8.1/10

Guilty Gear X2 is a breath of fresh air for a dying sub-genre. Guilty Gear X2, GGX2 for short, is a 2D fighter and is an outright fun game. It’s fun to watch, fun to experiment with and above all fun to play. At first glance it appears to be just a little out of place, you know the whole 2-dimensional thing, but upon deeper inspection it becomes blatantly obvious that this is a game able to run with any of the well-known big dogs, i.e. Marvel vs. Capcom 2, King of Fighters, etc.

The game literally looks and moves like an anime style cartoon, so if you’re into anime, you’ll absolutely love the animation and even if you’re not the chances are still pretty high that you’ll still be impressed with the animation. There are 20+ weird but simultaneously cool and well-designed characters. They range from the typical bad ass in black and red to the creepy green thing that hops around with a stick to the cliché muscle man the looks like Arnold on horse steroids. This combination of diverse characters is complimented well by the nice but very complicated combat system

The combat system is so complex that it would take several pages to adequately describe all of the features in detail. Don’t worry, I won’t do that hear but I will give a brief description. The combat system is comprised of counter attacks, double jumping, dashing, safe fall, guard breaks, stagger moves, dust attacks, roman cancels, false roman cancels, burst attacks, fortress defenses, dead angle and of course instant kills. We will begin with instant kills; they are exactly as they sound, a way to instantly finish off a would-be-victim in a matter of seconds by entering IK mode then inputting a fairly simple command. However, trying to pull one off against a skilled player will often result in your death before theirs due the inherent risk in pulling off the ever-satisfying instant kill. Dust attacks allow you to launch opponents into the air in order to pull off air combos, burst attacks are quick attacks allowing you to escape long combos and cramped situations, roman cancels allow you to reduce the recovery time for special attacks but require precise timing in order to pull them off while false roman cancels require even more precise timing. Like I said, the combat system is very complex and far too much to capture hear but well worth checking out for oneself.

Two-player mode is definitely way more fun than the solo counterpart but there are an abundance of modes to play around with (albeit some are just a little strange). There is Arcade, Survival, Training, Story mode (with multiple story paths per character), Medal of Millionaire, Gallery mode and Mission Mode. Mission Mode, which is a set of fifty missions with different characters and special circumstances for each match is undoubtedly the coolest of them all, excluding versus that is.

In conclusion, GGX2 is a really fun game…while playing with other people. The one player mode is lacking just a little but not nearly enough to detract from a must buy for any true fighter fan and especially anyone who is a fan of any of the Capcom or SNK games. The graphics are nice, the music is crazy, the characters are weird and the game is good.

-Tommy "The Tyrant" Oliver