The Game Awards 2021: Best Fighting Game Winner

Arguably the biggest mainstream achievement of Guilty Gear Strive was its innovative implementation of rollback netcode, which many praise as an excellent evolution for online fighting games as a whole. While continued gripes with Strive 's lobby design/matchmaking design are understandable, the actual mid-match gameplay experience online remains extraordinary, which has helped improve Strive 's staying power with fans. Other aspects of praise for Guilty Gear Strive was for its visual design, which was stylistically animated for a flashy and smooth aesthetic des


Of all the fighting game nominees for this year, it's clear that Guilty Gear Strive is the frontrunner for this category in nearly every regard. Guilty Gear as a series had become very popular with Guilty Gear Xrd and Rev 2 , and saw renewed success with the rollback update for Accent Core +R , but Guilty Gear Strive saw an explosion of popularity across the whole fighting game scene. Casual and competitive players, whether they were fans of the series or anime fighter newcomers, flocked to Stri


Generally speaking, anime arena fighters have never really been considered competitively deep experiences. Most of the time, these games are casual-oriented fighters that don't emphasize a high execution level from players. Much like the many Naruto and Dragon Ball 3D games before it, Demon Slayer -Kimetsu No Yaiba- The Hinokami Chronicles very much falls into the same categ


At the Game Devs of Color Expo 2021 , game designer Cam Perry held a panel discussing how bad games comes from games that are chasing the success of better titles. The panel, titled Bad Media Has Better Ideas , breaks down numerous examples within different forms of media on how one thing may inspire the creation of another. However, though the inspiration is there, without truly understanding what made the title good in the first place, the new creation is likely to fall into pitfalls during the course of development, resulting in a title underachieving compared to the lofty heights of the original. The development of Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl shows an understanding of its genre that Sony's brawler could not seem to gr

The name says it all. Jenny would like nothing more than a typical teenage life , but she must routinely combat aliens and other robots threatening her town. Thankfully, her scientist mom equipped her well against these potential targ


Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl Stars Championship includes plenty of characters to satiate fighting game fans. Many of these come from various points throughout the network 's history. That said, there's still ample room for m


Now, Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl throws its hat in the ring. Its mission is simple: bring several Nicktoons from past and present together for one royal rumble. It's easy to see the potential in that premise, and the result lays a fairly solid foundation for a series. Sadly, this initial outing inevitably comes with a few kinks in Nickelodeon All-Star Bra


By keeping itself in line with what had come before, Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl kept from falling into a pitfall of innovating for the sake of doing so, as PSABR had shown itself to do just that. Another title that had suffered a similar fate was Mighty No. 9 , Keiji Inafune's Kickstarter title meant to be a spiritual successor of Mega Man . Perry cited an issue with the game's built-in Dash mechanic used to defeat and absorb enemies, noting how the mechanic " felt weird " when used on bosses and indicating that it " felt like something that was just applied to all enemies " without checking the balance on the bosses as a result of the developer focusing on making something new without checking if this was needed. Perry also mentioned the Kickstarter goals, stating the game " promised too much and couldn't deliver on it " while also " losing sight of what it wanted to b


Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl showed an intrinsic understanding of the Super Smash Bros. formula from the onset. All-Star Brawl's character moveset reveals leaned into the utility of the moves, showcasing them in a manner that players both familiar and unfamiliar with fighting games could grasp. The biggest hint of GameMill's understanding, however, comes from the in-depth explanations with terms such as zoning and wavedashing being used to describe the techniques. The use of such terminology showed a fundamental identification with the genre right down to some more advanced techniques, assuring players that the characters would feel balanced around those techniques in ways similar to Smash Br


What a pleasant surprise that the game includes faces from throughout Nick's history . Players can expect to see fighters from The Wild Thornberrys , CatDog , Danny Phantom , the Avatar shows, and even Ren & Stimpy . Not only does this avoid recency bias, but it also means nostalgic parents might want to play the game with their k


Wielding that mundanity against the wackier Nicktoons can create an amusing contrast. His vacuum cleaner might absorb fighters and fire them back out; his toilet plunger could double as a sword. Exercise some of the same demented imagination as the cult classic show, and even the little guy can triumph in his own