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Riot.EXE

Fighting Game Enthusiast
(He/Him)
Yeah, here's to hoping it works by the time I clock out tonight. I couldn't get on AT ALL last night or this morning before work...
 

Alixsar

The Shogun of Harlem
(He/him)
It's not just you, it's been off for everyone. They said there was some problem and needed to take it down.



*shrug* It's the worst possible time for this for me personally; this is my weekend to work and I'm off yesterday (it died) and tonight (need to sleep early, no word on when/if it's going back up). So...yup! Just hoping to get a bit more training room in honestly. The way that P and K only chain into themselves is like...still something I'm trying to wrap my head around.
 

Riot.EXE

Fighting Game Enthusiast
(He/Him)
It's not just you, it's been off for everyone. They said there was some problem and needed to take it down.



*shrug* It's the worst possible time for this for me personally; this is my weekend to work and I'm off yesterday (it died) and tonight (need to sleep early, no word on when/if it's going back up). So...yup! Just hoping to get a bit more training room in honestly. The way that P and K only chain into themselves is like...still something I'm trying to wrap my head around.
Yeah, I know it wasn't just me, but some people were able to at least get in the lab.
 

spines

cyber true color
(she/her, or something)
i did for about 15 or 20 minutes earlier. it feels fine on its own, arcsys are good at what they do. it's pretty confounding to play a character i have any familiarity with from the old games, though, because virtually nothing does the same things in a practical sense. i get that this was true of blazblue tag as well but it felt a little more honest about it since it wasn't like "here's a button with the same input that looks the same"

i haven't experienced the rc slowdown in this game really so it's hard for me to say if i find it as disorienting still, but the real crusher so far for me is throw whiff animations. i think it's already obvious that they make the game feel different to an enormous degree
 

Riot.EXE

Fighting Game Enthusiast
(He/Him)
i did for about 15 or 20 minutes earlier. it feels fine on its own, arcsys are good at what they do. it's pretty confounding to play a character i have any familiarity with from the old games, though, because virtually nothing does the same things in a practical sense. i get that this was true of blazblue tag as well but it felt a little more honest about it since it wasn't like "here's a button with the same input that looks the same"

i haven't experienced the rc slowdown in this game really so it's hard for me to say if i find it as disorienting still, but the real crusher so far for me is throw whiff animations. i think it's already obvious that they make the game feel different to an enormous degree
BBCTB is one of the absolute worst crossover fighting games for that reason...everyone feels WRONG. For Strive, everyone feels different, but still familiar.
 

spines

cyber true color
(she/her, or something)
i feel like it's the inverse problem, like it's great that when i do 5k i know about where it will hit and everything, but then...it barely chains or combos into anything, so everything i remember doing after that is completely different
 

spines

cyber true color
(she/her, or something)
alright nvm this game is fine, hammerfall yrc is dead and hitting with any half-screen button on ram deals like 50% damage

if there's ever a rollback xrd patch i might want to try playing her in that game again instead bc i think i've made my peace with the kind of all-or-nothing deal she had there, but i'm getting kind of used to how this game works and the zoom effects are not quite as overdone as they've looked in a lot of the videos i've seen
 

demi

(She/Her)
alright nvm this game is fine, hammerfall yrc is dead and hitting with any half-screen button on ram deals like 50% damage

if there's ever a rollback xrd patch i might want to try playing her in that game again instead bc i think i've made my peace with the kind of all-or-nothing deal she had there, but i'm getting kind of used to how this game works and the zoom effects are not quite as overdone as they've looked in a lot of the videos i've seen
Yea, I enjoyed our matches well enough too! I'm totally there for the twd/away+D input for grabs. I don't have the big brain to extrapolate what issues it could have in the long run, but it alleviates kara-cancel issues that multi-button grab inputs introduce while also preventing normal/throw OS from occurring. The lack of these "options" and the throw whiff animation are backed by pretty fierce damage on a landed grab, so that's neat. I don't know how input priority works for P/K/S/H + D simultaneously would work. Two of any other button plus Dust is burst, but what about only one other button + twd/away Dust? I think so long as one or the other takes complete priority, we're good to go; very interested to see what this kind of design leads to.

