GGST Dual Rulers: Is It Any Good?

GGST Dual Rulers: Is It Any Good?

Hey gamers, Gecko here. As of today, Guilt Gears Drive Dual Rulers is finished. The final episode has come out on Crunchyroll and you can go and watch it now. If you’re someone who like to binge shows in their entirety after they’re finished, there you go. Eight episodes, all about 20ish minutes long, right up there for you to go and watch and enjoy. But if you are someone who’s been holding themselves off or even someone who’s been watching it as it airs, you may have heard a couple of mixed things about it. It’s safe to say the reputation of the show has been mixed. A lot of people have a lot of problems with it, but I haven’t been talking about it too much. And we all know that the people that you should listen to are people with bigger numbers than others. He have big YouTube number that mean his opinion important. We’re so [ __ ] So, what do I think of as someone who is a massive fan of Guilty Gear? Well, it’s definitely a show. I’m not really good when it comes to reviewing media. The only show that I’ve ever reviewed was the DMC anime, and I had a lot of passionate things to say about it. And while I am more passionate about Guilty Gear than any other media property, it’s not as easy this time because the show is not blatantly terrible. Is it good? I think that depends on your perspective. For me, I genuinely really liked it. But I am also a pretty hardcore Guilty Gear fan. I play Strive very regularly. I’ve played the other games quite a lot. I’ve gone back and found all the spin-offs of Guilty Gear that I could play. While I wasn’t raised on this franchise, it is one that I love dearly. Hell, I pay my own money to go to different countries in order to compete in Guilty Gear games. I know quite a decent bit about the law. I try to follow on with any new developments and I keep myself up to date with everything Guilty Gear I can. And for me, this show pandas to me. If there is one positive I can give about the show, for me specifically, it absolutely [ __ ] loves Guilty Gear fans. There are things in the show that reference everything across Guilty Gear. Not just Strive. I’m talking characters from GG2, from Exod, from XX. This show loves Guilty Gear. All of the voice actors are the same from the video game. All of the characters act like how you would expect them to in law. You learn a decent amount about several of the characters. It’s great. If you already love Guilty Gear, you’re going to love the show. If you’re not a Guilty Gear fan, though, you’re probably going to have a bit of a different experience. Without going into spoilers, there are several times the show will literally just stop to give you background knowledge on characters and devices within the world. Every time a character is introduced at the start, it does this thing where the camera zooms out, it says their name like you would see in their character trailer, and it gives you a small amount of backstory about who they are. I didn’t really mind it because it gives me someone who knows these characters pretty well, a moment to point and do the wjack face cuz, oh, oh, Johnny’s here. I know Johnny. And it lets me live in that moment for a second. The problem is the descriptions they give are extremely brief and a lot of these characters are quite complex. I watched the show with a couple of friends after watching the episodes as they were airing. We haven’t finished it yet. We’re going to be finishing on about Monday or Tuesday. Probably Monday. We’ll see. But there was several times where I would have to give them additional information about who these characters were and why they are like the way they are. For example, Elfel and Raml would show up and I had to explain that they’re Valentine’s and that obviously led to the question of what’s a Valentine. I didn’t expect the show to be able to explain all of this in just eight episodes, but there is still a lot of context that it kind of just expects you to know about. Nothing that would massively impact the show, but enough that some people will be left a little bit confused. One thing I have heard basically everyone agree on though, when the show goes ham on the animation, [ __ ] me, it is good. The biggest criticism I had of Strive’s in-game story mode is the fact that the fights weren’t there. If you’ve never played the Strive story mode, there’ll be moments where a fight is about to break out or it’s implied that a fight’s going to happen and we don’t see it. We see the conclusion of the fight or we see a couple of still stiff frames where the models try to do something. It’s very obvious that this was a time and budget restriction because they had to make the whole Strive game, but it was still quite annoying. This show though, no problems. None at all. not even close to having any issues like that. Most of the time when an action scene is happening, it is well animated and extremely well choreographed. For the most parts, the fights are easy to understand what’s going on, easy to track with your eyes, and even show the characters in different lights. Several people have pointed out that the way that Soul fights is very accurate to how he fights in game, and they even add on to that. He doesn’t fight like a well-trained knight. He scraps. He slugs. He throws his body weight around wildly and just constantly goes for haymakers because he’s not a fighter. He’s a scientist and the show knows that. Both Johnny and Bikon have moments where they really lean into the samurai fantasy of who they are. They both have attacks where they go through several opponents and sheath their sword and they fall down and it’s it’s really cool. All right, every character is very wellfed if they’re in the anime. The visuals aren’t always 100%. I don’t want to spoil anything, but in some of the later episodes, there are times where it seems like they’re running out of budget or they just didn’t have the time to really flesh out these fights. and we get still frames with dramatic zooms over them. It’s a technique used a lot in older animes, but during an intense fight, it’s a little distracting. I’ll talk more about it in the spoiler section, though, don’t worry. Now, while I think the action in the show is very good, the plot itself is uh it’s not the greatest plot in anime history, I wouldn’t say it’s the worst. There’s no direct massive gaping holes in the plot. It’s just a little bit weird and a little bit generic. There’s things that you could absolutely point at and go this is weird or doesn’t make a lot of sense. And while you could nitpick it until there’s enough holes that it looks like Swiss cheese, I don’t really want to do that. It feels like they were really focusing more on the typical action side. It’s very much a show where if you turn your brain off, you’re going to have a good time. But if you really think about the plot and think about the villain’s plan for a couple of minutes, it’s not the best. But again, we’re not in the spoiler section yet, so we’ll get more into that later. Finally, I wanted to touch on the pacing of the show. In the first video I made for this where I said that Dual Rulers was out, I said that the pacing was really fast, and it kept that pacing for the majority of the anime. I really thought it was going to slow down, but no, it’s been break neck ever since the first episode. While that means a lot happens in each episode, it can be quite jarring at times. The anime never really has a chance to sit and stew and let you really process the things that have happened in the plot. You maybe get half an episode of downtime before the next major action sequence. There’s like one episode in the middle of the anime where the characters are allowed to just sit and talk and figure out what their next plan is. But even then, with just that one break in the whole thing, it feels [ __ ] fast. This does lead to a pretty big problem though. Anytime the show has to introduce something from the Guilty Gear law, you feel like someone has slammed on the brakes as the narrator shows up. It can feel very stop and starty, like a driver stalling a car while trying to figure out how to actually move it. While it’s not the worst pacing I’ve ever experienced, it can be a little bit annoying, especially when you know these things and just kind of want to get it to the next thing that happens. And that’s as much as I can talk about without going into spoilers. If you want my final score, skip to this part of the video. If not, and you are either okay with me talking about a couple of the later episodes or you’ve seen the anime yourself, let’s get into the spoiler section. So, obviously with the anime coming out, they wanted to use this as a chance to introduce us to Unika, who’s the character that’s coming out in Strive in like 2 days. And while I think it’s definitely gotten us acquainted with Unikica and has shown us kind of what she can do, it’s not really given us a lot about her character. Her background, do not get me wrong, we know a lot about that, but the actual character of Unikica, I feel, is a little bit lacking. I’m not saying this because I think she’s poorly written. I think she’s just put in a situation where she’s really not allowed to express herself. For the majority of the anime, she’s forced to be a porn in someone else’s scheme. And because of that position that she’s in, she’s not really able to show her personality traits. A lot of it is just basically her saying yes to whatever the big bad evil guy is trying to tell her to do. It’s fine for the anime, but I also don’t know like a core personality trait of Unikica. I know that she’s the daughter of Kai and Dizzy and she’s pretty [ __ ] traumatized, but beyond that, we didn’t really get that much. I’m excited to see what they actually do in Strive when it comes to her arcade mode, her voice lines, and her interactions and stuff, but the actual anime itself, it didn’t really do the best