Guilty Gear Petit

I've been a huge fan of fighting games ever since the days of Street Fighter II, doing everything I could to play the newest brawler no matter who made it. I've played a lot of excruciatingly bad fighters in my day, games found on systems like the Jaguar and the TurboGrafx-CD. But while there are plenty of terrible console fighting games, there is no better place to find a bad brawler than on a portable game system. Between the Game Boy, Lynx, and Game Gear the fighting genre just didn't stand a chance in the portable arena.

For years I thought that the fighting game genre was hopeless on a portable, I figured these games were just too powerful to be recreated on such a small console. It took the Neo Geo Pocket Color's stellar line of portable fighters to start to change my mind, and now that Capcom has been able to recreate Street Fighter Alpha 3 on the PSP I am a true believer of the portable brawler. I went into Guilty Gear Petit with high hopes, but would this WonderSwan title be more Neo Geo Pocket Color (good) or Game Boy Color (bad)?

I've had more than a few experiences with the Guilty Gear franchise, both on the Xbox and the PlayStation Portable. My copy of Guilty Gear X2 #Reload may sit collecting dust now, but when I first got the game I was on it practically every second of the day. Although I knew that the WonderSwan Color was not going to be able to recreate the amazing graphics and animation found in the console (and arcade) versions of the game. But I still hoped that it would play well and be relatively fun.

Much to my surprise I found myself actually enjoying Guilty Gear Petit, it ended up being a far better experience than I was expecting. Sure the graphics aren't very good (the backgrounds are especially weak) and the animations are as basic as you get, but there's something kind of lovable about this shrunk down Guilty Gear game.

Guilty Gear Petit gives you control of eight different warriors (only six are available from the start of the game), each with their own look and special attacks. You have popular characters like Sol-Badguy pop up, as well as a nurse with a GIANT needle, a pirate girl named May, and a sexy blonde named Millia Rage. You select your character, read a bunch of Japanese text, and then fight it out like a normal fighting game match up.

Your fighting is limited to punching and kicking, as well as a few special moves you pull off by combining a d-pad maneuver with a button. You won't be able to perform all of the moves you used in the console version, but you will still be able to uppercut, throw stuff, and much more.

The game moves around at a very quick speed giving you almost no time to rest. It may seem too easy with only two buttons but thanks to the games speed and special moves you will hardly notice your limited attacks. Unfortunately with only two buttons and the quick speed this Petit Guilty Gear title does not feel like the rest of the games in the series, which may turn off some gamers looking for the perfect portable companion to their favorite fighter.

If you're a WonderSwan owner looking for a fighting game then Guilty Gear Petit is easy to recommend, it's a fun fighter that offers everything you could want from a portable brawler. While it's not exactly like its console counterpart this handheld version is still worth checking out.