“Guilty Gear”, as we all know, is a franchise of fighting games which currently has about 17 games in it, depending on what you count and what you don’t. Minus a 4 year pause between 2008 and 2012 (the reason for which is an entirely different story that I don’t have time to get into here) we’ve been treated to a brand new “Guilty Gear” game, in one form or another, almost every year since 1998! That makes it one of the most lasting, enduring franchises of all, though if you look at the original game you wouldn’t believe it had the potential to start a series! Fighting games were a dime a dozen back in the late 90s, with Capcom absolutely DOMINATING the market with “Marvel Vs. Capcom”, “Rival Schools” and, of course, “Street Fighter”, which at the time was seeing its “Alpha 3” version. Daisuke Ishiwatari and his studio Arc System Works, however, decided to try their hand at something a little bit different. At the time, fighting games were busy trying to imitate one of two games. Japanese developers imitated Capcom’s “Street Fighter” series by making their characters more cartoony, yet still with a realistic look and feel to them despite their aesthetic, while Western developers imitated “Mortal Kombat” and its hyper-realistic and gory visuals. Ishiwatari, on the other hand, decided to see what would happen if they combined these two styles and mixed it in with a heavy dose of shonen manga. The result was “Guilty Gear: The Missing Link”.
Following the tenets left by Capcom, each of the game’s ten selectable fighters were inspired by anime and manga and were appropriately cartoony, but had their own feel and weight to them – you could feel them being really there. Unlike “Capcom” games, though, a lot of them brandished sharp weapons and weren’t afraid to use them! The overall aesthetic was inspired by manga and anime from the time period, and the resemblance is pretty obvious when you compare “The Missing Link” to anime such as “Ghost in the Shell”, “Ninja Scroll” or “Berserk”. The storyline was similarly exaggerated and over the top, little more than an excuse for the fighting to happen, but still pretending to have some sort of message. To put it shortly, in the early 2000s humanity created slaves known as Gears which would do all their chores for them, until the Gears naturally rebelled (as AI tends to do) and fought the humans, resulting in a war where the leader of the Gears, Justice, was imprisoned within a multi-dimensional prison, however that works. A surviving Gear, Testament, decides to resurrect Justice, which is why a tournament is held to discover the strongest person in the world who would be worthy of fighting Testament and Justice. Why they don’t just take all contestants and send them off against Justice I’ll never know, but hey, most videogames of that era didn’t have a particularly good storyline (“Metal Gear Solid” was the exception, not the rule).
I suppose I don’t need to tell you that that the game was a resounding success, with a ranking of 8/10 across the board (which was better than your typical fighting game at the time) and with reviewers calling it the best fighting game on the PS1, which is saying something considering most of Capcom’s fighters were for the PS1! The rest, as they say, is history!