Dual Rulers Wasn’t Peak Fiction
Howdy, howdy everyone. Sorry that it’s been like eight months since I actually made a [ __ ] video. I just had the worst year of my life and I am still in the process of it. Let me let me just have this. All right, we good. You don’t need to [ __ ] leave comments acting like I’m your dad that left and got milk. Oh, thank you for 25K subs that just happened. Uh I’m very happy you’ve all been enjoying my stuff even when I’ve been uh preoccupied with life. Let’s try to keep this brief. I want to be a real sweetheart and hope you like and subscribe. I have a co-ive blue sky, a Twitter, whatever. And you can What the [ __ ] is hype? Yes s hype the video. Sure. I feel like an old man. I’m [ __ ] 20. Okay, so uh Dual Rulers, an anime based on Guilty Gear. I’m sure we’ve all seen Okay, I’m sure we’ve all heard. Okay, fine. This thing is an 8 episode miniseries set after the events of Guilty Gear Strive with the main intent of introducing brand new character Unica. And it was it was it was okay. I mean, it’s fine. You should watch it. Uh, as a team art creator, I must say the only legal place to watch it outside of Japan is Crunchyroll. Sorry to wait this long before getting into the actual show, but like the marketing for this was kind of weird. They announced it in July of 2024 of just teasers and then like kind of slowly announced stuff, but it felt like most of the marketing was from the Japanese side of things, but I didn’t really notice because I was being a sicko and trying to get all the info for the wiki purposes. And then I blacked out. And then it was April 2025. The Japanese Guilty Gear account had a bunch of like promo images and stuff hyping up the characters and had messages from the voice actors and like giveaways of signed copies of the scripts and we did not get anything of the sort. I don’t really know what happened behind the scenes that made Arcist or Crunchyroll not really market it, but all I know is I saw a lot of people say they didn’t even know the show was out. I was watching each episode the day they came out and you can tell because I created all the pages for the episodes and Unica and Nerville on the wiki. Now that’s an alibi that could surely hold up in court. I don’t actually watch anime, so I don’t know what the average time between a show like this coming out and it getting an English dub is, but it’s been like 6 months or so, so I think that ship is sailing. [Music] Okay, so like talking about the actual show, I’m just going to assume that you’ve seen the show or have a general idea of what happens because plot recaps are boring and lazy and everything else. I’m just going to talk about what important things I want to talk about. First episode was very fun. It’s very much a springboard for just telling the Japanese TV watching masses who a sinke and a sole bad guy are. But I think it does its job like fairly well. I love Sin’s cartoon sound effects. And I really love the stained glass art for the flashbacks and explaining the plots of previous games. If there’s one thing I can’t fault this show for, it’s the art. The show was entirely made in Blender for all of its 3D animation. And I think it works really well. I can’t really imagine it looking any different, and I love how they blend the 2D art in for the backgrounds and give everything lots of silhouettes. It looks really nice. The main cast is Sin as the main character. the first time he’s a main character instead of Soul. Soul as Sin’s uncle and the babysitter, Guy, and Dizzy, except we won’t be seeing much of them. Ramthal, Elfelt, Jacko, Johnny, Bikin, Lao, and Vernon all in the first episode. And a little bit later, we’ll be seeing Bridg, Dr. Paradigm, Axel, and Erica join in, and various cameos from other characters, some with a surprising amount of screen time, despite not having a single line of dialogue like Testament, all the way to the others that get one little drawing in a corner. I think the characters they chose make decent sense. I do wonder how the normal average Japanese citizens who are just watching TV and had never seen Guilty Gear before thought of the relatively brief condensed version of these characters. Because like imagine being a guy just watching TV and doesn’t know what Guilty Gear is and also you’re Japanese in this hypothetical and you see this bubbly woman with little goober creatures with a smile on her face just disassemble this realistic SWAT team members machine gun in front of him in like 1 second and then kick his ass. Oh no, it is the dive rocket launcher. take action regarding that individual. Relax, I’ll handle it. I am the angry pumpkin. And then she goes to being serious and never makes a joke in the rest of the show. Imagine that whiplash. I really want to know if that