"An Ambitious Game, Indeed."

Guilty Gear Isuka an ambitious game that is meant to refresh the 2d fighting game scene. With the last revolutionary ( well, i thought it was revolutionary) fighting game being either Capcom vs SNK 2 or Marvel vs Capcom 2 (i thought they were good) from 3 years ago, i think that the 2d fighting genre needed a much needed breath of fresh air. Guilty Gear Isuka does that, and then some. A 4 player 2d fighting game?! That's unheard of! Super Smash Bros had that formula down pact, but it was so much more different than a traditional fighting game. Guilty Gear Isuka merges the crazy fast paced 4-player action of Super Smash Brothers, with a control scheme along the lines of any typical SNK or Capcom game. The end result is a unique fighting game that is fun to play and great for parties.

Game play: 8
The game play is very fun and gets bonus points for being truly unique and revolutionary.
That also means that there is a slight learning curve for everyone, even for players of Guilty Gear X or XX. 2 new things you notice right away are the inclusion of a '2 layered' battleground... a foreground and a background, which players can switch between ( seen in Fatal Fury (when you sidestep) ) or use to attack from (much like Fatal Fury's sidestep attack) and the most obvious being the ability to have 4 active players on screen at the same time (you could say that this was done in Street Fighter EX3, but not very well). Both are 'borrowed' from previous games, but when put together they're a blast to play. Sidestepping becomes useful to avoid attacks or just avoid the other 3 players, it was a good idea to have both a foreground and background, without it, the gameplay would suffer, due to people feeling 'overcrowded' on one fighting plane. But the 4 player was executed perfectly... with only one complaint from me. Turning around to face your opponents is done manually, not by pressing back, but by pressing the R1 button. It feels unusual and takes awhile to get used to. Blocking is also confusing because of this, because blocking is done by pressing back relative to the facing position of your character. When things get a little hectic in 4 player mayhem, it's hard to juggle which direction you're facing to block while trying to fend for yourself. They should have made a separate button for blocking. Since this is a new system, many people will have to learn to adapt to these things. Even if it's revolutionary, it doesn't mean that it's also easy. The game is a little complex, especially since many of the commands are done by hitting more than 1 button. This gets very confusing, especially for sidestepping into the foreground/background. The command for sidestepping is R1+O or R1+[] if you want the sidestep attack. It's difficult to pull these off, i usually end up just turning around instead. But these things are easily taken care of with a little tweaking to the control scheme.
The characters themselves are very unique and enjoyable and make the game that much more fun especially when playing as a weirdo. The commands for the game are like your typical street fighter or king of fighters, they're pretty straightforward. All the commands are relative to the facing position of your character, like any normal game. It gets difficult trying to do moves that require a back to forward motion when juggling with the direction the character faces.

Controls: (default) 6 (after a little tweaking) 7
What surprised me was the amount of unused buttons in the game. All the shoulder buttons weren't in use by default. It's usually best to assign a move like sidestepping to a shoulder button to avoid mistakes when you press the combination. There are just FAR too many combinations in the game to do simple things. Sidestep is an example of how difficult it is to do some normal moves. They usually require 2 to 3 button presses. I just don't like to mash on my buttons like mad, so i like using the shoulder buttons, but even then, a majority of the commands are still difficult to do (because you can only make 4 moves easier to do). Also there is NO analog stick support! I've been using the analog stick to play all my games and it's a hard transition to switch to the d-pad, not to mention that my friends mash on the damn d-pad like crazy and destroy my controllers.
It was nice of Sammy to include presets for things like the GGXX stick, the GGXX pad, and a simple joystick. Unfortunately, i don't have ANY of these things, so i can't test them.

Graphics: 8
They're quite good for a 2d fighting game. The anime sprites are very fitting and nice on the eyes. The animation is top notch for a 2d fighting game, and the effects are quite nice.
There are times when the graphics aren't that good. For instance, i saw in one of the game's intros, a swarm of insects go across the screen, like up close to the screen, and they are very pixelated. But then again, that's only with certain effects and not the characters themselves. The backgrounds are equally nice, but unfortunately the backgrounds have only a spare amount of animated things in there. But overall the game looks quite good and polished.

Sound: 7
Well, I'm personally not a big fan of rock music, but this game revolves around it.
There are constant guitar riffs all over the place, they're pretty decent to listen too, but some don't have that 'fighting game' sound to it.
Well, the voices of the characters are heard fine, sometimes the music overshadows them. The slash sounds sound a lot like the slash sounds in Samurai Showdown, that's perfectly acceptable. There is just a lot of rock music in here, and for me to review the music is kind of wrong, simply because I'm not too big a fan of rock music to begin with. So I'll be fair and just put a 7.

Other modes: 9
I absolutely LOVE the variation of Final Fight they have in here. You could play by yourself or co-op in a beat 'em up game where you use the characters in Guilty Gear. It's great, especially once you're bored of beating each other senseless. It's one of the things that keep me playing the game with my friends. Kudos to Sammy for putting this mode in!

Conclusion: Overall, a good ambitious game, and worth a play if you're a fan of fighting games in general. It's a tad on the complex side, but if you got a group of friends who love fighting games, then it's all good. And once you're fed up from losing, you can play co-op in a beat 'em up game. Good stuff, indeed.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 08/02/04