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IGN Review of Guilty Gear 2: Overture
There's nothing new about a series working outside its original genre. But there are inherent risks. The personality of a franchise is largely cultivated by the tenets -- and sometimes, constrictions -- of its genre. Guilty Gear has a reputation for its exquisite 2D art and wild characters that express themselves through their outrageous fighting moves. But neither of those key points survives the transition to an action-strategy game, leaving Overture a hollow experience that will only appear to the hardest of hardcore Guilty Gear fans that care far more about just spending time with heroes like Sol Badguy than whether or not he's appearing in a halfway enjoyable game.
It's entirely too easy and unfair to dismiss Guilty Gear 2: Overture as a real-time strategy Dynasty Warriors with big hair. Only half of the single-player campaign is strategy oriented. The rest of it consists of genre mash-ups, like a 3D brawler and a scavenger hunt. It's Overture's scattershot approach, dumping so many ideas into a single game, that is its biggest weakness. A handful of really good concepts are never properly executed, such as the very cool different armies each hero can summon into the battlefield or the intriguing homage to an arcade-style shoot-'em-up that occurs late in the game.
Overture uses a rolling tutorial to introduce its multitude of strategy elements and possible combat moves. The first stages are fairly straightforward, teaching you the basics of fighting and covering real estate through a dash move that reduces control but gets you from A to B in record time. The fighting itself is only moderately deep and fans will indeed see moves similar to those from the original 2D bruiser, such Ky's Stun Edge and Sol's Bandit Revolver and Volcanic Viper. These are good nods to the fans, but the moves aren't necessarily any more useful in the single-player campaign than just hammering on the regular attack button while locked on to an enemy. (Now, online is different, where players exceptionally adept with these moves are using them with great precision in duels. But more on that later.)
Soon, Overture transforms into the strategy game you've heard it billed as. The playing field, often a maze of bridges and small clearings, is littered with nodes called ghosts. You "own" one ghost at the beginning of the stage -- it's your masterghost and it is protected by a magical force field. The more ghosts you control, the more mana harvested. Mana is the means for summoning an army into the field. Using a tool called the organ, you hire monsters to do your bidding, such as descend on a particularly contested ghost and try to hold it. You can also use mana to summon items and skills, but just like the fighting moves mentioned above, you really don't need to bother with these nuances in the single-player game.
Juggling your attention around the battlefield is the key to success. It's not enough just to run up to a ghost and seize it. You must then install hardened troops to defend it, especially if the ghost is on your enemy's half of the map because the AI rarely plays defense. It's almost always on the march. Once you have an acceptable army, you can issue the command from organ to raid your enemy's masterghost. Your creatures are far better at shattering the armor around the masterghost than you, making it pointless to stage a one-man assault. But drawing too many monsters away from holding the ghosts -- or protecting your own masterghost -- to attack the rival masterghost is risky, especially if your enemy has enough banked mana to summon its own army while you're trying to overtake the masterghost.
As you play more and more of these stages -- and there are 19 total missions in Overture -- you unlock more troops to summon. These monsters and minions are divided into different categories, like melee and mobile, and the game employs a little paper-rock-scissors logic to offset each troop's strength. The monster designs are actually pretty slick. Sol, for example, issues for robots like the Blade and the Firewheel. Valentine's forces are gothic-inspired. Izuna's army is drawn from Japanese mythology, such as the Kappa. Unfortunately, it's difficult to enjoy the different monsters because once the clash begins, making sense of the brawl is troublesome. With health bars hovering over each monster's head and the camera closing in tight on the fighting, the screen becomes a jumble of colors and shapes. Locking on to a specific enemy with the right trigger only marginally improves the situation. While you can better aim your assault while locked, battling monsters have zero regard for personal space and stumble into the way.
After establishing the strategy stuff in the front half of the game, though, Overture loses focus again. The back half of the game offers a variety of stages with different goals, such as locating five hidden treasure chests around a magnificent temple (really, this is the most attractive stage in the whole game) without engaging any enemies. They attack you, but you cannot swing back. You just have to avoid them while using magic spells to locate the exact position of the invisible treasure chests. There are duels between fighters that devolve into button-mashing contests instead of the graceful battles from the 2D fighters.
