The EVO Championship Series was earlier this month, and with it came a deluge of fighting game news. This is like Christmas in August if you’re a fighting game person. You get to watch one of the biggest tournaments of the year, and there’s a bunch of announcements.
Unfortunately, I missed the entirety of EVO. I was up in buttfuck nowhere sleeping in a tiny wood cottage situated on the water. It was nice. Watching EVO would have been fun too, but I had a really good time turning my phone off for 3 days while I listened to the sound of the water.
Regardless, when I came back from my little excursion, I had a mountain of pings across Discord. I have a couple really good friends that will ping me with just about any relevant news they can find for the fighting games that I’m currently playing. In fairness, I would do the same for them. It’s just that, more often than not, I’m the last person to hear about anything. That’s especially true when you’ve deliberately gone out of your way to disconnect from everything during the biggest news weekend of the year for fighting games.
Anyway, that’s all to say that we got some details about Season 3 for Guilty Gear Strive, and I’m very excited. The initial announcement trailer didn’t do a whole lot for me, but this past weekend there was an event where Arc System Works had playable demo stations with the new version of the game. You know what that means? People have been trying to get as much information as they can from playing the demo before the patch notes go live.
The sheer volume of changes that people have found while playing the Strive Season 3 demo over the past 4 days has been staggering. Everyone is convinced that Strive will be a fundamentally different game going forward. There’s an avalanche of character balance changes, and new system-wide mechanics that give every character new ways to perform combos. As with most patches, the changes seem to be almost entirely focused on making sure that every attack in a character’s kit has a defined purpose. Arc Sys really wants you to use the full breadth of the character, instead of repeatedly cycling through 3 or 4 strong options that are hard to deal with. That’s the kind of balancing I can get behind, even if I know May is going to get suplexed into the sun this patch.
Season 3 isn’t just balance, and system changes though: we’re also getting new characters. 4 new characters, in fact. The first of these new characters is Johnny: a Guilty Gear mainstay, and long requested fighter to be added to Strive. He’s a pirate captain that dresses like a cowboy, and he wields a samurai sword. He’s basically what you’d get if you asked a 9 year old boy what the peak of masculinity looked like.
As ridiculous as Johnny is, I’m very excited to play him. I haven’t been this excited about a new character since Baiken, though I’m hoping that playing Johnny is less of a horrible disaster. I’ve gotten a lot better, in general, at fighting games, but I’m still pretty apprehensive about playing someone new. I’m so used to thinking about Strive from the perspective of May’s different tools, which led to a lot of frustration when I was trying to play Baiken back at the top of 2022.
However, my time with Street Fighter 6 has given me hope. Manon is fundamentally different from May in a lot of regards, and I’ve had to radically adjust how I think about my approach in Street Fighter as a result. I know that’s a different game with different systems, but I’m hoping that I’ve started to develop a better sense of how to manage different characters instead of looking at everything like it’s a nail because I’m so used to using a May shaped hammer.
Either way, I’m excited. Very excited. Season 3 seems like it’ll be the most fun Strive has been in a hot minute, and playing as Johnny will be a great way to start things off. Hopefully the promised online improvements also come to fruition because that’s still the number 1 thing keeping me from playing as much Guilty Gear Strive as I’d like to.
Frostilyte Writes 