Now, I’m not saying Game Pass doesn’t get decent fighters through it: the service has been home to Tekken 7, Soulcalibur 6, Dragon Ball FighterZ, Mortal Kombat 11, and most recently, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Wars R . There’s more… ambitious games, you know, games that mean well but don’t really stick to the landing (Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid, I’m Looking at You).
But, as good as this roster of fighters is, there’s always one thing missing from the collection: a real stunner, the kind of game you’d boot up at home with your friends just to say ‘look at this – seriously, look at it ! ’ I think Tekken is still pretty good, and Dragon Ball FighterZ has its own charm, thanks to that cute art style. But they’re all a bit dated at this point; Tekken 7 is 2015, FighterZ is 2018, and Mortal Kombat 11 is 2019.
Enter Guilty Gear Strive, the latest batshit brawler from the hyperactive minds at Arc System Works. Originally launching as a PS5 console exclusive in 2021, the game wowed players a few years ago with its gorgeous graphics and sleek UI. Guilty Gear Strive marks the series’ first use of Unreal Engine 4, and the result is clear: one of the most impressive fighters I’ve seen. The Japanese studio delivered the most beautiful 2D/3D cartoon-rendered graphics to date in Strive, and it looks even tastier and sharper on next-gen consoles (running at 60FPS, no less).
The developers have long claimed that Strive is a “rebuild” of the series; a rethink that makes it more accessible and more appealing to new players. An easy way to attract new players is to rethink the visuals, and Arc System Works has done well with that. In previous titles, the studio aimed to recreate Japanese-style hand-drawn animation using 3D graphics, but for Strive, the team opted for a more “Guilty Gear-esque” style rather than mimicking hand-drawn animation.
The results speak for themselves. Anecdotally, I know some players who downloaded the game just to see how it works on the Series X, and have actually invested some time in the tutorial and combat system. Arc System Works’ commitment to accessibility, then, is also evident in the gameplay. For example, you can do a lot of damage in Strive without having to memorize long combos, the entire string is determined by your choice of starting move and your situational decisions, taking the responsibility off of how the combo works. For many fighting game skeptics, this is a very attractive prospect.
The game was also very successful: it’s one of Arc System Works’ best-selling titles to date (compared to its own other projects like BlazBlue and other Guilty Gear, anyway: Dragon Ball FighterZ is a bit of an anomaly, based on the IP attached to it ). At its peak, it had over 30,000 concurrent players on Steam – no mean feat for a fighter – and even in the past few days, we’ve seen the developer confirm that there will be more than 30,000 concurrent players on Steam in the coming months. The game offers more support. Throw in some standout awards — such as Best Fighting Game at The Game Awards 2021 and Fighting Game of the Year at the 25th annual DICE Awards — and you’ll see that it’s not just bluster: the game is really, really good.
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In this day and age, it’s a bit naive to say that fighting games aren’t popular: just because they don’t sell like other genres doesn’t mean they don’t have a strong, loyal player base to back them until the servers shut down. Guilty Gear Strive is a niche game pass standard, but with some of the best looking, sleekest graphics on the Xbox, this gem of a game will likely get the attention it deserves (besides the fighting game stalwarts who already support it. outside).
Be careful if you’re trying to finish 1000G on this; the super boss is an absolute jerk.