It's also too bad that the game saves two of the best missions for the latter half of the game and then never revisits their concepts again. First is a stage where you must protect a gate from advancing forces that come from three directions in different waves. Amongst those incoming platoons are brainwashed enemies that you can bring over to your side if you target them individually and cast a spell on them. The more enemies you bring to your side the better, but seeking out the brainwashed enemies takes time, giving other monsters a shot at the gate. The other is a mission where ghosts power a series of magical fields that must be broken in order to win. You must balance taking control of one of the barrier-powering ghosts with smashing down the then weakened fields, inching your way across the entire battlefield. Yet this idea never appears elsewhere in the game, making the downer missions like seeking out invisible treasure chests seems even worse by comparison.
Overture does benefit from a solid online mode. The different stages from the single-player game are repurposed as ghost-laden battlefields. You start out with a set amount of mana and a masterghost. It's then up to you to smartly summon an army and fan it out across the battlefield, defending ghosts to maintain a mana advantage. You can play one-on-one or in teams of two, selecting from the different characters from the single-player campaign. So, if Sol, the main protagonist isn't your bag, you can play with other heroes and employ their unique monsters and skills.
Online mode is split between regular player matches and ranked matches. Right now, the ranked matches are brutal. There are very, very good players out there. You may try to methodically take over the whole field one ghost at time, but these guys are dashing from ghost to ghost to stop your mana production before beating you mercilessly with special moves. However frustrating this may be at first, you learn a lot through defeat about the need to balance mana harvesting with pure aggression. However, your enjoyment of the online game is dependent entirely on how much you enjoy the strategy missions in the single-player game. If, for example, you haven't been engaged by stage 10, there's little chance the online play will rescue the game.
Guilty Gear's storyline is nearly incomprehensible to anybody but the most versed in the Gear universe. Religious terms like Crusade and Sacred Knights of the Holy Order are employed to give the plot some weight, but by the halfway point, the narrative is mired in goopy melodrama.
Nor will Overture's graphics warrant any comparisons to the best of the generation. While some of the monster models are clever, the heroes just do not make the jump to 3D very well. Sure, they wear their recognizable over-the-top outfits and make-up, but their personality is drained. The backdrops are mostly unimpressive staples from anime, with a combination of sci-fi and gothic architecture. The soundtrack is a mix of metal and strings. There isn't really a unifying thread at all. The voice work in the story scenes is somewhat flat, but the little quips heard during combat are far too repetitive. For example, Sol barks "shut up!" with one sword slash. It's a useful sword slash, too, so get ready to be told to shut up about 400 times. You may even find yourself saying it right back.
©2008-10-17, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
It's entirely too easy and unfair to dismiss Guilty Gear 2: Overture as a real-time strategy Dynasty Warriors with big hair. Only half of the single-player campaign is strategy oriented. The rest of it consists of genre mash-ups, like a 3D brawler and a scavenger hunt. It's Overture's scattershot approach, dumping so many ideas into a single game, that is its biggest weakness. A handful of really good concepts are never properly executed, such as the very cool different armies each hero can summon into the battlefield or the intriguing homage to an arcade-style shoot-'em-up that occurs late in the game.
Overture uses a rolling tutorial to introduce its multitude of strategy elements and possible combat moves. The first stages are fairly straightforward, teaching you the basics of fighting and covering real estate through a dash move that reduces control but gets you from A to B in record time. The fighting itself is only moderately deep and fans will indeed see moves similar to those from the original 2D bruiser, such Ky's Stun Edge and Sol's Bandit Revolver and Volcanic Viper. These are good nods to the fans, but the moves aren't necessarily any more useful in the single-player campaign than just hammering on the regular attack button while locked on to an enemy. (Now, online is different, where players exceptionally adept with these moves are using them with great precision in duels. But more on that later.)
Soon, Overture transforms into the strategy game you've heard it billed as. The playing field, often a maze of bridges and small clearings, is littered with nodes called ghosts. You "own" one ghost at the beginning of the stage -- it's your masterghost and it is protected by a magical force field. The more ghosts you control, the more mana harvested. Mana is the means for summoning an army into the field. Using a tool called the organ, you hire monsters to do your bidding, such as descend on a particularly contested ghost and try to hold it. You can also use mana to summon items and skills, but just like the fighting moves mentioned above, you really don't need to bother with these nuances in the single-player game.
