Guilty Gear X Advance Edition

"Hmm, it's good, but it's lacking that certain umph."

Guilty Gear is one of the newest fighting game franchises with growing popularity. It's games on the original playstation, Naomi arcade board, dreamcast, and PS2 have all gotten raves from fighting game fans. Even most 3d only players sometimes admit its kinda cool for a 2d fighting game. Guilty Gear X is a frenetically paced fighting game with fluid and solid characters that just scream cool. With slobber inducing animation and a heavy metal soundtrack Guilty Gear for any of the above mentioned systems is a sure fire treat. Buuut, then comes the GBA version

Story
7/10
Read Guilty Gear for PSX, after the death of Justice a new gear is discovered with immense power but has not killed anybody. Somebody assembles a tournament so somebody can kill the new Gear. Your typical fighting game story.

Gameplay
6/10
Ahhh, the meat and potatoes of a fighting game. 14 Characters, 2 unlockable, each with a wide assortment of useful and sometimes amusing moves. Overdrives(Supers), Roman Cancels (cancel a move after you hit), Defense counters, and Destroyers (One hit kills, sorry MK fans no spinal cords or decapitations though). Thats great and all, but the CPU AI rode the short bus to school. Even at the hardest level its a pushover mostly, try that on any other version of the game and the CPU will most likely be picking you out of it's teeth for the next week and a half.

Graphics
8/10
As usual this is where Guilty Gear flexs its ripply well animated muscles. Just about every animation for the characters are intact (I believe the taunts are missing, darn). Like with most GBA games, the screen is dark at times and you may have trouble fighting Zato (hmm, fighting a person who uses his shadow on the gba, seems kinda ironic).

Sound
2/10
That grinding noise will be your teeth when you listen to the music on this version. Most of the sounds, and occasional voices are ok, but the music is some of the worst I've heard on the GBA. Anyone who has played the recent castlevania games knows the GBA is capable of pumping out some great tunes, but these gba version of the rocking soundtrack are mostly just mindnumbingly bad. I could make several jokes surrounding a kindergardener Casio synthesizer, but I'll go on. Hopefully, if there is a Guilty Gear XX for the GBA they won't butcher the soundtrack.

Replay
7/10
The game has several modes, arcade, survival, training, 3vs3, a tag mode, even a color editor. As with most fighting games, it's best enjoyed with a friend. You can unlock new characters and alternate versions of characters.

Final synopsis
It's a decent distraction with quite a few extras, if you're a guilty gear fan I'd recommend it, if you're a casual fighter fan give it a whirl you might like it or maybe not.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 11/15/02, Updated 11/15/02