2D FIGHTING GAME STAGES

Guilty Gear X2 and Guilty Gear Accent Core

Once again, much like the original American release of the first Guilty Gear game, a lot of these box arts are a TOTAL MESS.

Like someone bootlegged a music album and put random stickers on the CD cover, if I am being frank.

In matter of fact, it was NEVER SUPPOSED TO BE CALLED “X2” in the first place! Localization just decided to call it that because they didn’t understand the symbolism of it.

Just to clarify the “X” means Retake or a retelling of a similar story which is what happened between GG1 and GGX. Instead of the tragedy that was Sol killing Justice, Sol met Dizzy instead.

The XX has additional symbolism meaning “Double Retake”, which is a fancy way of saying RETCON, or in this case, the History of Guilty Gear was completely altered by I-No and her Time Travel powers!

Hence the Subtitle: The Midnight Carnival! It’s also word play on Shadow Festival aka Kage Matsuri which is also known as the Witching Hour.

But as we all eventually learned, I-No herself was the very embodiment of that alternate history!

But, just to give you an idea of how badly Localization messed up the Box Art for GGXX in the West, here’s the ACTUAL ILLUSTRATION!

It’s not even included in the Game’s original Gallery! It was a rare bonus art used for Arcade Currency Cards in Japan!

Since apparently someone wanted Ky’s face directly on the box, they just put his other face there randomly like a disembodied head! Gross!

Also it’s worth pointing out that the majority of these early box arts only cover Blue #Reload and not the original Red #Reload version update that was first released (and this was before the concept of Patch Updates).

So sequentially you had:

GGX1.5 (Atomiswave) > GGXX (Naomi-2/PS2) > GGXX RED #Reload (Mostly a PC patch update) > GGXX BLUE #Reload (Naomi-2/PS2/PC/XBox/PSP) >

In addition BLUE #Reload was used as a foundation for Guilty Gear Isuka (Atomiswave/PS2/PC/Naomi-2), Guilty Gear Dust Strikers (NDS), Guilty Gear Judgment (PSP), Guilty Gear Raid of Arms (RoA) (Mobile), and of course the limited run version of KOREAN #Reload that included a Korean dub, 1 exclusive stage, and a famous soundtrack composed by N.EX.T.

After Isuka gained some amount of popularity, SEGA decided to publish their own release in the form of Guilty Gear XX Slash, which takes everything from Blue #Reload, updated it, and added a prototype of Order Sol and A.B.A from Isuka. It even brought in new stages updated from their original GGXX forms.

Slash was later incorporated in to a Bundle pack with Guilty Gear Judgment on PSP (PlayStation Portable), but the PSP would later get phased out in favor of the PSVita.

Slash was mostly an exclusively Japanese release, so it only ever appeared in that region, so you had to Import or Emulate it.

Eventually they decided to incorporate everything Slash had, revamp past content, add more stages, and update characters and bring everything together in the ultimate package at the time.

That package was Accent Core, and originally it was almost exclusively on the PlayStation 2 console, it hardly even existed in Arcades!

What’s more, the original Japanese release of Accent Core was plagued by bugs, excluded Kliff and Justice, and was pretty barebones.

That’s when they decided to bring out… the APPEND DISC.

Revolutionary idea at the time, the Append Disc was quite literally a Patch Update meant to fix early versions by swapping out a Disc to install on either PS2HDD or a Memory Card.

Furthermore, it added Kliff, Justice, updates to EX Mode, fixes to a lot of animations, and after a long absence STORY MODE.

There had quite literally been a 4 game gap since the last major story, as most games in the mobile platforms were even lesser side stories compared to XX.

It was sometime later that Accent Core Plus was rereleased as a Standalone Game, which quite literally made fans have to buy the game twice if they bought the original initial release of Accent Core.

Thankfully the price difference was negligible, and it did help that the game was also released on PSP and PSVita. There was, however, a bit of a time gap before Accent Core Plus came to the Nintendo Wii.

And while most people enjoyed Accent Core Plus, the real problem was only just beginning to rear its head.

You see, what few people know is, in the transition from Guilty Gear X to Guilty Gear XX, many Game Stage visual assets had to be COMPLETELY RESIZED in order to adapt to more current Television displays. The original Paris Stage in GGX was massive because of its origin on the Naomi-1 and Dreamcast, however it was mainly suited for Arcade Displays, so they had to SHRINK many of the stage assets Sega was using for PS2 and other consoles to handle them.

It also meant the game audio had to be compressed from the original Arcade quality recordings. Accent Core certainly was released initially in Arcades, but Accent Core Plus added a whole lot more, so it took many years for the content to be reverse ported, not to mention the display standards had to change AGAIN to match even higher displays!

While Accent Core Plus was pretty stable on PS2 and Wii, it would later cause a great deal of problems on the PlayStation 3 console, PC, and Arcade boards when it was revised as Accent Core Plus R.

It was such a huge problem that entire stages had to be completely removed from the game as they were causing Instability and making the game crash.

This is the infamous stage that was giving them so many problems it had to be completely removed from *ALL* Plus R versions of the game.

It was eventually replaced by an older version.

But this version barely had any animation assets running in it whatsoever.

In addition, the Heaven stage Justice had used to have Rain particle sprite effects to simulate rainfall, those were removed too.

This is actually the GGXX version, but the Accent Core version had the Rain removed and was given a very pale yellow sky color, which is pretty awful as far as visuals go.

Fortunately they kept the rain effect for Paris and 2172 stages for Sol and Ky, but the Rain effect for Paris was originally supposed to be outside the building, not imposed over it like there was a leak in the ceiling, but they took a shortcut.

Well, that’s the tragic secret of modern ports of Accent Core Plus R. It’s just a fact not everything could be salvaged from older game versions.

In addition to this problem, they were multitasking with development of Guilty Gear Xrd on top of this during a crunch period, so the patch updates they planned for had to be delayed a whole year! Xrd couldn’t even keep its own Stage assets when they transitioned to Xrd Revelator because of the shift from Unreal Engine 3 to Unreal Engine 4!

So we just have to appreciate a lot of these games as they were originally released.

Unpatched Guilty Gear XX in particular has a version of Robo Ky you won’t be able to play as anywhere else, talk about exclusivity!

On top of all the problems Accent Core faced, in addition to game unbalance issues, Ishiwatari all but FORGOT how he used to draw Justice as is evident by the Accent Core Plus Justice and Kliff art piece he did. Justice fans just can’t catch a break, sigh…

Well, history and horrors aside, some of the art is pretty iconic and memorable.

The Order Sol and Ky piece that can be seen differently if you rotate it was also later parodied by an art piece of Ky and Robo Ky as well.

It’s also a BLOODY SHAME that Ishiwatari no longer draws Guilty Gear artwork in this style. Not since Xrd. Strive has him doing something like fresco paintings now.

Anyway, that’s enough old cans of worms, Accent Core is still a great game despite underlying flaws. It’s history, but it’s GOOD HISTORY.

Atop the VTOL