The a little tidbit behind Goldlewis that the song doesn't delve into is that Goldlewis is not a believer in Aliens. He refers to the creature in his coffin as a cryptid, or UMA. He also loves to listen to Miles Davis.
The thing about "Perfection Can't Please Me" is that it SOUNDS happy and upbeat, but in the context of the character it's incredibly sad. She thinks she's going to die soon, and she's in love with Sol but she believes he can never love her back - and she feels she absolutely cannot tell him either of those things - and the song is her coming to terms with those ideas. It's a sweet, bubbly exterior concealing resignation to a profoundly sad truth - it might actually be the GG Strive song that most perfectly embodies its character. Aisha's vocal performance on the track is also 🔥🔥🔥.
A few facts about each character, respective to their theme: Crawl is the ARCADE boss theme, which is almost always a super-buffed Nagoriyuki, who is permanently in his blood-rage form. Nagoriyuki is a 'Nightwalker', which are just stupidly powerful vampires in the essence that they literally cannot die, at all. Crawl talks about Nagoriyuki's intense rage since he's been enslaved by the main antagonist, Happy Chaos, and how he now wants nothing more than "the freedom of calm". The Kiss of Death makes a lot more sense when you realise that Goldlewis is the USA's Secretary of "Absolute Defence", plus an extremely obedient and selfless soldier - to the point he catches an entire RPG mid-flight and launches it away to save a squad of his men. The creature in his coffin is indeed an alien, but Goldlewis is a firm believer that aliens AREN'T REAL, and that the thing he captured is just a 'cryptid' or, as he calls them, a 'U.M.A.'. Despite that, whenever Goldlewis wins a match, aliens rush in while he isn't looking and abduct his opponent, and he simply assumes his opponent ran off out of fear. Jack-O' Valentine is, in essence, the wife of the protagonist Sol Badguy. Essentially, ages before the story, she fell ill and became a Gear (a scientifically-and-magically-enhanced version of herself) to live longer, but eventually her soul was used as the base for a robot known as JUSTICE. JUSTICE was possessed by a machine god known as the Universal Will, and created a series of exclusive Gears known as the Valentines. Jack-O' was one of these and, after a major story arc, the soul of Sol's wife was pulled from JUSTICE and moved into Jack-O''s body. It's both the childish playfulness of Jack-O' and the cautious care of Aria Hale, Sol's wife, that makes her so diverse (hence the use of "Trick AND Treat!" in her character trailer). The lyrics of the song mirror this, with some lyrics being very childish, like "grab lots of snacks, and wear new shoes" to symbolize Jack-O', and more lyrics that talk about love and distance, like "how far can I go" and "how many miles is a life?" to symbolize Aria.
I mean technically JackO and Justice each had half of Aria's soul initially- Ram and El where both creatrd by the Universal Will also, but Jackie was made by Asuka
I also took the "how many miles is life" to be referring to the fact that she's basically living on borrowed time right? Cause she thinks that once Aria is done recuperating she'll basically take full control to be with Sol. I always figured the song was about her wanting to do all the things that make her happy before she dies; which as far as she believes, will be very soon.
@@catrianheir Since most of the character songs are post main story (cause VS Mode and Arcade Mode is mainly post main story) I always took JackO's song to be about her finally enjoying her life after accepting that she *does* want and deserve to live it for herself
This series is backkk! Let’s goooo been waiting for this one. Both Jack-o and Goldlewis have great themes. Kiss of death is fairly straightforward but it’s honestly kind of refreshing for me that there isn’t some complex meaning or lyrics to it because I can just enjoy a great rock song
It's really funny to me that you talk about Jack-O and Golddlewis themes and bring up Goldlewis' as the simple one when Jack-O's is basically a list of what she likes. I get you though there is a giant ass context to that song but it's still funny.
I was just vibing with Jacko's theme one day like "oh Jacko your song is so silly. It doesn't even make sense." Then suddenly something in the lyrics clicked together and I realized "wait is she dying?!" A bit of research later and yes. She is in fact dying (as far as she knows) very soon, and this overly cheerful song is about her trying to do all the things that bring her joy with her husband before she dies.
Crawl is interpreted two ways: Nagoriyuki is trying to keep his vampire instincts calm, or it’s about what happens in the story where the games villain has him under control and is forcing him to be the muscle which personally enrages him but he can’t say no, so he’s gonna kick his heels in the dirt and make things as difficult as possible until he can break free. You pretty much hit the nail on the head with kiss of death. He hates the system, the job is the system, he hates his job, but he’s gonna keep his head down and do it anyway. Perfection can’t please me is about Jack-O’s whole story and character. She was made with part of the soul of Sols wife from a long time ago (Sol is QUITE old) but her creation ended up being rushed so there’s a childish personality and mature personality that ended up separate. Now for story reasons at the end of the previous game Jack-O was set to stop existing when the game ended, GG Strive takes place 2 weeks after that and she’s still around. Although the reason for her to stop existing hasn’t gone away it just hasn’t taken effect so now she’s wondering ‘how far is this going to go’ and ‘how long can this last?’ as she’s beginning to fall in love with Sol (again?) Her childish personality is also going “Hey, but like POPCORN though”
I really love the thoughts she gave on Crawl, that was so nice seeing her explain her thought process - most lyrics don’t make sense without story context but the ones that do are so great too
I'd love to see a reaction to the lore of Guilty Gear. There's a great series by woolieVS about Guilty Gear lore. It's a wild ride and the lyrics make more sense when you know the context.
