3 weeks ago marked the start of Guilty Gear Strive’s fourth season. I’d been out of the loop for a bit, but the bevy of balance changes alongside the return of Dizzy, now known as Queen Dizzy, was enough to pique my interest. Yes – it really is that simple to get my attention, especially when it comes to fighting games that I already enjoy playing.
Funny thing about Dizzy: for as long as Strive has existed, people have been speculating that Dizzy would return as a DLC character. There’s a couple reasons for that unyielding confidence, but the primary one is how she’s fairly important to the overarching plot of Guilty Gear for a variety of reasons. She’s ostensibly the daughter of the main character Sol Badguy, and is married to the other “main character” Ky Kiske. Never mind that Dizzy is, canonically speaking, akin to a God. As such, she usually has some role within the story of these games because she’s too intertwined with the main cast to not be included.
It’s also worth noting that Dizzy has historically scored quite well in community polling regarding which characters should be added as future DLC to Guilty Gear Strive. North America, where I’m located, and Korea seemed to be her biggest champions based on the polling from Seasons 2 and 3, but she’s always a consistent top 10 finisher across all regions.
As such, it was only natural that people were a) expecting Dizzy to return, and b) were very excited when Arc System Works finally announced that Dizzy was headlining Season 4. Heck, even I couldn’t resist that wave of excitement, and I eagerly awaited more information about Dizzy in the run up to her release.
Now that I’ve actually spent some time playing Queen Dizzy, I have some thoughts, and wanted to share them. Keep in mind that these are just my opinions, rather than definitive truths about Guilty Gear Strive. Also, I’m not above changing my opinion as I continue playing her, so several months from now I could have a completely different perspective on the character. I don’t imagine my opinions will change that drastically without some kind of balance patch, but you can never be totally certain.
Anyway, now it’s time to answer the all important question: what do I actually think of Queen Dizzy?
Honestly? She feels fairly weak compared to a lot of the cast, which isn’t totally surprising. There’s this joke tier list that I saw during Season 3 which only had 2 tiers. I can’t find it, nor can I remember who made it (sorry), but I’ve recreated it below:
As you can see, this tier list has a very narrow perspective on Guilty Gear Strive. A common complaint about the game for almost its entire existence has been that characters deal too much damage. Well – okay that’s not entirely true. The complaint is that some characters deal too much damage. This can lead to matches having a lot of volatility, which is a huge point of consternation for a very vocal contingent of the Strive player base.
While I don’t subscribe to that mindset, I can understand how someone arrived there. And it also helps to easily articulate why I have the opinion that I do about Queen Dizzy. If you had to guess, where do you think she’d fall in the above tier list? If you guessed in the second tier – doesn’t win the round in 2 interactions – then you’d be correct.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think this is a bad thing, but it does mean that winning with Dizzy takes a little more effort than it does with other characters. As someone who usually plays May, a character with attacking power akin to a sledgehammer, I’ve definitely noticed the lower overall power of Dizzy. That’s at least part of why I think Dizzy feels weak.
The other reason for my opinion stems from the gaps that exist in Dizzy’s kit. Kit, in this case, refers to the whole collection of attacks, special moves, and movement related abilities that a character has access to. In general, Dizzy has many slower, long-range attacks which can be good for playing keep-out zoning. She also has the ability to cover the entire screen in ice, which makes approaching her from the ground a lot more challenging. As such, you might have the same first-impression that I did, and assume Dizzy needs to rely on keep-out zoning to play to her strengths.
However, Dizzy doesn’t have the same range of available options to facilitate this kind of zoning-heavy game plan as either Testament, or Axl Low. Noteable, Dizzy lacks a good ground-to-air coverage option. Her 6P has very stubby range, and is slow. For a comparison, here’s what Testament, and Axl’s best ground-to-air coverage options look like:
Also, keep in mind that both Testament’s 6P, and Axl’s 6K (featured above) are faster attacks than Dizzy’s 6P.
Her other option for covering aerial approaches from the ground is 2H which is significantly slower than her 6P. This makes it almost entirely useless unless you read your opponent’s mind, and throw it out in anticipation of an aerial approach. You could also make a case for 5P, which is much faster than either 2H, or 6P, but it lacks the kind of vertical range that’d normally allow an attack to function as a great anti-air.
Some of you may be wondering why any of this matters. Dizzy has great control of the ground thanks to her long range pokes, and Ice Field. Why does she need to also control the space above her head? Well, if you can’t control the air then it doesn’t matter how good your options on the ground are. If your opponent can spend the entire fight jumping at you they almost certainly will. As such, you need a strong air game to facilitate a strong grounded game.
For this reason, while it is certainly possible to run Dizzy as a zoner, I’d argue that it’s a lot more trouble than it’s worth. The inability to reliably control the space above her from the ground makes it a very cumbersome task to commit fully to playing keep-out with your opponent.
