Guilty Gear Judgement(PSP)
Arc System Works

The Short Version:

CAST IN THE NAME OF GEAR

YE NOT GOOD

The Long Version:

I’ve really gone through a pretty steady curve of interest with the Guilty Gear series over the years. When I first saw someone play a bootleg copy of the original on a modded PS1 back in high school, I was pretty impressed. When I saw X for the first time, I was wowed. When I saw XX, I was hooked and thought there wasn’t any getting better than this, at least until the inevitable Guilty Gear XXX- because really, how could you leave it at only two x’s and rightfully call yourself eXtReEEEEEMMMME?

Being right kinda blows. Even though I stick by my glowing endorsement of XX from way back when, its tweaks and spinoffs have been hit or miss in the same sense that buckshot works on houseflies. It’s just as fun and loud as firing a shotgun usually is, but something’s just not right when you aren’t vaporizing what you aimed at. Isuka was a shitty attempt at deepening the vs mode with two more players and a second ‘dimension’ to the battle, Dust Strikers was kind of a half assed Smash Brothers attempt, with some minigames thrown in just to rub in the fact that time was spent on them rather then refining the main game, and Judgement, which we take a look at today, takes the half assed Final Fight clone mode of Isuka, slaps a half assed story into it, and pulls a bunch of new enemy critters out of its ass. On the up side, all of that ass does mean that Sir Mix A Lot’s anaconda might enjoy the game, if it can digest plastic anyway.

Maybe that’s a bit harsh. After all, for once, it’s a Guilty Gear game where you seem to be fighting Gear…like creatures, and the shreds of storyline do a better job of getting the ‘roving bounty hunters’ vibe the cast is supposed to have across, since they’re on a clear cut mission to beat up a guy named Raymond who baked up some monsters in his lab and is attempting to turn himself into a god, because that’s pretty much the logical thing to do in a world where talking keys, transvestite nun bounty hunters, and wind-up toy versions of French police officers are considered commonplace. Because everyone hates Raymond, Sol (or whoever you picked) dashes off to break his stuff and beat him up so everything’ll be cool again.

I don’t know if it’s the subconscious need to justify spending money on a game from a series I like (even though I’d been actively warned against buying Judgement by a friend) or what, but it seems like I’ve been running into this a lot lately- games that get my hopes up with a few really awesome moments, features, or other bells and whistles that get my attention, then promptly dash them with say, some laughable, hammy dialogue, or an infuriating mandatory game mechanic that throws a wrench in the gears of everything else. In Guilty Gear Judgement, it’s the fact that while it is a better made beat ’em up than Isuka’s similar mode, it’s still full of sloppy design, cheap enemies, cheaper bosses, and scattered text interludes translated in a way that puts me in a trance only Ny-Quil and Benedryl together can muster. Every so often, you’ll encounter another cast member fighting mooks, then you and they exchange a couple lines of banter before you get attacked from behind, they warn you, and it fades to black, completely skipping the team-up fight scene. At which point, the other character just goes ‘cya’ and vanishes, leaving you to go through the next sub section of the level like nothing ever happened.

Ok, ok. Let’s get serious now. Basically, you’re investigating the mysterious goings-on of Raymond’s island, and it turns out that he’s summoning demons and experimenting fusing them in different ways in an attempt to make magic weapons even more powerful than Gears. The big coup of his plan involves letting a demon overlord eat him, then taking over his body after you soften it up a little for him. At that point, he turns purple, changes his name to Judgement, and begins his evil plan to take over the world.

It is pretty fun to just obliterate hordes of foes all at once with your special attacks, and you can still air dash and stuff the way you could in a normal GG match. Sometimes (usually) turning around is a pain and your commands end up reversed, and inputting a down-forward-punch style motion on a narrow platform is pretty much a death sentence. (Naturally, you fight enemies who would go down easily to a GAN FLAME! on said narrow platforms, causing a lot of undue falls.) Jumping segments are also a tremendous pain in general, like the spikes in area 6. Basically, the gist of the entire game seems to be ‘keep making the stupid pitfalls and unavoidable cheap hits do more damage so it feels like it’s getting harder,’ and well, I suppose it kind of does.

Judgement also includes a story-less version of GGXX, whose only major flaw is being on the overweight black brick that is the PSP, and not having the story mode which I’d planned on picking through since I didn’t have the time at home. Whoops.