent when you compare how many players from non Anime Fighting games to traditional Fighting games. The reason for this is because most fighting games require years of practice and dedication for a player to become really good in. Many of the top Tekken players you see winning tournaments to this day have been playing for at least 10 years. This is especially true to Guilty Gear and basically all Anime Fighting games besides Dragonball Fighterz because in general, developers for Anime Fighters usually are more creative with a characters moveset and most of the time this leads to them having complicated movesets that require a lot of time to get used to. It is for this reason that fighting game sand especially Anime Fighting games are so niche and mostly cater to people who are willing to put in the time and energy to get good at the game.

Arc System Works during the mid 2000’s had a rival by the name of French Bread who are the creators of Melty Blood. Released for the PC in 2002, this game throughout the years has received a very loyal following. Many people in the fighting game community know about it and respect it as primarily being a grassroots title as this game, as like most fighting games back in the day and even the ones today, did not receive a lot of prize pool money as was generally seen as a “poverty game”. So much so that there is a meme going around nowadays that tournaments for this game and it’s community are hosted in bathrooms cause they can’t afford anything else. In a way this is also a compliment to the community because it shows how dedicated they are to their game and how much love they have for it. This game is the epitome of the Anime Fighting game community because it is the game that represents the structure of the conditions Anime fighting games face such as poor payouts in tournaments compared to other esports games and a small but dedicated community.

Back in 2004, a company called Sammy bought Sega. Sega was a company that helped Arc publish a bunch of Guilty Gear games and what eventually ended up happening was Sammy somehow ended up getting the rights to the Guilty Gear IP. That is why for the longest time the franchise didn’t end up getting a true and proper sequel from 2007 all the way up into 2014. Arc System Works because of this decided to work to what many consider a spiritual successor to the Guilty Gear franchise named Blazblue. Initially designed to be an RPG, Arc System Works decided to create this game as a fighting game instead since they naturally were more experienced in that field. The release of Blazblue came around the same time as a renaissance in 2d fighting games in general as during the mid 2000’s the only fighting games that were continuously released were Tekken, Soul Calibur, and Dead or Alive. In 2008 Street Fighter 4 was released and this caused the fighting game genre as a whole to be relevant again. If Arc System Works were to have released a fighting game this point in time would have been the best to have done so and they did. The release of Blazblue marked a new era in the Anime Fighting Game community as it was a brand new franchise from Arc System Works and what many people thought would replace Guilty Gear as the premier Anime Fighter ( and it did for a while until the release of Guilty Gear Xrd). Because of this game, many other Anime fighting games released after it and the sub genre is now filled with a healthy amount of anime fighters as supposed as to there only being two during the time Sammy held the rights to the Guilty Gear franchise. Many other well respected franchises that came after Blazblue are : Under Night in Birth, Persona 4 Arena, Dragonball Fighterz, and Arcana Heart. 2018 in particular was a big year for the genre as two of the biggest games in the community got released. These games were Dragonball Fighterz ( which set many records regarding tournament entrants and is pretty much the only competitive Anime fighting game that did great at a AAA game’s level) and Blazblue Cross tag battle ( which brought many communities together as this game includes characters from 4 different franchises as of now.)

Anime Fighting games and their community are significant to gaming because they are proof that as long as you have a small and dedicated player base, a game would be able to thrive and grow. Anime fighters are some of the most unique games created since some like blazblue utilize dying art styles and gameplay mechanics that most other genres do not include. As fighting games and most video games get easier and easier to cater to most people rather than people who actually play their games, anime fighters like Under Night in Birth and Guilty Gear purposefully try to avoid that since it takes away the identity of their games. This is a big issue regarding fighting games and many other games nowadays and this can be seen with Street Fighter V.