Genre: Fighting
Publisher: Sammy
Developer: Arc Systems Work
Release Date: November 9, 2004

Pre-order 'GUILTY GEAR ISUKA': PlayStation 2

Guilty Gear Isuka is about the fourth game in the series, not counting minor tweak releases (Guilty Gear XX#Reload) and weird spin-offs (Guilty Gear Petit). An "isuka," if you're wondering, is a Japanese bird. It's supposed to represent that the series is "flying to new heights." It's not really clear how that translates in story terms to the game, since in the tradition of a lot of fighting games, Isuka has finally gotten around to just tossing the ongoing plot of the series out the window in favor of a free-for-all. New to Guilty Gear Isuka is the ability to go at it with any combination of four players, from a four-way free-for-all to a two-on-two throwdown. You can do this with an incredible array of creative characters, from the samurai-sword wielding, pink-haired bounty hunter Baiken, to the assassin Venom who fights with a pool cue and a set of hovering balls he can fire off in nasty combinations, to your basic swordsmen and martial artists (each with their own weird quirks) to a girl who fights using her own hair as a weapon and a shambling, bloodstained woman whom the backstory assures me is in fact married to her giant key-shaped axe, GGI has a really weird lineup. I respect that. If you've got a playing style you enjoy, there's probably a character you'll love in Guilty Gear Isuka somewhere.

There's a good number of modes in this one, with an arcade mode, the aforementioned GG Burst mode, a color edit which is sorely needed for a couple of the alternate colors here, and the Robo-Ky II factory.

Arcade mode is that straight ahead, all-out free-for-all. Select a character out of the 20 or so returning heroes and the one (a couple more unlockable) new character, and go at it. Here's where a couple of new quirks come into play. The Soul system kicks in when you're facing more than one enemy, or when you have a two-on-two battle going. Souls are basically extra lives for your character; when a life bar drains, you lose a soul, and it pops back to full. Also new here is the line system; much like some of the older SNK games, you can spring back and forth from the foreground to the background of the battle arena. Unless you're playing with or against multiple people, though, this affects the fight less than you'd think. A feature that's sure to make weaker players twitch is the survival-mode style level counter that ticks upward as you fight through arcade mode. Hitting combos, getting First Strike as a match starts, and generally showing off your skills results in your "level" going up. Every twenty levels, your current match stops and you get to prove you're a daredevil by taking on two fighters at once. If you're still getting used to how the game controls, that can be a serious dent in your day.

Speaking of the controls, there are a couple of issues I want to bring up. Most fighting games automatically turn your character around as you go from the left to the right of your enemy. Because of the multiple fighters that can be onscreen at one time in Isuka, though, "turn around" is mapped to a separate button all its own. This is logical and probably not really a bad idea, but it takes a lot of getting used to. Additionally, unless you're a hardcore fan and have a large arcade-style "stick" controller, you're not going to get any analog support out of this game. I repeat: this game has no support for the Playstation 2 analog joysticks. I have absolutely no idea what possessed Sammy to do this, but it goes a long way towards making the game a good bit less accessible to beginning players or people who prefer not to have blisters the size of small western European counties on their thumbs after an hour or so of gaming.

Arcade mode is clearly meant to be the meat of this title, and I'm going to have to say that it bears the weight well. Guilty Gear Isuka is as technical a 2D fighter as you'll see anywhere. It's entirely possible to go from the easier-to-learn characters, button-mashing and gradually picking up skills, and take a few weeks to graduate up to more complex characters (like the more or less customizable projectile combos you can set up as Venom) with more complex techniques. Add this to Dead Angle attacks (counters that burn through your Super charge meter), Dust moves (often useful as very slow combo launchers or weird mid-air attacks), row-change attacks, and a host of other maneuvers, and you can be picking the bones out of this game for quite some time.

Arcade and versus mode only get more fun as you add more players. Abruptly what was just a human player against a fairly cheesy AI player can become a match between two humans, or (more fun, in my opinion) two humans kicking the cheese out of that AI enemy and an optional buddy. Three or four players at a time becomes glorious cascading insanity on a level not seen since Smash Brothers Melee.

If this were it to all there was to the game, I'd be a little less enthused about it, to be honest. It's good, but aside from the four-player feature, it's nothing we didn't see before in XX or XX#Reload, both of which simply "felt" like more complete games. Luckily, however, that's not all Isuka has to offer. There's also Burst mode, which is the single greatest takeoff on "Streets of Rage" ever.

It's basically just your average side-scrolling beat-'em-up, of course. One or two players walk to the right and fight waves of oncoming enemies. Occasionally there are spikes to fall on or barrels to break for powerups. The sheer move variety you can unleash in this mode to flatten all in your path is astounding, and the enemies are weak enough to make plowing through a crowd of them feel oddly satisfying. It's not terribly short either, although it won't keep you occupied all day. All fighting games should include something along these lines. With any luck, when other games include this mode, their take will be a little more forgiving about exact locations you need to be standing to hit enemies. This is a pretty minor problem, though.

The Color Edit mode is just a color edit. Personalizing your own color choices is fun in a Martha Stewart way, but it's hardly going to set the world on fire.

The Robo-Ky II Factory, meanwhile, is a chance to take a robotic double of one of the heroes and personify him to your own will. You can tweak Robo-Ky's attack power, defense, speed and so on, or just start piling on special moves. I don't think every special from every character is in here, but some of the ones that did make it are pretty nasty. Using this mode, you can easily transform the goofy looking robot from some kind of bargain basement robotic special to a fearsome force on par with the end boss of arcade mode. (Who, by the way, takes up both rows and likes to knock you around for a good half your health bar per hit. Someone at Sammy's been studying SNK's back history something heavy.)

The Guilty Gear series has long been known for having high resolution, smooth looking sprites and crisp backgrounds. At first glance, that's what's on display here too. Once things start moving and shaking though, the characters can get pretty heavily pixelated. It's also a little too easy to lose characters in the back row of a four-character battle behind a wall of flashy special moves and in front of the seriously busy backgrounds. That's more a complaint with the speed of the gameplay than anything else, though. The audio is full of Japanese voice acting and energetic music, as well as tings and announcer calls. If you've never had the pleasure of hearing a Guilty Gear soundtrack, this is a fine place to start listening.

To sum things up... it's a little hard to call this one. I just don't think this is quite as good a single-player game as XX or XX#Reload, but if you've already got either of those and you have friends who are into the series, this is a logical purchase. Give it a rent to see if it'll hold your interest if you're not already a fan of the series, and be patient with its quirks, and Isuka will give you hyperactive fighting fun for a long time to come.