"Abai yo"

Are you ready to be pulled into good fighter? When you start playing Guilty Gear X you're not going to want to stop. The Dreamcast release of Guilty Gear X was in Japan only so importers take heed.

That's right! You get a story too. Unfortunately you're not going to see this story anywhere in the game, but it's all in the manual. Basically it's the 22nd century and scientist have made biological weapons called Gears. In the last Guilty Gear, the ultra powerful Gear, Justice, was being revived and you had to stop it as the character you chose. Well Justice got his butt kicked and now their is another Gear out in the world called Dizzy. Who ever kills it wins 500000 World Dollars. To me it sounds like a cheesy B science fiction movie, but maybe you like those kind of movies. My biggest gripe about the story is that unlike the original Guilty Gear there are no endings. For beating the game on Arcade, all you get is one picture.

Choose one of the fourteen initial characters and get ready to have a blast. Guilty Gear X is fast paced and classic 2D fighting. You have your overdrive meter that allows you to use Overdrives(50% of the bar), Faultless Defense(constantly draining), and Roman Cancel(50%). An Overdrive is pretty much a super move, a Faultless Defense means you won't take any damage, and a Roman Cancel will stop you in the middle of a move or combo. The Roman Cancel may sound stupid and pointless at first but you'll soon learn how to do some great custom combos with it. There are other moves that may be preformed to. The recovery allows you to land on your feet instead of your back, the super jump allows you to jump very high, the double jump allows you to jump twice in the air, running is just what you'd think, and air dashing allows you to speed through the air.

Each character has four to six special moves. They're usually executed by doing the standard quarter circles and half circles in every 2D fighter. Also every character has an instant kill. Before you go screaming ''Cheapness'', you can see these things from a mile away. When you see your foe stop and flash red, watch out. To do a instant kill you must first hit all four attack buttons and then do two forward quarter circles and hit heavy slash(except for May, and Dizzy doesn't have one). Some instant kills are useless because they have no range at all, such as Johnny's instant kill. Other instant kills take up the whole screen like Axl-Low's and Millia Rage's. This is pretty cheap since you can basically choose Millia and just use your instant kill every round. Arc System Works should have made an option to turn them off because they do outlaw them from their official tournaments. Combos are a synch to pull off but that's because Guilty Gear X is a little ''button masher friendly''. Some fighters won't like this and other may love it. I for one didn't find it to be too much of a problem.

There aren't many different game modes in Guilty Gear X. There is Arcade, Vs, Survival, and Record. I never used Record because all it does is let you record a fight. I never liked the idea of that. The other three modes are fun, but with only sixteen characters to choose from, Guilty Gear X can get old fast for some people.

The graphics of Guilty Gear X are what made this game so infamous. The sprites are in hi-rez 2D and they're beautiful and stunning. When you first pop in the CD, your jaw will drop at the gorgeous anime style characters. In addition the characters are all large; bigger than King of Fighters games but smaller than Art of Fighting. The amount of frames of animation is amazing. Everything about Guilty Gear X looks great.

The colors are also incredible. They're just so many colors in the characters and even in the backgrounds. The backgrounds are alive with color and strange imagery. One stage called ''Nirvana'' contains a giant purple creature stuck to the floor with spikes and appears to be coming from a pentagram. Another stage, the ''Mayship'', is on an airship and has many female pirates cheering on the fighters or doing their tasks of the day. The one problem with backgrounds are that some characters must share stages for example Chipp-Zanuff, Baiken, and Anji-Mito all must share the same stage even though some characters like Jam Kuradoberi have their own stage. This isn't anything that will make you hate the game though. The backgrounds are so amazing that you'll like seeing them again.

You'll either love or despise the music of Guilty Gear X. It's all heavy rock done by a Japanese band named Lapis Lazuli. They've done a great job at re-doing the original arcade tracks with actual instruments, but I would have liked to see an option where you could actually listen to the original arcade music while playing the game. Fans of the original will be happy to know that some older tunes of Guilty Gear have been re-done in this version. Sol-Badguy's ''Keep Yourself Alive Version 2'', Ky Kiske's ''Holy Orders: Be Just or Be Dead, Chipp-Zanuff's ''Suck a Sage'', Millia Rage's ''Writhe in Pain'' and Baiken's ''Momentary Life'' are all return updated in Guilty Gear X. The older fighters Dr. Baldhead(Faust), Potemkin, May, Zato-1one, Axl-Low, and Testament all have new and in my opinion better music. The new comers Jam Kuradoberi, Anji-Mito, Johnny, Venom, and Dizzy all have wonderful music that's up to par with the old fighter's.

The sounds effects are up to par with many of other fighters. Guilty Gear X has the standard bashing, clashing, and slashing noises of any weapon based fighter. The voices are quite good too. The older fighters's voice actors return. The games own designer, Ishiwatari Daisuke, does the deep and menacing voice of Sol-Badguy and does a great job at making Sol come off as one bad dude. Baiken's voice sounds strangely familiar to the voice of Kenshin Himura from Rurouni Kenshin, but I'm sure it's not the same person. The late voice of Zato-1One is a experienced one who's also done the voice of Random Hajile in the Turbo CD version of Snatcher. The voices are all clear and audible. The voices are all in Japanese and sound cool, so I'am glad that Atlus didn't go ahead and dub all the voices in Guilty Gear.

Guilty Gear X uses a four button control set-up. There‘s a punch, kick, slash, and heavy slash. I don’t think the Dreamcast’s d-pad works well with this fighter. I had trouble pulling off moves that I had a breeze with on PS2.

I love Guilty Gear X. It may be my favorite game on Dreamcast. If you like 2D fighters, buy it now.

Pros:
-Beautiful anime style graphics.
-Awesome heavy rock music.
-Great gameplay but.....
-Decent Story.
-Cool cast of characters.

Cons:
-....a little ''button masher friendly''.
-Not too many game modes.
-Only 16 characters, and where's Kliff and Justice?

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 03/25/03, Updated 06/22/03