Guilty Gear Strive: Dual Rulers

When I give a 1 out of 10, I generally put it in one of two categories: 1. It's completely devoid of worth. There is 0 reason to seek this out unless you are a DIEHARD completionist, looking for the worst anime regardless of entertainment value, or you're a masochist. This would be something like, say, FLCL Grunge. 2. It may have SOME value (although generally speaking, not much) but it pisses me off so bad that it doesn't matter, the bad outweighs the good by too far a factor for it to get even a 2. This is more subjective but I've had this happen tome before, see the first half of Beastars Final Season. I genuinely think Dual Rulers is the first to accomplish both. I'll preface this with the fact that I am a Guilty Gear fan. Rev2 is my favorite fighting game of all time, I currently have Strive at third. I own all 4 main games, I even have fucking Dust Strikers. So for this to be a ONE out of 10, I didn't even think that'd be possible. Hell, my favorite Guilty Gear character was guaranteed to be in the show and I was like "well, even if the show sucks ass (it does), at least Elphelt's in it". I'll get to that in a second but let's talk a bit about the production. It looks like crap. Even when it's generally functioning well, it looks worse than the game it's based on and worse than most modern anime you can find. But sometimes? My God, pour one out for Ramlethal fans, she gets one opportunity to shine in the series and it looks worse than Uzumaki and Blue Lock S2 combined. I think Episode 8 (conveniently the very last episode) is the only time I was ever amazed by any visuals they did and at that point, I was so over the series, it didn't even matter. And even then, it's less demanding than the normal scenes of the show, it's just a cool visual. The sound, for such a music fan's fighting game, is kind of forgettable? For better or for worse, there aren't a bunch of NAOKI Strivecore songs like the character themes, the only really notable one is the OP which has grown on me since I first heard it admittedly. The ED is forgettable ED #5409. The OST is nothing to write home about. How is the writing? Before I get into the characters, I wanna talk about the narrator. They explain everything in LABORIOUS detail. I'm pretty sure there's one episode where it's explained that since Sin was born after the Crusades, he wouldn't understand the impact of it three times in that almost exact verbiage. Not to mention any character who matters at all gets a title card explaining everything about them like you're sitting next to a GG superfan and they pause the show to loredump you. Shut the fuck up and SHOW US who these characters are. The characters aren't much better. Needless to say, if they aren't on the poster, they're a cameo at best. I think Leo Whitefang and Axl Low are the only ones who that doesn't apply to (outside of NPCs who aren't playable like Vernon or Nerville) and their roles are generously considered not a cameo tbh. Speaking of which, before we talk about the main characters, let's talk about the majority of the characters on the poster. A lot of these feel like characters there just to pop Guilty Gear fans because they're pretty much bit-timers or characters there to fill the runtime with fights against Unika or cannon fodder enemies. Johnny, Baiken, Elphelt, Ramlethal, even Dizzy and fucking KY KISKE, THE DEUTERAGONIST OF THE ENTIRE SERIES get very little to do. For a couple as crucial to the plot and main characters as Dizzy and Ky, they spend Episodes 2-7 sitting in Illyria Castle. Johnny's written basically as "I LIKE WOMEN I LIKE WOMEN I LIKE WOMEN", he genuinely has more defining character traits in his title card introduction than the rest of his screentime You could not make me remember a single thing Baiken contributed to the story other than helping during fight scenes and just kinda standing there, throwing out a couple lines when she's needed. Elphelt and Ramlethal are put on guard in Illyria Castle aka they do jack shit. Elphelt gets one scene on her own to shine but it just makes her look like a dumbass dweeb (which... I mean Elphelt was never very book smart, we love our 0 IQ wannabe bride) and she vanishes until she's needed for fight scenes at the end. As mentioned above, Ramlethal genuinely might as well not even be in the story. You could write the dead corpse of Bedman in the story and he'd be just as useful. I genuinely do not remember if we ever see Leo Whitefang in the flesh and blood, he's just... on council with the President the entire story. Axl's entire contribution to the plot is a passing remark about the future. I could remark about how cynical it is that there are precisely 2 characters from each DLC season (Jack-O and Baiken for S1, Sin and Bridget for S2, Elphelt and Johnny for S3, and Dizzy and Unika for S4) as if they're put in there to plug DLC in case they somehow by some grace of God convince someone to buy Strive off the back of this travesty, but that's just a conspiracy theory tbh I think there are, like, 5 characters who actually matter. Bridget