happened to anyone. And of course, how can we forget our brand new stars, Unika and [ __ ] Hammer. Oh my. We’ll be getting back to him. So yeah, the writer for the show or series composition, whatever that means, was Noramitsu Kai, who has been the main writer for a lot of Guilty Gear stuff in the past. Uh he did a bunch of drama CDs, including Night of Knives, Guilty Gear Extra, which is a manga that exists and everyone I’ve talked to that’s read it didn’t like it, but hey, we all miss sometimes. And then he worked on the story mode for Guilty Gear X, XX, and Guilty Gear 2, which by the way, Guilty Gear 2 was a very fun game. Genuinely, if I bought it for full price in 2007, I could see how I could be mad at it. But nowadays, get it for like $3 and then crank it down to easy and just enjoy your sole bad guy punching people adventure. very enjoyable. Anyway, so yeah, uh we kind of just reused the plot point of Dizzy being trapped under the castle in a big crystal, except it’s both Kai and Dizzy. How heartwarming. Unica crashed their wedding, did all that. Said she’s from the future to kill all gears, and it’s up to Sin and Soul to go find her. Okay, let’s just talk about Unika. Unica is a very workable template for a new character. Time traveler from the future. She’s evil. She’s not going to be evil by the end of this. Sure, we can work with that. This design is really good, especially in the show where she’s got goggles and the cat ears. I really think it gives off this nice cold alien feeling. I have no problems with this visually. I think the scenes we get with her and Sin fighting are cool. I love how she gets shot in the face by Soul. That’s awesome. Do more scenes like this. The only thing not right with the scene is Soul didn’t specify what year and specific make of the gun he’s using. We can guess, but I want Soul to say it. Uh anyway, Unica has her lesbian scene of Bridget and like listen, the fact that they just showed lesbian romance with a trans character and had it work and make sense plot-wise and have Bridget’s character art kind of meet with Unicas on being your true self and do that all in Japanese cable is is [ __ ] awesome. Like holy [ __ ] I don’t give a [ __ ] about shipping in the slightest, but these two are just like an actual great pair. They finally gave Bridget fans an actual meal plot-wise and made it not [ __ ] Real shame about Bridget [ __ ] getting her [ __ ] kicked in to be officially once it for all the weakest guilty gear character. She got bodied by one Nerville clone. [ __ ] Nervville. Let’s go [ __ ] strangle him up. Nerville is actually like most of my problems with the show. I literally can’t get around everything else I need to say without mentioning him. Uh he’s the show’s main antagonist and they try to keep that a secret for some [ __ ] reason. Uh the actual second they announced this character. I think we could all guess he would be a villain. Just look at him actually mustache trolling villain who ties ladies to train tracks. The only question is would he be a main villain of the show or were they still hiding the real one? or more importantly, would he be a cool villain or a campy villain? Spin-offs in side games and Guilty Gear are filled with a long illustrious line of [ __ ] flingers that die and are never heard from again. Such great crates as Leo, Judgement, Polio, Gage, and the one we still think about in our hearts, Pro. Going in, I was completely fine with Nerville being one of these. Uh, preferably more like Judgment or Crow where they’re over-the-top and fun. Of course, if they somehow got me to actually actually like this character in the same way I genuinely love characters like Oscar, Happy Chaos, or Arrol as villains, then that’s even better. But I was expecting an [ __ ] who’s funny and we never see again. Somehow, they tried doing both of these things at the same time and satisfied neither category, and I actually kind of hate him now, despite being so desperate to love him. Okay, so uh Nerval’s a US senator. This is already great. I’m an American. I love political drama in Guilty Gear. Genuinely the best scenes in Guilty Gear when they get to exposit a [ __ ] ton of real world facts at you. And I was hoping we’d get some of that from Nerville. Uh there’s a scene with Axel where he time travels a bit and they have the narrator talk about 16th century Japan as Axel gets chased by samurai and like that’s [ __ ] awesome. Notice how that’s a really good scene. More of that, please. When the show was airing before the big twist of Nerville happened, I wrote this as just like a thing I would have done or like prediction. And I still really like this idea. Obviously, it was just a rough draft, but I think they could have really leaned into his job more and made a