Easily a contender for best fighting game ever made. Only one huge caveat-- This is also easily one of the most hardcore fighting games ever made. If you feel you don't fit into that camp, chances are you will be more frustrated than elated and quickly give up. From a pure design standpoint, the game is brilliant in so many ways that warrant dissection and discussion. So much so that the task of truly giving this game the thorough review it deserves is too daunting a task and could take 50 pages. Just to give some context on how deep the rabbit hole of this game goes: This is one of those games that you could spend literally thousands of hours on and still have a ton of room to study, and you will still find yourself in unique scenarios you have yet to experience and adapt to. Even after potentially thousands of hours and 10+ years of playing, I guarantee you will still come across players that push and utilize each individual character in ways you previously didn't consider. This is one of those games where you can sit down and analyze 10 of the top players from each character, and be able to recognize who they are simply by how they play their character...And you will find random players that are still able to expand upon and introduce new strategies and techniques even over the legendary players who are known worldwide. In addition to being one of the deepest and most expressive fighting games in existence, it is also one of the most brutal and impenetrable to get into. While there are easier characters, Many characters have execution requirements that will push fighting game veterans to their limits. But that isn't what makes this game so hard to get into. What does is that every single character in the game plays vastly different from each other, which requires new players to learn an absurd amount of matchup knowledge to have even mild competency in the game, even if you feel you have gotten a strong hang of controlling your character. Now add the fact that the community of this game is one of the most cutthroat in the genre (imagine thinking yourself a good scientist, then entering a Mensa meeting only to find yourself in a sea of smarter people and suddenly you no longer feel so special). Lastly, the game itself is heavily momentum based. Even if you are a slightly worse player than someone, their extra bit of knowledge and skill can be just enough momentum in a momentum based fighting game to steamroll you in a way that feels nothing short of impossible to win. Combine all of these qualities together and you have one of the most impenetrable and frustrating games to get into even for seasoned veterans of the genre. Breaking beyond these barriers to feel like you're beginning to be a contender is likely going to be an experience filled with many strong positive and negative reactions to the game. Those with the patience to break through will find themselves immersed into one of the most rewarding, deep, and well designed and balanced games ever made in history. If it sounds like this review sounds incredibly dramatic, it is 100% intentional to try to get across this notion. The genius in the game's design is hard to explain in few words, but to be somewhat brief, it essentially boils down to the breadth of system and character mechanics, yet *somehow* despite its staggering breadth, every single tiny detail exists in the game with pinpoint precision and intention. The design philosophy of the characters is that every character is designed to be a kind of god fighting game character in some way or form. Whether this is the ability to shit out insane damage in an instant, control the screen with a comical amount of projectiles, mobility options that will disorient even the quickest players, force unblockable scenarios on the opponent, run pressure/block strings that seem endless, the list goes on and on. But the brilliance is that the system mechanics exist to not only add incredible depth to the mindgames, but also equalize each character's absurdities in a way that lets every character be a god, but on more or less equal footing. Being able to accomplish this in itself to the degree done here is nothing short of genius game design and ingenuity. Yet it also just makes the game much more fun, dynamic, and active. There is never a stop to the mindgames from the moment a round starts to end, no matter if you have the opponent in a vortex of combos or whether you yourself are stuck in a corner and getting pressured or combo'd. There is a mechanic and a series of mindgames that apply to each little situation that spiderweb together in a way that feels so freeform, open-ended, yet also very natural. The game rewards the ability to be expressive, creative, and spontaneous and the game lets you. Unlike most other fighting games, you still are participating even on defense or getting combo'd due to the beautifully implemented defensive options. It never feels like the game is just playing out by a script because there is always an active mindgame going on at any single moment in the game. The character design also warrants mentioning, because like everything else in the game, the playstyles and designs are legendary. To sit and think with my current 650 hours in the game the amount of talent, creativity and intelligence it took to design these characters is almost mind-boggling. In most fighting games, character mechanics and playstyles differ to a moderate extent, but there still feels many little parallels and things borrowed from game to game, which is one of the reasons that transitioning from one fighting game to another is a relatively smooth experience for seasoned fighting game players. The difference about this game is there are just so many little nuances that simply DO NOT exist whatsoever in any other fighting game but this one. For example, there is a character that fights with pool balls and pool stick that has to "set" his balls on the screen. Once set, the balls can be hit with any attack to send the balls in a specific trajectory of angle and speed. But it doesn't stop there, as you can create many different ball sets as each set combination of 1-5 balls creates a new set pattern. The balls can also be set into motion from colliding with other balls, and can also be struck again once already in motion to change its angle and speed yet again. What is at once an extremely unique and interesting concept is made even deeper by the seemingly endless amount of trajectory possibilities and leads to exhileratingly deep and spontaneous mindgames. And that's the entire approach to character design for every character. The uniqueness of character design and playstyles extends FAR beyond just superficial visual/stylistic tropes. Despite the game featuring assassins who fight with their hair, a witch rocker who fights with an electric guitar, a short old man with a 8 foot sword, a goth chick in bandages who fights with a giant living key covered in blood, and much more, the characters are designed from the ground up to offer an unparalleled amount of creativity and expression. Even if all the fighting game characters in all fighting games in existence were replaced with simple squares for visuals and were thrown into a hat and played to you in a video, you could watch briefly and know exactly which Guilty Gear +R character is being played. Yet somehow, amidst all of the chaos, depth, and open-endedness, under the surface is one of the most well balanced and most painstakingly designed games ever made by human hands. This game is not for the weak. It's not for the casual. It unapologetically will require you to study, think, hone your mind and body to perform even at what would be in this community an average level. Regardless of if this is the game for your or not, this is undoubtedly one of the best games ever made, and a steam review simply cannot capture its sheer magnitude of excellence.
Read more