Yeah Woolie is prolly the best bet for a newcomer (even if the first vid especially has a lotta misinfo), all the other plot summaries Ive seen out there are eother too short or just... really bad
Can I say I love how Kiss of Death ends with "Can we start over?" "Deal.", cause in-game the song will start over at this point (if you ever last that long :^p) An aspect of "Crawl" I don't see mentioned a lot is like, it's the *boss* theme of the arcade mode, so it's technically not specifically about Nagoriyuki (even if Nago is the most common arcade boss) And like, the arcade boss at highest difficulty is really, *really* hard to beat, like hundreds of losses to one win hard to beat- So to me, "Crawl" feels like a song about you, the player, crawling and screaming as you despair trying to beat the dang boss :^p Goldlewis' theme prolly hits better when you know him a bit better as a character- like it kinda feels like there's a bit of a deliberate contrast between it and what he's like He's a veteran of the Crusades (that 100 year war thing) and is now the "Secretary of Absolute Defense" of the US; where his main passion is the research and capture of cryptids. In fact, he doesn't believe in aliens actually, and insists the creature under his control is a cryptid, not an alien. He looks like a rough and tough guy, but he does have a softer and caring side to him. But he *is* a newer character, so we don't got a lot of history on him yet. JackO, to put it most simply, is an artifically created copy of a dead woman, who was made to effectively resurrect said woman. (Strive spoilers below if you don't want to see?) She's always had half of that woman's soul, and recently she's finally managed to fuse with the other half. However, she found that instead of simply becoming that woman, her artifical "JackO" personality and self continues to exist instead. This was a great source of guilt for her, feeling that she didn't fulfill her purpose correctly and was "taking away" the woman she was modelled after away from her loved ones. But on the other hand, she also felt a strong desire to live as herself anyway. Her story in Strive is about realizing that she does deserve to live as herself, and as such, her song is reflective of her accepting and embracing her own life and future.
Bro my first time doing the arcade boss I came in like "yo I get a partner? pfff. This will be easy... Huh that's some intense music" queue unintelligible shrieks of sheer ass whoopings
So for crawl, the character it's talking about is nagoriyuki (the giant black dude). He is a samurai but also a vampire. Both of these things clash with each other. His blood thirst makes him want to kill everybody and go on a rampage but his honor as a samurai and his mind of steel prevents from doing it. The lyrics basically represents him struggling with his thirst for blood and his wish to die. But also no matter what he will keep on going.
Yeah, Cloudrop actually has the lyrics to Jack-O's Theme wrong, Capn Booker actually has the Correct Lyrics on his Channel, fun fact when you get to Baiken, he has her Correct Lyrics as well, keep that in mind.
the thin to note with the music in strive is its al on the chars story in a way so for jak-o how she was basically made as a perfect being and is dealing with mortal emotion if noticed the song gose on and the music gets more free form and less composed more imperfect turning into every instrument being a solo effectively, and the ending being organized.
The way I interpret Jack-O's song is that it's speaking to the duality of Jack-O's nature. She has two souls inside of her, the one made for Jack-O, and the soul of Aria, Sol's wife. She wants to figure out what she feels for herself (if her feelings for Sol are real and not just Aria's again, if Aria deserves to live instead of her) but the other part of her wants to just enjoy life as it is. During her arcade mode story, she also switches between her two souls/personalities which interact with the characters differently -- one the introspective sort and the other a carefree gust of wind. Hence the line "Let's not pretend I don't hear me"
Little bit of references mixed in the characters. Jack o is a reference Michael Jackson, her mask is a reference to Helloween ( The metal band), and I might be wrong, but her unique crouching pose might be a reference to the Queen song: Fat Bottomed Girls. It would make sense is sol a walking Freddie Mercury reference.
I love the GG music both becouse of its heavy metal and how diverse it can be to fit each character. It makes for great listening whenever i'm playing a ARPG or just reading a book :)
I just realized the Goldlewis' theme is a great foil/contrast to Potempkin's theme (armor clad faith). Both working for their government and following orders. While Goldlewis follows them blindly, Potemkin follows them but is contemplating if what he is doing is right and tries to have faith that he is doing the right thing.
Y'all should watch the guilty gear lore compilation by Woolie Madden. He made it sponsored by the Guilty Gear devs ruclips.net/p/PLiSdC6Lp8c7OkrBhzdQsQhGL_7jT0cSTv
It’s finally here! I’ve even waiting for an excuse to talk about Crawl - and now I have it! Crawl is one of the odd ones out in the soundtrack, as much like Leo’s theme - it has two plausible interpretations. The former is as a direct analogy to Nagoriyuki’s role in the plot. Nagoriyuki as we’ve already established is a vampire, and much like vampire thralls in fiction - he’s under the oppressive rule of a master. Nago serves under Happy Chaos, the m main antagonist of Strive (aside from I-NO). Much to his chagrin, Nagoriyuki is forced to fallow Chaos’ orders, despite his desire to have “freedom of the calm”. Contrary to most vampires in fiction, Nagoriyuki has a strong sense of armor. His samurai ascetic makes that rather clear, and the lyrics reinforce this. “Blue heat, black heart, instinct and intellect”. He’s not just a vampire craving the blood of the innocent. He’s got some sense to him. “A dead past to never return”. A nice double entendre. As a vampire (at least a classical one) he would very much so be a dead man walking. A corpse who can never return to his past life, both figuratively and quite literally. So how does Nagoriyuki combat this? *He goes back in.* He fights, he “holds faith made of steel”, that being his signature Odachi and Katana. He’s going to keep fighting: because when you can’t run anymore, you walk - and when you can’t walk *you Crawl.* _“But I'm not going to be lost tomorrow, even if it is hell”_ _“I'm gonna crawl”_ The secondary meaning lies outside the story. This theme song actually plays for more than just Nagoriyuk. It’s his boss theme when fighting him in Arcade Mode yes, but it plays with any character fighting him. This isn’t just his theme, but yours - the player. You’ve burned through this entire arcade mode, your thumbs ache and you’re on the edge of your seat as this vampire bastard is outraging you with his ridiculously long sword. You aren’t gonna fall here, you’ve come too far. So what do you do? You crawl, you crawl your way to victory. It’s a hype theme that encourages the player not to give up, you keep fighting. No matter the odds, you crawl your way to victory. Even if it’s hell. ----------------------- Jack-0 is another odd one. You see, Jack-0 as a character is technically two people. One of those people, or “souls” is the deceased wife of one of our protagonists - Sol. Her name is Aria, and Sol has already had to kill her in a precocious game. Of course, she was a genocidal Gear super weapon, but we’ll acknowledge that it was a necessary evil for Sol. Her theme is a mixture of the two beings inside of her, the conflicting memories and desires of both the people inside. Aria wants those feelings of “piping hot like popcorn” - the ability to see the world through her eyes. She’s not in control of the body, but acts more so as a disembodied voice dropping hints to Jack-O about who she actually is. She just wants it pursue her happiness, preferably with her husband Sol. She had a second chance at life, and she just wants to experience it with her husband. They’ve been taken away from each other once, and never again.
