I’d like to make this post to consolidate the most notable character rankings for Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus R. I made similar posts in the past for Accent Core and for previous games, and since Xrd is out now, I thought it would be a good time to do this.

AC+R came out in September 2012 but it received a big balance patch with Ver 1.10 in January 2013, which is the version that we have now. As I’m writing this, the game has been out for about a year and three months, and the metagame has matured quite nicely. AC+R as a game had a relatively low key release, with minimal promotion from ASW and not much media coverage. It’s a pretty big contrast to how Blazblue and GG Xrd are being pushed. As such, there weren’t that many publications detailing top player opinions of certain matchups or the overall balance of the game like there were in previous versions.

For Ver 1.10, there were several tier lists made by random users on the Japanese BBS, as well as a community effort to make a matchup chart. But the most credible and recent list was made by top Faust player Kiisha, who actually wrote his rankings after he won the Arc Revolution Cup.
S+ Zappa
S Chipp Faust Dizzy Baiken Millia
A Jam Slayer May Anji Order-Sol
B Testament A.B.A Axl Kliff I-No
B- Johnny Justice Potemkin Eddie Sol Ky Robo Venom Bridget

Ruu also made his own AC+R tier list after Xrd got released, with unique rankings
Extremely strong: Zappa Millia Dizzy Baiken Faust Chipp
Very strong: Axl Jam Testament
Strong: May Anji A.B.A Potemkin Johnny Order-Sol Slayer Sol Ky Robo Eddie I-No Kliff Justice Venom Bridget

The other notable 1.10 list is made by raw data! AC+R was the first Guilty Gear game to have the Aime card system in its arcade version, which meant that every player who had a card registered would get their win/loss statistics recorded. The system also tracks the stats of each matchup, and during idle times every cab will display a matchup chart based on the national statistics. If you’re wondering how this works: there are 25 characters in the game, which means that every character has 24 different matchups. Each matchup is assigned a number between 1-10, with 5.0 being a perfectly even matchup, and 6.0 being a 6-4 favorable matchup. The matchup chart cannot be viewed online, but the overall stats for every character are accessible on the GGXXAC+R Player’s Guild website. The stats are constantly changing, but as I’m writing this, they are currently:
Justice 132.1
Potemkin 130.9
Testament 128.9
Kliff 126.9
Eddie 126.4
Slayer 125
May 123.8
I-No 123.8
A.B.A 122.8
Axl 122.8
Zappa 122.7
Faust 122
Dizzy 122
Venom 118
Millia 117.3
Sol 116.7
Anji 115.1
Johnny 115.1
Baiken 114.3
Jam 114.1
Order-Sol 113.5
Ky 112.4
Chipp 112.3
Bridget 110.8
Robo 110.3

You can see the character rankings based on raw statistics are drastically different compared to Kiisha’s tier list. There are a lot of different ways to explain this, and I won’t bother going into detail here, but it is definitely worth noting that the chart takes into account win/loss statistics of EVERY player(who has a card registered). Not just top players, or even highly ranked players. Everybody.

Anyway, AC+R is in my opinion the most balanced game in the entire Guilty Gear series. This is reflected in Kiisha’s list, as he deliberately assigned the lowest tier a B- to illustrate how small the gap is between top and bottom. It is pretty clear that Ruu’s list agrees too. Every character is strong, but some are stronger than others. There was an early Arcadia interview with Arisaka, who was part of AC+R’s development, about the approach in balancing the game, and he stated that the intent was to strengthen the weaker characters from AC and change the playstyles of the stronger characters. I think the team definitely succeeded in strengthening the weaker characters, as they all either got improvements to move properties and/or new moves altogether. I like the majority of the changes. Honestly, the only character who I feel did not change well is Venom, who not only is weaker than AC but is also less interesting. But I think I know the reason why: he probably got hit by some last minute nerfs, as I remember reading several complaints about him being overly strong in the +R location tests.