Guilty Gear: Strive (2021)

I don't know how many people on here are into fighting games but am I alone in loving mirror matches? I hear people complain about them all the time, but I personally love them. If you're losing then you usually can see things and find new patterns and combos that you're not doing and try to see if you can apply them to your style, maybe adapt and beat the other player. If you're beating the other player, then you get a whole set of fun benefits. The satisfaction of knowing that at this moment you are better with your character than they are, the fun of watching as they try to adapt or do things you're doing, and usually still watching another player do things with your character you may not be applying. In summation Guilty Gear/Fighting games are fun, play fighting games, thanks for coming to my TED talk.

I now can’t play this game for more than 40 minutes or so without having pain in my left thumb that is unfortunately starting to spread to the rest of the hand. My guess is that it’s an unfortunate combo of something about the PS5 controller/D-pad + this game being pretty intense + me mostly playing less physically demanding games in the last couple years + “90’s kids getting a bit older” syndrome. So now I guess I need to take a few days off, do some hand stretches, then learn how to play with the analog stick… God help me trying to play online with that. Lol

Despite some of the technical issues I've had, and pretty uninteresting single-player content, I am having a great time playing ever since I was sorted into the correct online ranking to not just get destroyed every fight. 2021 has for me so far been one of the absolute least interesting gaming years, and understandably so due to COVID, so I'm glad to have another new title that I'll spend a bunch of time with.

Fun game, looks great, online matches are running great, matchmaking is… borderline unacceptably broken? At least 2/3 of my matches today just didn’t work with varying error messages, and others don’t go through for whatever other reason. How this company still hasn’t figured this part out, I will never understand. The nicest thing I can say is that at least you don’t have to engage with their terrible lobby system and can sit in training mode while you wait for a match to go through.

So after about a month of being out I can safely say that Strive is hands down my favorite online experience in a fighting game. Solid variety in opponents, low amounts of rage quitting or bm, and the delicious unbelievably rich cherry on top, the best netcode I've ever seen in a fighting game. Giovanna has carried me to the gates of Heaven but I haven't quite been able to fight my way in yet. Being able to play people not just across the country but even in Japan or Europe, with no noticeable loss in gameplay has definitely helped give me a good mix of matchup practice. The minor issues I have with the gameplay and supplementary features are also completely eclipsed by how gorgeous it is to look at and how incredible all the music is. Cannot recommend highly enough to anyone who likes fighting games or is looking to get into them.