I swear I check back like so often (not with just you guys but reacters in general) to see if there's any new videos of ppl checking out Guilty Gear I love seeing that lol Yeah Crawl is unique among the Strive themes in that it's not necessarily tied to any one character. It's definently tailored for Nagoryuki but it's broad enough to be applied to any character who happens to become a boss fight in this game (the base game and 1st season of DLC characters all fight Nago as their arcade mode boss, but season 2 and onward the boss is someone different. For Bridget and Sin the boss is Ky, for Bedman? the boss is Ramlethal, Asuka fights... himself, Johnny fights May, and Elphelt fights Faust). For Nagoryuki the consensus is that the song represents his anger at being made a pawn of Happy Chaos (who you should be meeting next time you do one of these videos lol). He can't ignore Chaos's will no matter how hard he tries and yet he's still forced to be aware of what he's doing. When he fights people in the story mode while under Chaos's control he often tells them to run or critiques their fighting form, because that's the guy he truly is. In the story mode during his final confrontation with Sol he admits that Sol surely would defeat him but it would take too long, Sol wouldn't be able to win the day. So he summoned all his strength just to let go of his sword, letting Sol land a knock-out blow. He crawled. I won't go over every other boss but I'll touch on Ky cuz I think hes the second most applicable (feel free to skip this part of the comment if you really want honestly lol). Ky was taught through experience all his life that Gears were evil by nature and that extermination was required to save humanity. It's us or them. When the leader of the Gears, Justice, was finally defeated, he was present during her final moments. Justice asked him why humans hate her so, and he replied his viewpoint, and in response Justice argued that she was only enacting the will that was programmed into her by the greedy heinous humans who made her. It wasn't evil to do so in her eyes. She was a reflection of all of mankinds evils and inability to look inward. In that moment Ky was stunned, unable to exchange any other words with her before she succumbed to her wounds. Later on humanity discovered that Justice had laid an egg, and the offspring was living isolated in a region called hells grove. A bounty was pot on its head and everyone and their mother set out to destroy it. But when Sol and Ky were the ones who made found it, what they saw was a timid girl named Dizzy who longed for contact, along with two protective wings with their own will to defend their host. Sol was gonna kill her but Ky stepped between them in the final moment and shared the thinking he had done since their encounter with Justice. Gears are not inherently evil. All Dizzy had ever done is exist in longing for connection, so Ky decided to show her the world outside the grove. She spent some time with the Jellyfish Pirates but then left to live with Ky and thats when they fell in love and eventually had a son named Sin, and due to a funny series of events I won't describe here he also came to obtain the Scales of Juno, which are a special type of Gear cells which are connected to the universe itself, to put it simply. Ky was so happy with his family, but he also knew that as 1st king of Illyria, him being in love with one of the very things that had terrorized humanity for a century was a delicate situation, and it took him a long time to go public about it. A lot of his time in the series was spent inching closer and closer to the dream he had for a peaceful world where he could coexist with his wife. He crawled, until he didn't need to anymore. In the boss fight where you fight him as Bridget, the idea is that he is relating his fears of revealing his wife to the world to Bridgets own worries about her journey regarding her gender identity, which I'll get to when you hear her theme lol. Ok Im gonna post this comment and then edit in the explanations for Goldlewis and Jack-O lol. Goldlewis shouldn't be too long, but Jack-O... No promises. Ok so it for some reason won't let me edit the rest of it into this comment so I'll see if I can just post it as another comment lol and hopefully you see both
_Crawl_ is great, but I think I'd agree it's what you 'expect' from Guilty Gear. It's certainly not one of my favourites, but it's in a lot of my playlists. I like _Perfection Can't Please Me,_ but I have the opposite problem where it's not my kind of music, and I've never thrown it on just to listen to it like I do with Necessary Discrepancy and a few others. _The Kiss of Death..._ I like it, but there's not a whole lot in there for me. I really like songs that tell a story, and it kinda doesn't do that. It's exactly my genre, though. Ah, we're into DLC character themes now! We're so close to some of my favourite tracks - in fact I think that's the next video, unless there's more DLC characters I'm forgetting.
