ZBirdV8
Flocker
Before we begin I am well aware that going to a Mortal Kombat forum and making a claim that another game is outright better is going to garner a fair amount of ill-will from the get go. Please understand that I am a Mortal Kombat fan. Mortal Kombat debuted in 1992 and I was born in 1988. Since years 1-4 of a person's life don't consist of much in the way of functional cognition I don't think it's
misrepresentative to say I have been a Mortal Kombat fan my entire life. I even stuck with the series through it's awful 3-D era. Hopefully this adjust the tone of the post from "some asshole on a high horse" to "a fellow fan worth listening to".
In this thread I have 2 aims: To encourage people who have not played the Guilty Series to try it, and to make Mortal Kombat 12 a better game via some compare and contrast. I'm using Xrd Rev2 as comparative rather than Strive because Rev2 is $15/$20 and Strive is around $65-$80 depending on the version. I am asking people to possibly take a maiden voyage, and they may or may not like it, if they don't I think $15 is more of a fair ask than $60. ROUND 1 FIGHT! HEAVEN OR HELL LET'S ROCK!-However you like it. Let's do this.
Tutorials/Practice Modes:
Both games offer various tutorials of core mechanics and individual characters. Mortal Kombat's training mode is almost always against a static opponent, and deep labbing usually takes a lot of set up time, recording the AI and practicing ultra specific situations. In the tutorials themselves successful completion of a drill even a single time progresses the player to the next drill. Which means a player can pass the drill and not really be able to pull off the concept consistently and in some cases not even fully understand the concept. There are no match-up drills unless programmed by the user.
Guilty Gear's universal tutorial has the player navigating sets of obstacles in something more like a minigame in which knowledge of movement and basic attack inputs allows the player to navigate back and forth across the screen in something that feels more like a game than a dojo. Once past that players can engage in "missions" which are drills on various universal mechanics like feints, intercepting pokes, guarding, etc. Each drill is repeated 5 times, with 3 successful completions being the bare minimum to pass, and a grade system for total successful completions-when you learn something in Guilty Gear, you really learn it. The game also features modes for learning each characters normals, combos, specials, etc. as well as match-up tutorials that assist the player in dealing with common tactics from other fighters.
Presentation:
Mortal Kombat is a gritty and ultra-violent tone, dark atmosphere, realistic characters (as opposed to cartoon animations), and a soundtrack of tribal drums set against quiet ambience for the most part. It's story is ludicrous, featuring time travel, otherworldly gods, and inter-realm tensions but this is all played 100% serious and straight but the characters on screen.
Guilty Gear is a very bright and energetic tone, it features an anime art-style, vibrant colors, and a very driving soundtrack of japanese power-metal (up-beat stuff with big lead guitars, and occasion keyboard passages). Guilty Gear's story is dystopian and serious in nature, but not every character in the game is taking that way. You get a bit of everything in a cast that features characters ranging from a one-armed samurai on a path for vengence, to an odd doctor character who may or may not be completely sane. It kind of let's player decide how they want to feel about it. It is also worth noting that the story of Guilty Gear is every bit as convoluted as Mortal Kombat's if not moreso. These are fighting games not RPGs shit gets weird.
Characters:
Mortal Kombat has martial artists, special forces operatives, ninjas, and mutants and monsters from the land of Outworld, and even a god or two. Guilty Gear has Air-Pirates, Gears (cyborgs), Kings, Lawyers, a doctor, a paraplegic on a mechanical bed, a ninja, and a character that has a sentient shadow, among others you get a bit of everything sometimes you get things you didn't really want.
Gameplay:
The two games play so differently that breaking down each nuance (especially in GGs case) would be more writing than even I am willing to do at the moment, but this is of course the most important part so I will discuss what I believe to be the biggest difference between the two-character autonomy. This might a be a little hard to follow, but let me try, and if I can clarify something in thread let me know. Mortal Kombat's characters feel strongly tethered to it's universal concepts whereas Guilty Gear's universal concepts feel more like a set of tools the characters can borrow from as needed.
The end result is that regardless of which character I am playing in Mortal Kombat it is always very clear that I am playing Mortal Kombat, even characters as far apart as Jacqui Briggs (heavy rushdown) and Cetrion (Zoning) feel like they have agreed to a fight within a certain set of rules-they play the game in different ways but they are playing the same game.
Guilty Gear's characters really feel like their own thing. When Jam (Heavy rushdown) and Dizzy (Zoning) fight, they feel like two fighters that have completely different ideas about what fighting is-Jam is playing her game against Dizzy, and Dizzy is playing her game against Jam, as opposed to Jam and Dizzy are playing Guilty Gear.
Where this really takes off is that because movement, attacking, and defensive options are much more vast in Guilty Gear different players of the same character can have wildly different takes on those characters. In Mortal Kombat two different Scorpion players will still be trying to execute the same game plan the distinguishing thing between them will be how good they are at doing it. Another way to say this would be that in Guilty Gear, my take on Baiken might be very different from how a professional player goes about using her whereas in Mortal Kombat, my Joker and SonicFox's Joker want to accomplish the same kind of things, his is just going to be much better at executing "the plan".
