Guilty Gear XX Accent Core review (PlayStation 2)

Otherwise, the game has a handful of other extras that Guilty Gear fans will appreciate, such as the ability to unlock original versions of the game's characters (with their original abilities and attacks) from the previous Guilty Gear and Guilty Gear XX games. It also includes an art gallery, a single-player arcade mode, a training mode, and two different single-player survival modes, standard and "Medal of Millionaire," the latter of which occasionally rewards successful attacks with bonus items and health-replenishing pickups. Medal of Millionaire is perhaps a bit easier to go through because of the pickups, but all this stuff is pretty straightforward single-player content you'd expect from a modern console fighting game. As with pretty much any fighting game, Accent Core is at its best when played competitively against real people.

Accent Core also offers a new coat of paint with new backgrounds to fight on and new voice-overs for its characters. The backgrounds themselves look just fine; they're colorful and interesting, but they aren't so cluttered or busy that they distract you from the action. The new sound samples and backgrounds add some welcome new window dressing, though Accent Core, like the other games in the series, is still all about keeping an eye on your character and your opponent during the fight. Accent Core reuses the same 2D sprites for its characters, as well as many of the special effects, that have appeared in other games. The characters are still very colorful and still very distinctively weird, and though some are better-animated than others, Accent Core looks pretty good.

These days, you really don't have many choices when it comes to new 2D fighting games for your home consoles, but Guilty Gear XX Accent Core should offer enough action and variety for most fans of this sort of game. If you're new to the series, you may be taken aback by just how strange its characters are, as well as by the twitchy, fast-paced gameplay dominated by long strings of combination attacks. Nevertheless, you'll get used to it quickly enough. If you're a Guilty Gear veteran, you'll probably find enough to like about Accent Core to make it worth your while, too.