Guilty Gear 2: Overture

Guilty Gear 2: Overture is the third title in the Guilty Gear main series being preceded chronologically by Guilty Gear XX (all of its various updates included). It's not a fighting game though. GG2 isn't even 2D. It's a 3D, 3rd person real-time strategy/MOBA/character action game. It's way less confusing than it sounds. Okay, it's kind of confusing, but if you boil it down to the most basic parts, it's an action game in which you spawn and direct units to take control of points on the map which are split up into MOBA style lanes. Eventually, you take over your enemy's base or destroy them. The closest thing I can think of is Brutal Legend but with MOBA lanes.

Your character controls similarly to Dante or Kratos. You run around pressing buttons to combo, launching enemies into the air, air dashing, and just doing your best to clear the field of those pesky people that aren't aligned with you. Unlike most action games, there's no ability to dodge while running around freely. You can guard by not attacking and facing the enemy attack, but that's about it. There is a fighting game flavor to it though. If you're trying to do specific combos you can't just mash it out. There's timing to things, sometimes a little too strict of timing. You can cancel the recovery animations of normal attacks and use special moves or even super moves. The super, specials, and cancels use up your super meter, but I rarely found myself needing to manage that unless I just really wanted to do a super move which uses a full meter entirely. The lock-on mechanic turns the game into something resembling a 3D fighter. The view doesn't change or anything it just makes you focus on one enemy, but lets you sidestep and dodge in relation to the locked-on enemy. Even on top of that you have skill slots that fill with abilities that work on cooldown. These have varied effects from stat boosts, more attacks, picking up a servant and releasing them again, or even summoning a time-limited minion. There's about 5 playable characters whose skills and attacks vary a bit, but all more or less feel rather similar. I'm sure people that spend a lot of time playing training mode in fighting games or DMC junkies could find some joy (not a lot) in what you could do in this system, but the combat, as a whole, feels clunky. What can you really expect when you try to shove a fighting game into an RTS. It's hard to gauge fighting game type move ranges from a 3rd person view and movement is rather slow if you're not using the CYCLONE BURST, a dash mode. It's crazy how big the levels can feel when you're just walking normally, but how small they feel when you're dashing through it.

For the RTS part, as you gain more control points, you gain more mana or currency for purchasing skills and servants. Servants come in all sorts of flavors like armored units, mobile units, ranged units, magic units, support units, and even unique elite units that you can only have one of on the field. They each have a rock, paper, scissors weakness/strength game. With there being more than three types, thankfully, the game tells you what each one is weak or strong to. You can tell the servants very specific paths to run along using the map and they'll just aggro to any enemy or control point close to them. Once the enemy is clear they'll go back onto the path you set and wait when they reach their destination. You can only have so many servants out on the field at one time, but you can level up your servants to make the ones that are there more useful. They gain exp by dealing or taking damage, becoming more powerful. So, managing your servants health becomes pretty important if you want that to happen. I played through the game on normal difficulty and never found a need to focus on leveling up units. I'm sure things could be done more efficiently if you focused on letting them level up, but I did just fine. I did have to watch what kind of servants I summoned, though.

So, while you're controlling your character and directing servants, out of every control point you own will flow a steady stream of capture units. These guys are super weak, but will heal you and your servants and do most of the bulk when capturing points as their name suggests. You standing near a control point does nothing, just clear the path and let the capture units do their job.

If you like micro-managing, you'll probably enjoy this game more than most. The battles end up being rather lengthy for my taste, like 20-30 minutes, and the entire time you have to be managing your mana, cooldowns, servants, and your own character all to the end of defeating your enemy. Positioning your units and yourself on the map is also rather important as enemy blips on the map only show up if a friendly servant is nearby. You could be assaulting your enemy's base and all of a sudden the game tells you that your base is under attack if you don't have any servants nearby. I lost quite a bit due to this. I'm more of a follower though, not so much a leader.

The bulk of this game is in the campaign mode. There's about 20 campaign missions in the game, but three of them are just cutscenes. The cutscenes, being presented by 3D backgrounds and 3D characters, are an upgrade from the story mode in Guilty Gear XX, but still are boring to watch. It's just, the characters aren't very lively or animated and just kind of stand there while talking. There's no real dynamic camera views or anything. It's very basic in it's presentation. That being said, I do enjoy the story of Guilty Gear. It's that convoluted, not fully-explained but kind of is, anime sort of thing I like. One of my favorite things is how they explain the magic of the world in music terms. Using twelve steps, chords, tunings, etc. It never makes total sense, but you feel like it's right outside your grasp.

Every line of dialogue is voiced, which is always a plus, and the scenes can be bulky, explaining a lot of story. The story itself isn't super strong. I'm not sure I would've even enjoy it if it weren't for my affinity towards Guilty Gear. Unless you're already engaged with the Guilty Gear series or are just a general fan of anime, the story may just bore or confuse you. There's a few good moments if you like GG and that's it.

The campaign isn't just story scenes and RTS battles though. It actually breaks up the pace quite a bit with time races, scavenger hunts, survival challenges, and a few boss fights. One of the boss fights even plays more like a bullet hell game than the rest of the game. I found the dashing levels to be exceptionally fun and helped me gain better control of the CYCLONE BURST, but as you can imagine some of this stuff isn't perfectly implemented. The bullet hell boss battle became rather frustrating until I hit a key moment of understanding it. I enjoyed it honestly, but getting to that point was draining. Scavenger hunts are rarely fun and this game is no exception. The boss battles are, like most bosses, games of pattern recognition. The only one that is decently memorable is the last one when at certain points you seem to fall into the boss's psyche.

There were certain frustrations during normal gameplay as well. Some missions had you teamed up with an ally, an ally that the game didn't tell me would cost me the mission if he died. I thought he was there to help me, but it turns out he was a chore to keep alive. I could really only view his health if he was on screen with me and while he would call for help once his health was running low, it typically wasn't soon enough for me to respond effectively. I'm not sure if that's a fault of translation or what, but it got me a little heated. There were other little quirks that made the game less enjoyable like the character airdashing in the direction they're facing rather the direction I pointed the analog stick and the enemy getting to summon servants pretty much anywhere to make it harder.

There are free missions, which are just the story missions served up with character selection, and free battles as well. Free battles being the main RTS style gameplay just with no story elements attached which you can do in a large number of maps. Doing this with 2 player split-screen would seem weird and I would expect to hurt the strategy of the game, but I haven't had a chance to do it. If you were daring enough, you play these battles online too, but that would require planning. When I checked the weekly leaderboards, a grand total of five players were active making it quite hard to just go online and play. Also, one of the five was kicking everybody's ass. So, good luck with that endeavor.

I would've never picked this game up if it weren't for being attached to Guilty Gear. Removing my interest in that universe leave a unique but mediocre game. The campaign would be paced well if every type of gameplay held up. I honestly would only suggest you play this game if you like Guilty Gear or real-time strategy and I mean really like real-time strategy. There's some interesting things going for it, but it executes these elements clunkily.