Gunvolt Series Marathon - Part 3 of 5
It was fun coming back to this one. It's about as good as I remembered it being. Let's start with presentation. Music's alright, with a couple of pretty great standout tracks. Visually it's solid, with good spritework and expressive animation. I don't usually enjoy character designs like these, but something about them manages to escape the usual annoyingly overdesigned anime character trope. Story is enjoyable enough, but it feels a bit flat. Especially in regards to the main antagonist, who is just pretty lame. Now for the main stuff, the gameplay. The mechanics are very unique, focused on shooting an enemy to set up the possibility to deal more damage. The prevasion system means you only take damage while attacking, which is fun but makes the game a tad easy if you don't care about rankings. Speaking of rankings, that's what this game really revolves around. Most of the levels are still fun, but feel lacking when not going for good times or optimal enemy kills. This mastery-based system is a bit weakened by the game's annoying challenges system, which only lets you do one at a time. For instance, one mission is to clear a level and get a B rank. If you got an A rank, you clear the mission but then unlock the next mission, which is clearing it with an A rank. Basically you'd have to replay the same level several times even if you had already mastered it. There's also an odd focus on material gathering and making gear, but it's so expensive that you're really only gonna be able to make anything if you spend quite a lot of time grinding for ranks and times. Anyways, the game's pretty fun. Falls apart a bit if you don't care about ranks.
It was fun coming back to this one. It's about as good as I remembered it being. Let's start with presentation. Music's alright, with a couple of pretty great standout tracks. Visually it's solid, with good spritework and expressive animation. I don't usually enjoy character designs like these, but something about them manages to escape the usual annoyingly overdesigned anime character trope. Story is enjoyable enough, but it feels a bit flat. Especially in regards to the main antagonist, who is just pretty lame. Now for the main stuff, the gameplay. The mechanics are very unique, focused on shooting an enemy to set up the possibility to deal more damage. The prevasion system means you only take damage while attacking, which is fun but makes the game a tad easy if you don't care about rankings. Speaking of rankings, that's what this game really revolves around. Most of the levels are still fun, but feel lacking when not going for good times or optimal enemy kills. This mastery-based system is a bit weakened by the game's annoying challenges system, which only lets you do one at a time. For instance, one mission is to clear a level and get a B rank. If you got an A rank, you clear the mission but then unlock the next mission, which is clearing it with an A rank. Basically you'd have to replay the same level several times even if you had already mastered it. There's also an odd focus on material gathering and making gear, but it's so expensive that you're really only gonna be able to make anything if you spend quite a lot of time grinding for ranks and times. Anyways, the game's pretty fun. Falls apart a bit if you don't care about ranks.