Developer
Arc System Works

Released: November 2, 2004
Genre: Fighting
Players: 4
ESRB: Teen

8
9
9
8
8.8

Supported Features:

That being said, Sammy Studios has been building their reputation in the gaming world largely on a single franchise: the Guilty Gear games. They look like anime, sound like a riot and play more quickly and smoothly than most 3D fighting games, let alone their 2D competitors. The latest game, Guilty Gear Isuka, continues the bizarrely cool series with a lot of familiar faces, plus some new additions to the roster. New play modes and even a new mechanic round out this newest offering from Sammy.

Isuka has the style. It has the gameplay. It has the rockin' sound. The real question is whether the whole package is as cohesive as the last release, the critical darling Guilty Gear X2 (#Reload, for XBOX users). Read on to find out how well the strands of this game's fabric have been woven together, what's new, what isn't, and what's missing.

However, that hardly makes it a bad game. Isuka features a very wide range of play modes - perhaps not on par with the level of diversity seen in Mortal Kombat Deception, but wide nonetheless. These modes have all been well implemented (though they can be confusing at times), and manage to at least somewhat make up for the lack of a storyline.

First off is the much touted, new and improved versus mode. The main draw, up to four players can play at once, in any combination of teams or a free-for-all. For a 2D game this, of course, means having all four fighters on-screen at once. To facilitate this, Sammy has made a simple foreground-background setup in each of the levels. Players start out two in front and two in back, but it's easy to switch around between planes and there are some moves that can hit enemies on both at once.

Some reviewers have decried this setup, saying that it erases a lot of the technical aspect of the game. Having played through Arcade mode as well as multiplayer deathmatches, I have to disagree for one simple reason: Guilty Gear Isuka wasn't a technical fighting game to begin with.

Sure, it does expect complicated and precise command entry. Yes, blocking is a matter of split-second timing. And, as in many fighting games, there are more gauges to keep an eye on than just your health bar.

But let's face it. Guilty Gear is all about utterly insane fighting action. We're talking about a series of games that makes no logical excuse for the appearances and abilities of most of its characters. Everything is frenetic, over-the-top and gleefully reckless, from the soundtrack to the gameplay. Isuka does a fine job of balancing enough technical elements to give it depth, with plenty of situations where you have to let your subconscious mind take the controls or watch your fighter crash and burn. Four-player Isuka is the best example yet of the kind of synapse overload that can be enjoyed by playing a Guilty Gear title. Of course it's a bit crazy. It's supposed to be. And the fans wouldn't have it any other way.

Speaking of crazy, the Arcade mode has a similarly loony feel to it, though it's toned down quite a bit - it wouldn't be rewarding if you couldn't use the skills you'd developed to some definite end, right? The Arcade mode is more about one-on-one and occasional one-on-two battles, with one of the best damn AI’s I've ever gone up against. For newbies and just plain crappy gamers like myself, the easiest setting still manages to provide a challenge without ever feeling cheap or repetitive - this is one game where different fighters really do have different fighting styles. Some of the opponents will try to avoid you and only attack in passing or with sneak attacks, whereas others will close in and try to juggle you in the air for as long as possible. Despite the fact that the AI opponents almost feel like real players with distinctly different styles, it still manages to set a beautiful difficulty curve. Now that is an impressive feat.

Rather than the standard "7-10 rounds plus a boss battle" setup seen in most fighting games, Isuka uses a much more graduated system whereby you attain "Survival Levels" during the course of play. Each survival level makes the opponent just a shade more difficult. After playing through enough Survival Levels, you reach the boss. This means that if you are doing poorly, even if you manage to defeat opponents pretty steadily, you'll attain survival levels more slowly, resulting in more fights before the final showdown.

Survival Levels also seem to have something to do with the odd "Here Comes Daredevil" feature of Arcade mode, though I can't quite figure out the relationship. This feature boils down to the idea that, during the course of your battle with one character, a team of two others may decide to just jump in and challenge you. When this happens, your current match ends and the words, "Here Comes Daredevil" flashes across the screen. The daredevil fights are more difficult, not only because most of the regular matches are one-on-one, but also because the daredevil team really works together, usually attempting to surround your character and bat her back and forth until she dies. I don't have any problem with this feature, but I don't think it really adds much to the game.

In addition to these modes, players can also participate in a way-cool side-scrolling beat-em-up adventure through several different nondescript areas and endless waves of nondescript enemies. All of the moves from arcade mode, and all of the fighters, are available to play through this mode as well. Basically, your fighter walks or runs down the road as dozens of enemy fighters run up or drop down onto it all around her. She beats them up and goes on to the next area. It's a lot like the old Double Dragon games, or Golden Axe without the hobbit piñatas.

Sammy's selling to its base with this mode, as many fans of 2D fighters are fans of old-school gaming in general, and if you miss smashing waves of bad guys and collecting meat from barrels to keep your health up, you'll definitely want to give this a go. However, the lack of a storyline really hurts this mode more than any other. Even Billy and Jimmy had SOME purpose for fighting all those nefarious, badly-dressed street thugs in Double Dragon (Billy's girlfriend got kidnapped. Remember?). In Isuka, you're given no reason as to why your selected fighter is bothering to do this. It's fun, but it wears thin after a while without at least the prospect of learning a bit more about the character hanging in the distance.

