Guilty Gear Strive Potato Mod Runs The Game On Crappy PCs

While it may go overboard sometimes, Guilty Gear Strive is one of the most beautiful fighting games of all time. So beautiful, in fact, that you can reduce the quality of its graphical output dramatically — say, for the purpose of improving its framerate on less-powerful PCs — and still be left with a very stylish game.

Fighting game modder FGCdraft recently demonstrated just how meager Guilty Gear Strive’s graphics can get while still remaining legible. By dropping the in-game options to their lowest point, futzing around with configuration files behind the scenes, and ultimately removing the more intensive aspects of its stage backgrounds with FGCdraft’s mod, the newly released fighting game can run at 60 frames per second even on min-spec PCs with as little as 8GB of RAM and 1GB of VRAM.

In this video, the mod boosts performance from a paltry 20-25fps to a smooth 60:

The resulting output is a far cry from Guilty Gear Strive in its full, magnificent glory, but it gets the job done. Personally, I think the grainier visuals are a great alternative to the game’s regular 2D-imitating 3D models. The low-level graphics aren’t quite as impressive as Guilty Gear in its pixelated prime, sure, but there’s a certain charm there that evokes the same feelings of old-school nostalgia.

These changes also have the added benefit of allowing more people to play Guilty Gear Strive, which is always a good thing. Plus, hiccups caused by less-powerful rigs have been known to translate to online competition, even if the person on the other end has up-to-date hardware. Now players on low-spec machines won’t have to worry about causing technical issues during matches with other players.

It would probably behoove everyone to play Guilty Gear Strive with graphics at maximum to learn as much about the game as possible, but that’s not always in the cards for a variety of reasons. Until that’s possible for more people, FGCdraft’s mod should do the trick. You can pretend you’re playing Guilty Gear Strive on a Game Boy Advance in the meantime.