Guilty Gear -Dust Strikers-

Guilty Gear Dust Strikers, or Guilty Gear DS, is a spin-off fighting game in the Guilty Gear series for the Nintendo DS and the thirteenth installment of the series. It allows for up to four-player fights and has unique stage mechanics for the series, with increased verticality and platforms players can jump between.

Gameplay

The game features twenty-one playable characters but only twenty Story Modes, as Robo-Ky has no story mode. Most of the cast plays like their Guilty Gear XX versions, with some new normals added to allow movement around the game's stages.

Dust Strikers features seven mini-games, each themed around a different Guilty Gear character:

Balance Game: a plate-balancing game featuring Jam.
Venom's Billiards: a billiards game inspired by Venom's fighting style.
Hit Down: a whack-a-mole game featuring Faust.
May's Dolphin Show: a game featuring May that involves moving hoops for her dolphins to jump through.
Yo-yo Polish: a game themed to Bridget where the player cleans dirt and grime from Roger in yo-yo form.
Note Capture: a game about grabbing notes thrown from I-No's hat and filling the empty spots in a score.
Sword Master: a game involving slicing through haystacks thrown in the air, themed to Baiken.^[1]

Playing the mini-games allows players to unlock new moves for Robo-Ky to use in the game's RK-Factory Mode, which it takes from Guilty Gear Isuka.

Summary

Dust Strikers introduces Gig, a Gear possibly made by That Man, as an exclusive final boss. However, Gig is not mentioned or referenced by any character until the boss fight, as the Story Mode for each character in Dust Strikers is a series of self-contained character interactions showing the circumstances that lead to each stage's four characters deciding to fight, with each stage's story unrelated to the story of the stage before or after. With the exception of each character's dialogue leading up to the fight with Gig and ending, these Story Mode interactions are not unique and are reused for multiple different characters' paths.

The majority of characters who previously appeared in Guilty Gear X Plus reuse an X Plus Story Mode illustration for their Dust Strikers ending illustration. Characters introduced after Guilty Gear X Plus, as well as Dizzy and Jam, have new ending art drawn by Atsushi Kawasaki.

Arcade Mode is similar to Story Mode, but with random opponents and no character interactions. Each Arcade Mode path still ends in a fight with Gig. Beating Arcade Mode results in one of three possible ending screens, each featuring around a third of the game's cast, with the ending screen shown dependent on the character used.

Characters

Playable characters

Non-playable characters

Gig

Trivia

Dust Strikers is the only game in the Guilty Gear Series not developed by Arc System Works, being instead developed by XELFLEX.
It's also the only entry to release earlier in the NA region rather than the JP region.
Japanese copies feature a different opening than US or EU copies of the game. In the US and EU, the opening shows the cast posing in front of each of the letters of the game's title as they flash on screen. The JP opening is longer, and instead features a series of stills taken from the opening of Guilty Gear XX.