Regardless of recent reports that Daisuke Ishiwatari and Toshimichi Mori are considering a new Guilty Gear title, a recent interview with Eurogamer has revealed that it is nowhere near their top priority. When asked “whatever happened to Guilty Gear?” Ishiwatari responded that Guilty Gear was a problem because it became too hardcore for most gamers. In fact, it became too hardcore for hardcore fighting game fans. That’s why so many fans flocked to Capcom fighters instead.

Ishiwatari said that Guilty Gear needed a reset in order to lower the level of entrance. That reset was Blazblue. New characters, new mechanics, slower combos, and simplified systems make Blazblue easier to get into but just as complex to master.

Ishiwatari also stated that Guilty Gear isn’t on the top of their priority list because the fan base for Guilty Gear has grown up. The original generation of hardcore Guilty Gear players have moved on from the fighting game scene. A great example is the legendary Mike Z who is now making his own fighting game, Skullgirls. Since the old generation of fighters has gotten a bit too old for the games they loved, the reset to Blazblue ushered in a new generation of fighting game fanatics while still allowing the old greats to test their strength. These new fanatics will stay with the scene for years to come until they too grow up and move on and the pattern repeats itself.

It’s important to get fanatics into your fighting game because, according to Mori, fighting games will never be accessible enough for everyone to play. Why? Because the majority of casual gamers are sore losers. Mori says the basic rule of every fighting game is “one person wins and one person loses” and this is a rule that many people simply cannot endure. You can never win most of the time in a fighting game. You have to take your lumps. There will never be a perfect fighting game everyone can enjoy because human variance skews the level of skill between two players too much.

Mori and Ishiwatari scoff at ideas like Kinect or Move as a tool to get people into the fighting genre. According to them, motion controls are not precise enough. Having enough room to play would be one issue, but misreading movements in an enclosed space is another one. Even if motion controls are totally perfect, you actually have to move to activate them. This means that people who move faster will have an advantage. According to Ishiwatari, you can’t make a video game that gives an advantage to someone with better physical conditioning. If that’s the case, you should just play sports.

So fighting games will always be hardcore, but which fighting game does Ishiwatari, designer of Guilty Gear actually like? Oddly enough, he thinks that another company’s fighter is better than his. He says the best fighter of all time, in his opinion, is Street Fighter III: Third Strike. “It’s the nervousness between you and your opponent that gives me joy,” Ishiwatari said. “You have to guess what the next move is by your opponent. That was the most fun thing about the game. It was so enjoyable.”

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