Frosty Faustings is a Celebration of Guilty Gear Legacy

In its fourteenth year, Frosty Faustings is the biggest tournament to run all three major Guilty Gear iterations.

Guilty Gear -Strive– has been making serious waves since its release last year. While the general Guilty Gear player base remains divided on how much they enjoy playing the latest installment, few would debate that there have been some incredibly hype tournament brackets and this past month was no exception. Frosty Faustings debuted Strive as their headline game this year in glorious fashion. The bracket featured Hotashi, Kizzie Kay, Lost Soul, and more showing off just how fun to watch Strive can be. 

Easily the best part of Frosty Faustings Strive top 8. pic.twitter.com/BcfLAbWFdp

— bc | ApologyMan (@ApologyMan) January 30, 2022

Of course, Strive was always bound to be right at home at Frosty Faustings. Frosty is, first and foremost, a Guilty Gear tournament after all. It’s right there in the name. Founded and run by Guilty Gear XX ACPR legend and Faust-main ElvenShadow, Frosty has always put Gear front and center. This year was a particularly beautiful showing though, with three generations worth of Guilty Gear put on display over the weekend. 

Frosty Faustings Has Immense Respect for Guilty Gear

It is pretty incredible to walk through the main ballroom of a venue and see not one, not two, but three iterations of a fighting game franchise being played. The only other game that could pull this off would be Street Fighter, but even their older iterations tend to be relegated to secondary or retro-focused spaces. Not so with Guilty Gear at Frosty Faustings. 

On day one of the tournament, you had free reign to take your pick during pools. The +R setups had a block on one side of the room. Down the center, you could find the Xrd players doing their thing. On the far side, Strive dominated the tables. This, of course, was only the official pools. Casual setups for all three games took up plenty of real estate in the Bring Your Own Console area, too. The Frosty crowd’s admiration for Guilty Gear in its various forms was palpable at the tournament. 

You can watch +R A.B.A. legend SkeletalMinion play casuals one moment, then go spectate LostSoul showing off Happy Chaos tech the next. You can see Blacksnake’s stellar bracket run on the big screen before perusing the ocean of Elphelt enthusiasts in the Xrd pools. 

OMG, I ACTUALLY GOT INTO TOP 8 IN STRIVE AT FROSTY FAUSTINGS!
THIS IS GODLIKE!! 😭😭😭
MY AGENTS OF CHAOS, WE GETTING FAR!!

My nerves is still there, but it’s much lessen than compared to ArcRevo! I’m still dropping combos however haha

Let’s go far as we can Bros!!! pic.twitter.com/QJUTxnOcNj

— LostSoul (@Lost_Relic) January 30, 2022

KizzieKay Plays All of the Guilty Gear

Of course, you can also watch professional player and all-around good guy Kizzie Kay do work in all three games. We were fortunate enough to catch up with Kizzie after the tournament and pick his brain. 

As a legacy Guilty Gear player, Kizzie has nothing but love for Frosty. 

“It’s definitely the pillar of Guilty Gear competition, so no matter what version of Guilty Gear is out, all of the versions of the game will bring out the best of the best.” 

7 top 8 finishes across 8 different games 🔥

Our Pandas entered so many events at @FrostyFaustings yesterday that we had to pull out a brand new graphic for their results. Good stuff to the whole Panda squad! #HoldForward pic.twitter.com/WyU20TXVY7

— Panda (@PandaGlobal) January 30, 2022

Kizzie made top eight runs in both Strive and Xrd, with a respectable placing at 17th in +R. Though he has love for all of Guilty Gear, Xrd holds a special place in Kizzie’s heart.

“Rev 2 was the most enjoyable bracket. I wanted to see how strong the players have gotten over the span of the game and I am very happy to see many of them being strong.”

Frosty Faustings is ElvenShadow’s Passion

After fourteen years of running the tournament, one can only admire ElvenShadow’s commitment to the Guilty Gear scene. As one of the best American +R players, Elven is as passionate as anyone about Gear. 

“Guilty Gear is what really motivated me to play fighting games seriously. I’ve also met a lot of great people because of Guilty Gear. I just want to play Guilty Gear with dope people. So, I will keep running events to make that happen to the best of my ability.”

As far as Frosty’s future, ElvenShadow plans to always run as much Guilty Gear as possible. All three games were among the most-entered brackets at Frosty this year. That means a lot considering Frosty ran a staggering twenty-five official tournaments. Guilty Gear will always take priority though, in all of its competitive iterations.

“Frosty will continue to run all of them as long as the event exists. There are a ton of really strong players actively playing all 3 games, and we had many of them show up to Frosty, so the brackets were really exciting.”

With Strive dominating viewership this past year, +R thriving in its rollback era, and Xrd’s devoted base still going strong (and praying for rollback), Guilty Gear’s popularity can only go up. Next year’s Frosty Faustings will be returning to Lombard, Illinois, early in the year. Considering Strive’s popularity, we can safely expect more characters, more patches, and more incredibly hype Frosty Faustings moments to come. Be sure to follow Frosty on Twitter to stay up to date. See you next year, Frosty.