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Guilty Gear Judgment is actually two games in one, which in itself isn't especially unusual. The funny part is that the better of those two games in one doesn't get to have its title on the front of the box.

Judgment the game (as opposed to Judgment the collection) is a side-scrolling beat-'em-up, using some of the characters and most of their moves from the Guilty Gear X2 fighting games. Astute players should recognize it as an upgraded version of the bonus mode thrown in the home version of Guilty Gear Isuka.

Despite what the cover says, the real draw is a portable version of Guilty Gear X2 Reload, long renowned as one of the finest 2D fighters ever made. The Naomi-powered arcade game doesn't make a perfect transition to PSP, but it's just about as good as we could ever expect, and that makes this package more than worthy of a purchase.

Ecks Too Sharp Reload

Does Guilty Gear demand an introduction anymore? A few years ago it was a freaky niche production, but not so much anymore. After Guilty Gear X2 first came stateside three years ago, it's gradually gained acceptance as a first-rate fighter.

What Guilty Gear does well is offer fun, challenging gameplay for every level of competitor. Capcom's latter-day 2D fighters tended to cater exclusively to the company's existing fans, dedicated competitive players who demanded increasingly complex games. By the time SNK Vs. Capcom 2 hit, you had games that were actively hostile to rookie players.

Reload is finely balanced for competitive types, but it's also fast, flashy, and no problem for newcomers to pick up. The PSP version helps out with impressively responsive controls -- even the more complex tension moves are easy to pull off with the D-pad. It's tough to nail the hardest combo timings while holding the unit with both hands, but you can't blame the game for the way the hardware's built.

Nipped and Tucked

Visually, of course, the conversion is not perfect. To compensate for the transition to a wide-aspect screen, the default viewpoint is a little closer. This cuts a slice of the background art off the top, and taller characters like Faust and Potemkin now regularly brush up against the interface overlays. Luckily, the viewpoint still zooms quickly and smoothly, so it doesn't make much of an obvious difference in gameplay.

Those backgrounds have also suffered a serious drop in resolution. Holding still, you can make out blocky pixels and visibly fuzzy edges. If something had to be cut down to reduce the load times and prevent any slowdown, though, that was probably the wisest place to start cutting.

The character sprites, which are the more important half of the package, look about as sharp as the screen will let them. There's some visible aliasing around the edges of the characters, which might have been aggravated by the close-up default viewpoint, but they look remarkably good given the limitations of the display and the system memory. It's also a surprise to see the PSP version retain the original's transparent foreground objects. Those still smoothly fade in and out as the characters pass behind them.

What hasn't seen or heard any compromise is the music. Guilty Gear's signature all-metal soundtrack rocks as hard as it did on any console -- through a good pair of headphones, the bass tones are rich and the treble isn't excessively tweety. All this comes with a perfectly acceptable cost in loading times. Between the character introductions and the beginning of a fight, no more than six seconds of waiting usually passes.

Judgment Bar

As for the game that's been given top billing, Judgment's an amusing diversion. It's fairly repetitive, as Final Fight's descendants tend to be, but it's better than the side-scrolling slugfest mode from Isuka. The controls are more intuitive, two-player co-op works well, and the playable characters have rearranged movesets better suited to beat-'em-up gameplay. Cinematics fill in corners of the typically preposterous fiction that underpins the Guilty Gear series -- those might entertain the more obsessive breed of Gearhead.

For all it's a competent conversion job, those same die-hard fans may still be disappointed by the other half of the package. That's because the Japanese version of Judgment includes the next newest iteration of the Guilty Gear fighters. While we get Reload, they're playing Guilty Gear XX Slash, an upgraded version with a couple of added characters and another round of gameplay tweaks. Maybe someone would rather this PSP game didn't cut in on sales of a future American console release.

Whatever the case, since the American market missed out on the stand-alone PSP Reload (that one hit Japan in the fall of 2005), it's good to see it finally arrive here in some form. Judgment itself may not be anything special, but it's a good enough freebie to go with a legitimately great game.

Article by: D. F. Smith
Video produced by: Sean Jennings