The Charming Insanity of Guilty Gear 1

-- likely to edit a lot in the future --

well, it's one of the worst fighting games ever made.

This blog post will catalogue some of the absurdities of this game, a few tidbits about its development history, and how it turned into one of the best fighting games ever made. So, without further ado:

Guilty Gear 1 was, to its credit, an extreme shot in the dark. Capcom's Vampire series (Darkstalkers in the West) had already tread a lot of the ground it was trying to work on, but GG1 was the first game to put all the pieces together and make something recognizable as an anime fighter. Sure, Vampire Savior had airdashes, double jumps, pushblocking, chains, and other elements that would later be folded into the dough of anime fighters as they are understood today (also marvel vs capcom I guess), but GG1 made some big, big leaps. It universalized movement among the cast (unless you're potemkin), allowing every character access to two (!!) air actions after their jump. No one in Vampire sniffs this level of movement variety, and its lineage has gone on to define the neutral design of many games in its stead (note, with this praise, that movement in GG1 is wack as hell and feels awful.) It was the first game to have faultless defense, one of the coolest mechanics ever designed- a passive pushblocking effect that drains your meter when you use it. It doesn't come up in this game, but it's something. Amusingly, Guilty Gear 1 manages to have mechanics that already existed and were known to be viable extremely poorly. Its gatling system works in theory, but the game, idiosyncratically, puts most characters' sweep on their crouching kick button, which is a quick poke while standing and jumping. As such, standing chains take the recognizable Punch > Kick > Slash > Heavy Slash route, where on the ground it just goes Punch > Slash > Heavy Slash, generally meaning you need a special cancel for knockdown in your combos. Not that that matters, of course.

The Real Jank

Welcome to Hell. Now, we're dealing with the most broken mechanics GG1 has to offer, and some of their implications and nuances. First on the chopping block, and why I say that getting knockdowns after combos doesn't matter, is the game's teching system. Now, to my knowledge, GG1 has the first true air ukemi system in a fighting game (though I like being proven wrong), but it's not very good. It's unresponsive and inconsistent. The AIs aren't even programmed to air-tech, so many people think there are infinites in this game that don't exist (that famous volcanic viper infinite? That's fake. Same for the OTG dash kick infinite,) The ground teching system is similarly absurd- particularly because ground teching had been implemented before, and really well. GG1, though, refuses to get anything right, and as such ground teching is extremely fast, invalidating pretty much all okizeme except for special cancels that force a block. Conveniently, though, our next mechanic exposes the problem with the concept of "forcing a block" in the first place. This is the actually-nightmarish fact that every single special move in Guilty Gear: the Missing Link can be performed during blockstun. I don't know what they were thinking, good god. This is obviously intentional, to some extent, as some moves gain invulnerability frames when used in this way, but why it extends to every special in the game and why some specials simply lack invulnerability when used as a guard cancel is entirely beyond me. It speaks to a desire to up the ante on defense in response to the power of offense, but it has the strange effect that it just focuses offense patterns towards the worst excesses of the GG1 system anyways. Oh, speaking of! Charge Cancels!

The modern Guilty Gear series features the "roman cancel", which lets you spend the same amount of meter as a super to cancel the recovery of a move if it connects. This is another really cool idea that has ended up worming itself into every game on the planet (V-Trigger works like a Roman Cancel. X-Factor works like a roman cancel. That's not even mentioning FADC!) However, Guilty Gear 1 forgot that cancelling recovery is really, really good, and should probably require meter to use. Yes, everyone in Guilty Gear 1 (except for Axl, Justice, and Testament) has access to meterless Roman Cancels for any move that can special cancel (as the primary function of charging- whether CCing was an intended function, Daisuke only knows- is powering up your specials by doing the relevant special motion and Respect). You can guess what this implies- Pressure is never unsafe unless you forget to Charge Cancel, and nearly the entire cast has an infinite combo. Not a hard one, or one that needs setup, just a typical punish that, in sane games, would lead to little more than some damage or okizeme, and in GG1 inexplicably leads to the character dying. Lord help if you drop it, though, because at under 50% health characters get infinite access to supers, creating inescapable lockdown situations in some matchups.

Guilty Gear 1 is a living case study in the weirdness of designing games in this genre and in the medium in general. It is a mistake, created by a few desperate programmers attempting to salvage a project that was turned on its head midway through development, a passionate man with lots of big ideas for the potential of fighting games who wasn't in the right place, too green and too unfortunate, to realize them then. It helps us appreciate the wild speculation of '90s fighting games, where we came from, why things work and why they don't. It's a testament to the amount of tuning modern fighters go through, but it reveals the waning period of a time of incredible discovery for the genre, before things were set in stone, before they made sense, before you could pick that badass rock-'n'-roll fighter off the Blockbuster shelf and know in any way that it wasn't going to suck. I think Spacehey users, who are navigating a weirder, more nonlinear pocket of netspace to renew a similar nostalgic freedom might be able to sympathize with what I find charming, a little beautiful even, about Guilty Gear 1.

This game's hitboxes are really broken. Chipp, for example, can make attacks whiff by leaning back in his idle animation. Amusingly, some moves with large deadzones (such as Zato's 5H and Baldhead's f.S) will catch Chipp while leaning back but whiff while leaning forward.

Crouching is pretty overpowered for a lot of the cast. The aforementioned Zato 5H will whiff on almost every croucher- unless, of course, they've been put in a blocking or damage animation, in which case the increased height they get from leaning their head back or standing slightly to guard will let 5H hit. Baldhead's crouch is so low he can go under the final boss Justice's supers, as well as most standing attacks in this game. Many overheads in this game, including the aforementioned Zato and Baldhead's, will whiff on many crouching opponents, making them entirely useless as mixup tools in those matchups. 

This game's frame data is nonsensical. Baldhead's Going My Way attack (familiar to Faust players in XX and Xrd) is frame 1 and, combined with its huge hitbox and fast movement, is extremely effective for air control. Other characters have separate absurd frame data jank. Recommended reading: https://www.dustloop.com/wiki/index.php?title=GGML/Testament

Many characters have viable timer-scam strategies. Their moves have some sort of bug or poor implementation that makes them loop forever, even when not dealing damage. Ky's instant kill attack loops into itself when escaped, meaning that he can essentially waste an entire round if the opponent can't use an invincible reversal to get out of the loop. He can also repeatedly use his air fireball to bounce him into the air, and he gets absurd height off of this alongside hard to contest screen control. May has a Beast Cannon-style move that she can use infinitely and is difficult to contest. 

Axl Low exists in an unfinished state in this game, with entirely untested and barely-usable normals (which, if you know axl, is REALLY BAD for him), entirely untested and inconsistently useful specials, and a super that exists in the game files but is not referenced anywhere in the manuals or movelists. For some time, the GG1 community called it "Ninjortsu Secret Technique" because its real name was unknown.

Millia Rage's Iron Maiden super fills the screen with gigantic, homing projectiles. This is not very fun when she has access to infinite supers at <50% health.