Let's Learn Guilty Gear! Some Other Sources of Information

While writing about my favourite fighter I've been aiming to make things as plain and understandable for people who haven't really played fighting games before. At the same time, I haven't really gone over the very basics of what the game's inputs are, what chains mean and so on. I could do that now, but why make content of my own when others have come before me and covered exactly those things?

As these videos go along, expect the language used to be more fighting game-ish than I've been aiming to write in lately. Complex ideas tend to develop their own language because people like what they communicate to be as information-dense as possible.

This video and its second part pretty much run down the base mechanics of Guilty Gear, as well as more advanced quirks of its programming and what they mean.


Here's a video that from memory was made by a damn good Chipp player from Queensland  a good 6 years ago. As the title suggests, it's aimed at an intermediate playerbase, but it's definitely built with the sort of mindset I like to look at fighting games with. You know, building from a "dont get hit -> get a hit -> get more hits" base.

Last year novriltataki worked with various people in the GG community to make a series of basic character descriptors. These cover things like what strange system-breaking quirks a character has, what their basic gameplan is and what standout tools they have.
 Think of these as a way to start your brain thinking about characters rather than direct flowchart of exactly how to play. GG's cast have toolsets that can respond to most situations once you're familiar with them and the game's systems.

I was tempted to link a pile of good matches here, but there's something I'd like to talk about instead.

Watching other people play be it in person or through recordings can be a valuable source of information. You can see what works in situations, and what doesn't. However, watching and playing are significantly different experiences for your brain. With a recording you're able to passively observe situations and use hindsight to work out what went on and what could've been done to turn things around.

Playing is a whole different experience. You have to work this all out on the fly. You have to work out what someone's thinking while they're still thinking it through. You'll drop inputs. You'll make mistakes. You'll make bad calls. You'll get angry. You'll get annoyed. At the same time, you'll get elated when you do things right. You'll talk smack to the guy next to you or start listening to when they're hitting buttons. You'll be thinking about what you're doing for dinner tonight. About how you need to go the toilet soon. How it's been two minutes since you were last thrown, so maybe a throw is coming. You'll be thinking about a great deal of things that aren't exactly what your opponent is doing and what you should do about it.

My point is, you won't really learn how to play a game unless you play the game. You want to learn Guilty Gear? Great. Get the game and play it. Find people who suck. Find people who are better than you. Spend an hour against a max difficulty AI going through arcade mode. Play the game and you'll one day find that while you may not be able to write essays on everything you do, you've developed an intrinsic understanding of what's happening. That's what experience does.Experience Guilty Gear for yourself.

Next time I might talk about identifying hit properties. That'll mean I get to actually record Accent Core footage for once.