During today’s Guilty Gear Official Livestream, Arc System Works unveiled the latest addition to Guilty Gear Strive‘s roster: a new character called Giovanna.
Giovanna fights with a combat style that appears to be very kick-oriented, like a Guilty Gear twist on Kim Kaphwan from The King of Fighters. She’s also joined by a green wolf-like spirit who seems to fight by her side at all times (rather than being independently controlled, like Zato=1’s Little Eddie or Chaos’ lizard pet in Under Night In-Birth). Arc System Works described Giovanna as a character who’s easy for beginners to pick up, so her being a puppet character seems unlikely.
The trailer ended with a tease for (presumably) the next character reveal: Anji Mito, who hasn’t been playable in a Guilty Gear game since Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus R. I don’t know if Anji’s one of Guilty Gear‘s most popular characters, but he certainly has his dedicated fans—myself included—so it’s good to see him back in the spotlight. The next trailer is scheduled for 1 January 2021, though, so we’ll have to wait a bit to see his official announcement.
Guilty Gear Strive will include 15 characters at launch. There are 13 characters announced so far: Sol Badguy, Ky Kiske, Chipp Zanuff, Axl Low, May, Potemkin, Faust, Millia Rage, Zato=1, Ramlethal, Leo Whitefang, Nagoriyuki, and now Giovanna. Assuming Anji takes the 14th spot, there’s still one more spot to fill and a lot of great potential candidates from Guilty Gear‘s history.
Guilty Gear Strive is planned for release in early 2021 for PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, PC, and arcade. In a first for the series, it will include rollback-based netcode, an approach to latency mitigation that’s generally considered better than the delay-based netcode seen in many games, including Guilty Gear Xrd.