The other mode of note is the Lab, where you can upgrade the weird, weird Robo-Ky II (Ky Kiske and Robo-Ky I are also playable characters. Why more Ky? Who knows?). You do this by earning points to unlock other characters' special moves. You earn points by guiding Robo-Ky II through the aforementioned beat-em-up game. Since Sammy was not gracious enough to send me a copy of GGI with an instruction manual, I am afraid that the nuances of the system are as yet lost on me. However, the point system is pretty simple (flashier moves cost more, and so on) and the seemingly hapless Robo-Ky often has odd takes on his opponents' moves, which is fun to see. This aspect of the game might have been more interesting to me with the instruction manual. As it is, it's a decent diversion but nothing very exciting.

As usual, a Practice mode rounds the package out, along with a way cool palette editor for each of the characters that is very easy to use and lets players design custom color schemes for their favorite fighters. There is at least one brand-new character, the mysterious and uber-cool A.B.A. (some connection to Dr. Faust? I have my suspicions, but again, no story....). A.B.A. and the rest come with plenty of moves, many of which are quite different in application from other characters' sets - most of Bai-ken's moves, for example, can only be performed from a blocking stance. All in all, Guilty Gear Isuka presents a very solid and addictive game to play, though it is not quite as exciting as the last installment of the series.

I have heard some complaints about the graphics of GGI when compared to those of the arcade version of the game, and since I am not a rich man, I have not wasted the gas and money necessary to drive to an arcade and play it myself. However, these complaints came from the same guy who swore up and down to me that Mortal Kombat Deception had "super-unlockables" (it didn't) and that Fight Club was a good game... which it definitely isn't. So I'll choose to ignore him for now and just say that the graphics in this game are very nice overall.

There are plenty of characters to choose from, and you should never have trouble telling two of them apart. Isuka has the crazy character designs that are a hallmark of the series, plus a few tamer ones that only seem weirder when compared to the terminally odd designs of characters like Faust, A.B.A. or Zappa. Speaking of A.B.A., her design is definitely worthy of the Guilty Gear name, and her play style is influenced heavily by her design, too - a nice touch, and one which I'd like to see more of in other games.

Anyway, the fighters all have a seemingly endless number of animations, which are so smooth that they look more hand-animated than sprite-based. It's easy to forget that this game uses sprites because most of them are extremely detailed and none are rough looking at all. Combined with the flashy light and energy effects of the game, the overall effect is like watching a slick-looking, slam-bang anime action sequence. Can't argue with that.

It is worth noting, though, that some of the non-character graphics, which are also sprite-based, can look pretty bad at times, usually when they are zoomed in on too closely. Take Zappa's locusts, for example, which swarm across the screen at the beginning of the game. One locust sprite flies very close to the 'camera,' and it looks more like a jumble of blocks than an insect. A little discretion in this regard would have served Isuka nicely.

Other than that, the only graphics worth writing about are the backgrounds for each arena. There's a lot of variance between them, and some have more action than others, but they are all nicely done. They're very atmospheric and go a long ways toward setting a specific mood for each match. Though more subtle than the character designs, they were also designed in a fanciful and surreal way, which just adds to the unique world of the Guilty Gear games. There are even a few little surprises and some background humor, for those willing to look. The arenas don't always have the very best A-plus-plus designs, but they're pretty close to being the best I've yet seen in a 2D fighting game.

The game's music is the kind you thought died off around 1992, straight-up thrash-influenced metal a la 1986. That description may initially turn you off to the idea that this game sounds good, but let me continue by assuring you that it's all instrumental. Remember the awful Van Halen song "Hot for Teacher'? Okay, now just think of the main guitar riff, without any of the voices or bad dancing. Got it? Now add in some wicked-cool anime characters duking it out at mach 5, with that riff playing in the background, and you'll get some idea of how it feels to play this game with the sound blasting. See? It was the clothes, the hair and the lyrics, not the instruments!

Voice acting, as usual, is all in Japanese. It's great that Sammy continues to leave in the original voice talent for the Guilty Gear series. It's all very dramatically acted, so that even a non-Japanese-speaking loser like myself can pick up on the emotions and thoughts behind the voices. Normally, I wouldn't complain at all about the lack of an English voice option, since I never use it when there is one, anyway. However, the lack of any storyline (that pesky problem again) means that having some voice work in English, even as an option, might have helped shed more light on these characters, their histories and motivations. There's nothing wrong with the setup as it stands now, but this small addition would have made it better nonetheless.

It has a good variety of gameplay modes, although a story mode would have added replay value - how can I care about a character about whom I know nothing? The beat-em-up is a great way to pass time, and for those of you who can handle losing, despite superior skills, just because there's too much going on at once to keep track of, will be vastly entertained by three and four-player versus matches, too.

This game really cries out to be online. It is unfortunate that it is not. Especially with the palette-altering utility, Sammy is just begging fans of the game to flaunt their style and skills to other players the world over, and yet they cannot. I can't imagine that it would be terribly difficult to implement an online element for the next Guilty Gear game. Let's hope it comes out soon!