(continuation from another comment, I think maybe I hit the RUclips comment character limit or something LOL) Goldlewis is the US secretary of ABSOLUTE defense (that's literally what his in game subtitle is lol). You pretty much got the idea of his thoughts with his job. A lot of ppl think he's jaded and thinks hes just a dog of the military, but I think he actually likes his job, for better or worse. He is loyal to the president to a fault, and the current president in Guilty Gear certainly isn't a bad one thankfully. President Colin Vernons whole campaign pitch is about world peace, and putting an end to "might makes right". Anyways, other than Goldlewis's job, his hobby is that he's an avid cryptid collector. A lot of ppl think that hes an alien denier but in actuality he's playing dumb in order to hide what's in his coffin. It's funny how that managed to fool so many fans honestly... But yeah, any playable character who has an additional pet or creature accompanying them, like Lucifero (the 2 little mouth bat thingies that carry Ramlethals swords), he has additional unique match intro dialogue with acknowledging them. He also mistakes Faust for a cryptid and wants to analyze him lol. He's a pretty silly guy and I love him. Back before Sol Badguy was what he is now, back in 2014, he was a scientist named Fredrick Bulsara (his name is a reference to Freddy Mercury) accompanied by two colleagues. Aria Hale, and "That Man". They were working on the Gear project together with That Man as the head of the project. The three of them were good friends, and Fredrick and Aria even fell in love. Around the end of the project though, Aria revealed to Fredrick and That Man that she was terminally ill with a TP infection, and wanted to spend the rest of her time with the two of them. Neither Fredrick nor That Man wanted to accept this, and wanted her to go into cryosleep until a cure could be found. That Man ended up taking extreme measures, and forcefully used Fredrick as the first human Gear specimen. A Gear is essentially a super soldier, a being with an extended life span, special magical affinity and more durable bodies, capable of shrugging off disease. That Man did this to try to prove to Aria that a cure could be close, but in a rage Fredrick destroyed the facility and fled, forcing the project to be shut down. Nevertheless, Aria did end up consenting to cryosleep. Eventually in the 2060s the Gear project was reopened for military purposes, much to That Mans chagrin. He joined the project under the alias and worked his way up to the head once again. He used Aria to create Justice, the first perfect Gear. The only Gear that would be intended to have free will, intended to lead the rest in battle by exerting her will on them. But in 2074 when she was fully activated for the first time, a mysterious entity from an alternate dimension began trying to cross into reality using Justice, the same way this entity had tried to at the turn of the century decades ago, during the dawn of revival, an event that caused humanity to distrust technology and switch to magic based machines. The event in 2074 led to the total destruction of the country of Japan, and the beginning 100 year war known as the crusades, in which Justice, after losing her mind due to contact with the mysterious entity, would wage war on humanity. Much was lost, but she was finally put to rest a full century later by Ky Kiske, Kliff Undersn, and Sol Badguy. Later on that same mysterious entity, now taking on a humanoid form named Ariels, attempted to use Justices corpse to gain the power to wipe out humanity and start over. She created Ramlethal and Elphelt with the goal of fusing them to Justice to gain control of that power. THIS is finally where Jack-O comes in lol. In 2074, That Man managed to save half of Arias soul, with the other half residing in Justice. Using the half he saved he created Jack-O, his own Valentine just like Remlethal and Elphelt. Jack-O would be a plug to basically stop anything else from fusing with Justice, and in the process recover the other half of Aria, to keep within Jack-O. This plan succeeds, and afterward Jack-O becomes Sols companion, but she wasn't exactly Aria. She's Jack-O, plus the other half of Aria that was in Justice, essentially shattered inside of one body and unable to be that same person again, but Sol ends up falling in love with Jack-O anyways. Eventually in Strives story mode she becomes the only way to stop I-No from destroying the universe, at the cost of herself, but Sol stops her from doing so because he would rather die with her while trying to save the world, than live in a world without her. Jack-O tells him Aria isn't coming back, he asks her if she'd ever heard him call her Aria. Jack-O isn't Aria to Sol, at least not completely. He loves *Jack-O*. It's a really sweet story. Jack-O had been really confused with herself during the entirety of Strive, but that one act of love from Sol affirmed her so much. She didn't sacrifice herself, Sol managed to save the world, and now they're both retired, living the slow life together like they deserved over a hundred years ago. Also one final note, Jack-O has a stange speaking pattern, stemming from her nature as a splintered Aria. She'll usually begin by talking in a childlike manor but then mid sentence she might switch completely into stoic mature scientist mode, and that quirk is sort of represented in her Strive theme, where each line of the lyrics kinda doesn't flow into the next as well. You can interpret that as a reference to her speaking quirk or you can take it deeper and say it's both Jack-O and Justice speaking one after the other, until they both reach harmony finally near the end, with the Justice half essentially being able to rest and let Jack-O take the wheel. Either way it's a cool detail. I hope that made sense, Guilty Gear lore gets kinda crazy especially with anything directly to do with the crusades. I'm the same person who in the comments of the last video rambled for way too long trying to tl;dr I-No, who is also directly tied to the crusades lol, it's wild.
Yet another nice batch of Themes, i think i liked Goldlewis’ Theme the most out of these, also what do you mean Boss Theme? Anyway, I wonder which ones you do next? Speaking of which, I would like you to do Guilty Gear - Todas Aberturas - All openings - 1998 ~ 2021 by Muita Luta Na Mente at some point, if you’re interested?
Goldlews is a body guard and security for the us government and the song is like him being and told what his orders from us government are and he think their barking orders even tho he knows what his orders are
Goldlewis is one of the newer characters introduced in Guilty Gear Strive so his song is about his current state rather than older characters that are striving to change. So unfortunately his story is currently just starting, maybe later it will change and we will get a more interesting song in a sequel.
If you are intereseted on the lore of these games, there's this guy on youtube called "Thorgi arcade" that makes lore videos on fighting games like Guilty Gear or Darkstalkers. They are good, but the videos are long tho.
The meaning behind the kiss of death is essentially "I hate the system, but I am the system, fuck"
The a little tidbit behind Goldlewis that the song doesn't delve into is that Goldlewis is not a believer in Aliens. He refers to the creature in his coffin as a cryptid, or UMA. He also loves to listen to Miles Davis.
also, he doesn't believe the creature he keeps hauling around is a cryptid or an alien.
The thing about "Perfection Can't Please Me" is that it SOUNDS happy and upbeat, but in the context of the character it's incredibly sad. She thinks she's going to die soon, and she's in love with Sol but she believes he can never love her back - and she feels she absolutely cannot tell him either of those things - and the song is her coming to terms with those ideas. It's a sweet, bubbly exterior concealing resignation to a profoundly sad truth - it might actually be the GG Strive song that most perfectly embodies its character.
Aisha's vocal performance on the track is also 🔥🔥🔥.
Tbf she died 3 times, just let her rot in her grave
A few facts about each character, respective to their theme:
Crawl is the ARCADE boss theme, which is almost always a super-buffed Nagoriyuki, who is permanently in his blood-rage form. Nagoriyuki is a 'Nightwalker', which are just stupidly powerful vampires in the essence that they literally cannot die, at all. Crawl talks about Nagoriyuki's intense rage since he's been enslaved by the main antagonist, Happy Chaos, and how he now wants nothing more than "the freedom of calm".
