Faultless Defense (フォルトレスディフェンス, Forutoresu Difensu?), called Perfect Guard in the original Guilty Gear, is a recurring defensive mechanic in the Guilty Gear series. This type of Guard allows the player to prevent damage from Special Attacks.
Overview[]
Normally, blocking a Special Move always drains some health, although reduced. This can be prevented via Faultless Defense which allows blocking without losing any life at all. To initiate a Perfect Guard in Guilty Gear, the player must press and hold the 
button while blocking. From X onwards, Faultless Defense is done by guarding and simultaneously holding down any two attack buttons except 
. In this state, chip damage is not incurred, but the attack will knock back further than usual, putting some distance between the characters.
Using this technique will decrease the Tension gauge with each hit, and if the Tension gauge drops to zero, this guard can no longer be used. Other traits are: it increases blockstun (good or bad depending on the situation), reduces Tension gain temporarily (reduced by 80% for 1 second), and does not increase Guard Balance/R.I.S.C. Level.
Furthermore, due to being useable without an attack needing to come out (having its active frames occur), Faultless Defense has a variety of other uses such as being used to brake early from a dash or to block in midair earlier during the rising-jump period unlike with normal blocking (FD can also be used to block standalone/raw air-unblockable moves as well).
In X however, it was notorious for being cancel-able into off of a number of attacks, and allowing the user to essentially loop the victim into infinite combos or pressure at a mere touch (as their continuous offense keeps providing them tension to spend just the bare minimum needed to use FD for the cancel). Since the revisions and in the upcoming XX installment however, this property has been done away with. Even then originally in X, not all characters were able to make use of FD-cancelling, especially GG Mode characters.
Trivia[]
- It is sometimes unofficially called "Fortress Defense" by players.
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