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Guilty Gear XX #Reload: The Midnight Carnival
  PSPFightingJ  
  opened by paleface at 21:11:47 03/18/06  
  last modified by paleface at 12:25:50 03/05/24  
  paleface [sys=PSP; cat=Fighting; reg=JPN]
           
Impressive port of the high resolution arcade/console 2D fighting game. Very minimal load times, yet chock full of the high-speed anime-style fighting animation and thrash metal guitar music that the series is known for, and now it's all in delicious 16x9 widescreen format. I'm not all that familiar with the details, history, and subtleties of the fighting system, but it feels quite similar to past X installments of the series, which isn't a bad thing in my mind: lots of double-jumping, air dashes, insta-death supers, wild eye candy fx, chain combos, silly characters, and so forth.
 
They've gone pretty wild with modes these days in Guilty Gear land, also. You can play Survival mode pretty much forever; as you play and get points, you go up in "level," and every 20 levels you fight a special boss. All the characters you fight seem to be custom color tints of the regular characters, which is interesting. This is particularly apparent in the Mission mode (GGX2 on PS2--entry 108--had this), where you have to beat little challenges, such as taking someone out using only supers, or something like that. These arbitrary rules can be sort of annoying, so you have to take that mode as a kind of puzzle game thing, really. You can play any of the challenges you want, and it tracks which you've cleared, and, typical of the overload of the series, there are like 100 or so challenges, so that could keep you busy for a while.
 
Then there's normal Arcade mode, Training, and Gallery modes. The funky "M.O.M." mode from X2, where you get medals for beating someone down quickly, based on a decaying timer combo meter type of thing, is here. There's Story mode, with lots of text and Japanese dialogue, but no real end boss fight (at least, I didn't get one with the character I chose--maybe 'cause I continued?--but actually my impression is that the "boss" is just that character's nemesis), Vs CPU mode, and LAN Network play.
 
At first glance, the graphics appear slightly pixelated--the zooming used here doesn't have the benefit of the smoothing that the PS2 is capable of. But everything animates well, and moves fast, so once the fight starts, you don't really notice the scaling artifacts--unless they throw them in your face with a super-low-res sprite effect swimming across the front of the screen for some special move, which personally I find charming. When the characters are close to each other, the screen zooms in nice and tight, and they look very large and nice and impressive.
 
This is a good port of a good installation of a good series. You'll really need some kind of help for the PSP's D-pad in order to enjoy it properly (something like the D-pad mod in entry 1028, for instance); you can use the analog stick, which sorta works, but doesn't have the quick response that a D-pad, at least a properly adjusted one, does. But if you do get the hardware side taken care of, you're in for one helluva crazy portable fighter.
 
Supposedly this game is going to be included as part of "Guilty Gear Judgement" coming to the States this summer.
 
  paleface 21:16:34 03/18/06
           
The game has worked its way up to 21 or so characters, at least to start with; although their system is quite flexible, and in Mission and Survival modes they tinker with CPU character colors and abilities seemingly at will to generate a more or less unlimited variety of opponents.
 
The pause menu has a very nice, concise, easy-to-read movelist. Oh, and the controls work quite well on the PSP, since GG really used four main attack buttons (mapped to the face buttons by default), with a fifth "Dust" button that initiates a special air juggle (mapped to right shoulder button by default). This arrangement feels much more natural on the PSP than Capcom's fighters that have to get six attack buttons on there somehow.
    
 
references:
· Guilty Gear Isuka (PS2)
· Guilty Gear Judgement (PSP)
· Guilty Gear X (PS2)
· Guilty Gear X (DC)
· Guilty Gear X2 (PS2)
· Guilty Gear Xrd -Revelator- (PS4)
· Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus (PS3)
· Hokuto no Ken (PS2)
· Sengoku Basara X (Cross) (PS2)

 
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