’Guilty Gear Strive: Dual Rulers’ premiere review: “Ceremony”

Video games and anime go pretty well hand in hand, but never as much as Guilty Gear Strive: Dual Rulers. Visually, the game is just as if I was playing my PS5 copy of Strive in real time. Narratively, I’m just as overwhelmed as I am trying to understand the game’s lore while playing. This is one of those series that’s really for the fans, and I kind of loved its first episode because of that.

This one goes out to the fans.

Guilty Gear is filled to the brim with long running lore, and Dual Rulers makes only minimum effort to explain any of it. Most of its world runs parallel to ours — though the inclusion of the United States is practically hopepunk at this point — but the discovery of magic leads to the creation of bio-weapons called “Gears.”

Dual Rulers is set long after the massive war between humanity and Gears as the parents of protagonist Sin Kiske (Issei Miyazaki) use their marriage to improve the relations between the two groups. There’s a lot of political impact from this, leading Sin to depart with his mentor Sol Badguy (Jouji Nakata) to track down an assassin that attacked them.

Folks, Guilty Gear lore makes Kingdom Hearts read like Steinbeck. It’s kind of incredible.

Looks like the game – in a good way.

While those who have never played the game are going to have a lot of questions, the confidence does give Guilty Gear Strive: Dual Rulers a very efficient opening episode. Despite introducing no less than 7 core characters complete with title cards and most of which are fighters from the game, the episode flows pretty well. That’s a credit to the staff of SANZIGEN Inc.

The team, led by director Shigeru Morikawa, has done a fantastic job replicating the gorgeous design work that developer Arc System Works put into Guilty Gear Strive. However, the anime never commits so much to being a recreation that it compromises itself. There’s plenty of fluid animation and scene composition that the game doesn’t really get into. They’re using the same visual design aesthetic but are leveraging their medium properly.

Naturally, being a fighting game adaptation means the fights have to look good and while hardcore fans aren’t going to get 1:1 recreations of the game’s faceoffs, SANZIGEN does manage to replicate the bombast that Strive’s combat offers. While it may not be the best fight of the season, much less the year, this action looks great. It’s exciting enough to overcome the confusion of the greater lore and keep focus on the basics: an attack on a political family leads that family’s son on a quest to find out why.

Rewarding fans can still make for good anime for everyone else.

Guilty Gear Strive: Dual Rulers gets off to a very good start in episode one. There’s not a lot of interest in onboarding new fans to the narrative. That might make it difficult to stay on the train as the series continues, but the actual production is strong enough so far to compensate. Even with dense lore, the basics are there and Guilty Gear is cool enough on the aesthetic level that this one is worth keeping eyes on.

Guilty Gear Strive: Dual Rulers airs Saturdays on Crunchyroll.

Featured images © ASW/Project GUILTY GEAR STRIVE DR

Travis Hymas

Travis Hymas is a freelance writer and self appointed Pokémon historian out of Salt Lake City, Utah. Known to be regularly obessive over pop culture topics, gaming discourse, and trading card games, he is a published critic featured on sites such as Uppercut and The Young Folks.