The movement is a huge deal too Mortal Kombat has back, forward, backdash, forward dash, and a single universal jump. Guilty Gear's characters walk, dash, run, and have jump, high jump, double jump, and air dashing. This is huge because it has two major impacts on gameplay-Zoning, and Lock down. Mortal Kombat can be a frustrating affair because of it's slow and limited movement. Zoners look very spammy in Mortal Kombat because Mortal Kombat characters don't move well which in turn limits how complex a zoning character can be-if you have limited ways to move in, the zoning character in turn has to have limited ways of keeping you out. It's not a great time maneuvering Baraka through the zoning of Shang, Cetrion, or Skarlet, even if you know how to do it, it's not fun gameplay. Likewise getting rush down and locked by Jacqui's staggers and frametraps, results in situations where "I was blocking the whole time, and still died," and that's not a great feeling either. Loses in Mortal Kombat feel really tacky sometimes. Hell, let's be honest, winning in Mortal Kombat isn't always as gratifying as it should be. You also have characters like Sub-Zero that can turn the whole game into a 50/50 in which the winner is not necessarily the player with better MK Knowledge or Mastery, but rather just simply the better guesser that day, or a character like Scorpion who slows the game down massively because he can check, and whiff punish at will if he choses (Scorpion can take spacing completely out of the gameplay if he wants to).
By contrast, winning in Guilty Gear feels earned, and losing in Guilty Gear usually does genuinely feel like you got outplayed by a stronger opponent and it's because that stronger player has so many more ways to express their knowledge of the match-up and of the core mechanics-they have more tools to "be better" at and with. More importantly Guilty Gear matches are fun win or lose. They are faster, more colorful, and you spend a lot less time in block stun.... and
Sountrack
Guilty Gear has a better soundtrack all day long, Do you want some high energy rock and roll/metal or some ambient tribal drums? It goes beyond that though. Good sound design is super important in a fighting game. The reason most fighting game characters yell their special moves is because it serves as an important audio queue to both players. Mortal Kombat characters exchange battle crys for a set of generic metallic, gun, lighting, and laser sounds. I realize this is because the tone of the game might be ruined if Mortal Kombat characters shouted their abilities all the time, but there has to be a middle ground, and Raiden's old electric fly scream is the stuff of legend. Why can't we have things like that again? Why can't we have something like the industrial-metal soundtrack of the original Mortal Kombat movie? WHY CAN'T WE HAVE THE GODDAMN THEME SONG FROM THE MOVIE IN A MORTAL KOMBAT GAME!? We can definitely do better than we did in MK11... ya'll remember any bangers on this one or have you done what I do and mute the in-game music and play from Spotify instead?
Anyways, thank you for reading my blog. JOHNNY BOUGHT A CAR!!
misrepresentative to say I have been a Mortal Kombat fan my entire life. I even stuck with the series through it's awful 3-D era. Hopefully this adjust the tone of the post from "some asshole on a high horse" to "a fellow fan worth listening to".
In this thread I have 2 aims: To encourage people who have not played the Guilty Series to try it, and to make Mortal Kombat 12 a better game via some compare and contrast. I'm using Xrd Rev2 as comparative rather than Strive because Rev2 is $15/$20 and Strive is around $65-$80 depending on the version. I am asking people to possibly take a maiden voyage, and they may or may not like it, if they don't I think $15 is more of a fair ask than $60. ROUND 1 FIGHT! HEAVEN OR HELL LET'S ROCK!-However you like it. Let's do this.
Tutorials/Practice Modes:
Both games offer various tutorials of core mechanics and individual characters. Mortal Kombat's training mode is almost always against a static opponent, and deep labbing usually takes a lot of set up time, recording the AI and practicing ultra specific situations. In the tutorials themselves successful completion of a drill even a single time progresses the player to the next drill. Which means a player can pass the drill and not really be able to pull off the concept consistently and in some cases not even fully understand the concept. There are no match-up drills unless programmed by the user.
Guilty Gear's universal tutorial has the player navigating sets of obstacles in something more like a minigame in which knowledge of movement and basic attack inputs allows the player to navigate back and forth across the screen in something that feels more like a game than a dojo. Once past that players can engage in "missions" which are drills on various universal mechanics like feints, intercepting pokes, guarding, etc. Each drill is repeated 5 times, with 3 successful completions being the bare minimum to pass, and a grade system for total successful completions-when you learn something in Guilty Gear, you really learn it. The game also features modes for learning each characters normals, combos, specials, etc. as well as match-up tutorials that assist the player in dealing with common tactics from other fighters.
Presentation:
Mortal Kombat is a gritty and ultra-violent tone, dark atmosphere, realistic characters (as opposed to cartoon animations), and a soundtrack of tribal drums set against quiet ambience for the most part. It's story is ludicrous, featuring time travel, otherworldly gods, and inter-realm tensions but this is all played 100% serious and straight but the characters on screen.
