Meth: it’s a hell of a drug. It can mess people up in the head and it’s why I assume the developers thought making Guilty Gear 2: Overture more open-ended for its combat. In comparison to the others in the Guilty Gear series. But all jokes aside, the game is notoriously bad. When you start playing a Guilty Gear title you expect a nice fighting game where you can battle your opponents and friends. But this title makes you say “what the hell” with its real-time strategy style combat and giving Sol Badguy various abilities he has never had before. It also aims to tie all the canon main fighting characters into a single game. Its first initial goal is to literally confuse the players by explaining how magic works.
But I digress. As I start playing the game it introduced the mechanics to me slowly in an almost never-ending barrage of tutorial missions. Once you think you have finished one, you are stuck yet again doing more and more; and I use the term “mission” loosely. A typical mission will have a start and a stop to it. The missions in this game start but are soon followed by several other baby missions until the overall mission is completed.
The Guilty Gear 2: Overture feels as if it jumbled together a mess of things, with elements from various genres, including MOBA and RTS. These are combined with a Hack’n’Slash that you would expect to see in a Dynasty Warriors title. Some of the elements work while others are an utter disappointment. The overall game feels like it is just trying too hard to reinvigorate a game series that isn’t known as well as Street Fighter.
This all leads me to beg the developers and plead and say “Stop, please, drugs are bad, stop taking Meth or whatever you are taking to think this game is good”. The game’s controls are possibly one of the worst, and for a good while I was just trying to figure out how to run on a stage. But it doesn’t teach you until roughly the eighth tutorial mission. For anyone who is wondering, it’s R3 on the controller. God have mercy on you if you’re using a keyboard.
Now the overall plot for each stage is to take over tiny little magical tower things by attacking them and bringing your troops over so you can produce more troops and clear the areas. It’s easy enough, considering the Hack’n’slash of the game gives you the ability to kill a lot of things with ease. The boss fights to remain a total bore and is some of the worst I have ever played in a game to date. So is a lot of the corny dialog and the lip-syncing to the characters, although it’s what to expect with little love given to a port of a game. They must not have had a lot of hope for the game to sell well in the Western and European markets.
The overall design of the stages doesn’t really stand out to me in a good way either. You get to see a fully rendered Sol Badguy, Ky, and the rest, but when you look at the background it feels as if they took stock assets from other titles or developers and threw them in there with warped buildings that remain unexplained in the game’s narrative. The only real saving grace of the game is the music and just how well the actual cut scenes are done. But even then it’s not good enough for us to merit this game being good.
The controls are sluggish, the music is alright, the cut-scenes are good, the design overall is poor and it’s filled with enough tutorials to make anyone rage. But hey, if you actually read all this and you still think it’s good, then by all means go and buy it! I won’t condemn you. It is your money after all!
Latest posts by Daniel Clatworthy (see all)
- The Yuzu Emulator, Nintendo, and Psychological Reactance - March 6, 2024
- Eternights | A VISUAL MASTERPIECE OF STORYTELLING - November 9, 2023
- SONY’S LOOMING DISASTER IN THE GAMES INDUSTRY - November 1, 2023
