Played through a bunch of the Guilty Gear Strive second beta (8-9 hours in total, by my estimation), and I wanted to give some of my thoughts:

- The lobbies and general network infrastructure needs work. I was spending more time trying to find and connect to matches then actually playing. There were several instances where the game would fail to connect me to my opponent, or cut out right before the match started. Considering this was a stress-test beta, I'm not *super* worried, but I am a tiny bit paranoid that the instability was outside the scope of the beta's purpose, and that the first few weeks of launch will be equally rough.

- The ranking system is super interesting imo. It abstracts your rank as a 'floor' in a tower. The interesting design choice is you can basically (assuming matchmaking is implemented in the full release) queue as any rank at or above your level, but not below. Ideally this means people who are confident can queue for higher-ranking matches much quicker, instead of grinding out the lower ranks for points. There is also a 'secret' last floor that you have to go 5-2 in in order to fully unlock, or you will be locked out. In the beta, I was able to grind out to the last floor (though I have not been able to fully unlock it yet), so I'm curious how well the floors are able to regulate the differences in skills between players given a few weeks for the playerbase to settle.

- The matches themselves felt almost universally great, once a connection was established, and if Arcsys was using the same leniency settings as before, that means this is the best netcode in any fighting game released to date.

- The gameplay itself felt a lot slower than past Guilty Gear titles. The change in the Gatling system (linking attacks to form a simple combo), the huge counter-hit punishment, and enormous hit-stop makes this feel a lot closer to a Street Fighter game than classic Guilty Gear. Personally I'm fine with that kind of mentality, but I can see a lot of older fans bouncing off of this title before to long.

- The training mode is pretty good, with the ability to set recovery options on the dummy. I would love to be able to see frame-data, but Arcsys seems to be adamant that feature be hidden.

All-in-all, I'm pretty happy with the beta. I'm super curious how Arcsys are going to take feedback from this event, and what changes will be made in the full release. If this would be your first fighting game, I highly recommend checking it out, as I feel it's a good game to focus on fundamentals with, and the online will all but guaranteed to be the best on the market.