How To Beat Sol Badguy In Guilty Gear Strive

Despite what his name may imply, Sol Badguy is actually a rather pleasant guy when you get to know him. Beneath his monstrous strength and magical aptitude, he’s a free-wheeler with a strong sense of duty and a love of a stiff drink. Of course, if you’re in a fistfight with him, there won’t really be enough time to bond before he shoves your face in the dirt. Here’s how to beat Sol Badguy in Guilty Gear Strive.

As the game’s mascot, Sol is classified as one of the most balanced characters alongside Ky and May. That said, while he’s marked as a “Balanced” character, Sol really shines with a more aggressive playstyle, bordering on rushdown. His kit doesn’t have any elaborate inputs or weird systems, he’s just a dude with a big sword that launches fireballs. It’s that accessibility that ensures you’ll encounter him in just about any floor of network play, which can be annoying if you have consistent problems dealing with him.

How To Beat Sol Badguy In Guilty Gear Strive

The frames on Sol’s attacks reach far and wide; his forward and far Slash inputs can cover about a third of the screen, while his special moves are large and flashy enough to scare you into standing back. However, there are a couple of quirks to these attacks that offer moments of retaliation.

The aforementioned Slash inputs do have a long reach, but that long reach also makes them vulnerable to Psych Bursts. If a Sol starts spamming Slashes at you, you can safely Burst out to put him on the defensive. You can apply a similar principle to his screen-clearing Fafnir attack, knocking him out of it with a long-reaching normal of your own. This approach won’t work on all wide-spanning moves, though; Night Raid Vortex is specifically designed to avoid counter hits, but it leaves Sol wide open after the fact, so either dodge or block before retaliating.

What you really want to watch out for is Heavy Mob Cemetery, one of Sol’s Overdrive moves. It’s a command grab that not only rockets Sol across the entire screen, but has full invincibility for its duration; you cannot knock him out of it. However, when used, the move carries Sol in a straight line across the ground, so you can dodge him with a short hop and tag him with a cross-up when he passes by. This can be made a little easier with a Roman Cancel if you’ve got the meter for it.

If you need more hands-on training, don’t forget to check out the game’s built-in Training mode. It’s surprisingly exhaustive and, coincidentally, uses Sol as your training dummy frequently.