Inti Creates is one of my favorite developers of all time. Mega Man Zero, ZX, Blaster Master Zero, and Curse of the Moon are some of my favorite game series of all time. But for some reason I just couldn't get into what is practically their flagship franchise, Gunvolt.

Unlike Gal Gun, where I immediately understood that the game doesn't play to Inti Creates strengths, Gunvolt should, by all means, work perfectly. It's an action platformer, EXACTLY what Inti Creates is known for. Yet the game has just never clicked with me.

First of all, there's SO many mechanics in this game that are just WAY more complicated than they need to be, and none of them are clearly explained. Like, I seriously still don't understand what triggers the revive mechanic, and the item crafting mechanic feels so tacked on. Outside of the true ending pendant, you could honestly go the whole game without touching the equip screen and miss absolutely nothing.

All these mechanics make me feel like I'm missing something. Some mechanic that would make the game more interesting. Some mechanic that would make the game FUN. But the games biggest issue is just that it's too damn easy, and actually understanding any of the superfluous mechanics could only possibly make the game easier.

To start, the game's base gameplay being based around auto-targeting just doesn't mesh well with the action platformer genre. Once you've hit the enemy to lock on, you basically just stand there and dodge attacks, and this is assuming you even fight the enemies. It's easy as hell to just jump over everything, and there's nothing about the level design that prevents you from doing so.

Pretty much the ONLY challenge in this game comes from the boss fights, and even these become easy once you realize that the DEFAULT EQUIPMENT makes you practically fucking invincible as long as you aren't attacking. There's still a few bosses that put up a decent fight (Acura and the true final boss have an attack that takes your powers away, and the true ending requires you to fight the bad end final boss WITHOUT the pendant that makes you invincible), but 95% of this game can just be brute forced through and even if you do happen to die, the revive mechanic is likely to save you anyways. I don't understand how this mechanic works at all, it might as well be random, but it seems to kick in way to often on deaths.

There IS a ranking system that, in tandem with the kudos system, encourages you to not get hit, but there's really no incentive for even bothering with rank. The only thing you get is some extra materials which you can MAYBE use to make some items that aren't even that useful.

Storywise, this game is alright, but (even putting some bad localization choices aside) it's definitely not inti creates strongest story. This story feels like it wants to be WAY more in-depth than its format allows for. There's so much going on in the world of Gunvolt that isn't clearly established and it can often be hard to keep track of what's going on through the minimal dialogue. On top of this, every boss needs to have some crazy backstory they recount to you for 5 minutes while you fight them.

Speaking of which, in-gameplay dialogue also does NOT work well with an action platformer at all. On top of covering part of the screen and being hard to pay attention to at all, the dialogue isn't paced well at all. There will be a conversation that lasts for 2 mintues, but if you walk more than one screenlength it gets interrupted by another one, most of the bosses can easily be beaten before the dialogue ends, and on top of that the revive mechanic interrupts any ongoing dialogue with it's own stock set of dialogue.

I really hope the later games improve on this a lot, because unfortunately, it's just kind of mediocre as is.

Really solid game overall, but it also kind of shows how much Date was an integral part of what made the first game so good.
Ryuki and Tama feel like they're intended to be a role reversal of Date and Aiba, but the dynamic doesn't really work as well when the "straight man", so to speak, is the one with the actual agency. It tends to make a lot of his scenes feel a bit more dull comparatively. The game does do some decent things with his character, but it's all mostly relegated to Mizuki's side, rather than when he's actually the protagonist.
Mizuki on the other hand is thoroughly entertaining, just as she was in the first game, though I don't think her dynamic with Aiba is quite as strong as his.

While the story isn't as strong from scene to scene, I did feel the overall story was a bit stronger and more interesting, but even so, I would still say I prefer the first game.

The main game is pretty easy, but it's still decently fun. The reversal of having Acura fake-out into Zonda as the final boss is pretty funny. There's not much story, but what is there is very poorly translated. I'm sure the awful translation quality is supposed to be an intentional joke, but "haha, look, the translation is bad, just like an NES game! Please laugh" simply isn't a funny joke.

A few of the DLC levels bosses are actually a decent challenge, though the stages are still aggravatingly easy, so it's a bit of a slog if you run out of lives at the boss fight and have to replay the level (I'm looking at YOU Elise).

