Ready? Fight! How Guilty Gear -Strive-‘s approach to fighting game animations lend themselves to character appeal.

Abstract: This paper’s goal was to understand how the fighting game animations in the video game Guilty Gear -Strive- lent themselves to their characters appeal, by looking how the animations are built up to be a good quality for a more interesting character based on the character background. The paper aids to help designers find relevant information for the creation of animations for a greater player enjoyment of its characters in a fighting game. This was done by choosing three characters with different speed classes in terms of their design and official marketing for the video game, as well as three attacks that were analyzed by looking at its consisting frames divided into sixty frames per second. The paper finds relevant information and good practices to enhance the appeal of a fighting game character to better represent their characteristics. We find that bigger visual effects such as big explosions or shockwaves are good for stronger characters while the use of faster movements using methods of slow in and slow out and timing are good for making faster characters more appealing, anticipation of attacks are also important while the specific use of the anticipation frames can give different feelings even if they are equally long where acrobatic characters use it for building momentum and stronger characters use them to charge up by pulling their body back.