rallamajoop (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rallamajoop) wrote2007-07-25 01:58 pm
rallamajoop) wrote2007-07-25 01:58 pm
Entry tags:
Giant Guilty Gear pimpage post of DOOM
This will probably be a bit wasted on much of my RL friends list (given that they include the people who got me into this game in the first place) but what the hell. It'll be worth it to have in some remotely coherrent form where this crazy addiction came from, and why more cool people should check it out and be an excuse to get all these accumulated links in one place before I start losing them.
Anyway, back to the topic.
For anyone utterly unfamiliar with it, Guilty Gear is a 2D fighting game (or rather, a series thereof) - what sets it aside from every other fighting games that never held my interest is that it has a terrific cast of characters and a hell of a lot of plot to go with them. The Guilty Gear plot spans three main games (not to mention a hoard of minor spin-off titles on half a dozen different platforms) two novels, seven drama CDs, a volume of manga and a small library of guidebooks, and is by now so convoluted that it’s a small wonder if even the creators are managing to keep most of it straight. In brief: the premise for the Guilty Gear world is that mankind discovers the existence of magic in the not too distant future, and most conventional science goes out of fashion in a hurry. The ‘Gears’ are created by magical modification of humans or animals; they're near-immortal creatures that may look like anything from perfectly humanoid to giant monsters. Surprise surprise, mankind’s new creation turns on its creators, plunging the world into a hundred years of war. It’s five years after that war ended that the first game kicks off.
The world we get out all this is one of those classic anime-style creations made up of a mish-mash of science fiction and fantasy elements. It’s a world where Japan has been all but destroyed and the few survivors have been herded into protective colonies, where old science is preserved on a floating continent called Zepp under a military dictatorship, where there's a Robin Hood style-band called the Jellyfish Air Pirates running an airship manned almost entirely by orphaned girls, where an Assassins’ Guild and a sinister organisation known only as the Post War Administration Bureau may be running whole countries from behind the scenes. There’s everything from heavy metal music references to religious symbolism - there are a lot of different elements in this universe.
The characters are a mix of humans, surviving humanoid gears and other randoms, of all ages, nationalities and backgrounds - if anyone can point me to another fighting game with a more fantastic, diverse and utterly bizarre cast of characters, I will be immensely surprised. Leading the cast are Sol Badguy and Ky Kiske. Wikipedia does a better job with their backstories than I’m going to do (Sol’s bio is here, Ky’s here), but suffice to say Sol began life as one of the scientists on the Gear Project and became their first test subject for Gear conversion about 50 years before the war began. He’s spent most of the 150+ years since alternately working as a bounty hunter and fighting to clean up his and his former colleagues’ mess, and to say he’s become a bit unfriendly and jaded in the process is to do him no justice at all. Ky is a natural prodigy at fighting in and magic, so talented that he was given command of the Holy Order – the main military force that fought the Gears in the war – at only sixteen years old, and went on to lead them to victory. He’s young and charismatic and devoutly religious to the point that recognising that there are grey areas out there in the world has been a real effort for him. Even without their shared history they would have been personalities which were destined to clash. And with that backstory in play, they've got a healthy rivalry going before we even get to the start of game one.
While I’m never going to be the sort of fan who can be sold on a series just by a little slashy subtext, believe me when I say this is rival slash at its best - so bad that not even a fandom dominated by fanboys seems to be able to come up with much of an argument to the contrary. Sol and Ky are suffering from one of the worst cases of official art I’ve ever seen, there’s undeniable respect and even obsession mixed in with the rest of the conflict-and-angst of their backstory, and that’s before I even get started on all the rest of the things people bring up as evidence the guys are somewhat-less-than-straight. (Ky’s hobby is collecting teacups, of all things! And there’s a minor character introduced at the start of the GGX drama CDs who’s entire roll seems to be to decide Sol is gay within about two minutes of meeting him and sure, all the evidence she had was that he wasn’t interested in her, but when she continued to refer to him as ‘the gay guy’ until he finally gave her a lot of money to go away, you do have to wonder whether the producers were trying to tell us something there). I haven't even touched on the material from the Side Red/Side Black drama CDs yet either, which would really be enough just on its own.
And seriously, I'm not doing either of them justice here – I could put together a whole extra rant on just how awesome they are in their own right and in combination, but I’d never get around to talking about anything else.
