Question: is any other character's Normal and Hard mode endings not considered canon or is it just this one?
Guilty Gear Strive
- Thread starter BrawlMan
- Start date
It's not normal or hard mode, it's just the true ending where you don't lose any rounds at all in your playthrough of arcade so you get rewarded with the canon ending and the dialogue is different in various places. Every char is like that.
It's a common theme in basically all of the arcsys games like blazblue and GG and so on. They do a ton of what ifs, some are serious, some are jokes, some are dark, so on and so forth, but you always have a true ending route (like a visual novel) which is the one real thing that counts and is the basis for sequels. In blazblue especially they did a lot of gag reel routes which were totally out there random stuff like the story stopping and becoming about a guy proposing to a girl who doesn't even know he exists, stuff like that. And of course they had bad ends which you had to lose specific fights to see as well like with Bridget here. Those usually would be the darker ones. You had chars die or get totally mentally broken down and whatnot. None of that was canon of course cause if they were the sequel would have like 4 chars lol. I'm talking going insane and murdering all your family or destroying the entire world after being possessed by the demon of the apocalypse levels of dark.
The idea is to explore the characters and see what they do when faced with various situations. In Bridget's case in particular you can see him losing to Goldlewis shaking his confidence as a man to the core and having him decide he was a girl after all since he couldn't win the fight, but in the true route he wins so he is empowered to stick to his guns despite it being seen as odd.
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So every other character in *Strive* ignores their Normal and Hard mode endings as strictly non-canon? Are you sure about that?
Because if you take them in sequence, it's Bridget coming out to Goldlewis and Ky and gaining confidence in that decision, and if you take it the way you suggest, you're claiming that the Guilty Gear devs are cruel enough to suggest that FORCIBLE TRANSITION AGAINST A PERSON'S WILL IS AN APPROPRIATE ENDING FOR NOT-PERFECT PLAY. Remember, the *confident* "I'm a girl" line comes after Bridget and Goldlewis beat up Ky Kiske in Hard mode. (Lose one stock, but after the first two fights)
And I just don't see the ArcSys devs thinking that way. Persona one's, maybe, but not ArcSys
That's a lot less cruel of a bad ending than other stuff that has happened in GG, and in their other games. You have had chars who were born in a lab and sent to forage in a vacuum that was akin to space and then discarded like dolls. You had people be trapped in a jail like dimension for 80 years wafting into emptiness until their personality broke down completely. You had a brother kill his family, adoptive nun mother and chop his brother's arm off, because of a sword posessing him making him go insane and then becoming so twisted as to sexualize the murder of said brother and be homosexually aroused by the act of killing or stabbing him. You had a child's father kill his mother and sister, turn em into marionettes and forcing him to use one of them as a weapon to seek revenge only to eventually go insane himself at the end. You have a whole race of bio-engineered weapon folks living in slums and being though of as trash despite having a full range of emotions.
The Bridget stuff is not particularly stand out as much as cruel or dark storytelling goes lol.
And yeah you have to lose a round to have that quote, which makes it a bad end automatically. A lot of those are also more what if than outright bad ends too and this is more in that vein than outright "you and everything you love is gone" levels. I think the idea is to illustrate that Bridget is in a very vulnerable place and being pressured by a lot of forces, nothing more concrete than that.
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Wow, all that happens in the normal and hard arcade endings in Guilty Gear Strive?
A lot of those *in Strive*? In Strive every other character's route in Normal and Hard mode is completely non-canon and have zero effect as they're the bad ends and should be absolutely ignored?
No this is a mix of stuff from all the GGs since it's a continuous story and BBs too since they basically were the spiritual successor for GG during a period when Sega had the publishing rights, you can read a lot of this in the glossary. Also I left the Justice pregnancy stuff out cause that's very spoilery, and Ky being racist to his own son and his 5 year old wife cause that's even more weird lol. (protip: he isn't named "Sin" by accident")
And like I said you don't ignore it, it's just more data for the char's personality and how they'd react in certain situations. What ifs. Not canon but rather possible outcomes that might have been.
