Do you think that the current generation of gaming has too few cross-dressing nuns and rock-and-roll witches? If so, you’ll be glad to hear that there’s apparently a brand-new Guilty Gear in the works.
If you don’t think Guilty Gear X2 was the best fighting game of the last generation, then you’re obviously not me, because I sure as hell did. It was fast, it was furious, it had the best bizarre character designs I’d seen in a fighting game in ages, and it became the college multiplayer game of choice in my circle of friends – who needs Halo?
Alas, when this generation rolled around, we learned that developer Arc System Works had apparently lost the right to their IP to publisher SEGA Sammy, and after making one final – and really mediocre – action game (Guilty Gear 2: Overture), ASW passed the torch to a new spiritual sequel, BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger. Which turned out to be totally awesome, so that’s all good.
However, it looks like the torch may not have been completely passed after all. On a visit to the NowGamer offices, ASW Business Development Director Tomo Ohno was asked if the company had any plans to do a “Versus” crossover between GG and BB in the vein of Marvel vs. Capcom or SNK vs. Capcom.
His response? “Personally I don’t like that idea,” said Ohno. “What we can say about Guilty Gear is that it is not dead yet. It has not ended. The producer/creator of Guilty Gear, Daisuke Ishiwatari, his comment for this meeting [was] ‘I have the full intention to create Guilty Gear for PS3 and 360.'” As far as we can tell, he means an actual 2D fighter, and not something weird and unfortunately mediocre like Overture.
That doesn’t rule out an eventual crossover, though. “It’s a different world – it’s not BlazBlue taking over Guilty Gear, but Guilty Gear is an important thing for us and we want to make sure fans of Guilty Gear continue to have fun in that world … BlazBlue is a new thing, and there might be some crossover but at the moment we don’t have any plans.”
Anyone who has played Guilty Gear or BlazBlue‘s story mode knows that Ishiwatari is just beyond Hideo Kojima on the Insanity Meter, so whatever he does come up with will likely be describable as “really freakin’ weird.” However, I think this is a good thing – don’t get me wrong, I love my BlazBlue a hell of a lot, but the world needs more Guilty Gear. The world needs more games where you can get your friends to admit “Hey, that nun chick’s kind of cute” before freaking them out with the revelation that “she” is really a guy.
Maybe that’s just me.