I still have a lot of the same gripes I had when I was watching footage:

Hitstop is too long for pretty much everything, Counter Hit especially so, and with all of these occurrences as well as the "stop" that occurs in wallbreak scenarios, the game feels jerky to watch and to play. If I'm not already anticipating the "stop" from counter/near wallbreak, it messes with input timings as well. The game whiplashes through bits of animation and complete stops, compared to GGXX where hitstop was mostly low and RCs were instant. I mislike this trend with overly dramatic events in the fights (SFV's crush counter, for instance) because I think that the fervent pace of a fight is more exciting than stopping the action. There should be balance here. When I consider something like Alpha series or SFII/III, the super flash charges up over the course of a second, just enough time for players and spectators alike to catch their breath and build some excitement. But it's not happening that often: the break in pace is an exception and that's part of the effect.

Also, there's a lot of HUD going on. It feels overdone and distracting. This compounds with the way character models are affected with the lighting of stage around them, and so they don't seem as visible. So I guess my main complaint is that a lot of the changes they've made ostensibly for "esports" and spectating seem pretty antithetical to the actual experience of feeling & following the action.

Roman cancel time dilation for the opponent still feels incredible disruptive, esp for the person on defense? I didn't play Xrd competitively so I don't know how bad this can get but it still seems pretty powerful just in that aspect.

For the rest, I'm interested to see where the game goes. It feels very different from XX and Xrd and in that aspect alone I think there is some success here. It's a slower-paced game with less low confirms and chain flexibility: It seems like RC's going to be leaned on heavily for empowering mixups and opening opponents up to begin with, which leaves less meter for huge combos behind a hit. Whatever this game's going to be, it definitely feels new so that's a win.

Design-wise idk, Millia is Millia, new Faust is a refreshingly horrific change, I still miss old Potemkin, and Ky's still gorgeous. So, usual mixed bag for me I suppose, but it's good to see everybody haha. No opinion on music yet though, didn't listen closely. I still have reservations esp about pacing, but I'm more curious now than I was before.
 
I'm totally there for the twd/away+D input for grabs. I don't have the big brain to extrapolate what issues it could have in the long run, but it alleviates kara-cancel issues that multi-button grab inputs introduce while also preventing normal/throw OS from occurring. The lack of these "options" and the throw whiff animation are backed by pretty fierce damage on a landed grab, so that's neat. I don't know how input priority works for P/K/S/H + D simultaneously would work. Two of any other button plus Dust is burst, but what about only one other button + twd/away Dust? I think so long as one or the other takes complete priority, we're good to go; very interested to see what this kind of design leads to.
I actually want the old throw mechanics back. I get the argument that the OS is bad in XX and Xrd: all the attacker has to do is press another button when they go for a throw, but if the defending player reads the throw correctly, they still have to jump and immediately FD to avoid taking damage, which is a lot more work. But there are no air unblockables in Strive, so that problem is already solved; they didn't need to nerf throws specifically. Also, D + 1 other button is still burst, but if you don't have burst, D seems to take priority over the other button.

Anyway, the last character trailer is out!
 

demi

(She/Her)
I actually want the old throw mechanics back. I get the argument that the OS is bad in XX and Xrd: all the attacker has to do is press another button when they go for a throw, but if the defending player reads the throw correctly, they still have to jump and immediately FD to avoid taking damage, which is a lot more work. But there are no air unblockables in Strive, so that problem is already solved; they didn't need to nerf throws specifically.
It's true the defender doesn't take damage in that situation now. But, depending on the normal, they can still be at a disadvantage; and the situation will benefit some more than others. There are balance and design implications for various characters' buttons that would OS from a whiffed grab. Like, if the old throw mechanics were in, Strive Millia's new 6H move (slow and rather long animation, limited vertical reach) would be a nightmare to have come out if her grab gets jumped; a fair bit worse than the grab whiff animation. I think having the new grab command allows the developers to create new moves in the former OS spot of 4H/6H without being limited by "how does this affect their grab game", "what will the OS situations look like", and so on. They can just develop the move for that slot to be exactly what they want it to be.

But yea, lots of TBD with it! Throw whiffing is huge and a big change for the series (so is having a two frame startup!), but they're backed by some hefty damage now so that's neat. I felt like damage off of RC'd throw wasn't scaled as heavily as in the past either, so they seem especially potent if backed by meter. Thank you for the info on the button priority too.
 