Also you have to keep in mind that as far as the society at large is concerned everyone already perceives Bridget as a girl to begin with and he has had to correct folks day and night. So him deciding he's a girl wouldn't be something that'd surprise people or make them somehow be weirded out by him. This bad end story is about him tiring of having to correct people all day and night and being like "screw it, I'll just be a girl since you all want me so much to be one!", which is a not-unthinkable way to react to constant pressure since birth to be girllike so you won't be killed by your parents, and then people constantly judging you by your looks. This is why you see him be kinda awkward about saying he's a boy to Goldlewis, he's tired of having to do that, and in the good ending he finds the courage to be true to himself no matter how hard it may be on him, like how Ky admits to being a gear openly, despite looking like a normal human.
Yes, that hesitant "I'm a boy" followed by supportive statement from her friends and the very confident "I'm a girl" really screams "tired of saying she's not a girl"
Like, come on, "Ky admits to being a gear inside despite looking like a normal human" and it's a point in favor of the cis boy claiming he's a cis boy? Allegory is not your strong suit. (Which is probably why it was stated explicitly and confidently to the camera in the "not easiest but not hardest" arcade ending)
There's been zero people trying to force Bridget to be a girl for literal in game years by this point.
You are forgetting the cis boy is not perceived as that by society, but as a girl. When people confuse him as a girl he can just not correct them and nothing else will need to change. He doesn't need courage or bravery to do this if he wants to. It's actually the easy option that takes no effort.
Bridget is basically a trans man in this context, one that also happens to be male.
And people who say GG has no bad endings have never played any other arcsys game besides strive and fail to grasp the storytelling purpose of arcade mode, which is a supplemental thing that you have to fill in the holes of the main storymode and give you a bit more characterization. It's actually more coherent to say none of it is canon than all of it is cause technically none of it happens in storymode itself if anything. But according to tradition the true endings are canon too.
*Sigh* Strive is set six years after that
(Official Bio for Bridget in Guilty Gear Strive)
She's been free to be a man for literal years by the time of Strive. She could return home in triumph as a man of great power and wealth...and yet...
You're arguing with plain, objective, official text
Or it's because we are talking about Strive and not those other games. Which other character *in Strive* has a non-canon bad end in arcade mode?
Developer backyard came out: Strive is selling very well
www.guiltygear.com
11th volume of “Developer’s Backyard”(9/14 Release) | NEWS | GUILTY GEAR -STRIVE- | ARC SYSTEM WORKS
GUILTY GEAR -STRIVE- OFFICIAL SITE
Oh hey, forgot to mention: They are going to try and make the cross play test free to play, so if you were ever interested in trying the game out, there's a time
Oh thank god. Was not looking forward to trying to set up couch co-op from Steam
www.ign.com
BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle and Guilty Gear Strive Coming to Xbox - IGN
Microsoft has announced that BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle and Guilty Gear Strive are both coming to Xbox next year.
OK so long story short, heard a song that caught my attention during a video (Pootis Engage // Extreme, just about the best SFM animation I've seen) and went looking for it a week or so ago and ended up finding this;
(Kind of surprised it wasn't already posted in this thread but understandable since it dropped the same day as Bridget)
Long story shorter still, thanks to @TheMysteriousGX pointing out that the crossplay beta was open to the public I was able to try Strive (the first fighting game I've sat down to try and figure out) and am now in love with this game. So much fun and goddamn does the music just make everything work.
(Kind of surprised it wasn't already posted in this thread but understandable since it dropped the same day as Bridget)
Long story shorter still, thanks to @TheMysteriousGX pointing out that the crossplay beta was open to the public I was able to try Strive (the first fighting game I've sat down to try and figure out) and am now in love with this game. So much fun and goddamn does the music just make everything work.