Azure Striker Gunvolt puts you into the role of the titular Gunvolt, which is definitely not a ridiculously over-explanatory name. Gunvolt, or GV as the game usually calls him, is a superpowered being (known in this game’s universe as an ‘Adept’) working for a secret shadow organization, Quill, to take down a different secret shadow organization, Sumeragi, who intends on taking over the world through the unstoppable power of J-Pop. GV is sent in to destroy Sumeragi’s little anime idol, a butterfly girl Adept named Lumen, but has a change of heart after discovering that Lumen is actually nothing more than a projected personality of a young Adept named Joule, who has been kidnapped and forced to be Sumeragi’s slave due to her ability to control and empower other Adepts. GV, finding out all this, realizes that he can’t kill someone who is essentially an innocent pawn in someone else’s game, and decides to defect from his shadowy organization and become a freelance bounty hunter of sorts, doing odd jobs, taking hits and frequently working for the shadowy organization that he had previously left to kill other Adepts that Sumeragi has under their employ, who are arguably just as much pawns in Sumeragi’s game and some of which are very likely innocent and just require serious mental help, but they’re not class-A waifu material so GV has no problem killing them in cold blood for a paycheck.
The story of Azure Striker Gunvolt is fine. It’s the kind of narrative you were likely to find in the Super Nintendo era from basically anything that wasn’t an RPG. It’s more there to connect the stages and the gameplay together, which are where the game truly shines. Though that’s not to say the story doesn’t hit its stride and become important either. For about the first half of the game, it’s just ‘GV tries to protect his girlfriend from the organization that he mostly takes orders from still while fighting cool, elemental-themed boss’. But after the halfway point, Gunvolt goes in this fascinating conflict about the responsibility of power. It’s not deep stuff by any means, but it’s still interesting to see a serious topic like this in a game that normally has a predisposition to a heavily comedic, self-aware tone. It’s compelling stuff.
Speaking of that comedic tone, this game really goes all in on being light and self-aware. One of the characters in particular, GV’s close friend and former coworker Zeno, is constantly spouting out one-liners and jokes about anime and video games and seems to be the most aware that they’re in a video game. It’s an acquired taste, honestly. If you like, say, Deadpool but only when he’s super jokey and self-aware, you’re probably going to enjoy this. Myself, I felt it could get pretty obnoxious but it was overall harmless. If it does bother you, you can turn off the dialogue during stages at any point, which is a nice bonus, as even without the jokes the various characters basically never shut up and a lot of your HUD during gameplay is taken up by dialogue. Though you’ll end up missing some helpful tips so be wary of that.
Azure Striker Gunvolt is an absolutely gorgeous game. I’ve mentioned before my love of great pixel art and Gunvolt definitely did it for me. All the sprites are incredibly detailed and beautifully animated, creating a feel and personality for the game that, even with the similarities to the Mega Man franchise, makes it feel like something all its own. There’s a lot of gorgeous backgrounds on top of that, which really invoke the cyberpunk feel I think they were going for, considering how much of this game resembles Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell and, of course, Mega Man X. It’s the kind of retro styling I love, combining what I love about those games and reverse engineering it in modern tech to give it more life and more detail. It’s honestly one of the best looking retro throwback games in my opinion and I could see myself just going back and hanging out in a section just to look at the beauty.
The stage design in Azure Striker Gunvolt is very basic. It feels a lot like someone testing out a formula more to prove a concept so they can expand upon it in the future. I get a lot of Mega Man 1 vibes from it, with things like ‘fire level is full of lava and explosions’ or ‘plant level has a lot of wall and ceiling turrets’. That isn’t to say there aren’t any cool gimmicks within the levels. The underwater base level being at first a space level dealing with wormholes was pretty cool. I loved the light level’s use of bounce pads and chaining bounces together through spikes and enemies. And there’s a genuinely tense survival horror level at one point that I really dug. Not to say that these levels don’t need their tweaks, as there’s a lot of the old Mega Man tropes like poor enemy placement or unfair, trap-heavy design. But as a first game proof of concept, it’s a lot of fun.
Soundtracks are also very important to this kind of game. The Mega Man series is arguably more fondly remembered in the modern day for its music than it is for its actual games, and it’s honestly not a wrong assessment or view of the Mega Man series. So it’s so very unfortunate that Gunvolt has a very underwhelming and forgettable soundtrack. That’s not to say it’s bad of course, it does its job well, giving you something nice to listen to while you’re plowing through the robotic hordes of Sumeragi. But I don’t find any of these tunes to be especially memorable. I wasn’t humming the Biochemical Plant tune the same way that I did Flash Man’s theme when I first played Mega Man 2. This, of course, might just be me not listening close enough or getting distracted, which is entirely possible, I’m hyper. But if I’m so uninterested in your soundtrack that I opt to just play my own music over it, it means the soundtrack most likely didn’t grab me.