character like Sin have to back up his words in a debate with a skeptical crowd. I think that could have been a real interesting route to take because as a senator who hates Gears, uh he kind of has a real reason to. Okay, this isn’t in the script. I kind of forgot to do this, but um uh so you know that Lars Canyon stage in Guilty Gear Strive with the massive [ __ ] skeletons in there. Uh yeah, there’s like a calendar that has lore for that stage and it says that those uh giant skeletons are still alive and they could come back to life and also those are in America somewhere. I would be kind of [ __ ] skeptical. Those are gears. Are they going to [ __ ] kill me? Maybe. Like they have a whole backstory with him about how he was traumatized by the Crusades and like became a politician to help people after getting rejected from making weapons of mass destruction with this virus that kills all gears. And it’s like damn they’re playing this guy straight. I’m kind of interested in liking where this is going. And we get a bit of that with sweet realworld [ __ ] with him reading Paradise Law and Dante’s Inferno and him talking about the Hey Flick limit like yes this is what I’m here for. and he’s working alongside Unka and then his future self comes through a portal and then eats his present self alive. Bam. This is the best scene in the whole [ __ ] show. This is so [ __ ] cool. This is so sick. I love body horror. This is a fantastic body horror. It’s so unexpected. It’s hype. It’s such a sharp left turn. I love it. Unfortunately, this is the peak of the show. This is the last scene in episode 5 and the last three episodes are bad. I think the show was going to be 10 episodes and then it got cut down to eight later because from here on the pacing is so fast and we barely have any room to grieve. Uh I have a high tolerance for Guilty Gear [ __ ] I’ve played all the games. I know the plots. I can explain the plot to other people. I was having to pause and rewind a bit just to figure out what was happening. This one part that really got me is when uh Nerbles a big storm cloud and Ramthal shoots Calvados at it in Ayria which is in Europe and that stops the invasion temporarily. That’s our heroes regroup in America. Uh, apparently he was in like multiple places at once or something. Uh, but I was like so confused on if she shot across the entire Atlantic Ocean to [ __ ] Arkansas from Rome. Also, yes, Nerville might be from Arkansas based on this one shot. I I love that. That’s perfect. He’s from [ __ ] Arkansas. This dude has a castle with a moat and dresses like a vampire in [ __ ] Arkansas. Kai, why did you even invite him to your wedding? The big problem with Nerville and by extension Unica is just this one tiny little detail that makes everything with her feel incredibly not planned out and wrong. Uh Nerville raised Unica from birth. He found her in an egg after Kai and Dizzy were both omega dead and raised her to become an assassin to go back in time and kill all the gears to stop the second crusades from happening which happens in the future. Also, yes, Unika is Sin’s sister. They are the dual rulers. Wow, that’s me clapping if it doesn’t pick up on the mic. Now, uh if you don’t immediately realize the problem with Nerville being the parental figure for Unica, all you need to do is look immediately to the character she is most compared to throughout this entire series. Sin. And look who raised him. Soul. You see how you could see so many traits of souls that get reflected in Sin by virtue of being raised by him. Zin has no manners. He’s kind of stupid. He goes out and hunts for food by hand using a [ __ ] flag pole. He’s super carefree and has no regard for any established rules that prevent him from inflicting his will of ultra generosity onto anyone and everyone. He is the exact mixture of the son of Kaiisk who was raised by sole bad guy, taking the best traits from both. After this, we swap from Bill and Una to the Unika that’s used in the rest of the show and Strive. And her personality is non-existent. She has none. Look at her interaction lines in Strive. H. No, because I want to make you cry. What? So, this is the power that leads a nation. I see. The strength you have requires some serious vocal prowess. I don’t know how to put it into words. I still don’t know if I’m ready for this. ABC’s of making a guy fall for you. See? See? cautious spirit. Hey, so what is this? What info does this give me? You could swap like half of her lines of Ramoths and I don’t think I would even be able to tell if I hadn’t had so much space in my brain dedicated to the Strive interactions memorized. Okay, like I know we’re getting a bit off topic from Dual Rulers, but like these characters are dual rulers. Let’s do a bit of a deep dive. Okay, so