That said, Dizzy isn’t completely defenseless when it comes to the space above her even if I made it sound that way with my earlier diatribe. I’ve found both her jump dust, and fish projectile (214P) great for keeping my opponents in check. Both place a projectile in the space right above Dizzy’s head which makes it impossible to perform a jump-in attack against her. This gives Dizzy some much needed breathing room, which she can use to slowly hone in on her opponent, or set up Ice Field.
This is kind of why I don’t really think Dizzy makes a great zoner: she feels a lot less about keep-out than other archetypal zoners do. Instead, it feels more like Dizzy needs to use her projectiles to lock the opponent down, and jail them while she runs her offense.
For an example of this, we can look at one of the simplest sequences I, and many other Dizzy players have been running. You simply score a hard knockdown using either a throw, or your sweep. Then you use 214K while your opponent is on the ground. This sets up a homing projectile that will immediately attack the opponent giving the Dizzy player the opportunity to perform a really basic mix-up. You can either attack the opponent from the side you’re already on, or jump over them to perform a cross-up. This sequence is a little ambiguous when performed correctly, and it loops when you’re successful. That is – you can repeat the mix if your opponent doesn’t block it correctly. Absolutely fiendish.
You can also use the combination of Ice Field, and 214P as a way to completely lock your opponent’s movement down when you want to approach. This puts a lot of the cards in your hand because Dizzy isn’t negatively impacted by the ice movement penalty to the same degree as other characters. Again, this feels like another example of how Dizzy feels more like a control character that is built around jailing her opponent as opposed to one that relies on their tools to play keep-out.
Never mind that traditional keep-out zoning is fairly weak in Guilty Gear Strive. There’s a couple of different reasons for that, but the high-level summary for why I think zoning is weak is that most characters have a ton of strong movement options, and the game discourages zoning. That first point means that it’s a lot harder to cover all of the different approach angles even when a character has many fantastic keep-out tools in their repertoire.
The other point about how Strive discourages zoning needs a bit of explaining. The most common way that you build up your super meter in Strive is by moving toward, and attacking your opponent. You’re also awarded some meter for defending, but you’re not awarded any for walking away from your opponent. In fact, if you evade your opponent for too long, Strive actively punishes you by taking away all of your accumulated super meter. As a result of this, the game heavily favours more unga bunga play, and actively punishes players for trying to lean too heavily into space control, especially from fullscreen.
And on that note, I don’t think Dizzy has great moves to really thrive in an unga bunga landscape either. Typically when a character has such strong tools to lock down their opponent’s movement, they’re offensive capabilities take a hit somewhere else. In Dizzy’s case, she doesn’t have strong jump-in options, she doesn’t have any forward advancing special moves, and her damage feels lower when compared to the more nuclear members of Strive’s cast. I don’t have a problem with any of this, but it’s yet another reason for why I believe Dizzy feels weak overall.
Having said all of that, I still think Dizzy is very fun to play. Fun is obviously subjective, but I really like how unorthodox she is. Her kit lets me do a lot of the same sorts of things I would do with May. Obviously I can’t run the same ignorant offensive pressure, but I can keep my opponent locked to a certain spot on the screen. That’s something I really enjoyed doing with May, and Dizzy’s kit is much better suited to playing in this control-centric way.
Some of her tools are also just so goofy. I don’t know that I’ve seen a character where their attacks feel so feast, or famine and that’s hilarious. For example, almost none of her normals have any vertical range, so they almost all get completely snubbed by low-profile attacks. But then she has a sweep that hits from an entirely different postal code, and her 5H (featured below) has a whopping 18 active frames (that’s 4 times longer than most attacks in this game). It’s just so bonkers. What even is this goofball character?
The other big thing that I like about Dizzy is how low the skill floor feels for her. At least, I think it is. Admittedly, I’m not the greatest judge of this anymore because I keep accumulating more experience and skills as I continue playing other fighting games. However, this is the first time I’ve picked up a new Guilty Gear Strive character, and felt like I could immediately gel with them. That’s especially notable as May plays quite differently from other members of Strive’s cast, so I don’t have a lot of transferable Strive specific muscle memory to lean on when picking up a new character. Though, Dizzy’s 6P is also better as a counter-poke than an anti-air, her 2S doesn’t hit low, and her 5K is her best fast poke, so maybe it’s just that Dizzy has a lot of the same weirdness as May that made her feel so familiar.
Anyway, that’s where I’m at right now with Dizzy. I think she’s fun to play as, but Dizzy doesn’t feel as powerful as I was hoping she would. I will always be a fan of high burst damage, and I don’t know if I’ll ever get to a point where I can reliably unlock that sort of potential out of Dizzy. Nor do I know if she even has the ability to do insane burst damage without her opponent mashing in a particularly ill-advised spot within her pressure. Regardless, it’ll be interesting to see how general sentiment, and my own opinions about Dizzy continue to evolve over time.
What about you? Have you played Season 4 yet in Guilty Gear Strive? Did you try out Dizzy? What were your takeaways? I’m curious how others are feeling.
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Frostilyte Writes 