Regulus

Sir Knightbot
Interesting, I was kind of expecting the last reveal to be the boss and a new character. I wonder if I-No is the boss again, or if the boss isn’t playable at launch this time.

I like her new design.
 

Alixsar

The Shogun of Harlem
(He/him)
I wake up Pot Bustered a Chipp and laughed for nearly a minute. Ky is starting to make more sense, but I'm worried the overall more-limited combo structure is gonna kill interest in the game amongst hardcore players. I mean I guess they expanded how RCs work, but I don't know if that evens out.

The lobby system is irredeemably awful. There are no excuses for why it's this bad.

Zato's animations are just...fucking incredible. My friend and I did Zato mirrors, and neither of us had any idea what we were doing in any real sense, but the whole time I was just like..."holy shit this rules". Definitely recommend at least going into training with him. Cuz holy shit
 

spines

cyber true color
(she/her, or something)
i definitely don't think the throw changes make them overly weak or anything, and with the tone down of a lot of frame advantage and high/low reward on offense they're even still pretty defensively significant from what i've played so far (though i expect the game will shit more heavily to baiting defensive throws etc.). but i don't like the feel, because i'm a scumbag who just wants to mash my best button a ton and get throws if they're close enough. i do feel like there's always been weird stuff with the buttons that map to throw they've always let rock, like bridget's entire exisence especially, and i-no getting easy air/burst throws while dashing being the really obvious examples, but universalizing it is certainly a better "simplification" than stuff like the gatling changes imo

(oh yeah, i never mentioned this, but i ended up practicing ino a bunch in +r after trying out a bunch of characters for a while. she just felt like the one i could play matches with and enjoy while still being happy to keep hitting up training mode time and time again. and with the frc being twice as easy now as when i first started playing with it i'm starting to get the real hang of it!)

eddie's animations in this game are some black magic for sure. what they did with him was obviously incredible in xrd, but he's so freaky and otherworldly now, way more "impossible" looking from both an aesthetic and technical standpoint, and i love it.
 

Alixsar

The Shogun of Harlem
(He/him)
I played more last night and a bit this morning. Overall I think it's fun, but I stand by my assertion that it's not a "real" Guilty Gear, for better or worse. And because of that, like I said before I'm not too sure how long hardcore players will stick with it. The lobbies are so so bad, so incredibly stupid and ill thought out, and it's so annoying that ArcSys was told that during the first beta and just didn't change a single thing about it. It's so incredibly bad and hurts the overall product. The netcode is incredible though, so hopefully they take the right lessons away from this. They're halfway there! The old lobby systems had their problems too, but this one introduces new and worse ones...just let us pick people's names from a list or something! We don't need avatars that teleport all over the place and complicate matchmaking, sheesh.

My children Ky and Potemkin are fun enough, though they are taking some muscle memory adjustment...but I'm enjoying Giovanna and Faust too. I've seen people go ham with Nagoriyuki but I just like...don't get him at all. I got chipped out by him at, like, 15% or something impossibly huge for chip damage...he's wild when done right. I really really WANT to like Ramlethal, but she doesn't work with my brain either. "Big medium buttons with fireballs" are my favorite kinds of characters, but she just like...doesn't make sense. Not saying she's bad, who knows at this point, but basically all I ever wanna do is play lame, throw fireballs, and hit medium buttons into fireballs (Katalina is like...the MOST Alex character in any fighting game) and yet...she feels weird. I dunno. Needs more time in the oven I guess.
 

spines

cyber true color
(she/her, or something)
went online, because that's apparently a thing we can do. (i don't have ps+)

i spent a few minutes messing with zato and chipp to at least get inputs in my head since i have no clue how to search for combos in this game, then kind of cycled between those two and ram in matches with alixsar and riot. i had fun! actually if anything i think the fact i didn't develop some kind of hard notion of what i'm "supposed" to do in the game yet helped a lot, and really made me feel kind of free in terms of going out there and doing stuff with those characters, especially when it came to tossing out rcs and stuff to see what happened. chipp feels like a terror in this game too, where so many characters seem slower and jumping is kind of safe and free a lot of the time.

