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The Guilty Gear series is driven by the unmistakeable hunger of the underdog. When series creator Daisuke Ishiwatari was a university student he obsessed over how he could design a fighting game to compete with the genre's heavyweights, Capcom's Street Fighter and SNK's King of Fighters. His solution was twofold: a thematic lunge away from martial arts into the fantasy excess of the anime tradition, and a doubling down on graphical fidelity. Ishiwatari, who still maintains creative control over the series, harangued the artists at Arc System Works to draw the game's sprites with four times the number of pixels than any other game at the time. He made few friends at his new employer in those early months (not least because the team was working on PlayStation, with its comparatively weak 2D capability) but the results had the intended effect. Guilty Gear, in its labour-intensive workaround, offered a glimpse of a high-definition shift in games, film and TV that was still some years away. In this way, Ishiwatari's game became an overnight contender.
18 years later and, in spirit, at least, Guilty Gear has finally found dominance. Street Fighter 5's battle director Ryuichi Shigeno, a professional Guilty Gear player, cited the series as a major influence on Capcom's latest. Despite this success, Revelator does not bespeak a studio lounging on laurels: its generosity shames Street Fighter 5, which launched anaemically in February, propped up by a stack of menu beams marked 'under construction'. Revelator, by contrast, offers a tower of tutorials, challenges, playmodes and distractions, including the best online mode in its class.
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