job. I think this is more of an issue because of the way that the anime is paced as well. Going back to that stalling issue, it really feels like they’re trying to cram as much stuff into the show as they possibly can, but they know that the general anime audience won’t understand it, and it gets really annoying. I think like the first five episodes are generally well built up. There’s times where it stops and be like, “Okay, this is a thing that soul bad guy has. This is a device he made and he’s able to use it this way.” It’s like, “Okay, cool.” And then we go again and it’s like, “Okay, this is Jacko. Her name’s Jacko.” And you’re like, “Okay, I mean, okay, this is Alfelt.” And it’s like, “Okay, [ __ ] okay.” But it’s generally fine. Things are introduced and explained enough that you can kind of follow on. And even then, some of the things that need to be explained are explained in universe through the story, which is all right. I also think episode 5 is kind of just where the anime peaks. There’s a lot of weird threads throughout the whole show that don’t quite make sense. And then we get to episode 5 and suddenly it all clicks into place and makes sense for about one episode. It’s really nice. It’s really cool. But past that, it feels like the anime really starts rushing. Like they know where they want the story to go. They know what they want the final sequence to be. They know what they want the final fight to be. But they only have two episodes to get there. and it feels really really rushed because of it. And this is where we get on to one of the like major faults of the anime. There’s just several plot points that appear and then get dropped a couple episodes later or they just sort of get deusex markered away from everything. For example, episode 6 ends on a a pretty big cliffhanger. Like everything is kind of [ __ ] at the end of the episode. Things are not going well. And then we start episode 7 and the issue is over in like 2 minutes. We get a small recap. We get the intro and we literally get a deosex mark and a laser beam and the issue is resolved for now and we can go on to the next part of the anime. And it’s like if this was the only time that this ever happened in the show, I’d be fine with it. But there’s a bunch of other ones like this. I still think the funniest one to me is when Elfelt gets nuked, elf gets [ __ ] laser beamed on, Gold Lewis spends 50 meter and Elfelt gets disintegrated off the face of the planet and then two episodes later she’s fine. She literally disappears for an episode and a half and then shows back up and she’s completely fine. It’s just kind of annoying. It’s just kind of weird. And sometimes it feels like they didn’t go back and change drafts or they realized they had to tie up a plot point and just did it in the most lazy way possible. Like Axel’s in the show to basically explain the time travel. It makes sense. If there’s time travel in a Guilty Gear thing, Axel’s probably going to be there just because he’s a time traveler. But there’s also a bit where it’s shown that the events that happen are on a predetermined course and Axel shows up and just goes, “Ah, since I’m here, the future must have changed.” And disappears. And it’s like, “So why did you have the predetermined bit earlier? What What was the point? You just wanted us to know that Axel was safe. Is that it?” I will also say despite the cast being pretty large, it’s very obvious that they wanted to add a couple of characters and weren’t able to for whatever reason. Someone on the animation or storyboarding team [ __ ] loves Testament. I I cannot express how many times Testament shows up in the anime and doesn’t have a single line. It’s genuinely really funny. It started getting to the point where when things would happen, I’d be like, “When’s Testament going to show up?” And they would almost always show up. But it does also lead to a couple of weird awkward situations where characters should really be in places when they’re just not. For example, there’s a seminar in the United States of America that gets attacked and Gold Lewis and Gio are nowhere to be seen. the president’s personal bodyguard and the secretary of defense are not there and they’re not even they’re not even mentioned. They’re not shown. They’re not waved off. They’re just not there. And it’s really weird. There’s a bit where Johnny says, “We can use my ship for this expedition.” And it’s not the M ship. And it would make sense if it’s like, “Oh, they just didn’t have the time to model it, so they just have to model something smaller.” but it’s made in Blender. I don’t know if this is 100% confirmed, but I’m pretty sure they’re using the models from the games with just different shaders on them. People have been able to recreate the style of Dual Rulers by changing a couple of things in Blender, and they’ve said the show was made in Blender, so why didn’t they just put the model of the Mhip it like they they have it. It’s been in other things. It’s