Let's Learn Guilty Gear! Part 3 Addendum ~Anti Throw Option Select~

As you may have heard, a demo for Guilty Gear Xrd was released yesterday. It's for PS4 and requires a Japanese PSN account with Playstation+. If you don't have such a thing, here is a guide to make a Japanese PSN. There's a 14 day free trial of Playstation+ one can sign up for that has all the features of the regular thing. The demo contains single player arcade with Sol and Ky available, as wel as the in-game tutorial. If you're desperate to play Xrd instead of any XX iteration and happen to have the equipment, go ahead and give it a whirl!




The tutorial is very similar to those in Blazblue Continuum Shift and Chronophantasma. I have plenty of issues with how those were constructed, but there's some interesting information regardless. Most notably it confirmed the existence of a quirk in earlier GGXX iterations that was removed in Accent Core. I didn't discuss this when I wrote about throws because I wasn't certain it had returned. I'm referring to the anti-throw option select.

An option select is basically a situation where you make an input that the game can interpret several ways, with it giving you the best result depending on the situation. A classic example in games with throws like GG or Street Fighter 2 is to simply hold forwards and Heavy Punch. If you're close enough, throw comes out. If you're too far, a hard-hitting normal comes out. A more crazy example would be Old Hawk in Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, who can make the game option select between his Piledriver and his invincible uppercut. If you jump, you get hit. If you block, you get thrown. If you hit a button, you either get thrown or hit depending on the move's speed.

So what's this returning option select for Guilty Gear? It's rather simple to execute. When you think a throw is coming, press Forwards + Kick + Heavy Slash (6K+H). I won't go into the specifics of how Guilty Gear's input interpreter works to make this happen, but the end result is this:
 - If they were trying to throw you, the game makes their standing Heavy or Forwards Heavy come out, while your standing kick comes out instead of a Heavy and thus beats their attack since it's faster.
 - If they weren't doing anything and just blocking, your Kick comes out and they block it.
 - If they were doing anything invincible or faster than your Kick, you get hit.
 - Likewise if they're at frame advantage and do anything, you'll get hit.

In other words, you can beat throws, but this never makes your own throw come out.

Here's a demonstration of this in action. I set the dummy to mash throw on wakeup, then use this to maintain momentum.

You can mash 6K+H to make sure you get the timing right. Just be careful if you're someone like Ky or Milia who actually has a normal attached to 6K that gets swatted by more things. This technique also works in Accent Core, but you're just as likely to get the actual throw tech as you are a Kick.

So that's it! If you think someone's going for a throw:
 - Jump or
 - Input 6K+H

Naturally this doesn't work against command grabs since they're mighty fast.