counterhit stuff is weird, it feels like a lot of rounds go by without it making much impact, then you'll get one where there's just like 5 huge stops in a row from scrambling. easy to forget till it isn't. i still don't love the music, but it's kinda better than xrd's for the most part, which felt like such nothing to me. here even where it's kind of obnoxious or ridiculous at least it's its own thing.

i think one thing that will really stick with me even if i don't play this game after release is...airthrows. having to do them a lot more intentionally actually really gave me a new perspective on how to play the air game in general, where i feel like my common idea is "i want to be over them at my perfect range to go in or get out" and this pushed me more towards trying to play more patiently and smartly to gain a larger advantage when i was able to get the right read. the fact that you can airdash airthrow also kind of helps with that, but i tried not to rely on it too much since it won't go back to the older games. well, guilty gear anyway, i guess it must have been a thing in persona and blazblue (which have two-button inputs) that i just haven't thought about in ages

though getting it is...seeming a lot more likely than it did, i'm surprised how much i liked it really, and the lobbies, while huge failures in a lot of ways, don't ruin great-feeling in-match play. i'm still kind of torn about paying $60 for it, but there's a statement to be made of some kind, i guess, and it's not like i haven't spent that much plenty of times on stupid games unnecessarily
 

Fyonn

did their best!
So I haven't been playing this game because I've been depression napping instead.

But then I played some this morning. This definitely isn't the same kind of fighting game Guilty Gear is, but I'm finding it hard to complain when I'm meshing with it so well. I actually feel like I'm approaching functional combos for Strive's pace.

This is less about Strive and more about getting better personally, but I'm making much more deliberate decisions, even if those decisions are bad. Part of that might be the fightsticks I got which just, like, woah. It's so much easier to do a specific thing in the moment when each finger (more or less) is assigned to a specific job.
 

spines

cyber true color
(she/her, or something)
i'm honestly really happy at how much i've seen sentiments like this, since the standard for people already accustomed to another game's sort of nonsense is to be skeptical at attempts to replace it with a new kind of nonsense. there are elements of strive that i definitely feel are very strange, and new rules around air behavior like tech resets and blocking feel "friendlier" but will probably be just as difficult to deal with as experts adapt to the new ways to exploit them. but overall it's a game where you can move around a lot more easily than previous arcsys games, and deal big damage by hitting buttons, and i'm happy if that makes people feel good. even for me it let me try out some characters i had trouble putting together plans with before!
 

spines

cyber true color
(she/her, or something)
if they keep the lobby system they have for ranked or whatever and make it a little more usable i think people can live with that

...as long as they implement some kind of real room that's usable for casuals with friends, tournaments, etc. and for that matter i can think of reasons they would've worked on or planned some of these concepts and kept them out of the test (e.g. that they would be less appropriate for stress testing, or to encourage more playing with strangers), but needless to say it'll kill a lot of the work they've put into making online play a pillar of the game like never before if people can't have private rooms and spectator modes, especially in the "no live event limbo" era

also if there's no rematch in casual mode that's not much better. those ps4 load times...they're not as bad as granblue but they're not much better
 
The beta's back! The lobby still has the same art style that nobody seems to like, but it has "battle stations" that you use to challenge people instead of just interacting with them directly, which solves the main issue I had, which was that I'd mash X next to someone to try to get into a game, and end up having to wait for like a full minute while their R-Code loaded if they weren't ready. Also you can rematch now, but a rating update overrides the rematch prompt even if you end up staying on the same floor. Oh, and I-No and Anji are in the game.
 

Alixsar

The Shogun of Harlem
(He/him)
Welp, it's worse than we thought


Mother of God...this is awful! What the fuck! I'm like...completely speechless. The stuff they had already revealed (stuff like Chipp, Potemkin, Giovanna, Faust) was, like, fine? Not great but ya know, not terrible. But turns out it's the best stuff in the soundtrack?! Fuckkkkkkkkkk

Hopefully XX's soundtrack is unlockable again

Edit: That said, this is accurate
 
Last edited:

Fyonn

did their best!
My inner 17 year old with a crush on Avril Lavigne thinks May's theme is the best thing I've heard in my entire life.
 

