The best and worst match ups in Guilty Gear Strive according to data pulled from over 3 million games
It's all a matter of perspective I suppose
The Guilty Gear Strive community, like pretty much every other fighting game, are certainly no strangers to its players complaining about one character or another being way too difficult or impossible to defeat, but how much of that is backed up by the hard data?
Although Arc System Works does not officially release the results of online sets, Felix Windström recently launched a website that's tracked over 3.3 million games played on the PC version of Strive and generates match up charts according to said data.
Windström's impressive Rating Update site actually breaks the statistics into three different match up charts between the complete global matches, the average of high-rated players against each other, and what seems to be the match up records of those high-rated players.
These match up charts don't deviate much between each other beyond a few percentage points, so we'll just be focusing on the global and average records to determine the best / worst match ups to be found in Strive right now.
As far as said global data goes, Goldlewis is actually the one with the worst match up in the game with an only 37% win record against Axl.
It's certainly easy to see why too considering Dickinson's lack of mobility without an air dash and no real good options to close the distance on the zoner make it a tall order to score any meaningful damage against Axl.
Funnily enough, however, Goldlewis also has one of the best match ups as well against Potemkin with a 62% win record, which I presume is due to the grappler not really having any tools available to stop an onslaught of Behemouth Typhoons once locked down without spending meter.
This trio of fighters appear to have the most volatile records of the entire cast unsurprisingly, but what of the rest of the roster?
You might be interested to know that Nagoriyuki's toughest opponent is also Axl though he has a harder time against Happy Chaos and Faust of all characters.
Sol only has two barely losing match ups on the global standings against Zato-1 and the vampire samurai while Leo hits a bit of a wall squaring off with those with longer range like Axl and ones who can go gorilla even harder than him like Potemkin and Jack-O.
Moving on to the high-ranked player data, Faust is the one that finds himself backed into the corner most often with two 32% win-rate match ups against Axl and Chaos — plus a 34% match up with Giovanna.
Jack-O understandably dies quickly to Millia in a 38% win rate while Anji does much the same against Zato.
What is perhaps the most fascinating result, however, is a good Nago losing pretty hard against a good Happy Chaos with only a 39% rating, so I guess the gun is mightier than the sword.
Speaking of the newcomer, Chaos has the best spread of match ups across all three charts with the mad lad being the only fighter to have an overall win rating of 52% in the global match data.
And while those worst ratings above may point to otherwise, Guilty Gear Strive appears to still be in a very good place balance-wise, as there's no character below a 49% average win rate in the full stats.
Things do skew a bit more among the best players, but even then, the lowest average win rate is still 47% with Ky of all people.
Some of you will probably feel that many of these worst match ups are fairly obvious to see, but I'm sure you still probably learned a new thing or two too — like Chaos and Faust beating Nago.
We recently also used Windström's website's player ranking feature to take a closer look at the characters being used among the top 100 competitors, which you can check out here.
