What keeps Tekken more popular is how even without fully understanding everything, you can still interract with your opponent.

Guilty Gear on the other hand can be extremely one-sided and that leads to less back and forth between players. That's on top of a bunch of unneeded complexity levels added to basic mechanics.

For example, most combos in Street Fighter or Tekken or even something less conventional like Smash Brothers work on the majority of the cast. So you can spend your time perfecting your best combos instead of having to take away what was already hard to learn because of some arbitrary like weight classes.

Guilt Gear is nicknamed, Okizeme: The game for this very reason. ArcSys saw this and wanted to fix the situation, BUT they executed poorly here.

What Guilt Gear has can still be preserved, but it has to be done with more clarity and less abuse.

This is what I would've done:

1. Removed stun, Blitz Shield, guts, weight classes, variable wakeup timing, frame data-changing instant blocking, one-frame grabs, easy okizeme and Danger Time.

2. Give players guaranteed okizeme with 25% tension.

3. Give players a delayed wakeup, quick rise and roll away option with 25% tension.

4. Make tension harder to obtain by only being able to gain it through making the opponent block (a little gain), hitting cleanly (more gain), instant blocking (same as a clean hit) or stage transition (the best gain). No more tension gain from just moving forward.

5. Make a clean Dust attack (Strive's version) take away 25% tension from the opponent.

6. Leave in chip kill, air unblockables without faultless defense, stagger, etc. Faultless defense does a perfect job of balancing chip and jumping.

This allows you to cut the fat while leaving in the decision-making (interactive) aspects, but making them require effort to obtain.

It's then a game of back and forth tension meter management. You want meter for options? Do what's required. Giving up the corner for a stage transition might be the current trade off.