Alixsar

The Shogun of Harlem
(He/him)
Even for the character themes that are okay, I can't look at any of those character's previous themes and not think their previous ones were vastly better. It's, like, across the board worse than Xrd, which was across the board worse than X and XX (which is admittedly one of the GoaTs, so hard to follow). It's just kind nuts to think we went from Noontide and Holy Orders and Write in Pain and The Midnight Carnival and No Mercy and Still in the Dark and fucking Keep the Flag Flying to...Leo's Theme?!!? What IS that? What the fuck, man.

Like nothing in the entire sampler goes even half as hard as Keep the Flag Flying does, and THIS is supposed to be Guilty Gear? It's bad enough the UI got turned into some Apple Store bullshit. I know this is what ArcSys thinks they need to do to keep GG relevant, and maybe they're even right, and I still want it to succeed because more games need rollback and it's still a fun ArcSys game (even if it removed a ton of stuff that makes Guilty Gear feel like Guilty Gear)...but fuck man. This is depressing.
 

spines

cyber true color
(she/her, or something)
soundtrack by the people who saw the reaction to Birthday Train, definitely.

i actually think i still like it better than most of xrd's just since it's actually different, instead of "xx again but worse". but i don't love it
 

Alixsar

The Shogun of Harlem
(He/him)
I was just talking with some friends about it and one of them made a good point; all the songs having vocals makes a lot of noise. Not just...like, literal noise, but in the sense that it can obscure what's going on. You're trying to listen for audio cues from the characters, who are constantly saying stuff as it is, and then there's some dude warbbling FLY LIKE A TIGER ADN BLAHBLAHBLAHRUAHFUSFGHHHHH BE THE HEROOOOO AND BALHRFJILHAJSDK, on top of the announcer already screaming COUNTER with accompanying gigantic explosion noises. It didn't bother me too much, but he found it really distracting overall and I suspect he won't be alone. Hopefully there's at least an instrumental option, if not old music.
 
I was digging the hell out of Strive's music in the closed beta last year, when it could only be heard during online matches. I still like it in that context, but it did get tiresome hearing the same song loop for half an hour in training mode, which led me to turn down the volume in a Guilty Gear game for the first time ever. So yeah, some kind of instrumental option would be welcome, and GGXX's soundtrack would be ideal.
 

Riot.EXE

Fighting Game Enthusiast
(He/Him)
I was just talking with some friends about it and one of them made a good point; all the songs having vocals makes a lot of noise. Not just...like, literal noise, but in the sense that it can obscure what's going on. You're trying to listen for audio cues from the characters, who are constantly saying stuff as it is, and then there's some dude warbbling FLY LIKE A TIGER ADN BLAHBLAHBLAHRUAHFUSFGHHHHH BE THE HEROOOOO AND BALHRFJILHAJSDK, on top of the announcer already screaming COUNTER with accompanying gigantic explosion noises. It didn't bother me too much, but he found it really distracting overall and I suspect he won't be alone. Hopefully there's at least an instrumental option, if not old music.
This...it's the fucking vocals...if the music were instrumental, it'd be way better.
 

Alixsar

The Shogun of Harlem
(He/him)
I had an epiphany yesterday

Listen to this real quick (this is just the preview version looped twice)


Okay so...we can debate whether or not it works as a song for Guilty Gear Strive. BUT!!!!!!! Think about this!!! This is the real shit, think about this!

THIS IS AN ELITE BEAT AGENTS SONG

Right? Right?! Just listen to the chorus and imagine the pomp pomp POP "Yeah!" "WHOOOO!!!!!!" sound effects from EBA in time with the music. There's even a breakdown where they loop it where the story panels would play out. And the song's production has some kind of intangible quality that makes it sound like it's an EBA song. Just...like...I'm not crazy right? Someone else hears it? Like this level would be about a dog trying to get home, and then he ends up knocking over a hot dog stand and skateboarding away from a grandma whose hot dog he stole, and then in the end the dog winks. Right? You guys see it?! I'm not crazy?!?!
 

Alixsar

The Shogun of Harlem
(He/him)
Uh oh, look what made it to Youtube already



Honestly Ky's theme isn't terrible?! The chorus is all they played in the preview and that's the worst part! The intro is cool?!
 
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