Sunday, October 10, 2010

Guilty Gear Wii Easy FRC mode - Instant Professional


Guilty Gear's a pretty good game. I could go into plenty of details about why it's so good and a fun game in general, but I don't have enough experience with Guilty to say everything with confidence. Instead I will talk about something I am confident about, what is easily the worst feature of the game that isn't a character: FRC's, or False Roman Cancels.

A Roman Cancel, or RC, is an action that cancels whatever move or animation your doing back into a neutral standing position. This allows you to combo moves that would otherwise be impossible. This costs 50% of your super meter, which is a very valuable resource in Guilty Gear. An FRC serves the same function, but for half the cost, a cheap 25% meter. However, you can not FRC everything. Only certain attacks can be FRC'd for the reduced cost, and you must time the FRC within a fraction of a second, usually 1-3 frames, which translates to around a 30th of a second. If you attempt to RC outside this window of a 60th of a second, your move will not be canceled.

For example, Sol Badguy's Gunflame attack shown above is a very important attack to FRC, as it is near useless without FRC'ing since it leaves you very vulnerable. To consistently FRC the Gunflame, you need to practice, a lot. Not just practice FRC'ing the gunflame by itself, but in a combo. The timing is extremely strict.

To sum that all up, if you can't precisely time your FRC command (which by the way, is 3 buttons pressed at the same time) within this tiny window, you can not play Sol Badguy.


Press 'A' to become a pro

This is when the Wii Exclusive feature of "Easy FRC" mode comes to save the day. With the push of a button you can make FRC's easier to very much easier, extending the FRC windows to go up to 5 frames or up to 20 frames. To my surprise, setting the mode to 5 frame windows made FRC's completely doable for someone my level. I was instantly playing Sol Badguy, gunflames and all, without even practicing the FRC's. Chipp's teleport FRC's became easy, Order-Sol's charge FRC's were nothing. Just the small addition of a couple extra frames to do an FRC made it completely possible. It felt like I instantly became an experienced Guilty Gear player.

There are some issues, though. Easy FRC extends the window of the FRC, it does not create a buffer or let you do it early, only later. Depending on how far you extend the window, some moves can be FRC'd so late to create new combos. For example, set high enough you can FRC Johnny's forward kick after it hits. In normal mode, this can only be FRC'd just before the kick hits, to set up grabs and other mixups of the like. There are many other examples, such as Sol's Riot kick which can be FRC'd very late. This is the obvious reason why this isn't used in tournaments.

But since I'm a scrub at Guilty Gear, none of this mattered much to me. All I knew was that I playing Guilty Gear like everyone else can on higher levels. All I needed was more experience, not more training mode time. It will still take me time to become the greatest Sol player in history, and maybe practice in Easy FRC mode will help me in the long run, but what's important now is that Easy FRC mode made the game much more fun to play for me, and now I can get a better understanding of Guilty Gear without wasting my time trying to hit an FRC in training mode.

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