Guilty Gear Strive Season 4 Ramblings

 

I mentioned back in my Multiversus post that I wanna experiment more with my blog posts. Well, this is that. Instead of taking about something as a whole, with a bunch of random tangents thrown in, here's just a bunch of tangents. A lot of this rambling was originally gonna be a part of my (recently updated) Team Of 3 Beta post, but there was so much that I decided to split it off into its own post.

Happy Chaos + Zato

During the week or so I played of Strive after the first Team Of 3 Beta, I actually tried learning a bit of Happy Chaos. I agree with the general consensus that he's particularly hard. I was actually skeptical beforehand though, because people also say Zato is hard, but I don't agree with people on that. Sure, I won't say Zato's straight up easy, but all the Eddie moves are pretty outwardly strong, and managing the Eddie meter primarily consists of using 1 move occasionally. Perhaps I'm just more tuned to Negative Edge than the average player, I dunno. I'm not gonna judge ya if ya find it hard. Anyways, I think one thing that genuinely makes Happy Chaos difficult, both to play and to fight, is how small his recourses are on the UI. It's really hard for me to read out of the corner of my eye, so I have to completely avert my vision to it whenever I wanna check it. Whether or not the auto-aim on his bullets actually works is also way more of a headache than I expected. There's like 4 separate variables that determine whether or not they actually hit. Happy Chaos was a neat time, and I had some fun moments, but he's not for me. I'm glad I tried him out, he's a really unique character.

Giovanna

After the second Team Of 3 Beta, I considered playing Giovanna after the Beta since she's seemed to me like a character I'd like, but overtime she seems to be moving less and less in a direction I like, so I'm afraid it might be too late for me to fall in love with playing her. I've played her a bit before, particularly in Season 1, and back then I personally found her to be really intuitive. I might still find her relatively intuitive nowadays, but Chave gives her way more room for optimization, and to compensate her more of the stuff I already get was made worse. I could still give her another shot in the future though.

Sol Badguy

The recent changes made to Sol's Fafnair are quite surprising to me. It's now a pretty safe combo conversion special move to Gatling into, which Sol didn't really have before. I feel kinda weird about it, because I would've really appreciated something specifically like this back when I started playing Strive, but at this point I don't really need it. Before I played Strive, I was pretty used to just about always buffering heavy normals into special moves, so it was pretty hard for me to wrap my head around and get used to not doing that as Sol. That, and a few other things about Sol that I struggled with led to me dropping the character for like 2 years, and I felt kinda bad about it because he's one of those characters people hyperbolize as braindead easy to win with. Perhaps it's worth a post in the future, how much I particularly hate "ease of use" discussions in fighting games.

The new Clean Hit on Fafnair, like seemingly most Clean Hits in Arc Sys games, feels weird and completely nonsensical, but feels good when you hit it. The changes to Heavy Mob Cemetery are pretty cool. It feels very inline with Sol's moveset to give him another combo tool.

 

The removal of charged Bandit Bringer was also surprising, but I don't really use Bandit Bringer a ton anyways, so I don't mind that much.

Potemkin

I'm not as shocked at the Potemkin changes as a lot of other people seem to be. It's still confusing considering the devs didn't give any explanation as to why they removed his best Kara Cancel, but I can see an angle where they thought Kara Cancelling created too steep of a gap between high and low level Potemkin players. I probably would've appreciated the changes if I played Potemkin, but I don't, and I don't plan too, so I don't have a particular preference for them.

 

 

Music

I've noticed recently that I've been listening to a lot of Symphony. I guess it's really grown on me. Maybe it's just because I haven't played as much since A.B.A. was added compared to when the game launched, and thus haven't listened to it as much as some other songs, but it feels less repetitive to listen to than even my favorite Strive songs. Maybe it's better fighting music. I think it is related to me being a Sol main again. My song choices in fighting games to tend to be related to the characters and stages I choose. Back when I mained Zato for example, I'd choose Perfection Can't Please Me a lot because I found the sharp contrast between the character + song funny. For anyone curious, my 2 favorite songs are Love The Subhuman Self and Roar Of The Spark, but I also really enjoy a ton of the other songs. Shout out to there being 3 new songs with the Dizzy patch instead of just 1. Also shout out to Dizzy's theme (Radiant Dawn) being officially released on YouTube before the patch. It's been weird how sometimes non-official sources would post new Strive songs to YouTube before their releases in-game. It feels much less weird to me when ArcSys just does it themselves.

Boss Characters

The addition of a credits song specifically for Dizzy's arcade mode (Shelter From The Rain) reminds me, why are there a bunch of random boss versions of characters exclusive to Arcade Mode CPU's? It'd be pretty fun if I could play as them. I hate when fighting games have CPU only characters, because they tend to be similar enough to normal characters that I can imagine playing as them.

 

 

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