The Kiss of Death makes a lot more sense when you realise that Goldlewis is the USA's Secretary of "Absolute Defence", plus an extremely obedient and selfless soldier - to the point he catches an entire RPG mid-flight and launches it away to save a squad of his men. The creature in his coffin is indeed an alien, but Goldlewis is a firm believer that aliens AREN'T REAL, and that the thing he captured is just a 'cryptid' or, as he calls them, a 'U.M.A.'. Despite that, whenever Goldlewis wins a match, aliens rush in while he isn't looking and abduct his opponent, and he simply assumes his opponent ran off out of fear.
Jack-O' Valentine is, in essence, the wife of the protagonist Sol Badguy. Essentially, ages before the story, she fell ill and became a Gear (a scientifically-and-magically-enhanced version of herself) to live longer, but eventually her soul was used as the base for a robot known as JUSTICE. JUSTICE was possessed by a machine god known as the Universal Will, and created a series of exclusive Gears known as the Valentines. Jack-O' was one of these and, after a major story arc, the soul of Sol's wife was pulled from JUSTICE and moved into Jack-O''s body. It's both the childish playfulness of Jack-O' and the cautious care of Aria Hale, Sol's wife, that makes her so diverse (hence the use of "Trick AND Treat!" in her character trailer). The lyrics of the song mirror this, with some lyrics being very childish, like "grab lots of snacks, and wear new shoes" to symbolize Jack-O', and more lyrics that talk about love and distance, like "how far can I go" and "how many miles is a life?" to symbolize Aria.
I mean technically JackO and Justice each had half of Aria's soul initially-
Ram and El where both creatrd by the Universal Will also, but Jackie was made by Asuka
I also took the "how many miles is life" to be referring to the fact that she's basically living on borrowed time right? Cause she thinks that once Aria is done recuperating she'll basically take full control to be with Sol. I always figured the song was about her wanting to do all the things that make her happy before she dies; which as far as she believes, will be very soon.
@@catrianheir Since most of the character songs are post main story (cause VS Mode and Arcade Mode is mainly post main story) I always took JackO's song to be about her finally enjoying her life after accepting that she *does* want and deserve to live it for herself
Jack-O doing nothing but unnecessarily complicating the story in her theme? Who would've guessed.
Yay the GG Strive theme reaction is back!
You are getting close to the big ones like “Drift” and “Mirror of the world”.
This series is backkk! Let’s goooo been waiting for this one. Both Jack-o and Goldlewis have great themes. Kiss of death is fairly straightforward but it’s honestly kind of refreshing for me that there isn’t some complex meaning or lyrics to it because I can just enjoy a great rock song
It's really funny to me that you talk about Jack-O and Golddlewis themes and bring up Goldlewis' as the simple one when Jack-O's is basically a list of what she likes.
I get you though there is a giant ass context to that song but it's still funny.
I was just vibing with Jacko's theme one day like "oh Jacko your song is so silly. It doesn't even make sense." Then suddenly something in the lyrics clicked together and I realized "wait is she dying?!" A bit of research later and yes. She is in fact dying (as far as she knows) very soon, and this overly cheerful song is about her trying to do all the things that bring her joy with her husband before she dies.
Crawl is interpreted two ways: Nagoriyuki is trying to keep his vampire instincts calm, or it’s about what happens in the story where the games villain has him under control and is forcing him to be the muscle which personally enrages him but he can’t say no, so he’s gonna kick his heels in the dirt and make things as difficult as possible until he can break free.
You pretty much hit the nail on the head with kiss of death. He hates the system, the job is the system, he hates his job, but he’s gonna keep his head down and do it anyway.
Perfection can’t please me is about Jack-O’s whole story and character. She was made with part of the soul of Sols wife from a long time ago (Sol is QUITE old) but her creation ended up being rushed so there’s a childish personality and mature personality that ended up separate. Now for story reasons at the end of the previous game Jack-O was set to stop existing when the game ended, GG Strive takes place 2 weeks after that and she’s still around. Although the reason for her to stop existing hasn’t gone away it just hasn’t taken effect so now she’s wondering ‘how far is this going to go’ and ‘how long can this last?’ as she’s beginning to fall in love with Sol (again?) Her childish personality is also going “Hey, but like POPCORN though”
The nago boss theme hits so hard.
For quick insight. It’s basically nago trying crawl from his vampire instincts.
I really love the thoughts she gave on Crawl, that was so nice seeing her explain her thought process - most lyrics don’t make sense without story context but the ones that do are so great too
I'd love to see a reaction to the lore of Guilty Gear. There's a great series by woolieVS about Guilty Gear lore. It's a wild ride and the lyrics make more sense when you know the context.
Yeah Woolie is prolly the best bet for a newcomer (even if the first vid especially has a lotta misinfo), all the other plot summaries Ive seen out there are eother too short or just... really bad
Can I say I love how Kiss of Death ends with "Can we start over?" "Deal.", cause in-game the song will start over at this point (if you ever last that long :^p)
An aspect of "Crawl" I don't see mentioned a lot is like, it's the *boss* theme of the arcade mode, so it's technically not specifically about Nagoriyuki (even if Nago is the most common arcade boss)
And like, the arcade boss at highest difficulty is really, *really* hard to beat, like hundreds of losses to one win hard to beat-
So to me, "Crawl" feels like a song about you, the player, crawling and screaming as you despair trying to beat the dang boss :^p
Goldlewis' theme prolly hits better when you know him a bit better as a character- like it kinda feels like there's a bit of a deliberate contrast between it and what he's like
He's a veteran of the Crusades (that 100 year war thing) and is now the "Secretary of Absolute Defense" of the US; where his main passion is the research and capture of cryptids. In fact, he doesn't believe in aliens actually, and insists the creature under his control is a cryptid, not an alien.
He looks like a rough and tough guy, but he does have a softer and caring side to him.
But he *is* a newer character, so we don't got a lot of history on him yet.