first off, who is Nerval Hammer? At heart, Nervville is a cunning, talented mad scientist. He’s very intelligent, has some amount of charm and persuasiveness given that he holds a Senate seat and is seen in Universe as an elite, respectable man. Enough so that he gets invited to Kai’s wedding. Why did you invite him? As shown later, Nerville is a heartless mastermind who sees Unika as only a weapon of mass destruction to be used and discarded when she’s finished with her purpose. Now, who is Unika? The following is a very generous reading of her characterization and Strive. Unica is a socially awkward girl who knows a vast amount about combat but very little about others. She is very kind and open to all kinds of learning. She also has an interest in fashion and will comment on characters outfits and her taunts and some other lines. And according to her in-game bio, her hobby is seasoning and she hates dogs and octopi. What the [ __ ] She is also a lesbian with a motorcycle that doubles as her sword. That’s awesome. What the [ __ ] do you mean your hobby is seasoning? like winter, spring, a regular. No. Oh, now if you’ve noticed, uh, she doesn’t really have any traits from Kai or Dizzy besides just virtuousness. And she also doesn’t have anything from Nerville, which she absolutely should have. And it’s crazy to me that she doesn’t. Even for like Ramoth, she keeps her shark teeth in like an idol animation. And elf shouts, “I love you, mom.” in one of her wall break lines, which even if it’s just like a stage crowd like rockstar joke, it’s still like she’s probably referring to Arrol. That is her mom, falling in love. Unica doesn’t even mention Nurbal and Strive. Nobody does. His name isn’t even said anywhere outside of Unica’s bio paragraph, and it’s just like a recap of the plot of the show. I’m going to [ __ ] say it. Uka should be weird. She should be a freak. Okay, how about this? Instead of using her taunt lines to talk about fashion, which is a very dicegay thing to write, but it’s also being done by several others. She should be insanely good at reading and judging her opponents at just a glance. She should be guessing and pointing out flaws in their attacks, beaming of ways that she could get them to drop their guard or get an upper hand on them. She should have an evil laugh. Her dad looked like this. She should have inherited that. She should be acting like a creep, not because she’s an evil person, but because she literally doesn’t know how to act around people. She has no frame of reference. Her current self feels like she’s trying to put up a wall of indifference way more than her finally being her true self. Her natural state should be a bit creepy and rude, like just a bit. Her dad surprised her by turning out to be mega abusive. And the only reason she wasn’t hanged is so she could work a job at the US government because she couldn’t find it in herself to jump into a new family’s arms immediately. She should be angsty. She’s working with Giovana. They should be mean together. Instead, she has lines that mean nothing and give nothing. As it stands, is she going to be a new main character? Like, what can she even do? Anything that she adds at the moment could be over overlapped with Ram, and the only thing I can actually see her doing is hanging out with Giovana more because she’s the only one that can extract a personality out of her. Being around the Keith family will just have them all in an endless loop of thanking each other over and over again. And then in a developer backyard, they casually dropped that one. Unic has a lot of undisclosed settings, as they say, uh that they can’t wait to share in the future, which h if only there was a place where we could have put all of the interesting facts about Unica. H man, if only there was like something dedicated entirely [ __ ] to her. And then two, uh, Kai and Dizzy named Unica, not Nerville, which like, okay, man, did you write her name on the egg with a [ __ ] Sharpie before you died? But, you know, [ __ ] it. Why should Nerville even have one piece of anything to signify that he was a character at all moving forward? It’s not like I was interested in this character that clearly had a lot of scrap screen time and the rush to get the series down to eight episodes and would have had a really interesting arc and going from a traumatized war veteran to a [ __ ] god who spent quote infinite time in his own pocket dimension to evolve himself of gene editing until he became a giant web of neurons the size of the [ __ ] moon. Hellbent on destroying all life on Earth to replace of himself and making himself look like a [ __ ] creepy pasta while giving his final monologue. [Music] It’s not like that’s [ __ ] awesome or anything. It’s not like I gave a [ __ ] The show’s a very strong love letter to fans. I just wish it got to actually stick the landing because as it stands now we have a show that spends so much of its runtime on plot beats that don’t pan out well and doesn’t get to spend nearly as much time as it should on the real fun of Guilty Gear which is stupid side character interactions and all fun facts. I’m glad we got characters like Dr. Paradigm and Erica getting screen time but also the absence of characters like Gold Lewis, Gio, and Daryl is like really weird because like where the [ __ ] are they? Daryl shows up in the final wedding scene for like 2 seconds. Where the [ __ ] were you during the time when the first king got [ __ ] put in a massive ice crystal? Leo was on [ __ ] Zoom calls asking what’s going on for like the whole show. Where were you? Also, Gold Lewis and Gio are the president’s bodyguards and were nowhere to be seen when the president almost got assassinated. That’s literally your one job. What were you doing? If you were in [ __ ] Brazil catching creatures, please let me see that. That’s really interesting. Please. I want to like the show because I really did enjoy those first five episodes a lot. And even after that, I enjoyed moments from the last three. I wish that they got to make what they actually wanted to make because it’s so clear they had to shave off so much of but the barest essentials in the final moments to make it through. Kai and Dizzy get like maybe 3 seconds of actually seeing Unic before the show is just over. In Exer, there’s these things in the gallery called secret voices which are little recordings of the playable characters voice actors talking about working on the game or just Guilty Gear in general. And a lot of them, specifically Akai and Johnny’s, I believe off the top of my head, um they talk about how much they would love to do a Guilty Gear anime one day. And that’s really awesome that they got to do that. Imagine playing the same character for 20, 25 years and then seeing them gradually grow up and become more popular until one day they finally get a big anime. That had to be really cathartic. Unfortunately, a lot of the time with TV, a bad ending just really eats through a lot of the potential of it being rewatchable because like who’s going to commit to watching just like half of it. Did you know they released a Blu-ray of the show and it’s like $200 [ __ ] dollars? This isn’t even like a tariffs or shipping fees thing. This is how much it costs inside Japan. And it comes with a little guide book of the thing with like the character bios and descriptions for the episodes, but the bios are just copy pasted from the website. So like, cool. Why is it $200? That’s the only big goodie it comes with. What is the strategy? If you’re going to rob me, give me an art book. Is this the first Blu-ray to sell zero copies? Who the [ __ ] is buying this? Anyway, I hope you all enjoyed that. Hopefully, it wasn’t too late. I don’t know. I need money. I keep spending it all. I’m trying to get this legendary item known as a STEM degree. I am never [ __ ] getting a job. Subscribe and all of the links. Thank you so much. Means the world. Bye-bye. Videos like this are possible because of viewers like you and generous supporters over on Kofi like KAS. Thank you. And also thank you again to Shmeule for editing this because he put in so many details that weren’t necessary and I didn’t ask him. Did you see Unika and Nerville blinking in the Ace Attorney courtroom scene? He didn’t need to do that, but he did. Incredibly talented. Please go follow him. Thank you for watching. I’m going to go back to something.
Guilty Gear Strive: Dual Rulers is an anime tv show thing. It has characters like Sol Badguy, and Nerville.
Note: I have received support from Arc System Works through their creator program, however they were not consulted for anything in this video. All views are my own.
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Edited by: https://twitter.com/ShmuelBrain
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Music Used (In Order):
Binary Game- 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors
Awe of She- Guilty Gear XX
Hungry!- JoJo’s All Star Battle: R
Theme of E-102ɣ- Sonic Adventure
Otherworldly Foe- Earthbound
Burly Heart- Guilty Gear X
A Cool Reception- Shovel Knight
Time Lapse by TheFatRat (low quality)
She Came from Outer Space- A Hat in Time
Wandering Ghost- Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
Moonlight Museum Version 1- Klonoa 2: Lunatea’s Veil
Orbulon’s Theme- WarioWare Inc. Mega Party Games
Horde Theme(??? I dont know which one im sorry)- Left 4 Dead 2
Let’s Make Some Money (Gallery Shop)- JoJo’s All Star Battle
Career Mode- Punch-Out!! (Wii)
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