The bosses in this game are kind of mixed for me. There’s a lot to like about them as characters. Each one has a very outlandish and memorable personality, as well as unique elemental abilities. Instead of going for the basic ‘fire, ice, water, earth, etc’ formula, Azure Striker Gunvolt goes with Space, Insect, Light, Death, Fire, and Magnet. This creates a pretty interesting set of bosses with fascinating designs and cool abilities. Couple that with the characters’ cartoony villain of the week personalities, each based relatively on one of the Seven Deadly Sins, a good formula for basically any villain team, and you got yourself a good batch of robot masters. For the record, the Sin equivalence go: Merak, the wormhole-creating Adept representing Sloth, Jota, the light manipulating Adept representing Pride, Viper, the pyrokinetic Adept representing Wrath, Carerra, the magnetic Adept representing Greed, Elise, the mistress of life and death representing Envy, Stratos, the insect controlling Adept representing Gluttony, and Zonda, the batlike, flying Adept representing Lust. Though, we don’t get a lot of time with Zonda because of this game’s equivalent to Proto Man or Zero, Copen. Copen is just a cool villain in his own right, a young man who despises Adepts and has devoted his life to ridding the world of them. He’s even managed to develop a weapon that suppresses an Adept’s abilities, causing him to be a serious threat overall. On the character side, these bosses get a thumbs up from me.
On a gameplay side, these bosses are so incredibly cheap. So many of their attacks feel less like a Mega Man style game and more like this is like if Touhou made a platformer. The patterns themselves are very simple and a little repetitive, with many of the bosses having too few of a variety of attacks, but that doesn’t especially matter given the fact that they have so many hard to dodge, near screen sized attacks. Each boss has an ultimate attack as well, which just serves to make their already ridiculous attacks near impossible to dodge, and they can do this attack as many times as they please if their health drops to a third and you don’t kill them fast enough. It’s almost as if the game wants you to tank the hit, but that’s counter-intuitive to one of the games other mechanics. It leads to a lot of unnecessary death.
But it’s not like the enemies are the only cheap ones. GV plays as you’d expect him to considering his resemblance to the protagonist of Mega Man X. He’s able to jump, shoot, dash, wall grab, wall kick, all that good stuff. I’ve never personally played an X game, but seeing them played has led me to believe that Azure Striker Gunvolt doesn’t have the same strong gameplay flow that X has, but it still feels nice to play overall. But GV also has a lot of balancing issues as well, primarily in his guns and his powers. Unlike his spiritual predecessors, GV doesn’t gain weapons based on the boss abilities after defeating them. Rather, after he reaches certain requirements, he unlocks new weapons. There’s the standard gun he starts out with, a charge shot, a catapult shot that you can launch from a floating target you fire to go an extra length and change direction, a two way spread shot, a shot that fires out a drone that proceeds to fire eight shots, and a shot that ricochets onto other enemies if it makes contact. But you don’t need any of them. The majority of these have severe situational use with no solid practical use, with the charge shot and the catapult shot almost being completely useless. This is a problem just in the genre, honestly, but Gunvolt does it super poorly.
But then there’s the opposite side of the spectrum. Whereas most of the guns are severely underpowered and not very useful, GV’s powers are severely overpowered. All GV needs is a mark, which can be done by successfully hitting an enemy with your gun’s shot, and GV can let loose with his electricity and decimate every normal enemy in his path. It’s almost a joke how ineffective the stage enemies are, the only time they present any trouble is if they come upon you at random and are able to get some shots off on you in the chaos. And this is only if you mark an enemy once, a single enemy can be marked up to three times and, depending on the gun, you can mark anywhere from two to eight times. Mark one enemy. Mark a bunch of enemies. Destroy everything because your electrical field is severely unbalanced and could’ve used more handicaps. The game is so aware of its unbalanced main mechanic that the first piece of equipment you’re alerted to in the game is a necklace that makes it so you don’t take damage from normal enemies if you have a charge, thus stopping you from just constantly using your electrical field and draining your charge. But the game also gives you the ability to instantly restore your charge without apparent consequence, as well as gradually restoring your charge while you’re not using it, so still a ridiculously broken mechanic.
Azure Striker Gunvolt’s most interesting mechanic is its Kudos system. As you start to rack up kills without getting hit, GV starts accumulating points as well as a combo multiplier. And then whenever you reach a checkpoint, you can kill the counter and add the numbers to your stage score for hopefully a higher ranking at the end of the stage. It adds a really cool risk/reward mechanic to Gunvolt, do you play it safe hitting all the checkpoints along the way for small boosts to your overall score, or do you go for the risk of just skipping all of the checkpoints for the hopes of a grander multiplier, knowing that any bad jump or enemy horde might end your combo as well as potentially make you restart the whole stage. It’s really cool. Myself, I don’t care about the rankings so I didn’t try very hard at this, but I wouldn’t be against going back and replaying all the levels to attempt to try and S-Rank them.
I’ve never played Mega Man X before, so I don’t think I got as much out of Azure Striker Gunvolt as others would. But, I still had a lot of fun with the game. It may not have been one of the most interesting experiences of my gaming career, I was really struggling to write about it because my general idea after was ‘it was good’, but it’s still a really good game nonetheless. I hope you enjoyed this look at Azure Striker Gunvolt and we’ll be back next time with the fun, flipping adventures of Dandara. See ya guys then.
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