Guilty Gear Strive nearly got Ciri from The Witcher instead of Lucy from Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, producer reveals
Guilty Gear Strive’s producer, Ken Miyauchi, opened up to Dexerto in an exclusive interview about how the series’ first-ever guest character was chosen — and who was almost picked, instead.
Lucy was revealed at Evo 2024 as the first guest character in Guilty Gear Strive — the first out of the entire Guilty Gear franchise, to be exact. This came as a welcome surprise for many players, a good portion of whom were also fans of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, in which Lucy plays a starring role.
However, questions instantly cropped up within the community. Why choose the middle of Strive’s lifetime to add Guilty Gear’s first guest character, and, above all, why Lucy? Lucy herself doesn’t do much fighting in the Edgerunners series, at least when compared to her modded-out counterparts like David or Maine.
We got the chance to sit down with Strive’s producer, Ken Miyauchi, to get to the bottom of this. He was happy to open up about the process — as well as what’s next for the future of Strive and potential guest characters.
Guilty Gear producer had been seeking out a guest character since Season 2
First, Miyauchi admitted that he’d been wanting to add a guest character to Strive since Season 2 as part of the company’s overall goal of expanding its playerbase. CD Projekt Red happened to be the first developer they reached out to — and they had an extremely warm response to Arc System Works.
”We started to think about how we would be able to bring in newer players. There are various ways of achieving that goal, and one of them is to bring in a guest character,” he explained.
Guest characters have become standard in fighting games over the past decade or so. In order to catch eyes and make Guilty Gear stand out from the crowd, they’d have to do something bold. ArcSys was dead-set on adapting something from their expansive RPGs to bring in a completely different audience.
“I’d been looking for a guest character since Season Two. Like, if we’re doing Season Four, then we would like to incorporate that element. The first company that we approached was CD Projekt Red, who responded to us very quickly.
“I got to talk to Satoru Honmna-san, who representing CD Projekt Red in Japan. He was telling us that maybe collaborating with Cyberpunk: Edgerunners could work. So, that’s how it started.”
Guilty Gear Strive almost had The Witcher’s Ciri instead of Lucy
But, why CD Project Red? According to Miyauchi, they reached out to CD Project Red first because Guilty Gear Strive’s lead artist, Sakamura Hidehiko, is a big fan of the Witcher series.
“We also thought about bringing in Ciri from The Witcher 3,” Miyauchi admitted. “But then, there was like, quite a different type of conversation between CD Projekt Red, and we finalized our idea to down to bringing in Lucy from Cyberpunk: Edgerunners.”
Guilty Gear fans almost got Ciri as a fighter in Strive, instead of Lucy.
For now, he isn’t able to say much more regarding Lucy’s development, but he assured us that the team is having a blast bringing her from Edgerunners into the universe of Guilty Gear Strive… and he’s open to more collaborations in the future.
“ That’s something that I’m actually open to,” he told us. “I can’t really guarantee it, of course. But we’re open to it, and if any creators are interested, please reach out.
“I can’t talk much about how her development is going, but what I would be able to say is, all of our members, designers, battle designers, artists, they’re having fun trying to bring in Lucy as a fighting game character.”
While much about Lucy’s progress is being kept intentionally vague, it’s clear that the minds behind Guilty Gear are keen on expanding their IP by collaborating with other major properties — and given SNK and Capcom’s recent partnership with Street Fighter and Fatal Fury, it seems like quite a few other major fighting game developers have the same idea. The more, the merrier!
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