Guilty Gear is quite the success story in the fighting game community. Just ten years ago Guilty Gear was a niche title, and one that was basically just getting back on its feet with Guilty Gear Xrd after being supplanted by BlazBlue for so long within the community. But once a few legal issues were pushed out of the way and Arc System Works had refined their formula to be more appealing to larger audiences, they released Guilty Gear Strive in 2021 and have not looked back. Since that game’s release ArcSys and Guilty Gear have seen mainstream appeal that they haven’t seen since the game was initially brought into conception all the way back in 1998. And now Guilty Gear Strive is so popular that it has its own anime coming out, Guilty Gear Strive: Dual Rulers.
We don’t know too much about this animated series, just that it will star Guilty Gear main character Sol Badguy as well as co-protagonist Ky Kiske’s son Sin Kiske as shown on the artwork. This setup is very similar to a much lesser known Guilty Gear game released many years ago, Guilty Gear 2: Overture, where Sol and Sin travel together in a 3D beat em up style action game that was quite the departure from the norm in Guilty Gear. Thankfully, an anime will likely be a bit easier to digest than Overture.
It is still a wonder just how popular Guilty Gear became as a property, and it speaks volumes as to how fighting game developers will branch out to reach new audiences. Video games in general now have long since been reaching to other forms of media to hook new viewers unaware of the source material into the gaming world, and it looks like Arc System Works are now sniffing onto that trend and latching on.