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.

"I guess you guys aren't ready for that yet. But your kids are gonna love it."
-Guilty Gear 2: Overture reception through the years summarized

I only played the story mode so far and i'm glad that they didn't just decide to erase it from existence. A lot of modern Guilty Gear's story is based on things introduced in this game. Artistically, this game is really cool, and if that's enough to make a game worth buying then you will probably like it :]

Also I think Izuna should come back. Even if he's just in the background or something. please ArcSys <3

genuinely i don't know how to describe this game cause its like league of legends but also devil may cry but also guilty gear. Its so weird, never have i had a more confusing gaming experience. Its both awesome, mid, and dogshit all at the same time literally how did they do that

izuna is so attractive. i need him so bad. ive never been more attracted to a character than when i first saw izuna. hes gorgeous. hes funny. and hes a furry. whats not to love in this gorgeous, breathtaking, jawdropping, eye widening, heart throbbing man. i want to get him pregnant

This is by far my favorite guilty gear game and i heard its also the creator more or less his actual vision of the game,and i recommend it to anyone who doesn't know what game to play for now.