not like they didn’t want to put the jellyfish pirates because May and April show up at the end of the anime. Speaking of the end of the anime, I was watching it with a friend and she got really annoyed because obviously at the ending Kai and Dizzy finally get married and everyone everyone’s wearing white. Apparently that’s mad disrespectful. I I didn’t know that. But basically everyone in that scene is wearing at least something white, if not a full white outfit. I promised her I’d say that. So, you’re welcome. It feels like the show was overly ambitious. It feels like they really wanted to make this the best that they could, but they ran into budget or time constraints. And I think there’s a really good thing that shows this. And I think episode 7 shows this the best. You may have seen on Twitter or whatever of a social media site you use, there are several moments where a big fight is happening and then a still appears of just an attack that the character would do. And it happens quite a bit. It’s really apparent with Ramlfall and Lfelt because they’ll do this big cinematic move and then there’ll just be pans and stills sort of just like yeah you you know what’s going on. And while it is a bit of a buzzkiller, especially cuz every action scene before that has been really well animated, I think it shows that they were running out of resources near the end. Obviously, shows aren’t made linearly. They don’t animate episode 1, then episode 2, then episode 3. A lot of teams working on all the different episodes at all the same time, but I do think the action scenes for this episode were forced to be cut so that the budget could be redistributed for the rest of the anime. And I think that’s fine. I really think the people who made this wanted to make it as good as they could and they ran into some sort of issue and that’s what we got because of it. I’d rather we get the show and the animators get to see their family rather than having it be a perfectly animated amazing show. You know, it already looks amazing and I can’t knock something for being overly ambitious. Saying something tried too much just doesn’t feel like a negative to me. I really think they shot for the moon with this anime. I really, really think they did. Do I think they nailed the landing? No. But I could never knock them for trying. And they definitely tried. The last episode has some really out there stuff in it. A couple of the visuals that happen are very strange. Like there’s bits where it feels like I’m looking at an Earthbound fan mod rather than a Guilty Gear anime. The shots that they do are [ __ ] surreal. It’s It’s awesome. It’s It’s genuinely really sick. I liked it. I enjoyed the anime. So, overall conclusions, they tried They tried really, really, really hard. I think the show has quite a few issues that can’t necessarily be ignored. And while me, someone who is very invested in Guilty Gear, did really enjoy himself, I don’t think I can necessarily recommend this to everyone, which is a shame. I would have liked this to be something that could get people into Guilty Gear, but it is what it is. I would rather take a show that is pandering to me and making me feel rewarded for knowing as much as I do about this franchise than something that goes off in a completely other direction. And while I think the pacing issues can be annoying, it never feels like they’re doing it maliciously. They either just ran into bumps in the road or they ran out of time and budget. I’m more than happy to give them the benefit of the doubt on this one. If you want a final score, it’s a 6 out of 10. It’s above average for me. I had a really good time with it, but I can’t say that it’s the best thing that I’ve ever watched. I’ll probably watch it again at some point. Like, I had a fun time with it, but I’m not having a clamor in to go back and see it all very quickly, which is funny cuz I’ll be watching it again very soon. Considering how most video game media goes, hell yeah, I’ll take this. If you’re a fan of Gillig Gear, go watch it. If you’re not a fan, but you like cool fights and you like cool animated sequences and don’t mind turning your brain off when it comes to plot stuff, yeah, maybe go give it a shot. If you really like a good story, maybe give it a miss. Yeah, that’s my thoughts. What do you guys think? Let me know down in the comment section below. I really want to hear people’s thoughts on this anime because I’ve been hearing a lot of different stuff. So, I kind of want to hear what people who are really invested in Guilty Gear and maybe people who aren’t that interested actually have to say. I imagine if you’re not that into Guilty Gear, you’re probably not going to like it. But even then, I’ve seen people who are really into Strive say they just don’t like the show, which I’m excited to hear about. Have a good night, everybody. See you around. [Music]

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0:00 Overview
9:20 Spoilers
18:52 Final Thoughts