So it goes without saying that Sol and Ky are my favourite characters, but the next big BUT in this rant is that I think I’d still like this series even if neither of them were in the game, because the rest of the cast? Are also just that fantastic. There’s a teenaged street ninja, a Kenshin clone (if Kenshin had been female with one arm, one eye and an attitude problem you could see from space), a former assassin who not only turns her hair into a weapon but somehow makes this look both genuinely dangerous and stylish, a pint-sized pirate girl who fights with a giant anchor and may very well be the cutest thing ever, a villain who wears a witch’s hat and fights with a guitar, a cross-dresser who fights with a yo-yo, an involuntary time traveller, a mad doctor who conceals his former identity by wearing a paper bag over his head – the list goes on.
Even given how little screen time there is for some of them, they’re all impressively well developed too. The official art alone can say a lot in one picture sometimes (not to mention the impressive level of detail in just the background and architecture in some pictures). The animation is beautifully done too, you can really tell a lot about the characters are just by looking through sprite rips or going through their moves in training mode – there’s that much individuality.
There is a lot of fanservice of the short-skirts-and-panty-shots variety – and I do mean a lot. But the female characters are all still pretty damn kickarse in their own right, and I’ve well established this is fanservice of the equal-opportunity kind with all the pretty boys as well, so I’m certainly not deducting any points.
Last but by no means least – and I say this as someone who is useless at fighting games, who can’t string together a combo worth a damn and responds to discussions where the fans start talking about tier rankings and false roman cancels by finding a nice corner to hide in – it’s also really damn fun to play.
The whole series, if this somehow hasn't come across sufficiently yet, is on crack - but it's the good kind of crack. And the future of the series looks set to be heading in some interesting directions too. ^_~
Guilty Gear stuff is harder to find than it has any right to be, probably owing mostly to the fact that the two biggest sites most of the older links direct me to have been down for some time. Most of the material is still out there, it's just a little more scattered across the wide lands of the interwebs than you might hope for.
General links
Wikipedia
Not a bad place to start for a basic description of each game and character. As is sadly so often true of Wikipedia, not all their information is exactly accurate (there are all these little errors that I just can’t quite be bothered fixing myself), but it’s mostly pretty reliable.
GuiltyGear.ru
Biggest single source for GG stuff that’s still active these days. Has an enormous gallery, with character art and ending images for just about every game ever made, complete sprite sets for almost all the characters, and a good pile of backgrounds, guidebooks scans and other stuff as well.
Artbook scans
Mostly standard stuff, but there are quite a few nice pics in here I haven't seen anywhere else. (Easier to navigate through if you start at the first page and change the numbers in the URL to get to other pages.)
Guilty Gear Sprites
Mostly just the same as the other sites, but there are a lot of animated ones as well.
More sprites and other graphics for some of the harder-to-find characters (ie, A.B.A. and Order Sol)
Links post over at Dustloop with a whole lot of various media which I may not have linked to here.
Story links
(Note of warning - the GG plot is always starting halfway through. Quite a bit of background context is required before most of this stuff will make much sense.)
Game scripts
Partial script for the original Guilty Gear game (such as there is any script, since it seems there’s no dialogue until you get up to the last couple of battles before the final boss). Victory quotes for the characters this misses are here, and guiltygear.ru has animated gifs of the ending sequences for all the characters.
Story mode walkthrough and complete script for Guilty Gear X+
Story mode walkthrough and complete script for Guilty Gear XX.
Plot FAQ
Clears up a lot of stuff which isn’t well explained elsewhere, from 'Just what is a gear?' to 'So just how many of these characters are gay?'.
Moves lists and exhaustive translated battle quotes from all the characters in GGXX. (Plot significance is a little arguable, but even random victory quotes can have some interesting stuff in them.)
Youtube search with videos of story mode sequences and endings from Guilty Gear XX (did I mention the voice acting in the game is awesome too?). Naturally, youtube has pages and pages of gameplay videos too.
Drama CDs
mp3's for all the drama CDs except the last two volumes of the Night of Knives set. There are mp3s from all the game sound tracks here as well. (Downloads for the remaining two drama CDs can be found at this forum post)
Translations of the GGX and GGXX Side Red/Side Black Drama CDs. Sadly, no-one’s done translations for the Night of Knives CDs (though I can direct people to a complete Japanese script, if this is of any conceivable use).
Manga
The Guilty Gear Xtra manga
Chapter one is translated, but the remainder are in Japanese, and will probably stay that way until Shasta and I get our act in gear enough to finish putting our own translation together.
Novel Summaries (had to go all the way through the wayback machine to find these o_o)
Lightning The Argent
Set between GG and GGX. No prizes for guessing the main character.
The Butterfly And Her Gale
Chipp's story, post-GGXX.
Communities
Dustloop
What can I say? It’s a game forum, grammer and spelling tend to be a bit hit and miss. But it is still the most active site for GG discussion out there, and most of the interesting new news I track down shows up there first.