JackO, to put it most simply, is an artifically created copy of a dead woman, who was made to effectively resurrect said woman.
(Strive spoilers below if you don't want to see?)
She's always had half of that woman's soul, and recently she's finally managed to fuse with the other half. However, she found that instead of simply becoming that woman, her artifical "JackO" personality and self continues to exist instead.
This was a great source of guilt for her, feeling that she didn't fulfill her purpose correctly and was "taking away" the woman she was modelled after away from her loved ones. But on the other hand, she also felt a strong desire to live as herself anyway.
Her story in Strive is about realizing that she does deserve to live as herself, and as such, her song is reflective of her accepting and embracing her own life and future.
Bro my first time doing the arcade boss I came in like "yo I get a partner? pfff. This will be easy... Huh that's some intense music" queue unintelligible shrieks of sheer ass whoopings
So for crawl, the character it's talking about is nagoriyuki (the giant black dude). He is a samurai but also a vampire. Both of these things clash with each other.
His blood thirst makes him want to kill everybody and go on a rampage but his honor as a samurai and his mind of steel prevents from doing it.
The lyrics basically represents him struggling with his thirst for blood and his wish to die. But also no matter what he will keep on going.
Yeah, Cloudrop actually has the lyrics to Jack-O's Theme wrong, Capn Booker actually has the Correct Lyrics on his Channel, fun fact when you get to Baiken, he has her Correct Lyrics as well, keep that in mind.
Especially so with Baiken’s cause I feel like the lyrics cloudrop has paint a very very different story than what it actually is
Nature is healing as strivers learn that CloudDrop has not updated their videos to the official lyrics
@@RainbowCupCait Yeah, good point
@@KingOfFools784 I wonder if he'll ever do that though...?
@@KingOfFools784 but what will I do without a video on the side to keep my attention span?
I noticed no one is mentioning that goldlewis is actually extorting the alien that he doesnt believe in, forcing it to help him
Three absolute bangers in a row next time, can’t wait to see you guys react to the Drift / Mirror of the World / Like A Weed triple hit.
Really do love this series. It has really great music
the thin to note with the music in strive is its al on the chars story in a way so for jak-o how she was basically made as a perfect being and is dealing with mortal emotion if noticed the song gose on and the music gets more free form and less composed more imperfect turning into every instrument being a solo effectively, and the ending being organized.
The way I interpret Jack-O's song is that it's speaking to the duality of Jack-O's nature. She has two souls inside of her, the one made for Jack-O, and the soul of Aria, Sol's wife. She wants to figure out what she feels for herself (if her feelings for Sol are real and not just Aria's again, if Aria deserves to live instead of her) but the other part of her wants to just enjoy life as it is.
During her arcade mode story, she also switches between her two souls/personalities which interact with the characters differently -- one the introspective sort and the other a carefree gust of wind.
Hence the line "Let's not pretend I don't hear me"
Little bit of references mixed in the characters. Jack o is a reference Michael Jackson, her mask is a reference to Helloween ( The metal band), and I might be wrong, but her unique crouching pose might be a reference to the Queen song: Fat Bottomed Girls. It would make sense is sol a walking Freddie Mercury reference.
I love the GG music both becouse of its heavy metal and how diverse it can be to fit each character.
It makes for great listening whenever i'm playing a ARPG or just reading a book :)
I just realized the Goldlewis' theme is a great foil/contrast to Potempkin's theme (armor clad faith). Both working for their government and following orders. While Goldlewis follows them blindly, Potemkin follows them but is contemplating if what he is doing is right and tries to have faith that he is doing the right thing.
Y'all should watch the guilty gear lore compilation by Woolie Madden. He made it sponsored by the Guilty Gear devs ruclips.net/p/PLiSdC6Lp8c7OkrBhzdQsQhGL_7jT0cSTv
It’s finally here! I’ve even waiting for an excuse to talk about Crawl - and now I have it!
Crawl is one of the odd ones out in the soundtrack, as much like Leo’s theme - it has two plausible interpretations. The former is as a direct analogy to Nagoriyuki’s role in the plot.
Nagoriyuki as we’ve already established is a vampire, and much like vampire thralls in fiction - he’s under the oppressive rule of a master. Nago serves under Happy Chaos, the m main antagonist of Strive (aside from I-NO). Much to his chagrin, Nagoriyuki is forced to fallow Chaos’ orders, despite his desire to have “freedom of the calm”. Contrary to most vampires in fiction, Nagoriyuki has a strong sense of armor. His samurai ascetic makes that rather clear, and the lyrics reinforce this.
“Blue heat, black heart, instinct and intellect”.
He’s not just a vampire craving the blood of the innocent. He’s got some sense to him.
“A dead past to never return”.
A nice double entendre. As a vampire (at least a classical one) he would very much so be a dead man walking. A corpse who can never return to his past life, both figuratively and quite literally.
So how does Nagoriyuki combat this? *He goes back in.* He fights, he “holds faith made of steel”, that being his signature Odachi and Katana. He’s going to keep fighting: because when you can’t run anymore, you walk - and when you can’t walk *you Crawl.*
_“But I'm not going to be lost tomorrow, even if it is hell”_
_“I'm gonna crawl”_
The secondary meaning lies outside the story. This theme song actually plays for more than just Nagoriyuk. It’s his boss theme when fighting him in Arcade Mode yes, but it plays with any character fighting him. This isn’t just his theme, but yours - the player.
You’ve burned through this entire arcade mode, your thumbs ache and you’re on the edge of your seat as this vampire bastard is outraging you with his ridiculously long sword. You aren’t gonna fall here, you’ve come too far. So what do you do? You crawl, you crawl your way to victory. It’s a hype theme that encourages the player not to give up, you keep fighting. No matter the odds, you crawl your way to victory. Even if it’s hell.
-----------------------
Jack-0 is another odd one. You see, Jack-0 as a character is technically two people. One of those people, or “souls” is the deceased wife of one of our protagonists - Sol. Her name is Aria, and Sol has already had to kill her in a precocious game. Of course, she was a genocidal Gear super weapon, but we’ll acknowledge that it was a necessary evil for Sol.
