And we wouldn’t really have it any other way
Despite the large amount of banger tracks found across the genre, concerts dedicated to fighting game music is not really something we get to experience around these parts, but if anyone was going to do it, of course it would be Guilty Gear.
The Arc World Tour Finals this weekend did give attendees and viewers at home a special show with a live Guilty Gear Strive concert with vocalists NAOKI and Aisha along with a full band, and it was kinda a mess at times — but still entertaining and worth watching.
Things got off to a bit of a rough start with Find Your One Way where the stream audio sounded pretty blown out, and Naoki seemed somewhat out of breath at the end of the first verse.
He admitted after that first song he almost lost his voice from the rehearsal the day before, but Naoki did sound like he got into more of a groove as the set went on and could still belt out the big notes.
For both Naoki and Aisha, though, they had to fight to stand out from their own loud backing tracks drowning out the live vocals until midway through The Disaster of Passion.
Anyone who’s been in music or dealt with live audio knows just how finnicky mixing can be from multiple sources to different outputs, especially at an event where the concert isn’t the main attraction, so I won’t be very harsh on the audio engineers there since they did make adjustments on the fly to make it better.
There was some other funny moments from Naoki throughout the performance like him scatting during Happy Chaos’ theme Drift and literally singing “I forgot, the lyrics” along with missing cues in some other songs — though he never stopped pushing his voice as far as it would go.
Aisha’s songs went smoother overall, and the band seemed to do a good job through the set too. The cameras didn’t focus on them much, so it was unclear how much they were relying on backing tracks.
We did get to see the man himself, Daisuke Ishiwatari, come out on stage for at least one song to shred, which helped make things more special for the finale.
The crowd sitting and shaking their light sticks for most of the show did make it feel more like a concert in Japan and not a rock concert in America, which was a bit funny as well for music that goes hard.
Overall, we were promised a Guilty Gear live concert for free (or included with a venue ticket), and they delivered for over an hour of riffs, solos and screaming in a way that only this series can.
We also can’t speak for the lucky people there in the flesh and their experience, but they definitely seemed to have a great time.
Our ultimate hope is that this wasn’t a one and done deal and they come back to do more concerts in the future in North America / the West. I would go to another show in a heartbeat.
There were some issues to work out from this initial showing over here, but much of that could be easily worked out by giving the band some more space in their own dedicated event instead of trying to slot it into a tournament venue with everything else going on.
We can also look back to previous Guilty Gear and BlazBlue concerts in Japan from the past and see what can happen when provided the full resources for a big show.
If you didn’t already, check out the Guilty Gear concert from AWT below where we’ve included timestamps for the almost dozen songs featured at the special event.
Arc World Tour Guilty Gear Strive Concert Timestamps
• Find Your One Way – 5:20:30
• What do You Fight for? – 5:24:50
• The Roar of the Spark – 5:29:40
• The Disaster of Passion – 5:37:30
• Armored Clad Faith – 5:42:30
• Talk About You – 5:48:50
• Drift – 5:54:15
• The Town Inside Me – 6:00:30
• Mirror of the World – 6:06:30
• Necessary Discrepancy – 6:16:30
• Smell of the Game – 6:24:25
• A Special Goodbye – 6:30:50