Guilty Gear Strive artists explain biggest challenges bringing fighting games to life

We sat down with Guilty Gear Strive’s 2D artist, Shoichi Kitazono, and environment artist Genki Mamada, to quiz them about what exactly goes into creating the visuals for a fighting game.

Guilty Gear Strive is the latest installment in the beloved anime fighting game series, hailed throughout the community for its heavy metal soundtrack and eye-popping artwork.

Arc System Works, the game’s publisher, is known for crafting gorgeous visuals that blend elements of 2D and 3D animation for a unique look that’s difficult to replicate.

We got the chance to sit down with the minds behind Guilty Gear Strive, who let us in on some of the unexpected work that goes into creating such an intricate-looking game — and one of the most interesting answers came from Strive’s environment artist, Genki Mamada.

Mamada told us that one of the biggest challenges in creating stages for fighting games is working with the system’s camera. In 2D fighters, players really only get to move right, left, up, or down in a two-dimensional space, which imposes some interesting limits on the artist making it.

“For fighting games, the biggest thing is camera work, actually,” he said. “It’s in a fixed position, and you can only really slide from one side to the other. That’s a really particular point when making fighting game backgrounds. Even if you have a 3D background, there’s only so far that you can slide, and only so far that you can show depth and detail with that.

“You’ve gotta be able to make it so that people can easily see not just the background, but also what’s going on in there. That’s one of the major points that you need to really think about when making a background for a fighting game, is the fixed point factor of the camera.”

That’s not all; Mamada also explained that, as a background artist, he doesn’t want to outshine the game’s characters. After all, fighting games are heavily dependent on visuals for players to see incoming attacks.

“The character is really important, so one of the biggest things is not to interfere with them,” he added. “The story mode, the location that appears in the story mode, things like the battle stage location… if the world inside Daisuke Ishiwatari’s head can be expressed in the background, I think the fans will definitely enjoy it, and they can discover a lot of things, but of course, characters are the most important part.”

Strive’s producer, Ken Miyauchi, interjected to give Mamada some extra credit, thanking him for allowing Guilty Gear’s characters to shine on the stages he created with elements like lighting.

“I also want to credit that the environment artist for making the character stand out on the stages,” he said. “for example, with the lighting. If there’s like a forest stage, and there’s sunshine coming through the leaves, and then that drops the shadows on the characters, which makes the character have more life in the actual world of Guilty Gear.”

The team made it clear that a big part of creating fighting game backgrounds is also building upon the world of the game. There’s a certain amount of storytelling that happens in these stages that allows players to get a glimpse of what everyday life is like for the characters they’re piloting

“If you take a look at our new stage in particular, you’re trying to tell the world setting through the stages, whether you’re going between the story locations or the battle stages themselves,” Mamada said. “It needs to explain, ‘What is this world?’

“We take Ishiwatari-san’s ideas for this world, and from that, create something that the fans can really love — something that they can enjoy exploring and searching through as they play through the game.”

Of course, there are certain intricacies involved in making Guilty Gear’s characters, as well. These fighters boast some of the most complicated designs in the genre — but for concept artist Shoichi Kitazono, nailing down an attractive pose and overall form is most important.

“For 2D character key art, I want to start with an attractive shape or an attractive pose for the character,” he explained. “So of course they have their head, their body, their limbs — but how do you shape them in a beautiful way that is also a way that is them, the character?”

For Kitazono, his personal favorite piece of art he’s made for the Guilty Gear franchise has to be of A.B.A., a returning character introduced earlier this year.

“My favorite work is actually the A.B.A. artwork that I did,” he told us. “I really feel like her pose speaks to who she is as a character.”

It was enlightening getting an inside look at the creation of one of the world’s most iconic fighting games — a title that Miyauchi says they want to make sure is the “best of all Arc System Works fighting games.”