Guilty Gear: Strive has been rocking the fighting game scene since its’ release this July, with plenty of copies sold and recent DLC to boot, but fans have been complaining about one specific issue. No, it has nothing to do with Guilty Gear’s rapid-fire combo fueled gameplay, or the game’s signature striking visuals: The problem is with load times.
Until just recently, as Kotaku reports, Guilty Gear Strive has been a real slog to play because of the wildly varying load times. Most players have been forced to wait minutes just to get into the main lobby, after which they have to separately load in to a multiplayer game. It’s a long process that can often take far longer than the average match of the game itself. Luckily, one dedicated Guilty Gear fan has found a solution.
Weilu “optix2000” Jia has developed a software he refers to as Totsugeki, named for one of the most frustrating moves in the game. The mod, in short, decreases load times dramatically. It does this by acting as a go-between for the game and the servers way off in Japan. Although there are normally over a hundred separate connections that need to be made between the player and Arc System Work’s servers, Totsugeki condenses these connections down so that less need to be made, which makes the game way faster to boot up and play. You can see just how extreme the difference is in the video below.
But wait– there’s more! Totsugeki can load even faster using a separate mode lovingly dubbed “Unga Bunga.” So, why wouldn’t players always use this? Well, the mod’s creator has warned users that this mode can load the game so fast that it can bug or break the game. That’s pretty crazy, and it shows just how much a fan with enough time on their hands can accomplish. In Weilu Jia’s own words: