Guilty Gear is the Metal Gear of fighting games! Seriously,I just logged near an hour viewing the anime story-line in REV 2 and there's so much "timey whimey" "PHILOSOPHY" and "meta physics" going on simultaneously my head is on the verge of exploding! As someone who writes convuluted plot-lines myself, this is akin to me facing some sort of karmatic retribution. (You like it DEEP Ben?! Do ya?! Then take it hilt deeeep you degenerate ball-gagger!) Oof! Guess I derped myself straight into BDSM laden whip-me spank-me jail!

Ribbing aside, I've had fun so far! I've never been "great" at Guilty Gear but I always was endeared to the outlandish characters and exploring "the meaning of life" thru this weird Heavy Metal inspired fisticuffs jamboree. Still, sometimes you just like to "fight",y'know? I love "lore" but there is over-doing it a tad and both Guilty Gear and Blazblue are kinda known for "rambling on" whilst haphazardly adding new characters and not exactly going anywhere in particular. I liked the simpler days when GG simply stated "Ey,we figured out magic in the future and did all sorts of wacky experiments with it. This lead to the creation of "gears" bad-ass super life-forms whom betrayed their makers thus declaring war on mankind! Eventually a holy-order of equal bad-asses was recruited to stop the gear threat and that's exactly what they did! Oh,some gears proved to be wholesome waifus and shacked up with kawaii smitten holy order husbandos. The end!" If you strip away all the "fat" that's mainly what Guilty Gear was about. Sure, you had a few other fractions with their own shady goals and supposedly something called "The higher will" is the Evangelion-esque plot device that keeps trying to wipe out the current version of humanity. Which is precisely why after awhile you kinda get this deja-vu sensation you are watching the major plot archs found in "other" manga/anime. Guilty Gear certainly isn't the only creative work "guilty" of this and no,it never outright plagiarizes. Yet you soon find yourself yawning between over elaborate cut scenes and speeding thru a friggin bible-sized collection of "extended world building".

As someone who originally championed the story lines in fighting games I feel like a hypocrite berating GGXrdRev2 for catering to me with such gusto. A part of me "does" very much appreciate it but a part of me misses the sublime simplicity of its' earlier entries. (That were still "story driven" and "character driven" but not nearly to this try-hard extent!)

So how's the fighting? A bit "floaty" and slower than I'm accustomed to. Keep in mind one of my favorite fighting game franchises is King Of Fighters which is the "speedster" of the genre. That means even when GGXrdRev2 processes and runs "perfectly" there's still that feeling you are exchanging blows while on the moon. Aka,lotsa high jumps and air dashing similar to the Marvel vs. capcom series as well as some attacks that are very fast mixed in with ones that have extended "wind up" animations or have a delay before they fully do what they're suppose to. It can take a bit to get used to but adds much more strategic layers than its' more straight forward competitors. Of course the game looks like friggin "hawt sex". Both the characters and backgrounds are vibrant living and breathing pieces of art. The soundtrack and audio likewise "slaps hard" too!

I hope I get more satisfaction out of GGXrdREV2 as it truly is a masterpiece. I'm merely left with the quandary if I'm "still" the target audience. It definitely has "pieces" of all the things I love yet it was the way those pieces were stitched together that left me a little lukewarm.