A whole bunch of new Guilty Gear Strive footage dropped yesterday when GameSpot released nine minutes of gameplay featuring Ky, Sol, Axl, Zato-1 and newcomer Nagoriyuki.
We certainly noticed Ky Kiske’s new Dragon Install technique, but Rooflemonger describes this and three other notable takeaways from the showcase, one of which is an update to the way the brand new and vampiric Nagoriyuki’s blood meter mechanic works.
The cybernetic vampire certainly has a ton of intrigue about him, as he’s one of Strive’s additions to the Guilty Gear franchise, and he has a unique mechanic that serves as a kind of double-edged sword: his blood meter. This gauge fills up over the course of the fight, giving the character turbo-charged abilities, but it also constantly exhausts its life when it fills up.
Rooflemonger points to a fairly major update to this mechanic compared to the little we’ve seen of it before, specifically that the gauge fills up gradually rather than in instant chunks. There’s a lot more about this fighter as it was featured in the showcase, such as possible features from its insane mode activation sequence, but we’ll let the content creator go into detail there.
Another major focal point of the images is the showcase of Axl Low’s new time to quit Super. The returning Guilty Gear character now has the ability to freeze his opponents to prepare for a rock-hard combo of his choice.
Of course, we only have visuals to rely on in our analysis, but it seems that this Super needs to be populated first before it is implemented in the action. Axl saves the technique and casts a purple glow around him to indicate it is now in play (not all unlike M. Bison’s V-Skill 2 in Street Fighter 5), but then activates it and freezes his enemy seemingly somewhere on the screen.
During the footage, the maneuver is used with opponents being stunned by previous attacks, leading us to speculate that Axl can’t just trigger this at any time and make it work. Enemies can very well block the freeze if they are not in the middle of a combo or in some sort of long boot or restore animation from one of their own attacks.
Watch the full video here for all the interesting tidbits you might have missed while watching for the first time. Is there anything else that hasn’t been flagged by anyone yet? Respond to the comments with your thoughts, comments and responses.