With all of the excitement surrounding the new upcoming fighting games like Marvel Tokon, Avatar Legends, and Virtua Fighter Crossroads, as well as all of the buzz surrounding Tifa and Yujiro Hanma joining Street Fighter 6 and Tekken 8 respectively, it’s easy to feel like Guilty Gear Strive has fallen a bit into the background. But the reality is that Strive is still going strong after six years, especially after the Guilty Gear Strive 2.0 patch completely revitalized the meta with the removal of a core system mechanic and a roster wide rebalancing patch.
At Evo this year, I got to do my yearly catch up with Guilty Gear Strive Producer Ken Miyauchi, to chat about what’s still to come in the world of Strive, how he feels about the current state of the game, and what players can expect when Robo Ky releases later this week.
IGN: I asked you last year if you could share any details about Robo-Ky and Jam. Obviously it was a little bit too early back then and Jam is already at this point, but with Robo-Ky’s release being so near, is there anything you can reveal about what’s new about this iteration of character and his unique play style?
Ken Miyauchi, Guilty Gear Strive Producer: Well, for Robo-Ky, since he didn’t appear in the past Guilty Gear series, which is Guilty Gear Xrd, he’s returning to the game for the first time in nearly over 10 years. He’s had a very unique play style in the past series and we wanted to carry that kind of play style to Guilty Gear Strive. So he has a unique meter and unique mechanics along with that meter and a lot of game play that has been inspired from the past, like Guilty Gear XX. So I’m really hoping those people who played Robo-Ky will love to pick up Strive’s newly refined Robo-Ky. And also I’m expecting a lot of people who are new to Robo-Ky would also enjoy his gameplay because he has a lot of comical and funny animations, which will really make people laugh.
Strive 2.0 released earlier in the year and I think generally people were very happy about it. What’s your current take on the state of the game? Are you happy with where it’s at after the removal of Wild Assault and the rest of the balance changes made to the rest of the cast, or is there still work to be done in your opinion?
Miyauchi: So I’m currently happy with what we decided for 2.0 update, which is removing Wild Assault, and reorganizing the battle balance as a whole. Because I’ve also mentioned this before in the 2.0 update, but the state of the game had been kind of inflated a lot and a lot of characters felt overpowered, balance-wise, and continuing to make updates, making all the characters stronger and stronger would be hard for us to continue balancing the game. So we wanted to set certain levels and make sure the game will be able to be stably balanced and updated for another… who can expect, but maybe maybe five years or longer than that.
The state of the game had been kind of inflated and a lot of characters felt overpowered, balance-wise. “
So 2.0 is really good from a developer perspective, its sort of like setting the standard, the new standard of how the game balance of Guilty Gear Strive goes. And starting from here, our team is very motivated to freshen up the game. So there are a lot of things that we aren’t still happy about, but our update is not just 2.0. We’ll continue updating the game. There will be more characters. So along with the characters and also the blazing pass, we continuously hear the community feedback about the balance of the game and try to continue refining and hope we’ll be able to make everyone happy playing their characters.
Speaking of characters, we’ve seen a lot of excitement around guest characters recently. Obviously there’s Tifa in Street Fighter, there’s Yujiro in Tekken 8, Kenshiro in City of the Wolves and of course Strive added Lucy from Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, but I wonder is there any like pressure on the dev side to incorporate bigger and more notable guest characters given what other fighting games are doing?
Miyauchi: I think we don’t really have pressure, but I think a lot of those games have also been running for quite a few years and they’re starting to have more guest characters. I mean, Street Fighter 6 had guest characters from an earlier stage. And seeing how the community is reacting to those and seeing a lot of people expecting to see more guest characters, I think if necessary we would like to, answer to those kinds of expectations. But just doing like the guest character doesn’t simply mean that it’s, how to say, always welcome. We need to decide on which IP to collab with or if that really matches with the Guilty Gear design, like the world. So it’s not really pressure, but we are also kind of, seeking or examining, sort of like looking around.
Trying to find like the right fit?
Miyauchi: Yeah. Trying to find the right fit. If there is any potential chance, then we might do it, but who knows. It’s really interesting culture to have a lot of fighting games having the guest characters nowadays.
Coming back to Robo-Ky for a second, both Jam and Robo-Ky are beloved characters who made a comeback in Strive and they also featured updated visual designs for those characters. Can you talk a little bit about the design process for coming up with the new look for Robo-Ky?
Miyauchi: So his new design is… It’s always been that the new character designs are something that Daisuke Ishiwatari designs from his rough sketch and we sort of like… based on that rough sketch, kind of detail things up and make the 3D model of that character. So when we design a character and talk to Daisuke, at that point, we still do not know how he will look like in Guilty Gear Strive. What we share with Daisuke is very, very simple plot and settings about the character. ‘This is what Robo-Ky in Strive is going to look like and his gameplay is going to be this format.’ And so the entire design is made by Daisuke, but every time when Daisuke designs, he adds something that we don’t really ask for. I mean, it’s not like in the negative way. I mean, in a positive way, he just adds something unique to make the character, not completely 100% equal to the past design and he likes to do that.
Robo Ky gets a new outfit, not just mimicking the Holy Order era of Ky’s costume, because technicalyl his body has blown up in the story, so he needs to get a new body. “
So in Jam’s case, she had very different kind of outfit fit and Robo-Ky’s case, he also gets a new outfit, not just mimicking the Holy Order era of Ky’s costume, because technically his body has blown up in the story, so he needs to get new body. But the new outfit sort of has some kind of Ky aesthetic as well as like he’s a currently trending style of what he thinks to be a cool guy. So that kind of character design is in the new design of Robo-Ky.
And then finally, it’s been more than five years of Guilty Gear Strive. That’s a pretty significant milestone. How does that feel to have this fighting game that’s still going strong all these years later?
Miyauchi: Yeah. So we really never expected the Guilty Gear Strive to run for over five years and now it’s going in sixth year, right? And I did the research recently looking around other fighting games. If there are any other fighting games during that date over six years and I find that there aren’t. So what we are doing is… It’s getting harder and harder as the time goes on because we always want to have newer players coming in to get to play the game as well as those people who left the game, [we want them] to pick up the game again. The 2.0 update was something that’s really focused on that element and I think we did do quite well, looking at the recent active player count and all those numbers who are playing the game. And to maintain those numbers, while also making the community happy about how we update the game is very, very challenging.
So I personally feel very, very worried, but at the same time, not only me, but the entire team is very excited to see we will face those challenges that we are going to face and we are very much enjoying the current moment.
Mitchell Saltzman is an editorial producer at IGN. You can find him on twitter @JurassicRabbit