Guilty Gear: Gear Be Dragons

I have always enjoyed Guilty Gear. As irrelevant a claim as it is, I was indeed there on the ground floor for the first game back in 1998, and I immediately adored Guilty Gear’s rough and glorious excess, its devotion to heavy-metal anime gaudiness as an art form. Later titles were far more polished, but the original has an earnest, furious aura that comes from someone throwing everything they have into a creation. You can see that everywhere. It’s in the striking intro, the catchy soundtrack, the inventive characters, and, of course, memorable backgrounds. 

Like all things Guilty Gear, the stages grew more absurd and detailed with each game, and yet the original has plenty to see. The series unfolds in a shattered future where artificial creatures called Gears run rampant, and in this mélange of civilized pockets and rampant wastelands, just about anything goes.

 

For example, it’s neat how the militarized backdrop of the hulking soldier Potemkin’s homeland has mecha units worthy of their own model kits…

…Or how the temple favored by American ninja (and future president) Chip Zanuff combines giant tengu masks with what seems to be a warped cybernetic Avalokitesvara statue.

Yet I want to discuss the aged knight Kliff Undersn’s recurring combat scene, known as the Grave in official Guilty Gear documentation. Its centerpiece is a giant dragon carcass, but note the smaller lizards frolicking among its decay. Perhaps scavengers or some lesser genus of dragon themselves, they observe the combat and sometimes pause to clean themselves like rabbits. They apparently harbor no ill sentiment toward Kliff and his offensively named Dragonslayer sword.

Those small dragons reappear in this stage in subsequent games, looking slightly sharper to fit the more polished look, and they even gather around fires and take to the air on stubby, aerodynamically insufficient wings. Look, Guilty Gear has a character whose wings are a quarreling angel and grim reaper. Chubby reptiles taking flight is a low-rung implausibility. 

Yet it’s their initial appearance that intrigues me most. The first Guilty Gear packs a lot into an original hand-drawn PlayStation fighter, and it had a difficult production. While creator Daisuke Ishiwatari and Team Neo Blood initially made the game with rendered sprites as in Killer Instinct, they scrapped that prototype, redesigned many of the characters, and started over with sprite artwork. And they still found time to animate some capering reptiles for the dragon-corpse level. 

It’s this sort of thing that wins me over, perhaps even more than Guilty Gear’s constant sense of overkill, the countless compelling details in the animation, the extensive backstories, or the subplots about Axl’s neglected girlfriend or Millia’s unfortunate fanboy.

The dragonlings are not in the nighttime version of the Grave seen in Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus R (actual title). Their campfires are out, suggesting that they’re diurnal or crepuscular in their activities. Or maybe they’re Kliff’s pets and he’s conscientious enough not to let them roam in the deep of the night. Given how vast Guilty Gear’s worldbuilding can be, maybe there’s an entire novel available only in Japan and devoted to Kliff’s life and times, including his complex relationship with various dragon species. 

I have not seen these dragons in more recent Guilty Gear titles, but then Kliff isn’t in those games either. It could be that the critters lurk somewhere in a background and are just hard to spot in the rapid complexities of Guilty Gear Xrd -SIGN- and Guilty Gear: Strive and whatever other forms the series takes. It’s hard to keep track sometimes, but for me it’s always worth the trouble.