Guilty Gear

The original Guilty Gear Xrd arrived a year earlier on Japanese consoles, with a Western release following a few months later. It was a strong addition to the series, though not without rough edges, and it never quite built the audience a modern fighting game needs to stay relevant outside Japan. Arc System Works gave the game a second chance with an updated version titled Guilty Gear Xrd 2, already available in Japanese arcades and set for release in the West on May 26th.

Japanese fighting-game sequels typically work differently from their Western counterparts. Rather than a fully new installment with a new story, mechanics, visuals and cast — the way a “Mortal Kombat” follows a “Mortal Kombat X” — Japanese developers tend to re-release the same game rebalanced around fan feedback, with extra content bolted on. It is not a universal pattern (the “Super Smash Bros.” series changes radically each entry), but “Street Fighter” has had numerous editions, “Marvel vs Capcom 3” became “Ultimate MvC3,” “Persona 4 Arena” became “Persona 4 Arena: Ultimax,” and franchises like “BlazBlue” and “King of Fighters” have followed the same model, as have Japan-only series such as “Bleach: Heat the Soul.” Guilty Gear Xrd 2 follows the same principle: it carries over all of the original Guilty Gear Xrd content plus a handful of additions.

Those additions include an overall roster rebalance, new moves for every character, and new story episodes for fighters who previously lacked them. The headline additions, though, are two new playable characters: Baiken, a veteran samurai fighter, and Answer, an office-worker-turned-ninja. The update is a fairly modest one for existing owners — priced at $20 for those who already own the original Guilty Gear Xrd, or $40 for newcomers. For anyone who has never played Guilty Gear Xrd, Xrd 2 is the definitive version and a reasonable entry point; for existing owners unmoved by the two new characters, waiting for a price drop is a fair call.

Guilty Gear has produced enough entries — Guilty Gear X, Guilty Gear Dust, Guilty Gear Judgment, Guilty Gear Xrd, and others — that even devoted fans can occasionally want a change of pace. The following is a short list of other fighting games that play in similar territory. The ground rules: each game must be 2D, and it must play in a way that would feel familiar to a Guilty Gear fan — so no “Mortal Kombat” or “Street Fighter” here.

1. Skullgirls

An easy pick to lead with. At a time when most fighting-game franchises had moved fully into 3D, Skullgirls arrived as an unapologetically 2D indie effort, and the ambition shows: its sprite work is large, crisp, and heavily detailed, making its battles genuinely satisfying to watch. A fan-made trailer pairing footage from the game with “Big Blast Sonic” — a track most Guilty Gear fans will recognize — gives a good sense of the presentation. The combat backs up the visuals with tight mechanics that reward real execution; unlike some button-mashable entries in the genre, Skullgirls punishes players who don’t understand its systems.

2. BlazBlue

Anyone who has played “Persona 4 Arena” or its sequel will find BlazBlue immediately familiar — both were made by the same team and share a similar approach to combo-building between light, heavy, and special attacks. BlazBlue plays like a more chaotic sibling to the “Arena” games, and the resemblance extends to storytelling: like the Persona fighters, BlazBlue threads a single continuous narrative across multiple playable characters, rather than settling for a loose, Tekken-style pretext plot.

3. King of Fighters

This entry bends the “strictly 2D” rule slightly, since the latest mainline installment, King of Fighters XIV, uses 3D character models rather than 2D sprites. The exception feels justified: the previous mainline entry arrived in 2010, before original developer SNK exited the market to focus on pachinko machines, so a proper sequel arriving at all is notable in itself. Even in 3D, King of Fighters XIV plays much like its 2D predecessors, and the earlier 2D entries in the series remain worth returning to regardless.

Guilty Gear is a fighting-game franchise with roughly 17 entries to its name, depending on how spin-offs and re-releases are counted. Aside from a four-year gap between 2008 and 2012, the series has produced a new Guilty Gear game in some form almost every year since 1998 — making it one of the longer-running franchises in the genre, even though the original game gave little indication it would spawn a series at all. Fighting games were common in the late 1990s, with Capcom dominating the market through “Marvel Vs. Capcom,” “Rival Schools,” and “Street Fighter,” then in its “Alpha 3” iteration. Daisuke Ishiwatari and his studio, Arc System Works, took a different approach. At the time, most fighting games leaned toward one of two visual styles: Japanese developers followed Capcom’s cartoony-but-grounded “Street Fighter” look, while Western developers followed “Mortal Kombat”‘s hyper-realistic, gorier aesthetic. Ishiwatari combined both styles with a heavy dose of shonen-manga influence. The result was Guilty Gear: The Missing Link.

Following Capcom’s approach, each of the game’s ten playable fighters was styled after anime and manga archetypes — cartoony but weighty, each with a distinct feel. Unlike Capcom’s cast, however, many of Guilty Gear’s fighters wielded sharp weapons without hesitation. The overall look drew heavily from manga and anime of the era, with a resemblance to titles like “Ghost in the Shell,” “Ninja Scroll,” and “Berserk” that is easy to spot on comparison. The story followed a similarly over-the-top register — mostly a pretext for the fighting, though presented with some ambition. In brief: in the early 2000s, humanity created artificial servants known as Gears to handle labor, until the Gears rebelled and fought their creators. The war ended with the Gears’ leader, Justice, imprisoned within a multi-dimensional prison. A surviving Gear, Testament, later sets out to free Justice, prompting a tournament to find the strongest fighter capable of stopping them.

The original Missing Link was followed in 2000 by Guilty Gear X, which introduced the Roman Cancel system — a mechanic that lets a player cancel out of an attack’s recovery frames at the cost of meter, opening up combo routes the original game didn’t support. X’s home-console follow-up, Guilty Gear XX, became the series’ longest-lived single entry: rather than a conventional numbered sequel, Arc System Works released a run of balance-focused revisions — #Reload, Slash, Accent Core, and finally Accent Core Plus R — that kept the same roster and stage set current in arcades and on home consoles for the better part of a decade. That extended competitive lifespan is a large part of why XX Accent Core Plus R is still the version longtime players return to today.

Guilty Gear’s history also includes several releases that step outside the traditional one-on-one fighting format. Guilty Gear Isuka, released in 2003, supported four fighters on screen at once rather than the series’ usual two, an experiment not repeated in later mainline entries. Guilty Gear 2: Overture, which followed in 2007, went further still, replacing the fighting-game structure with real-time strategy and action-adventure elements — the most significant departure from the core format in the series’ history. These detours sit alongside the handheld spin-offs Dust Strikers and Judgment as evidence that Arc System Works has periodically tested formats beyond the core 2D fighter, even as the numbered mainline entries kept close to their original design.

The series’ visual identity changed again with Guilty Gear Xrd, which replaced the hand-drawn 2D sprites used in every earlier entry with 3D character models rendered to look hand-drawn — a cel-shading technique that preserved the same exaggerated, manga-influenced motion as the older sprite work while running on then-current console hardware. Guilty Gear -Strive-, released in 2021, carried that visual approach forward and paired it with a simplified input system and rollback netcode, factors widely credited with giving Strive the largest and most consistently active online population the series has had. For a broader look at how each entry fits together, see this site’s overview of every mainline and spin-off Guilty Gear release.