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With Guilty Gear Strive having announced its full launch roster, our hopes have fallen on Character DLC for those of us whose mains didn’t make the launch cut. After all, Strive is but the latest in a long line of Guilty Gear games, with a selection of really cool characters all with their own unique gimmicks and playstyles.
In that spirit, we’ve put together our own wishlist of Guilty Gear Strive DLC characters. Please note this is all 100% speculation on our part, and is purely a list of what we want to see come into the game be it for cool gameplay reasons or just the joy of seeing our waifus on screen.
Here’s the disclaimer that there has been no official announcement of Guilty Gear Strive DLC characters, as we said. Pure speculation.
1.Kliff Undersn
Considering Strive’s slower pace compared to previous Guilty Gear games, Kliff has the potential to be a huge gamechanger to how players interact with the game. Gameplay-wise, he’s got a huge sword that allows him to do ridiculous damage, though at the risk of opening himself up if the enemy challenges his moves thanks to an extended hurtbox.
He’s also got a dreaded charge move, being able to do barbaric amounts of damage off of a single hit if you let him charge it enough. Since Strive already has a much higher damage output than previous Guilty Gear titles, the potential for Kliff to become an absolute beast with this move is a lot higher if he gets added to the game.
Of course, Kliff has his flaws too. For one lugging around that big sword means less mobility, a trait he’d share with Strive newcomer Nagoriyuki and roster mainstay Potemkin. The other is that he’s canonically dead in the Guilty Gear universe, so you’d have to put up with the barrage of questions on why he’s still around if you made his appearance non-canon similar to Order-Sol in +R.
Some might argue that Kliff has a spiritual successor in Sin Kiske, who also has long range normals along with a resource management element to it thanks to his own abilities. But there’s just no replacing the cool old man with a giant sword, and I think having a character solely limited by their raw difficulty rather than any secondary meters would be a nice addition to Strive.
2. Johnny
Look, man. Johnny is the coolest. He’s a cowboy samurai whose eyes are permanently obscured by sick shades. He pilots an airship. He’s somehow worked playing cards into his motif as well.
Johnny is literally the embodiment of everything someone in the early 2000s thought was cool that wasn’t already part of Sol Badguy and reincorporated into its own character. His signature move, Mist Finer, increases in power based off of how many of his limited coin projectiles he can throw at his opponent first. As a result he’s a great risk/reward character, since you very much can run out of coins and open yourself up with your lack of options.
Adding Johnny to the roster means adding another character players would need to really understand the matchup to deal with, since players would have to learn to be wary of his mist attack, which makes the next mist finer unblockable.
While Strive has generally stayed away from more setup heavy characters, it’s not like we don’t have a template to work off of- Granblue Fantasy Versus‘ Narmaya shares many moves in common with Johnny, down to the Mist Finer. He also very much adhere’s to Strive’s focus on counter-hits, since a lot of his moves would leave him wide open if used recklessly.
3. Elphelt Valentine
OK, let’s get several things off of my chest – one, I was an Elphelt main in Xrd Revelator 2. Two, the continued anger and frustration I see online from netizens begging to not let the guns-and-roses bunny wife into Strive makes me want her in the game for no reason outside of spite.
Elphelt is an absolute beast of a character, regularly dominating tierlists thanks to her variety of really great options, from her fast and powerful shotgun stance, her long range sniper stance and her grenade setups to keep up her offense. Her tradeoff for so many options is that she doesn’t have any good reversals- meaning that once things go bad for you, expect them to stay bad until the round ends.
To further add to frustrations, she’s also an airheaded waifubait character, going on a quest to find her perfect husband. Her appearance has made her popular enough to appear in mobile game Guilty Gear tie-ins, and her win screen in Xrd is just her rambling at a laughably high speed about her romantic fantasies.
Honestly, adding Elphelt would definitely require some type of rework, similar to fellow Valentine Ramlethal. If Arc System Works could do what they did with Ramlethal where they preserved the spirit of her fighting style while keeping the character new and fresh, I’m sure there’s a lot of fun to be had with Elphelt on the list.
Spite aside, I think it would be nice having Elphelt in specifically because she’s such an oppressive force. While Strive has definitely done its level best in reducing the importance of setup characters, I still think the idea of a variable-offense character like Elphelt would be a fun addition to the roster, especially after the latest story trailer showed off the other Valentine, Jack-O. C’mon, Arc System Works, don’t have Elphelt be the only Valentine missing from Strive.
So there you have it, our wishlist of Guilty Gear Strive DLC characters. Strive’s shift in focus really brings a lot of new possibilities to the game, since it’s no longer a lightning fast game like Xrd or +R. Still, the way they’ve redesigned some characters like Ramlethal definitely gives us hope that any character is still on the table, in a way that would make them feel true to the character’s original purpose while not breaking Strive too much.