Her theme is a mixture of the two beings inside of her, the conflicting memories and desires of both the people inside. Aria wants those feelings of “piping hot like popcorn” - the ability to see the world through her eyes. She’s not in control of the body, but acts more so as a disembodied voice dropping hints to Jack-O about who she actually is. She just wants it pursue her happiness, preferably with her husband Sol. She had a second chance at life, and she just wants to experience it with her husband. They’ve been taken away from each other once, and never again.
I swear I check back like so often (not with just you guys but reacters in general) to see if there's any new videos of ppl checking out Guilty Gear I love seeing that lol
Yeah Crawl is unique among the Strive themes in that it's not necessarily tied to any one character. It's definently tailored for Nagoryuki but it's broad enough to be applied to any character who happens to become a boss fight in this game (the base game and 1st season of DLC characters all fight Nago as their arcade mode boss, but season 2 and onward the boss is someone different. For Bridget and Sin the boss is Ky, for Bedman? the boss is Ramlethal, Asuka fights... himself, Johnny fights May, and Elphelt fights Faust). For Nagoryuki the consensus is that the song represents his anger at being made a pawn of Happy Chaos (who you should be meeting next time you do one of these videos lol). He can't ignore Chaos's will no matter how hard he tries and yet he's still forced to be aware of what he's doing. When he fights people in the story mode while under Chaos's control he often tells them to run or critiques their fighting form, because that's the guy he truly is. In the story mode during his final confrontation with Sol he admits that Sol surely would defeat him but it would take too long, Sol wouldn't be able to win the day. So he summoned all his strength just to let go of his sword, letting Sol land a knock-out blow. He crawled. I won't go over every other boss but I'll touch on Ky cuz I think hes the second most applicable (feel free to skip this part of the comment if you really want honestly lol). Ky was taught through experience all his life that Gears were evil by nature and that extermination was required to save humanity. It's us or them. When the leader of the Gears, Justice, was finally defeated, he was present during her final moments. Justice asked him why humans hate her so, and he replied his viewpoint, and in response Justice argued that she was only enacting the will that was programmed into her by the greedy heinous humans who made her. It wasn't evil to do so in her eyes. She was a reflection of all of mankinds evils and inability to look inward. In that moment Ky was stunned, unable to exchange any other words with her before she succumbed to her wounds. Later on humanity discovered that Justice had laid an egg, and the offspring was living isolated in a region called hells grove. A bounty was pot on its head and everyone and their mother set out to destroy it. But when Sol and Ky were the ones who made found it, what they saw was a timid girl named Dizzy who longed for contact, along with two protective wings with their own will to defend their host. Sol was gonna kill her but Ky stepped between them in the final moment and shared the thinking he had done since their encounter with Justice. Gears are not inherently evil. All Dizzy had ever done is exist in longing for connection, so Ky decided to show her the world outside the grove. She spent some time with the Jellyfish Pirates but then left to live with Ky and thats when they fell in love and eventually had a son named Sin, and due to a funny series of events I won't describe here he also came to obtain the Scales of Juno, which are a special type of Gear cells which are connected to the universe itself, to put it simply. Ky was so happy with his family, but he also knew that as 1st king of Illyria, him being in love with one of the very things that had terrorized humanity for a century was a delicate situation, and it took him a long time to go public about it. A lot of his time in the series was spent inching closer and closer to the dream he had for a peaceful world where he could coexist with his wife. He crawled, until he didn't need to anymore. In the boss fight where you fight him as Bridget, the idea is that he is relating his fears of revealing his wife to the world to Bridgets own worries about her journey regarding her gender identity, which I'll get to when you hear her theme lol.
Ok Im gonna post this comment and then edit in the explanations for Goldlewis and Jack-O lol. Goldlewis shouldn't be too long, but Jack-O... No promises.
Ok so it for some reason won't let me edit the rest of it into this comment so I'll see if I can just post it as another comment lol and hopefully you see both
_Crawl_ is great, but I think I'd agree it's what you 'expect' from Guilty Gear. It's certainly not one of my favourites, but it's in a lot of my playlists. I like _Perfection Can't Please Me,_ but I have the opposite problem where it's not my kind of music, and I've never thrown it on just to listen to it like I do with Necessary Discrepancy and a few others. _The Kiss of Death..._ I like it, but there's not a whole lot in there for me. I really like songs that tell a story, and it kinda doesn't do that. It's exactly my genre, though.
Ah, we're into DLC character themes now! We're so close to some of my favourite tracks - in fact I think that's the next video, unless there's more DLC characters I'm forgetting.
Jack O is best girl.
(continuation from another comment, I think maybe I hit the RUclips comment character limit or something LOL)
Goldlewis is the US secretary of ABSOLUTE defense (that's literally what his in game subtitle is lol). You pretty much got the idea of his thoughts with his job. A lot of ppl think he's jaded and thinks hes just a dog of the military, but I think he actually likes his job, for better or worse. He is loyal to the president to a fault, and the current president in Guilty Gear certainly isn't a bad one thankfully. President Colin Vernons whole campaign pitch is about world peace, and putting an end to "might makes right". Anyways, other than Goldlewis's job, his hobby is that he's an avid cryptid collector. A lot of ppl think that hes an alien denier but in actuality he's playing dumb in order to hide what's in his coffin. It's funny how that managed to fool so many fans honestly... But yeah, any playable character who has an additional pet or creature accompanying them, like Lucifero (the 2 little mouth bat thingies that carry Ramlethals swords), he has additional unique match intro dialogue with acknowledging them. He also mistakes Faust for a cryptid and wants to analyze him lol. He's a pretty silly guy and I love him.
