She can also go into Azami stance while blocking an attack in order to parry and counter the next strike, but the timing is very strict. After a successful parry, you can press another button to do the counter attack. She has a move called Azami that puts her in a counter stance for a few frames, during which time she’ll parry any attacks (like a Blitz Shield, but with no Tension cost). In REV2, Baiken counters work very differently. This made her very good at interrupting an opponent’s offence and, frankly, a real nuisance to fight against. She used to have a handful of guard cancel moves – attacks that she could perform while in blockstun, like Dead Angle Attacks or Street Fighter’s Alpha Counters, but without any Tension cost. In terms of how she plays, Baiken chances a lot since Guilty Gear XX, mostly because her trademark counter attacks work quite differently now. Baiken and Anji are two of the games only Japanese characters, and together, they’re a potent subversion of tropes that are very common to samurai anime and film.) Just as Baiken rejects feminine stereotypes, Anji rejects masculine ones, and is himself something of a Yamato Nadeshiko character. (As an aside, I really wish Anji Mito was in Xrd as well, because he and Baiken go together so well. Despite her feminine physique, she completely rejects the “ Yamato Nadeshiko” archetype that women in samurai media so often fall into, and wholly embraces a rōnin anti-hero vibe that’s typically the domain of men. She’s fierce, brash, and violent, she drinks, smokes, and swears with the best of them, and she carries herself with swagger and machismo. She’s a modern-day samurai on a quest for revenge, making up for her missing arm with a litany of weapons hidden in her kimono and a sword that she effortlessly wields singlehandedly. She’s certainly one of the most interesting characters in the Guilty Gear franchise, and given how unique the character designs are across the board, that’s quite the achievement. It’s an expansion to Revelator, and though it’s available both as an add-on or a standalone, it’s priced accordingly. REV2 is akin to Guilty Gear XX Accent Core+R or Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition: it adds some new characters, a few more chapters to the story, and widespread balance changes to all the existing characters. Now we’ve got Guilty Gear Xrd REV2, which is a less ambitious update to the Xrd series, but a welcome improvement nonetheless. Related reading: REV2 is an update to Guilty Gear Xrd Revelator, which came out last year. It added Blitz Attacks (similar to Street Fighter IV’s Focus Attacks), supercharged supers, throw breaks, and an easy control scheme called Stylish Mode, along with new characters and revamps to the game modes available. Revelator was to Sign what Guilty Gear XX Accent Core was to Guilty Gear XX Slash, or Super Street Fighter IV was to Street Fighter IV: a new game in the same sub-series, which doesn’t bring the kind of overhaul that a new numbered title would, but expands on the core mechanics quite dramatically. It continued the story of the previous game, and added new characters, mechanics, and game modes. It was exactly what you could want from a sequel: a game that pushes boundaries and tries new things, without forgetting its roots and the things people play it for in the first place.Ī year later, Arc brought us Guilty Gear Xrd Revelator, an update and sequel to SIGN. It even managed to keep the series’ iconic 2D art style in place despite a shift to a 3D engine, thanks to some masterful cel-shading and animation techniques. Despite a pared back roster and the absence of some fan favourites, its selection of fighters offered a good mix of old and new, with a wide variety of fighting styles. This was a long-awaited new game in a franchise that had been collecting dust for many years, and it lived up to every expectation: it kept the series’ trademark depth and complexity, while toning down some of the needless technical difficulty that plagued the earlier games. In 2015, Arc System Works released Guilty Gear Xrd Sign, and fans of the series rejoiced.
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