![[Highlight] Guilty Gear Strive -- Arcade: Faustian Bargain](/images/yt/w8/highlight-guilty-gear-strive-arcade-faustian-bargain-cppqx.jpg)
[Highlight] Guilty Gear Strive -- Arcade: Faustian Bargain
2Among my earliest interactions with Guilty Gear Strive was to poke at its Arcade mode, despite the fact that I had heard rumblings that it was actively seeking to destroy the minds and bodies of its players.
Don't worry, I know a doctor! ... ... ...how bad could it really be?!
H-hey, let's not worry about that, I'm trying to explain how the Arcade mode works! Because the game sure won't! It'll just throw you straight into things without a word as to why it's declaring you're on the "Hard Route"...
To my understanding, there's only a few routes, anyway... "Hard" and... "Extreme"! ... ... ...wait, what? Is this supposed to make any sense? (To even see "Normal"... you MUST lose one round in Stage 1.)
But it gets better! The game would hopefully like you to believe that it's modulating its difficulty to your performance, but... um... it's just as simple as whether or not you lose a round along the way.
Except that's not it! Specifically, it's whether or not you lost a round in any match you walked away from. It doesn't matter how many times you lose twice and need to continue, just as long as you win 2-0 when you finally DO advance.
I-I'm clearly not saying this from personal experience or anything!
And there's still more! Your "reward" for clearing the Hard Route of all its adversaries is... a battle against Nagoriyuki. But your opponent from Stage 1 will actually have decided that their unique dialogue wasn't just a one-off weird incident... they'll come to join you in your moment of need!
You see, Stage 8 Nagoriyuki is a bit unusual. He starts with a full Blood gauge, thus immediately putting him into Bood Rage state. He then gets all its advantages and none of the drawbacks a player-driven Nagoriyuki would suffer. No health drain, he retains access to all his special moves... AND to top it all off, his meter will quickly fill up again even if he's not doing anything once the Blood Rage subsides.
Oh, and he's got twice as much HP as normal.
However, I think they REALLY overcompensated when they decided that you would get some help. Honestly, I'd already forgotten their interaction in Stage 1 at the time, it was so disjointed, but Ramlethal's back for some satisfaction! ...on your enemies!
This is already interesting, because Guilty Gear is not the kind of game that actually plays this way under normal circumstances... ... ... and your ally character actually has no life bar! Just stand back and let the game cheat back at itself even harder than you could've dreamed!
...it's a good thing Ramlethal has a seemingly inexhaustible energy supply, because Faust is in the unique position of being the only character who can hurt a friend... just like he normally has the capacity for self-harm!
And then, just like that... some more incomprehensibly terse babble that barely connects together, much less to anything else... and roll credits!
If you want any ACTUAL story, you gotta "play" Story mode! ... ... ...which I'm pretty sure I'd be asking for trouble if I did, even streaming, because... it's just a really long string of cutscenes! No gameplay! (Wow, I got an underground fighting game AND feature length dojin film included in the price of Daisuke Ishiwatari's latest experimental prog-fusion-metal album!)
Wow, this really IS an "arcade" game! ...you win, and it delcares Game Over! That's a real accomplishment for something that has unlimited opportunity for continues...
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