Juggling your attention around the battlefield is the key to success. It's not enough just to run up to a ghost and seize it. You must then install hardened troops to defend it, especially if the ghost is on your enemy's half of the map because the AI rarely plays defense. It's almost always on the march. Once you have an acceptable army, you can issue the command from organ to raid your enemy's masterghost. Your creatures are far better at shattering the armor around the masterghost than you, making it pointless to stage a one-man assault. But drawing too many monsters away from holding the ghosts -- or protecting your own masterghost -- to attack the rival masterghost is risky, especially if your enemy has enough banked mana to summon its own army while you're trying to overtake the masterghost.
As you play more and more of these stages -- and there are 19 total missions in Overture -- you unlock more troops to summon. These monsters and minions are divided into different categories, like melee and mobile, and the game employs a little paper-rock-scissors logic to offset each troop's strength. The monster designs are actually pretty slick. Sol, for example, issues for robots like the Blade and the Firewheel. Valentine's forces are gothic-inspired. Izuna's army is drawn from Japanese mythology, such as the Kappa. Unfortunately, it's difficult to enjoy the different monsters because once the clash begins, making sense of the brawl is troublesome. With health bars hovering over each monster's head and the camera closing in tight on the fighting, the screen becomes a jumble of colors and shapes. Locking on to a specific enemy with the right trigger only marginally improves the situation. While you can better aim your assault while locked, battling monsters have zero regard for personal space and stumble into the way.
After establishing the strategy stuff in the front half of the game, though, Overture loses focus again. The back half of the game offers a variety of stages with different goals, such as locating five hidden treasure chests around a magnificent temple (really, this is the most attractive stage in the whole game) without engaging any enemies. They attack you, but you cannot swing back. You just have to avoid them while using magic spells to locate the exact position of the invisible treasure chests. There are duels between fighters that devolve into button-mashing contests instead of the graceful battles from the 2D fighters.
It's also too bad that the game saves two of the best missions for the latter half of the game and then never revisits their concepts again. First is a stage where you must protect a gate from advancing forces that come from three directions in different waves. Amongst those incoming platoons are brainwashed enemies that you can bring over to your side if you target them individually and cast a spell on them. The more enemies you bring to your side the better, but seeking out the brainwashed enemies takes time, giving other monsters a shot at the gate. The other is a mission where ghosts power a series of magical fields that must be broken in order to win. You must balance taking control of one of the barrier-powering ghosts with smashing down the then weakened fields, inching your way across the entire battlefield. Yet this idea never appears elsewhere in the game, making the downer missions like seeking out invisible treasure chests seems even worse by comparison.
Overture does benefit from a solid online mode. The different stages from the single-player game are repurposed as ghost-laden battlefields. You start out with a set amount of mana and a masterghost. It's then up to you to smartly summon an army and fan it out across the battlefield, defending ghosts to maintain a mana advantage. You can play one-on-one or in teams of two, selecting from the different characters from the single-player campaign. So, if Sol, the main protagonist isn't your bag, you can play with other heroes and employ their unique monsters and skills.
Online mode is split between regular player matches and ranked matches. Right now, the ranked matches are brutal. There are very, very good players out there. You may try to methodically take over the whole field one ghost at time, but these guys are dashing from ghost to ghost to stop your mana production before beating you mercilessly with special moves. However frustrating this may be at first, you learn a lot through defeat about the need to balance mana harvesting with pure aggression. However, your enjoyment of the online game is dependent entirely on how much you enjoy the strategy missions in the single-player game. If, for example, you haven't been engaged by stage 10, there's little chance the online play will rescue the game.
Guilty Gear's storyline is nearly incomprehensible to anybody but the most versed in the Gear universe. Religious terms like Crusade and Sacred Knights of the Holy Order are employed to give the plot some weight, but by the halfway point, the narrative is mired in goopy melodrama.
Nor will Overture's graphics warrant any comparisons to the best of the generation. While some of the monster models are clever, the heroes just do not make the jump to 3D very well. Sure, they wear their recognizable over-the-top outfits and make-up, but their personality is drained. The backdrops are mostly unimpressive staples from anime, with a combination of sci-fi and gothic architecture. The soundtrack is a mix of metal and strings. There isn't really a unifying thread at all. The voice work in the story scenes is somewhat flat, but the little quips heard during combat are far too repetitive. For example, Sol barks "shut up!" with one sword slash. It's a useful sword slash, too, so get ready to be told to shut up about 400 times. You may even find yourself saying it right back.
©2008-10-17, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved