Thread  RSS Azure Striker Gunvolt



# 11467 8 years ago on Fri, Jan 15 2016 at 11:22 pm

More ranting about games from me, in part motivated by lovely vocal tracks in the game soundtrack.

Azure Striker Gunvolt is pretty much Inticreates making a not-Megaman game of their own. So, you can expect fast-paced platforming and all the usual things you'd expect from a game with the same pedigree as the Megaman Zero and ZX series. It is, however, its own original setting, with a lot of (even translated) fluff posted up on the game's website. It was first released on the 3DS, and later on PC, through Steam (which it seems Japanese developers are finally beginning to pay attention to). The Steam version has some new features not in the original release, and has restored dialogue that was cut from the English 3DS release.

The game has some very interesting mechanics, overall. Gunvolt has a gun, but it does minimal damage. Its real purpose is in "tagging" enemies. See, Gunvolt is an electrokinetic, and his main method of attack is called a flashfield, which envelops him in electricity. And zaps any tagged enemies anywhere they happen to be on the screen. You can stack up to three tags on a single target, for more damage from being zapped, although each gun has different limits on total tags. You're fighting against the oppressive Sumeragi Corporation and it's own psychic adepts, each of whom has their own theme...pretty much exactly like Megaman bosses.

The game has an interesting scoring system, in which you rack up "Kudos" for damaging and defeating enemies, and can continue to gain even more as long as you can keep going without being hit. You can also drop back to zero by touching a checkpoint or using one of your special skills, either of which converts your current kudos to score. What's fun is if you can keep a single chain going long enough to hit over 1000, the music for the stage changes to some really nice j-pop, should you like that sort of thing. I did mention music earlier. The tracks in the game, particularly the vocal ones, are pretty darn good, in my opinion.

The game is pretty challenging, and I'll admit that I'm pretty bad at it. It's still quite fun, though. And there's a pretty interesting safety net built into things. If you would die in a stage, there's a chance that one of the characters will resurrect you with her song (she also, coincidentally, sings the songs you get at high Kudos). If it happens, you can't generate any kudos for the rest of the stage, so your score suffers, but you do get a few nice buffs and it's neat that one does still get to continue through the game to see the story through, even if one is not the best player.

Alternatively, discussion of Megaman in general is also fine in here.


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