#This site was agonizing trying to sift through because the layout is so tiny on modern screens rofl

[solradguy]

Have you tried going thegearproject.org on the wayback machine? I don’t know how to navigate it but it seems to have stuff from the X2 era community

This site did not survive very well lol....

I was an idiot and hit ctrl+z despite knowing there's a bug in the new Tumblr post editor that makes it DELETE THE ENTIRE DAMN POST ARGH

Anyway. Looks like this site only existed from 2003 to 2005 before the domain expired. I wasn't able to find anything that hinted they ever hosted raw Japanese text files or transcripts of the Japanese dialog from the drama CDs either, but a lot of the download links on this site are long dead.

The download links for the cover materials and a fan scanlated version of the first chapter of the GG Xtra manga survived though. This seems to be either an alternate version or an early version of what would end up becoming the Justice Revival Project's full scanlation of that manga.

Stuff like the character and lore FAQs were hosted in raw text and are still readable but they look kinda like they're the same files that have long survived and are now hosted in the GG lore server's archives in an updated form. A cool little tidbit anyway, though.

What's particularly interesting about this FAQ is seeing how the lore's since changed and how the fandom 20 years ago interpreted what was available to them in the west back then. This bit about Sol is fascinating because almost everything here has since changed:

Q. Why is Sol often called "Haitoku no Honoo"? A. Haitoku no Honoo means in this context "Corrupted Flame", not "Flame of Corruption" (as it is referring to the fact that Sol/Frederick has been "corrupted", not that he corrupts others). This relates to the whole title of the series, "Guilty Gear", as Sol can be described as both the "Guilty Gear" and the "Corrupted Flame" for having worked on the Gear Project. Who first bestowed the name on him is unknown, but when Justice and Sol meet at the end of the Holy War, even before Justice knows that Sol is a Gear, she calls Sol by this name.

The official English translations only ever translate Haitoku no Honoo as Flame of Corruption now. It isn't simply a Sol-exclusive title and instead also refers to the type of Gear cell he was infected with by "That Man," which hadn't been elaborated on in the canon hardly at all yet back then (Scales of Juno aren't mentioned anywhere in this old FAQ either). It would later be known that Justice called him that because she was Aria, who worked on the Gear Project with him and Asuka and (presumably) knew about the FoC and Scales of Juno.

I love getting little glimpses of the old GG community like this. It makes me wonder what these old FAQ authors and fan site webmasters are up to these days...