Guilty Gear is a very bright and energetic tone, it features an anime art-style, vibrant colors, and a very driving soundtrack of japanese power-metal (up-beat stuff with big lead guitars, and occasion keyboard passages). Guilty Gear's story is dystopian and serious in nature, but not every character in the game is taking that way. You get a bit of everything in a cast that features characters ranging from a one-armed samurai on a path for vengence, to an odd doctor character who may or may not be completely sane. It kind of let's player decide how they want to feel about it. It is also worth noting that the story of Guilty Gear is every bit as convoluted as Mortal Kombat's if not moreso. These are fighting games not RPGs shit gets weird.
Characters:
Mortal Kombat has martial artists, special forces operatives, ninjas, and mutants and monsters from the land of Outworld, and even a god or two. Guilty Gear has Air-Pirates, Gears (cyborgs), Kings, Lawyers, a doctor, a paraplegic on a mechanical bed, a ninja, and a character that has a sentient shadow, among others you get a bit of everything sometimes you get things you didn't really want.
Gameplay:
The two games play so differently that breaking down each nuance (especially in GGs case) would be more writing than even I am willing to do at the moment, but this is of course the most important part so I will discuss what I believe to be the biggest difference between the two-character autonomy. This might a be a little hard to follow, but let me try, and if I can clarify something in thread let me know. Mortal Kombat's characters feel strongly tethered to it's universal concepts whereas Guilty Gear's universal concepts feel more like a set of tools the characters can borrow from as needed.
The end result is that regardless of which character I am playing in Mortal Kombat it is always very clear that I am playing Mortal Kombat, even characters as far apart as Jacqui Briggs (heavy rushdown) and Cetrion (Zoning) feel like they have agreed to a fight within a certain set of rules-they play the game in different ways but they are playing the same game.
Guilty Gear's characters really feel like their own thing. When Jam (Heavy rushdown) and Dizzy (Zoning) fight, they feel like two fighters that have completely different ideas about what fighting is-Jam is playing her game against Dizzy, and Dizzy is playing her game against Jam, as opposed to Jam and Dizzy are playing Guilty Gear.
Where this really takes off is that because movement, attacking, and defensive options are much more vast in Guilty Gear different players of the same character can have wildly different takes on those characters. In Mortal Kombat two different Scorpion players will still be trying to execute the same game plan the distinguishing thing between them will be how good they are at doing it. Another way to say this would be that in Guilty Gear, my take on Baiken might be very different from how a professional player goes about using her whereas in Mortal Kombat, my Joker and SonicFox's Joker want to accomplish the same kind of things, his is just going to be much better at executing "the plan".
The movement is a huge deal too Mortal Kombat has back, forward, backdash, forward dash, and a single universal jump. Guilty Gear's characters walk, dash, run, and have jump, high jump, double jump, and air dashing. This is huge because it has two major impacts on gameplay-Zoning, and Lock down. Mortal Kombat can be a frustrating affair because of it's slow and limited movement. Zoners look very spammy in Mortal Kombat because Mortal Kombat characters don't move well which in turn limits how complex a zoning character can be-if you have limited ways to move in, the zoning character in turn has to have limited ways of keeping you out. It's not a great time maneuvering Baraka through the zoning of Shang, Cetrion, or Skarlet, even if you know how to do it, it's not fun gameplay. Likewise getting rush down and locked by Jacqui's staggers and frametraps, results in situations where "I was blocking the whole time, and still died," and that's not a great feeling either. Loses in Mortal Kombat feel really tacky sometimes. Hell, let's be honest, winning in Mortal Kombat isn't always as gratifying as it should be. You also have characters like Sub-Zero that can turn the whole game into a 50/50 in which the winner is not necessarily the player with better MK Knowledge or Mastery, but rather just simply the better guesser that day, or a character like Scorpion who slows the game down massively because he can check, and whiff punish at will if he choses (Scorpion can take spacing completely out of the gameplay if he wants to).
By contrast, winning in Guilty Gear feels earned, and losing in Guilty Gear usually does genuinely feel like you got outplayed by a stronger opponent and it's because that stronger player has so many more ways to express their knowledge of the match-up and of the core mechanics-they have more tools to "be better" at and with. More importantly Guilty Gear matches are fun win or lose. They are faster, more colorful, and you spend a lot less time in block stun.... and
Sountrack
Guilty Gear has a better soundtrack all day long, Do you want some high energy rock and roll/metal or some ambient tribal drums? It goes beyond that though. Good sound design is super important in a fighting game. The reason most fighting game characters yell their special moves is because it serves as an important audio queue to both players. Mortal Kombat characters exchange battle crys for a set of generic metallic, gun, lighting, and laser sounds. I realize this is because the tone of the game might be ruined if Mortal Kombat characters shouted their abilities all the time, but there has to be a middle ground, and Raiden's old electric fly scream is the stuff of legend. Why can't we have things like that again? Why can't we have something like the industrial-metal soundtrack of the original Mortal Kombat movie? WHY CAN'T WE HAVE THE GODDAMN THEME SONG FROM THE MOVIE IN A MORTAL KOMBAT GAME!? We can definitely do better than we did in MK11... ya'll remember any bangers on this one or have you done what I do and mute the in-game music and play from Spotify instead?
Anyways, thank you for reading my blog. JOHNNY BOUGHT A CAR!!
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