Guilty Gear Xrd -REVELATOR- Has An Awesome Tutorial

Fighting games these days typically have many intricate mechanics, resulting in games with plenty of depth. This depth can seem impenetrable to many newcomers, however, so thankfully, those created by Arc System Works include very in-depth tutorials and tutorial-like modes. Guilty Gear Xrd -REVELATOR-, the latest in the Guilty Gear series, has what might be the best tutorial in any ArcSys game.

The Dojo sub-menu contains resources for any player wishing to learn the mechanics of the game or otherwise brush up on their skills. While the order from top to bottom is "TUTORIAL, COMBO, MISSION", I will be going over MISSION before COMBO. First, however, I will get into TUTORIAL.
(Note that the game refers to the various modes in all-caps when indicating somebody in an online lobby is playing them. Also, TRAINING is pretty much par for the course for fighting games.)

TUTORIAL teaches you the basics by having you fight the servants of Jack-O, one of the playable characters (Yes, you can summon them when you play as her, and it's actually a major part of her playstyle). You do this by running through obstacle courses, using the correct button to perform the correct type of attack, and so on. Eventually, it culminates in a match against Jack-O, followed by the unlocking of three minigames. These minigames help further the player's understanding of the basics.

MISSION exists primarily to teach the player more in-depth mechanics. In the screenshot above, you can see the mission to perform a Golden Psych Burst, as well as the fact that I got only 3/5 tries correct when doing this tutorial on a mechanic that is rather simple to execute because I'm bad at this game. MISSION also gives advice on how to deal with various characters. Specifically, common tactics used by people who play as those characters.

COMBO is one of those modes which many fighting games have these days. After having the player go through all of a selected character's special moves, they are tasked with performing various combos with that character. This serves as a character-specific tutorial, which is why I went into it last.

Overall, Guilty Gear Xrd -REVELATOR- has a splendid selection of tutorial modes which covers everything from the basics, to dealing with specific tactics, to the ins and outs of various movesets.

VR: What It Can Do For Various Genres

[I apologize for the lack of any posts last week.]

Virtual reality is the newest thing in tech. What I am thinking about is: What can it do for certain genres? Some genres can be enhanced with VR, and, in fact, some which have lain mostly dormant for the past couple of console generations could get new life breathed into them. Here are only a couple of examples:

Lightgun-Style Rail Shooters
This is probably one of the first genres to pop into a video game enthusiast's mind upon thinking about the premise of this article. Games such as Time Crisis could benefit greatly from being played in VR.
Granted, using Time Crisis as an example may seem like a bad choice on my part. A VR installment of the series would probably have issues for various reasons, such as the "ducking behind cover" mechanic probably not translating well to the medium of virtual reality, but something could probably be worked out. In addition, games without such a mechanic would not need to deal with this.

Music/Rhythm Games
So, there is already a good example of this one. Hatsune Miku: VR Future Live simulates the experience of being in an audience at a concert featuring the six Vocaloids who Sega has the rights to put in games. There are sections where you can perform actions to the beat of the music in order to raise some bars in the back of the stage. Filling the bars lets you see a bonus encore song. While the rhythm aspects are not the focus of this game at all (it is mainly just about the experience of pretending to be at a concert in person), something like VR Future Live which expands on the rhythm game elements could prove quite good. Of course, it could also turn out to be incredibly frustrating for various reasons. It will be up to the developers to find a good implementation of the idea.

The Level Design of Hatsune Miku: Project Diva X

[WARNING: THIS ARTICLE PARTIALLY REVEALS THE CONTENTS OF A COUPLE EXTREME MODE CHARTS IN CASE YOU CONSIDER THOSE TO BE SPOILERS]

I imagine you read that title and thought, "Wait, did I read that right? Isn't that a rhythm game? How on Earth can this game have level design? And why only X?" Well, allow me to answer your questions in order:

1. Yes.
2. Yes.
3. That's the point of this article.
4. It's the only one I have, not counting the very different Project Mirai DX (which has Puyo Puyo as a minigame in it, by the way)

For the unaware, Project Diva is a series of rhythm games starring Hatsune Miku, the most well-known character in the Vocaloid series of voice synthesizers. So, how can there be level design in a rhythm game like Project Diva? Well, let's look at Calc. for an idea of what I mean:

Here, you can see one of the series of seven star notes in a straight line that Calc. loves to throw at the player on Extreme difficulty (and there is always more than one). Every song in the game has a "signature" pattern of notes, which is usually especially evident on Extreme difficulty.

No discussion of this topic would be complete without Kaito's only song in the game. Urotander, Underhanded Rangers is a song about a team of superheroes who always use dirty tricks in order to win. Naturally, the chart for the song itself contains a lot of dirty tricks designed to mess the player up, though this is most prominent on Extreme difficulty.

 It should be noted that:

1.  Recordings of Project Diva X which use the PlayStation 4's built-in video recording and streaming functionality do not include the music so players will not run into copyright issues.
2. I am not exactly the best Project Diva player in the universe. Though you can still probably see how much this song messes with the player regardless.

From these two examples, it should be quite evident that, while it may not seem like a game such as Project Diva can have level design, it does. And this is a fact that applies to all genres you may not think of as having level design.