Guilty Gear Isuka

The story

Guilty Gear Isuka brought four-player battles to Atomiswave, with fighters moving between two lines, front and back. It was the only game on AW-NET when the service opened in December 2003, and for the first half of 2004 most of awnet.jp was about Isuka.

Everything online happened between matches. An AW card linked the player to Web Garage on the website, where they could check records, customise fighters and spend shared points. The fighting itself was always against the people in the same arcade.

Web Garage

Web Garage showed a player's records and each character's statistics, and let them set a display name and status, check the rankings and change character settings. It also held the shop.

Players chose between two rank courses after the first trainee rank: Holy Order (聖騎士団) and Bounty (賞金首). From 26 March 2004 the site kept a running national tally of how many players had joined each side.

Rankings

Isuka had six national leaderboards, each with a minimum before you appeared on it:

Clear times could take four to five hours to show up. The rankings table below collects every saved copy of these boards.

EX characters and colours

EX characters went on sale on 31 January 2004, for all 20 fighters. They were versions of the fighters with new or changed moves. EX I-No, for instance, has a running dash along the ground, and EX Zappa can choose which spirit possesses him. Each cost 1,500 points.

EX colours cost 300 points each. Thirteen were prepared for every fighter and released in stages, with two added on 8 March and the rest by 28 April 2004.

Buying something didn't switch it on. You turned it on in that character's Web Garage settings, then held Start on the character-select screen at an online cabinet until the EX emblem appeared.

Starting level

For 1,000 points you could buy a starting-level setting, set separately for each character, that let you begin Survival mode at any level up to 999. Without it Survival stops at level 100. With it, the CPU boss Leopaldon turns up every 50 levels above 100, at levels ending in 49 and 99.

Guilty Gong

Guilty Gong let players spend points as votes on the next ringtone or wallpaper for the GGX Mobile phone service. The first winner was a ringtone of "Exceptional Routine Work". AW-NET's news mentions a second round, for wallpapers.

Offline

If a cabinet lost its connection, the card still recorded wins, losses, plays, best score, highest survival level, win streaks, rank and team results, and sent them to the server next time. EX characters and colours didn't work offline. Isuka showed a green ONLINE in the bottom-right corner when connected.

Isuka's four-player mode linked cabinets within one arcade. There's no record of matches between arcades.

Points

The Isuka FAQ gives roughly 10 to 30 points per play. The March 2005 FAQ breaks it down by mode; see Points and the shop. Each Isuka card was good for 500 plays.