On LJ
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
guilty_gear
General community – not much traffic, but it seems to be ticking along in a general sort of way.
solxky
Not much traffic here either latelythat isn’t me, but I can hope it’ll pick up again.
I could list a few good places to find fanart and fic too, but that's probably a post for another day.
Anyway, back to the topic.
For anyone utterly unfamiliar with it, Guilty Gear is a 2D fighting game (or rather, a series thereof) - what sets it aside from every other fighting games that never held my interest is that it has a terrific cast of characters and a hell of a lot of plot to go with them. The Guilty Gear plot spans three main games (not to mention a hoard of minor spin-off titles on half a dozen different platforms) two novels, seven drama CDs, a volume of manga and a small library of guidebooks, and is by now so convoluted that it’s a small wonder if even the creators are managing to keep most of it straight. In brief: the premise for the Guilty Gear world is that mankind discovers the existence of magic in the not too distant future, and most conventional science goes out of fashion in a hurry. The ‘Gears’ are created by magical modification of humans or animals; they're near-immortal creatures that may look like anything from perfectly humanoid to giant monsters. Surprise surprise, mankind’s new creation turns on its creators, plunging the world into a hundred years of war. It’s five years after that war ended that the first game kicks off.
The world we get out all this is one of those classic anime-style creations made up of a mish-mash of science fiction and fantasy elements. It’s a world where Japan has been all but destroyed and the few survivors have been herded into protective colonies, where old science is preserved on a floating continent called Zepp under a military dictatorship, where there's a Robin Hood style-band called the Jellyfish Air Pirates running an airship manned almost entirely by orphaned girls, where an Assassins’ Guild and a sinister organisation known only as the Post War Administration Bureau may be running whole countries from behind the scenes. There’s everything from heavy metal music references to religious symbolism - there are a lot of different elements in this universe.
The characters are a mix of humans, surviving humanoid gears and other randoms, of all ages, nationalities and backgrounds - if anyone can point me to another fighting game with a more fantastic, diverse and utterly bizarre cast of characters, I will be immensely surprised. Leading the cast are Sol Badguy and Ky Kiske. Wikipedia does a better job with their backstories than I’m going to do (Sol’s bio is here, Ky’s here), but suffice to say Sol began life as one of the scientists on the Gear Project and became their first test subject for Gear conversion about 50 years before the war began. He’s spent most of the 150+ years since alternately working as a bounty hunter and fighting to clean up his and his former colleagues’ mess, and to say he’s become a bit unfriendly and jaded in the process is to do him no justice at all. Ky is a natural prodigy at fighting in and magic, so talented that he was given command of the Holy Order – the main military force that fought the Gears in the war – at only sixteen years old, and went on to lead them to victory. He’s young and charismatic and devoutly religious to the point that recognising that there are grey areas out there in the world has been a real effort for him. Even without their shared history they would have been personalities which were destined to clash. And with that backstory in play, they've got a healthy rivalry going before we even get to the start of game one.
While I’m never going to be the sort of fan who can be sold on a series just by a little slashy subtext, believe me when I say this is rival slash at its best - so bad that not even a fandom dominated by fanboys seems to be able to come up with much of an argument to the contrary. Sol and Ky are suffering from one of the worst cases of official art I’ve ever seen, there’s undeniable respect and even obsession mixed in with the rest of the conflict-and-angst of their backstory, and that’s before I even get started on all the rest of the things people bring up as evidence the guys are somewhat-less-than-straight. (Ky’s hobby is collecting teacups, of all things! And there’s a minor character introduced at the start of the GGX drama CDs who’s entire roll seems to be to decide Sol is gay within about two minutes of meeting him and sure, all the evidence she had was that he wasn’t interested in her, but when she continued to refer to him as ‘the gay guy’ until he finally gave her a lot of money to go away, you do have to wonder whether the producers were trying to tell us something there). I haven't even touched on the material from the Side Red/Side Black drama CDs yet either, which would really be enough just on its own.
And seriously, I'm not doing either of them justice here – I could put together a whole extra rant on just how awesome they are in their own right and in combination, but I’d never get around to talking about anything else.
So it goes without saying that Sol and Ky are my favourite characters, but the next big BUT in this rant is that I think I’d still like this series even if neither of them were in the game, because the rest of the cast? Are also just that fantastic. There’s a teenaged street ninja, a Kenshin clone (if Kenshin had been female with one arm, one eye and an attitude problem you could see from space), a former assassin who not only turns her hair into a weapon but somehow makes this look both genuinely dangerous and stylish, a pint-sized pirate girl who fights with a giant anchor and may very well be the cutest thing ever, a villain who wears a witch’s hat and fights with a guitar, a cross-dresser who fights with a yo-yo, an involuntary time traveller, a mad doctor who conceals his former identity by wearing a paper bag over his head – the list goes on.
Even given how little screen time there is for some of them, they’re all impressively well developed too. The official art alone can say a lot in one picture sometimes (not to mention the impressive level of detail in just the background and architecture in some pictures). The animation is beautifully done too, you can really tell a lot about the characters are just by looking through sprite rips or going through their moves in training mode – there’s that much individuality.
There is a lot of fanservice of the short-skirts-and-panty-shots variety – and I do mean a lot. But the female characters are all still pretty damn kickarse in their own right, and I’ve well established this is fanservice of the equal-opportunity kind with all the pretty boys as well, so I’m certainly not deducting any points.
Last but by no means least – and I say this as someone who is useless at fighting games, who can’t string together a combo worth a damn and responds to discussions where the fans start talking about tier rankings and false roman cancels by finding a nice corner to hide in – it’s also really damn fun to play.
The whole series, if this somehow hasn't come across sufficiently yet, is on crack - but it's the good kind of crack. And the future of the series looks set to be heading in some interesting directions too. ^_~
Guilty Gear stuff is harder to find than it has any right to be, probably owing mostly to the fact that the two biggest sites most of the older links direct me to have been down for some time. Most of the material is still out there, it's just a little more scattered across the wide lands of the interwebs than you might hope for.
General links
Wikipedia
Not a bad place to start for a basic description of each game and character. As is sadly so often true of Wikipedia, not all their information is exactly accurate (there are all these little errors that I just can’t quite be bothered fixing myself), but it’s mostly pretty reliable.
GuiltyGear.ru
Biggest single source for GG stuff that’s still active these days. Has an enormous gallery, with character art and ending images for just about every game ever made, complete sprite sets for almost all the characters, and a good pile of backgrounds, guidebooks scans and other stuff as well.
Artbook scans
Mostly standard stuff, but there are quite a few nice pics in here I haven't seen anywhere else. (Easier to navigate through if you start at the first page and change the numbers in the URL to get to other pages.)
Guilty Gear Sprites
Mostly just the same as the other sites, but there are a lot of animated ones as well.
More sprites and other graphics for some of the harder-to-find characters (ie, A.B.A. and Order Sol)
Links post over at Dustloop with a whole lot of various media which I may not have linked to here.
Story links
(Note of warning - the GG plot is always starting halfway through. Quite a bit of background context is required before most of this stuff will make much sense.)
Game scripts
Partial script for the original Guilty Gear game (such as there is any script, since it seems there’s no dialogue until you get up to the last couple of battles before the final boss). Victory quotes for the characters this misses are here, and guiltygear.ru has animated gifs of the ending sequences for all the characters.
Story mode walkthrough and complete script for Guilty Gear X+
Story mode walkthrough and complete script for Guilty Gear XX.
Plot FAQ
Clears up a lot of stuff which isn’t well explained elsewhere, from 'Just what is a gear?' to 'So just how many of these characters are gay?'.
Moves lists and exhaustive translated battle quotes from all the characters in GGXX. (Plot significance is a little arguable, but even random victory quotes can have some interesting stuff in them.)
Youtube search with videos of story mode sequences and endings from Guilty Gear XX (did I mention the voice acting in the game is awesome too?). Naturally, youtube has pages and pages of gameplay videos too.
Drama CDs
mp3's for all the drama CDs except the last two volumes of the Night of Knives set. There are mp3s from all the game sound tracks here as well. (Downloads for the remaining two drama CDs can be found at this forum post)
Translations of the GGX and GGXX Side Red/Side Black Drama CDs. Sadly, no-one’s done translations for the Night of Knives CDs (though I can direct people to a complete Japanese script, if this is of any conceivable use).
Manga
The Guilty Gear Xtra manga
Chapter one is translated, but the remainder are in Japanese, and will probably stay that way until Shasta and I get our act in gear enough to finish putting our own translation together.
Novel Summaries (had to go all the way through the wayback machine to find these o_o)
Lightning The Argent
Set between GG and GGX. No prizes for guessing the main character.
The Butterfly And Her Gale
Chipp's story, post-GGXX.
Communities
Dustloop
What can I say? It’s a game forum, grammer and spelling tend to be a bit hit and miss. But it is still the most active site for GG discussion out there, and most of the interesting new news I track down shows up there first.
On LJ
guilty_gearGeneral community – not much traffic, but it seems to be ticking along in a general sort of way.
solxkyNot much traffic here either lately
I could list a few good places to find fanart and fic too, but that's probably a post for another day.