Guilty Gear Isuka

A button that does nothing but turn your character around is the sort of thing a fighting game only needs when it has broken its own rules. That is exactly what happened here: Arc System Works took the razor-tuned two-player duel of Guilty Gear XX and opened the floor to four fighters at once, across two planes of depth, which meant the assumption that your opponent is always in front of you no longer held. Hence the turn button. Hence a lot of arguments.

The cast, the sprites and the underlying engine are all recognisably Guilty Gear, and the animation still looks superb — hand-drawn work at a level the sixth generation rarely funded. But the combat system was built for one-on-one pressure, for a Roman Cancel reading a single opponent's guard, and it does not scale gracefully. With three other fighters on screen the careful neutral game dissolves into scrambles where you eat a random gatling because someone behind you decided to press buttons. Team modes, handicaps and mismatched match-ups can be dialled in, and there is real fun to be had in a room full of people, but the competitive precision the series built its name on is gone.

What holds up better is how much extra stuff got bolted on. Boost Mode is a side-scrolling brawl with power-ups and levelling, an odd little beat 'em up running on fighting-game bones, closer to a novelty than a campaign but pleasant enough for an evening. The Robo-Ky Factory lets you rebuild the joke character into your own variant, spending points across stats and special moves, and the results are genuinely different creatures rather than palette swaps. For a 2004 fighting game that is a surprising amount of authored content.

It landed badly. Series players wanted the next tournament-ready revision and got a party experiment instead, and the reputation stuck so firmly that the game is still mostly remembered as the odd one out. That is a little unfair. Judged as a couch game for four, it does something almost nothing else on the console tried, and the presentation carries it further than the design deserves.

Play it the way it was built to be played, with people in the room and expectations lowered, and the turn button stops being a punchline and starts being a small, honest record of how far a studio was willing to push its own formula before it snapped.