GUILTY GEAR 2 -OVERTURE-

This one's good i promise.
daisuke has a lot of vision for his stupid ass games. so the year is 2006, and this dude i mean he's losing his mind after building these horrible fighting games with nonsense plot for a decade because he can, being an immensely gifted composer, traditional painter, director, animator designer the works. only for the majority of the rights to his original characters to be taken away in a custody battle.
In his hubris he decides that, having done minimal design for 3d games in his youth, on like a random tennis game and fairly unknown mech game, the next logical step for guilty gear, or what remains of it, will be a mixture of a dynasty warriors game, an anime fighter and warcraft 3. With declining staff on board, amid a continuously declining economy on weird next gen hardware, this garbage saga continues in guilty gear 2: overture, completely disregarding the scope, naming conventions, and most of the existing lore for that matter; begrudginly, the series continues.
Consider also, that this is a moba that precedes league of legends, in a way it dons an important legacy in the space of competitive games despite having never been spoken of in the same sentence as its contemporaries. Personally i'm only interested in the campaign. It is shit, full stop, its one of those tutorial campaigns that teaches you how to play the game online with all 20 of daisuke's unwavering apostoles. Its also a lot of fun, it threads a fine line between being, original, inventive, visionary for its time, a formative step to a genre that ended up playing absolutely nothing like a simple series game despite arcsys' prehistoric footprints on the moba genre.
See, you give a man an xbox 360 devkit and he goes insane with power, he renders 600 characters in a room at once and fills the screen with explosions, the hardware, with 500 mbs of ram and 3 core cpu expectedly, chugs and you can visibly tell by the timer taking 3 seconds to count down 1 second, his adhd brain doesn't care; he thinks instead, there needs to be a level where you run around a sea of blood like a freigh train, tokyo drifting around explosions trying to catch up to a mech too large to fit on a screen.
In over a decade of development and ballooning revenue league of legends has never matched the heights of glue sniffing gameplay that overture did in, at most 2 years of its making. (possibly less, the previous game to this was released in 2006) Idk what they put in the yen that motivates japanese men to sleep in their offices writing this bullshit when it keeps going down in value.
And yes the story is nonsense, its completely canon and infact some of the most important scenes to the series are shown in this game, featuring at most 2 pre existing characters + dizzy who due to legal reasons had to be frozen on ice and can only be referred to as mommy and 'the maiden of the forest' in quotation marks. As is the tradition with guilty gear, the story only transpires in drawn out scenes of characters standing in place explaning made up sci fi rules that smuggle music theory terminology in some nebulous attempt to explain why sol has to kill his wife again, meanwhile ky is a father trying to reconnect with his family in an increasingly discriminatory political climate, an emotional turmoil he's left to discuss with a furry cat man and a dragon in a hamster ball, "sega sammy owns the rights to my wife" he mutters, dr paradigm however, suggests they kill her. Truthfully something that could only ever be penned from the heart.
Other highlights of overture are the horrendous stealth section, there's this level where you have to run around a rainbow road type racetrack, there's all the boss fights which unfortunately don't withstand more than a single super move a piece, yet feature some of daisuke's most career defining music.
In this sense it differs a lot from contemporary rts offerings; warcraft 3, sengoku basara, one has these lengthy campaigns with fully fleshed out plots for each playable character, the other was episodic and reiterated upon with each game and this could have very well been the intention for overture, it was a valiant attempt at exploring unconventional game design concepts like capturing towers with combos and investing money to super several times in a row.
Anyhoo critics fucking hated this game, it was eaten alive by the press for being a confusing obtuse and undecipherable mess, it had no advertising and saw moderate success, it is not remembered by most 360 owners, needless to say guilty gear's venture into strategy games was bright but short, it had a wonderful future ahead of itself where it could have shared the throne of ludic louvre with games like earth defense force and armored core but arcsys sought to instead continue its kusoge fighting game legacy through blazblue, they would eventually recover the rights to daisuke's characters and guilty gear 2 overture would never be spoken of again. I think anyone who suffers from lead poisoning or who has repeated exposure to gas leaks owes it to themselves to try this game.

