Guilty Gear Review (Colandar)
I bought this game on sale along with many others from the franchise because I was curious how these games started and evolved over time. I was also curious about the story, and have been playing through them all since.
After 100% the achievements for this game(which isn't really THAT hard, just takes a lot of time, patience and determination) I definitely overall enjoyed this game. After the first few Arcade playthroughs the game finally clicked and I REALLY got fun.
That being said, this game has some HORRIBLE balancing issues that for the most part are just kind of annoying, but it steps up a few notches to the point of genuine anger when the enemies at the later rounds are just straight up cheating.
Not only do they read your inputs, pretty much making things such as instant kills impossible unless the A.I. LETS you land it, and long perfect blocking strings despite mix ups, and LITERALLY SPAMMING THEIR OVERDRIVES MULTIPLE TIMES IN A ROW. No joke Round 10 as Zato-1 is against Millia and there was MULTIPLE rounds where she would literally spam her Iron Maiden Overdrive, and I counted, over 10 times in a row. Which is not fun and is just irritating.
Justice is by far the WORST contender for the bad balancing. As a character, they suck. As an A.I. that cheats though? Overpowered and extremely irritating. My Chipp took an embarrassingly long time to clear because of this stupid guy, totaling in close to a third of my play time alone. Granted I had to learn to play Chipp really well, and finally winning was so satisfying that I actually popped off like I won a tournament. The hard hitting characters were disproportionately easier to clear than the faster ones, Cliff and Potemkin you literally only have to do HS and Justice just dies, so there is that I guess.
As for the story, it is really cool to see the beginnings of these characters, I was able to look up some nice translated Character profiles for this game that I found on reddit that did a good job setting the stage for these characters, but I do wish that they were in the game Instead. I also found the short dialogue and cut scenes at the end of be somewhat of a good reward for the clear( And too be honest, seeing the Steam achievements pop up was also satisfying.)
As a whole this game is very fun, and I really enjoyed my time with it, but seeing as I have cleared as everyone, and unlocked Baiken, I don't really see myself returning very often, if at all. I do recommend to pick this game up when It's on sale if you are already interested in the franchise, but only so long as you have a lot of patience for it's BS.