GUILTY GEAR PETIT
Original Release: Sammy, 2001, WonderSwan
The Guilty Gear series gets its own "Super Gem Fighter"-style munchkin entry, exclusive to the WonderSwan
Guilty Gear Petit (Sammy, WonderSwan, 2001)
Where to Buy: eBay
How to Emulate: coming soon!
Review by: C. M0use
The Guilty Gear series started in the CD-ROM era of gaming, so it immediately established a lot of its appeal on its rockin soundtrack and cool detailed character designs. Obviously not the strong point of the Wonderswan, which leaves one wondering why exactly Sammy was keen to do this version.
The best answer I can come up with is "just to get the Guilty Gear name on another platform while it was hot," because there isn't much other explanation for this product. It's hardly terrible; if it had come out in the Game Boy era it would have been quite OK and serviceable by those standards. But this came out literally just weeks ahead of the Game Boy Advance, which upped the handheld bar such that this sort of munchkin fighter was almost immediately obsolete.
Some other "super deformed" fighters added little new modes and touches to make them more interesting, but GG Petit really doesn't even bother with that. It's just a straight but stripped-down re-imagining of the bigger console games. You get an initial playable roster of just six characters, with one unlockable (Jam Kuradoberi ... fun to say) and seemingly some unlockable palette swaps. It does have multiplayer and a practice mode, but otherwise there's just a very simple story mode where you fight all the other characters once and get an extremely basic ending.
Unlocking characters is quite easy, as the game is quite easy. With only two buttons available, attacks are greatly simplified and it's easy to launch into combos ... the computer also just doesn't fight very well at any stage of the game. Having not played a Guilty Gear game in years, and having zero prior knowledge of Millia Rage, I just cruised right through with her winning literally every round on my first game. Then similarly cruised through with Jam just to see what else would unlock.
While it's fundamentally solid enough, I can't see anyone being interested in this except the most hardcore Guilty Gear maniacs that have to see absolutely everything the series had to offer. It does offer one draw in that sense, as it has a unique character named Fanny that only ever appeared on the Wonderswan. But otherwise you just get sometimes non-flattering SD characters (Sol Badguy looks like a bootleg Akuma with a sword), not-great chiptunes versions of the CD tracks, and really no challenge whatsoever.
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