Guilty Gear Strive has been making headlines as the most popular entry yet in the prolific fighting game franchise, bringing the series closer than ever to mainstream popularity. Since its release in June of this year, it’s already sold over 500,000 copies, making it the highest-selling Guilty Gear game to date.
It’s not hard to see why Strive has been making such an impact on players everywhere despite the franchise’s past as a relatively niche series. Every single aspect of the game is overflowing with style, from the animation to the soundtrack to the characters. Indeed, while the gameplay is always the most important part of any fighting game, it’s clear that part of Strive’s success is due to how Guilty Gear’s colorful cast of characters has resonated with fans.
At first glance, the playable roster of Guilty Gear Strive may just seem like a collection of outlandish oddballs with ridiculous names like Sol Badguy, Chipp Zanuff, and Goldlewis Dickinson — most of which are references to classic rock music, a major interest of series creator Daisuke Ishiwatari. But beneath all the flash of Guilty Gear lies a surprising amount of substance: since its first entry, the series has woven a single continuous narrative, complete with backstories and motives for every character. Story is an afterthought for most fighting games, yet Ishiwatari and company have created a fully fleshed-out fictional world for Guilty Gear.
Of course, it’s somewhat difficult to appreciate the epic, sprawling story of Guilty Gear when much of it is so inaccessible to new fans. Since the franchise has been telling an ongoing story since its 1998 debut, much of the series’ narrative is locked behind games that are exclusive to older consoles, if not out of print altogether — to say nothing of the various games and supplementary materials that have never been released outside Japan. And even then, the older games lack the cinematic story modes of recent entries in the series, instead conveying all plot developments through brief arcade endings. Despite all the effort that’s gone into Guilty Gear’s story since the beginning, said story currently exists in a fractured state, unable to be experienced the way Ishiwatari intended.
There are methods to alleviate this issue, of course. Guilty Gear Strive features an in-game encyclopedia that allows new players to read up on the backstory of the series’ world and characters. But as informative as this database is, spending hours reading about a story isn’t nearly as fun as experiencing it firsthand. Meanwhile, fighting game-focused Youtuber WoolieVersus has made a series of detailed lore videos recounting the entire story of Guilty Gear from the very beginning up to the last events before Strive. But once again, as well-made as these videos are, they’re no substitute for directly engaging with Guilty Gear’s plot.
A story with as much passion behind it as Guilty Gear deserves better than to have most of its narrative inaccessible to fans beyond secondary sources — and that’s exactly why the iconic fighting game series is the perfect game to be adapted into an anime. While anime adaptations of video games have varied wildly in quality over the years, a well-made anime that manages to capture the aesthetic or the games could do wonders for the story of Guilty Gear. There’d be no more need to rely on lore videos or in-game encyclopedia entries to engage with the series’ backstory: the entire plot would be available in a single self-contained narrative.
Because each game in the series already has a distinct plot, a Guilty Gear anime would only need to follow the same outline as the games. A hypothetical first season would adapt the plot of the original Guilty Gear, revolving around the series’ two central characters — the mysterious bounty hunter Sol Badguy and his rival, the honorable young knight Ky Kiske — and their background fighting in the hundred-year war against the magical bio-weapons known as Gears. But while Sol and Ky would be the focus, there would also be plenty of time to establish the rest of the original cast, like May, Chipp, Axl, and Milia. The season would naturally culminate in the Holy Order Selection Tournament, ending with the final battle between Sol and his nemesis, the Gear queen Justice.
From there, the second season would likely cover the events of Guilty Gear X and X2, focusing on the clash over the bounty on Justice’s daughter Dizzy, as well as the character development of Sol and Ky as they go from targeting Dizzy to protecting her. Meanwhile, the plot would also build towards the machinations of the series’ most prominent antagonist, the enigmatic witch known as I-No. Since the games become more narrative-focused from there, it would be simple for future seasons to straightforward adaptations of Overture, Xrd, and Strive. But due to the increased run time of a full anime season compared to a video game’s cutscenes, each season would naturally allow for more time to be devoted to exploring the cast’s backstories and character dynamics, fleshing them out further than what the constraints of the games allow.
And of course, there’s always the matter of presentation. While recent Guilty Gear games are known for their stunning animation and high-quality voice acting, the older sprite-based games haven’t aged quite as well in that regard. Even the cinematic story modes of Xrd and Strive are limited by budgetary constraints. Adapting their events using modern animation would allow the story of Guilty Gear to become even more of a visual spectacle, bringing Ishiwatari’s vision to life in a way never seen before.
Anime based on video games may not have the most consistent track record, but if there’s one game series that could benefit from it, it’s Guilty Gear. Because underneath all the over-the-top action, flashy character designs, and rock music references, there’s a sincere story about love, loss, hope, and redemption. If Daisuke Ishiwatari can create a story where a surgeon with a paper bag on his head, an American ninja who becomes the President of South Africa, a time-traveling witch with an electric guitar, and a bounty hunter based on Freddie Mercury who can turn into a dragon all have genuinely heart-wrenching backstories, then that’s a story that more people deserve to see.