BUY IT WHEN IT'S ON SALE!!!
you can Definitely tell it's an xbox360 game, and Yes it has problems at times with running properly (on win11 at least,) BUT it has a ton of lore that's important to the series and is just REALLY FUN and charming to me.
i love this game and all it's flaws. it goes on sale for super cheap now and then. please please please get it.

Guilty gear 2 -OVERTURE- is certainly a game I installed onto my computer and booted up.
Joking aside it's a very unique concept for a game but was a bit too ahead of it's time, I imagine if it released nowadays it would probably have a fanbase

(This review is written from the perspective as someone whos only played this games story mode)
I actually really like this game, i thought that it'd be much less of a product than i was getting when i first bought it. The first seven missions are some of the least fun ive had in my entire life, with weird enemies that arent to fight and a zone control game mode that turns it from an action game to a strategy game which i wasnt a fan of, although after the first seven missions it doesnt make another appearance except for another mission where its a much more enjoyable time,
The controls are similar to the dmc games in how you lock on and then use simple directional inputs like back or forward to determine what moves you use, the combat can be very fun and for the most part it is, but, the combat is too clunky, a lot of moves dont flow together very well (atleast on sol who you play as most of the story), the worst case of the clunky combat is how long you arent really able to move after you input some moves, you do the move and then youre left sitting there for much longer than you should be, although i think if this game were made today my issues listed might not even exist.
This games music is phenomenal and of the entries that i've played (strive,xrd2 and +r) it is very easily my favourite soundtrack and the designs are top notch at virtually every corner (ky's sucks), sol, sin, izuna, paradigm, valentine its banger after banger after banger with these things and the art style is amazing especially of the sprites with sol and sin's being my favourites.
I actually ended up liking the story quite a bit, the characters have some very fun interactions and even some well written scenes i feel, Sol and That Man's interactions making for some of the best, Valentine falls flat for me but makes up with it for her significance to sol.
The most surprising thing to me when playing this game was the voice acting, i think that just about every character is given great voice actors (especially sin and that man with yuri lowenthal) that deliver amazing performances.
This game also houses some amazing boss fights with amazing scores, the three best being Sin,That Man and Valentine's second boss fight, withh Valentine mark 2 being one of my favourite fights not just in its music but in spectacle aswell, truly a great game and i would love to see a game like this return as a future (spinoff) title

More of an interesting artifact of a genre branch that never was than a good game. Still worth checking out for historical value and for just being a weird game

there are about 5 cool missions in this game - about 3 of those are fun. if we are being honest though, nobody is here to worry about that. we are here to admire valentine's absurdly hard fit, complete with giant hat and lucifero balloon, and to hear sol badguy say things like "heralds of destruction", "gear sublimation", and "ky, i want you to kiss me on the mouth". this game probably does need a better pc port, but whatever i'm mostly glad it got one at all.

tldr: strange but fun (mileage may vary), campaign bad, multiplayer good, try on sale
most people view this as the weird cousin to the other guilty gears (most people can't agree on what genre it is), usually only seeing it for the campaign that's arguably the worst part of the game
the campaign tries to function as both a self sufficient game and a tutorial for the multiplayer of this game, it is not the greatest at either of these jobs (the best beginner tutorial is probably just reading the in-game notes and practicing against bots)
but other than that, this game is a truly unique multiplayer experience where you must master combining control of your character with the ordering of your troops to take over the field (learn how to blast drive and use the organ!)
the online is surprisingly functional even across seas as long as you have a stable connection (just watch out for crashes and glitches! this game really doesn't like being open too long!)
join the discord community if you're interested:
i recommend giving it a shot when the game is on sale (which is very often!) as i believe the full price tag may be hard to stomach when this game really isn't for everyone