My feelings exactly. We need more fighting games on PC. Unfortunately, since BlazBlue is a cross-platform GFWL title, it will NEVER get a DRM-free release which is quite sad IMO.

Still, other titles like Skullgirls have me hyped for what we may get in the future.

I hate J-rock mostly so I play without music anyway :P The single worst aspect of GG for me. For me Mortal Kombat series have THE fighting game soundtracks.

Or maybe they changed the soundtrack so that now I can like it? (i'm not against japanese music in general of course, some anime series have awesome soundtracks, Death Note for example).

I just couldn't get into Mortal Combat. As far as I'm concerned, "3d" fighters begin and end with Soul Calibur. Tried the others, couldn't really get into 'em. Anyhow, I can't say I think that the soundtrack would now appeal to you if you didn't like the first. I'll agree that Death Note had an awesome soundtrack, as long as the soundtrack doesn't include the opener to the second season (pure fail, both "song" and the crappy intro video that made no sense at that point, but I digress).

The only reason I got into Guilty Gear as the game is one giant homage to metal/rock of other nationalities, from the move names (and characters) to the in-game songs themselves. Shoot, if memory serves one of the 2 victory endings for I-No has her play some Metallica on the guitar. Guilty Gear still strikes me as the only fighter where the soundtrack isn't an afterthought, it's the point, and the actual fighting element of the game doesn't suffer for it. As much as I like Soul Calibur, it's obvious that the franchise doesn't care about the soundtrack. Oh well.

Guilty Gear is a fairly complex fighter that does many things right (well did, prior to Accent Core; slash should have come out in America) that later games like BlazBlue still don't do, years later. I've also thought that guilty gear is more friendly to beginners (in terms of learning the game) than most all fighting games while still "scaling" for the seasoned players. I wish they'd brought out Arcana Heart 3 for PC, instead of just making it a PSN arcade only title. Playing the quasi-official PC port with 360 controllers is the way. After playing Guilty Gear on PC with an analog stick thanks to GOG I find it difficult to go back to the D-Pad on the DualShock. Which reminds me, I've been playing their Persona 4 fighting game, and I can't say I'm too impressed.

I really wish that modern fighting games had Full HD (1920*1080) graphics. Guilty Gear was made in the SD era on PS2 so I forgive it that, but modern games need to get with the program. Maybe the consoles can't run the latest and greatest FPSes at real 1080, but a couple of 2d sprites moving around? C'mon.

For me Mortal Kombat are 2d fighters. The only MK i know is 1-4 and 9. While the two of them are 3d, they basically play like 2d.

I actually LOVE the opener for the second season (much more than the second season itself, at least after the MAJOR plot twist). Maximum the Hormone are actually closer to the kind of metal I listen to. Yeah it's kind of silly, then again, for me, all the openers for anime are kind of silly, becouse J-rock is kind of silly, so I actually had to get used to the opener for the first season! :) But becouse I had to hear them every episode, Nightmare became one of the J-bands I can swallow actually, after I learned to take their image, vocals and lyrics with a pinch of salt.

Now I know why Slayer is Slayer :P Didn't strike me, probably becouse I was never a fan of classic metal. I listen more to modern metal, especially it's heaviest extremes like Meshuggah or Dillinger Escape Plan. Still in GG it's all played in a very japanese fashion, much different from the Western source material.

That's the reason I got into GG. And extremely silly Japanese character design with a strong WTF factor.

I think no fighting game is friendly for beginners. You have to memorize the moves, which takes work. If not, it becomes a pointless random button mash, that you get tired of after 1 minute playing. I think that MK games (those mentioned above) are the easiest to get hang of actually, becouse of their simplicity - in GG i was attacked in the face with all this roman cancels, kill moves, three different bars, different ways to block etc. etc.

J-songs have lyrics? lol, when did this happen? ;)

I didn't care much for the second intro video as the first one was high quality and had references to classic pieces of art and used them to tell the basic story of Death Note in about a minute. The second intro, for some reason, lacked all that fun stuff and featured L and Watari, who were gone (sadly) for the vast majority of the episodes with the 2nd intro. Coulda put some other characters in there. I don't see why they had the whole Watari sniper thing in there as I only remember him shooting once, and I think it was before the second intro even happened. Plus I really, really, really hated Mello and Near, so there's that. I think that Guilty Gear is more friendly for beginners when played against other beginners, as fighting games go. Each face button is an "attack" button, there are no "gimmick" buttons. There are also no arcane, unique-to-guilty gear fighting mechanics that you must know to play guilty gear. There's no "homing" mechanism like Arcana Heart, no "Persona" element like Persona 4 (making every character essentially Carl from BlazBlue...), or the whole tag-team element of MVC.

Guilty Gear also has an effective and easily-used Burst system. In MVC, for example, if you're hit into the infamous Sentinel aerial combo, you're screwed. In Guilty Gear, there's at least a chance of getting out of it. Just my feelings on the franchise as I found GG far easier to get into with my fighting game beginner friends than I did with Tekken and MVC, which were recommended by my fighting-game-expert friends.

Guilty Gear has little provision for noobs combating other noobs who use zoning characters, but I don't know of any game that does. Arcana heart kinda does, but that requires learning the game's homing system. While Guilty Gear has characters with different move priorities, it seems much less brutally different than other games, like Arcana. In Arcana, if you're a slower, zoning character, you're pretty screwed unless you're very skilled if a high-priority melee character gets up close. To me, metal is all about high-level heavy guitar playing. Most modern metal seems to put that "on the backburner" in favor of screaming vocals and droning double bass drum action. As such, I thought the soundtrack of Season 1 of Metalocalypse was far better than the ones for seasons 2,3, & 4 ;)

While there are some homages to classic metal (and Queen) in the music in Guilty Gear, a lot of it really reminds me of Joe Satriani's work. For example, I can kinda see the similarities between the Ky Kiske theme "Holy Orders: Be Just or Be Dead" and Iron Maiden's "Be Quick or Be Dead", but it's not ultra-obvious. I've also heard that the song is supposed to be a musical homage to MegaDeth's "Holy Orders...The Punishment Due" but I don't really hear that one.