genuinely does more to help Unika than any character in the story. If you're someone who has been shipping Unika and Bridget since they had that little T cross-section cut-in or whatever in the opening movie, you might be the only people who'd enjoy this show and even then, there's probably already a "Guilty Gear Strive: Dual Rulers but only the Bridget moments" and you'd be better off watching that. And in exchange, she doesn't even get to fight all that much, probably because animating her doing yo-yo shit wasn't in the budget. Sol Badguy at least gets to do something unlike Ky but he's just Sin's mentor, the "old guy". He does actually matter but if you had hopes of seeing a faithful Guilty Gear anime where Sol gets to shine: 1. Why, this was clearly Sin's anime 2. You don't get that Nerville Hammer is a dog-ass villain. I'm not even going to mark this for spoilers because I mean just look at him. It'd be more of a spoiler if he wasn't a villain. He starts out as just A Racist against Gears which sure, fine, whatever, but then the more and more we learn about him, he just kind of flops. I don't really understand his plan? He just transforms into "muahahahaha I'm going to take over EVERYTHING and kill both humans and Gears" and like motherfucker, what do you plan to rule over? Trees? Zebras? He turns into such a cartoonishly overkill villain that he loses all his credibility and become exhausting, not to mention a significant downgrade in animation quality. Quite frankly, the biggest reason I saw this at all was, as a Strive fan, Unika was coming to Strive, so I had to know what her deal was. And it does not succeed in endearing her to me. For the majority of the story, she comes off as either a racist or a dumbass puppet and whatever attempts to sympathize her to me don't work. Apparently all it takes is naked Bridget and you go from "all Gears must die" to "you know, maybe my father is a jackass". Her connection to Sin never feels real and, as mentioned above, it feels more like Bridget saves Unika than Sin does. I saw a meme during the show's runtime that Unika felt like a Guilty Gear OC that's given a bunch of Cool Traits to make her seem Cool, like if you wrote your JJK OC as Hitomi Gojou who is Gojou's favorite younger sister and Megumi Fushiguro's lover and goes shopping with Nobara Kugisaki on the weekends and that's genuinely what Unika feels like to me. If she was meant to be some sort of new age deuteragonist, it doesn't work. Hell, even as a "normal" member of the cast, I would've been MORE excited to play as her in Strive if Dual Rulers never existed. Speaking of new age replacements, I wanna go on a bit of a tangent about "new" protagonists in fighting games. I feel like these are generally misguided. It's worked occasionally (see: Jin Kazama, Rock Howard [although considering it took like 25 years after his first game to get a sequel and that game seems to have drastically underperformed, one questions if even he works]) but a lot of the time, it at best makes a successful side character (K', Ash Crimson, Alex from Street Fighter) and at worst creates complete flops (Abel from Street Fighter, Pyrrha and Patroklos from SoulCalibur 5, the Kombat Kids from Mortal Kombat X). Why do I bring this up? I feel like this, other than to introduce Unika, was supposed to be a way to be Sin Kiske's coming out party as the new Guilty Gear protagonist and it does not work. I like Sin, generally speaking. He's fine, has an enjoyable enough gameplay style, he works as a side character in the cast of wacky characters. As the protagonist, he's kind of insufferable. He's a big dumbass and wants Everyone To Get Along but he fails to have a compelling reason to be the protagonist. As I've said a couple times, he doesn't really get to do much to help out Unika, he has to be given a special powerup to be anything more than "guy with a flag who happens to be a nepo baby" and even then, he fucks up and Sol has to bail him out (in a very bullshit way, mind you). Sin's quite literally only the protagonist because of who his parents are, which doesn't make him endearing at all. He's a dumbass, overly idealistic, and naive. It's fine for him to be those traits when he's A Character in the cast. It gets increasingly Not Fine when he's THE PROTAGONIST. ArcSys wants Hiroshi Tanahashi but all they got was Shota Umino. It's just not a good show. It doesn't attract people who haven't played Guilty Gear because, despite trying their hardest to explain what's necessary (and a lot that's not), there's no reason for non-GG fans to see this. It's another chapter in the story, not the start or even a particularly popular part. It fails to establish Sin Kiske as a worthy successor to Sol Badguy. It fails to make Unika a very compelling character. It doesn't really do much to make any of the other characters look good. It doesn't look good or have exciting fight scenes, which seems weird for an anime about a FIGHTING GAME. I've only really seen UnikaxBridget stuff come out of this and to me, that seems like a fitting condemnation in of itself. Give this one a skip.