Guilty Gear Isuka takes a very good 2d fighter and strips it of everything good and fun about it.

User Rating: 4.5 | Guilty Gear Isuka PS2
Guilty Gear Isuka (GGI) is the sequel to Guilty Gear X2 (GGX2). It is a 2d fighter in which you use the fighting moves of your character to defeat your opponent's character. But with a twist, the character's life bar can be diminished and depending on how many "souls" you've set for a battle, their life regenerates fully and you continue fighting, the player who runs out of souls and dies when they have none loses. Your character has the standard high slash, low slash, punch and kick buttons. In a sequence along with the directional buttons, you can pull off special moves and when you're "tension bar" is built up, you can do a special move. The thing is, pressing left and right on the d-pad won't change the direction your character is facing, the R1 button does, not only causing confusion, but frustration aswell. Opponents can easily hop over your head in mid combo and you would be caught off guard. This is especially frustrating in the one player arcade mode. It is a long version of the "Survivor" style of gameplay in most fighting games in which you defeat your opponent and you gain little vitality at the end of the match starting your next match with a different amount of life you had at the the end of the previous match unless it finished the previous match without gaining any damage. But in the middle of some fights you'll hear the announcement "Here Comes Daredevil!" stopping your fight, and bringing you to a fight in which you fight two characters against your one man self. This is where using the R1 to turn makes the game increasingly difficult. And the Daredevils appear at very random times. You'll find your self stuck inbetween both characters and comboed to death. Once you defeat the final boss, you'll watch the credits...and see a picture. Another part of the game is the GGBoost mode, a side scrolling beat em up that is two players. You'll find yourself hacking and slashing at waves of enemies in locations like a village or a very big elevator. At the end of each level you fight RoboKy Mk II and move on to the next stage. There is no real storyline for these two parts of the game, but they both become extremely tedious. The versus mode gives you many characters at your disposal, as well as four player gameplay, but your friends may not be interested in this because of the annoying controls. You also get a mode of gameplay where you teach the RoboKy Mk II the fighting moves it "learns" from it's opponents. A very nice idea that is very uninteresting. GGX2 had excellent gameplay and a very very interesting storyline, but Isuka drops the ball very very heavily, and is beyond disappointing to GG fans.