Back before Sol Badguy was what he is now, back in 2014, he was a scientist named Fredrick Bulsara (his name is a reference to Freddy Mercury) accompanied by two colleagues. Aria Hale, and "That Man". They were working on the Gear project together with That Man as the head of the project. The three of them were good friends, and Fredrick and Aria even fell in love. Around the end of the project though, Aria revealed to Fredrick and That Man that she was terminally ill with a TP infection, and wanted to spend the rest of her time with the two of them. Neither Fredrick nor That Man wanted to accept this, and wanted her to go into cryosleep until a cure could be found. That Man ended up taking extreme measures, and forcefully used Fredrick as the first human Gear specimen. A Gear is essentially a super soldier, a being with an extended life span, special magical affinity and more durable bodies, capable of shrugging off disease. That Man did this to try to prove to Aria that a cure could be close, but in a rage Fredrick destroyed the facility and fled, forcing the project to be shut down. Nevertheless, Aria did end up consenting to cryosleep. Eventually in the 2060s the Gear project was reopened for military purposes, much to That Mans chagrin. He joined the project under the alias and worked his way up to the head once again. He used Aria to create Justice, the first perfect Gear. The only Gear that would be intended to have free will, intended to lead the rest in battle by exerting her will on them. But in 2074 when she was fully activated for the first time, a mysterious entity from an alternate dimension began trying to cross into reality using Justice, the same way this entity had tried to at the turn of the century decades ago, during the dawn of revival, an event that caused humanity to distrust technology and switch to magic based machines. The event in 2074 led to the total destruction of the country of Japan, and the beginning 100 year war known as the crusades, in which Justice, after losing her mind due to contact with the mysterious entity, would wage war on humanity. Much was lost, but she was finally put to rest a full century later by Ky Kiske, Kliff Undersn, and Sol Badguy. Later on that same mysterious entity, now taking on a humanoid form named Ariels, attempted to use Justices corpse to gain the power to wipe out humanity and start over. She created Ramlethal and Elphelt with the goal of fusing them to Justice to gain control of that power. THIS is finally where Jack-O comes in lol. In 2074, That Man managed to save half of Arias soul, with the other half residing in Justice. Using the half he saved he created Jack-O, his own Valentine just like Remlethal and Elphelt. Jack-O would be a plug to basically stop anything else from fusing with Justice, and in the process recover the other half of Aria, to keep within Jack-O. This plan succeeds, and afterward Jack-O becomes Sols companion, but she wasn't exactly Aria. She's Jack-O, plus the other half of Aria that was in Justice, essentially shattered inside of one body and unable to be that same person again, but Sol ends up falling in love with Jack-O anyways. Eventually in Strives story mode she becomes the only way to stop I-No from destroying the universe, at the cost of herself, but Sol stops her from doing so because he would rather die with her while trying to save the world, than live in a world without her. Jack-O tells him Aria isn't coming back, he asks her if she'd ever heard him call her Aria. Jack-O isn't Aria to Sol, at least not completely. He loves *Jack-O*. It's a really sweet story. Jack-O had been really confused with herself during the entirety of Strive, but that one act of love from Sol affirmed her so much. She didn't sacrifice herself, Sol managed to save the world, and now they're both retired, living the slow life together like they deserved over a hundred years ago. Also one final note, Jack-O has a stange speaking pattern, stemming from her nature as a splintered Aria. She'll usually begin by talking in a childlike manor but then mid sentence she might switch completely into stoic mature scientist mode, and that quirk is sort of represented in her Strive theme, where each line of the lyrics kinda doesn't flow into the next as well. You can interpret that as a reference to her speaking quirk or you can take it deeper and say it's both Jack-O and Justice speaking one after the other, until they both reach harmony finally near the end, with the Justice half essentially being able to rest and let Jack-O take the wheel. Either way it's a cool detail.
I hope that made sense, Guilty Gear lore gets kinda crazy especially with anything directly to do with the crusades. I'm the same person who in the comments of the last video rambled for way too long trying to tl;dr I-No, who is also directly tied to the crusades lol, it's wild.
For the next Guilty Gear OST video. It took me ten minutes to notice the notification. I forgot about it in two seconds. That's about it.
GGS have some of the most heated song know in all fighting games man it is true that when you buy GGS you buy the album with it
You should listen and react to the character themes from Guilty Gear's spiritual successor BlazBlue. Lot of awesome tracks in that series.
Yet another nice batch of Themes, i think i liked Goldlewis’ Theme the most out of these, also what do you mean Boss Theme? Anyway, I wonder which ones you do next?
Speaking of which, I would like you to do Guilty Gear - Todas Aberturas - All openings - 1998 ~ 2021 by Muita Luta Na Mente at some point, if you’re interested?
Goldlews is a body guard and security for the us government and the song is like him being and told what his orders from us government are and he think their barking orders even tho he knows what his orders are
Goldlewis is one of the newer characters introduced in Guilty Gear Strive so his song is about his current state rather than older characters that are striving to change. So unfortunately his story is currently just starting, maybe later it will change and we will get a more interesting song in a sequel.
Oh you guys are doing OST reactions!? You should definitely check out some Persona 5 music
Love these GG reactions
another guilty gear OST reaction, another great day.
John Goodman is Goldlewis, that's the meme in the GG community lmao
If you are intereseted on the lore of these games, there's this guy on youtube called "Thorgi arcade" that makes lore videos on fighting games like Guilty Gear or Darkstalkers. They are good, but the videos are long tho.
We are so back
You guys should react to Tekken 6 Scenario Campaign cutscenes! It’s like watching Mortal Kombat 9!
Y'all forgot to say Fight Night Friday 😂
I WANT THE FREEDOM OF CALM AN INFINITE STORM OF NOTHINGNESS
Grendel Prime | Gauss Prime reaction? Hmm?)) 😼
Yippee ty ty
Yoo guys, cau you react to The Finals pls, that game i a 10/10
You should react to the supers from Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Heritage for the Future
I would love for you guys to react to the animations from this Dragon Ball Game called Dragon Ball Z Dokkan Battle
There’s different videos from different years I suggest start with 2021 and then continue until you reached 2023
Hey can u guys react to all gta online trailers?
Девушке лайк)
😅