Tag Archives: guilty gear strive

The Fun of Finding Your Style in Multiplayer Games

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When I was playing Splatoon 3, I would do something that I barely attempted in previous games: try out as many weapons as I could to get a feel for them. Because upping a weapon’s “Freshness Rating” is how you get tickets to obtain other weapons, it’s both a welcome system and an opportunity to experiment. Combined with the forgiving leniency of Open Anarchy Battles, and I could even do so without worrying that it’d tank my rating. 

This relates to a topic I always find fascinating: How people figure out what “feels right” for them and why. It extends to just about any game where players have the freedom to choose their tools. The considerations one makes about skill level, comfort, satisfaction, community consensus on what’s strong and weak, etc. all factor in. 

And then there are all the attempts to help people figure out where they are. The famous Magic: The Gathering psychographic profiles, i.e. Timmy, Johnny, and Spike, are meant to be broad categories to designate how different cards appeal to different players. YouTubers create videos to help anyone who’s unsure of what weapons work for them in various shooters. Fighting games like Guilty Gear STRIVE and Street Fighter 6 now include in-game basic descriptions of how characters play so that newcomers can more quickly pick the archetype that appeals to them.

I think what fascinates me in particular about the whole “trying to find what fits you” aspect of multiplayer video games is that just because something is the “best” doesn’t mean it’s right for you. The example that immediately comes to my mind is the Smash Ultimate player, MKLeo. Despite Pyra and Mythra being widely considered a top tier character, they don’t quite click with MKLeo’s play style for some reason, and he’s actually gotten better results with the theoretically weaker Byleth. Even a player who had been undisputed #1 for years, can’t automatically go with the “superior” choice.

I love to watch videos discussing choice of weapon or character. I love discussions about it, salt and all, even in games I don’t actually play! I think it’s the way these choices are conduits for personal expression, and it’s what makes games beautiful.

What Bridget’s Return has Taught Me About the Internet

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I’m no stranger to Guilty Gear or the yo-yo wielding Bridget: I cut my teeth on the character’s debut game, Guilty Gear XX, and I’ve seen both the unorthodox zoning and the particular internet notoriety garnered by Bridget’s feminine appearance and association with a certain term that implies an element of deception. I’m also one of the many surprised by Bridget’s return in the current Guilty Gear STRIVE—doubly so at the reveal that Bridget has gone from identifying as a boy (albeit one raised as a girl for superstitious reasons) to being a trans girl. Honestly, I never thought the games would make this decision, even accounting for the fact that another fighter, Testament, is nonbinary in STRIVE. 

However, the biggest shock of all to me was seeing some of the more negative reactions to Bridget’s loudly declaring herself to be a girl, specifically coming from a 4chan-derived crowd who worshiped Bridget as a “femboy” while simultaneously engaging in transphobic behavior. To them, Bridget being trans is a deep betrayal, or as one person summarized it, “their 9/11.”

I’ll be upfront in saying that I don’t really have an “interest” in Bridget, so this is not that type of personal matter to me. However, having seen the “Bridget worship” from all the way back in the day, I had always chalked up the caustic behavior of certain fans as a bit of self-deprecation mixed with slowly discovering their sexuality in a way that was psychically acceptable. While I never thought that being into Bridget automatically made you gay (attraction and sexuality are far more complex than that), I had assumed these people would like to see Bridget happy no matter what decision she made—and even then, the art of her wouldn’t have to substantially change. What I failed to take into account was the fact that bigoted fetishism is a thing, and that by extension, some use “femboy attraction” as a form of identity politics to rally against “wokeness.”

That was an oversight on my part. I know full well how fetishizing a group can risk dehumanizing them (though that’s not to say fetishes are inherently wrong). It also needs to be acknowledged that Bridget is a purely fictional character, which changes the dynamic compared to a real person. It does make me wonder, however, if affirming Bridget’s trans identity is somehow a breach of that plausible deniability that some had used to keep their contradictory beliefs afloat.

One thing I do worry about is how the politics of grievance seem to turn everything into a culture war, and that Bridget is going to be another front for harassment to occur, if it hasn’t happened already. Kudos to Arc System Works for being willing to take this risk, though. When it comes to updating their characters—be they straight, gay, cis, or trans, or anything else—Guilty Gear is unmatched.