asuka r. kreutz
A mysterious character in Guilty Gear. Appears in several story modes and side material. He is the one who created the Gears, and various characters, including Sol Badguy, Baiken, and Axl Low, are chasing after him for various reasons.
He turned one of his coworkers into the very first Gear, this person would later be renamed as Sol Badguy. He is also the actual person responsible for destroying Japan. However, he lost control over the Gears to the Universal Will and destroying Japan was a drastic response to the Universal Will doing something that would be far worse (basically, she was turning all Japanese people into Gear-shaped nukes), the event also made him lose control of Justice.
In official media prior to the reveal of his full name (and still very commonly in unofficial media up until his addition as a playable character in 2023), he was called simply "That Man", literally "あの男". His long period of activity, seclusion from humanity, and seemingly indecipherable actions across a wide range of appearances and aliases over hundreds of years led to him simply being referred to as That Man, as in, you-know-who.
It would later be revealed that Asuka had done very few of the crimes he was believed to; the real "That Man" was, in fact, Happy Chaos.