Out of the characters, Gunvolt is the best. I've seen Ekoro, Gunvolt, and Beck labelled as easy, medium, and hard respectively, but this isn't in the game itself, and I don't know where this labelling actually comes from. In fact, I would actually argue that Ekoro is the hardest, since she deals less damage per hit than the other characters.

Each character essentially has one unique movement option and one unique attack. Gunvolt can double jump, Ekoro can float, and Beck has a "dash" (which is really more like the classic Mega Man slide). Gunvolt's double jump is by far the most useful here. I always complain about MM9 and 10 removing the slide from it's MC, but Beck's slide just feels like complete ass here. Ekoro's floating is neat, but it's not nearly as useful as Gunvolt's double jump.
Attack wise, Gunvolt has a beam that can move up and down, Ekoro has a charge attack that can charm enemies to use as a sort of turret, and beck has a charge attack that dashes into the enemy. None of these attacks are all that great, but Gunvolt's attack is at least useful in a few select situations for picking off enemies, so Gunvolt wins here too. Ekoro's attack is kinda gimmicky and not all that useful, and Becks attack just sucks. It only kills SOME enemies, and if it doesn't kill them, you take damage, and in general its just really unsatisfying to use. It kind of reminds me of how Samus Returns fucked up the Screw Attack, but at least that was still somewhat usable.
Ekoro can also shoot four shots instead of 3 (I guess to make up for her lack of damage) and Beck's shots are ever so slightly lower than Gunvolt's. I don't know why they did this, but it sucks. There's a bunch of enemies that you can hit from the ground as Gunvolt, that are now literally like 1 pixel above your shot, so it just goes under them. Gunvolt's shots will also hit things on the edge of a platform while Beck's won't. It's just REALLY aggravating to play as Beck, and I don't even understand what the purpose of doing this was.
I guess calling Beck "hard mode" is at least somewhat accurate, as he's technically harder than the others, but only in ways that make him less fun to play. Beck being the worst character in literally every aspect certainly doesn't inspire hope in the then upcoming Mighty No. 9! I can't believe they thought this was a good game to tide over kickstarter backers from the game's delay.

After playing VLR and thinking "Hmmm, that was good, but too much of this is just rehashing Ever17... Maybe Uchikoshi IS a hack..." this game constantly had me going "WE'RE SO BACK."

This game really feels like Uchikoshi going completely unfiltered. Picking up where VLR left off, this game continues to take ideas from the Inifinity Trilogy's next entry, Remember11, but this time it doesn't feel as rehashed. It probably helps a lot that Remember11 is an unfinished game that doesn't really get the chance to delve into a lot of it's more interesting ideas, giving this game a lot more to actually say than it's predecessor.

The presentation of this game DOES suffer a lot from the games overly ambitious presentation that it clearly doesn't have the budget to execute, but the poor animations do have a certain campy charm to them anyways. The game would still definitely benefit from a complete makeover, but it's unlikely to happen given the game's general perception (and no, the ps4 version that gives the game shitty "realistic" lighting doesn't count. It even somehow manages to make the game look worse).


//SPOILERS PAST THIS POINT
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The only real complaint I have (besides the animations) is that I wish Uchikoshi was still the type of writer to LITERALLY make the player the "villain" of the game, but I guess that was probably more of Nakazawa's thing. The Zero Escape games still incorporate a lot of themes with very obvious meta readings, but Uchikoshi tends to avoid making the player an ACTUAL part of the story like is done in the Infinity trilogy, whereas Nakazawa's later works continue to implement the idea that the player is an active part of the story, even when it's extremely minor to the point of barely being brought up. Delta being a stand-in for the player works to a certain degree, but I do think it would've been better to do away with him entirely and make it "The player themselves is the one driving the story forward."

This feels like something that would be spit out by an AI if you fed it the script of Higurashi and asked it to write a new chapter. Nothing unique or interesting, just story beats from other chapters strung together into something that vaguely resembles a new story. And yet it's all written by a human; a work that truly demonstrates the ability of humans to write something as soulless and vapid as that regurgitated by an AI.
The premise of this being a sort of "worst case scenario" feels like it should at least be interesting in some way, but it feels more as if the writer has accidentally happened upon this through sheer unoriginality causing them to combine every bad thing that happens in the other chapters together, as opposed to any actual attempt at creating an original premise.

It's all so depressing. Practically the only reason anyone would even bother to read this in the first place is out of a desperate attempt to grasp for more Higurashi, to reexperience those halcyon days. This is something that GouSotsu deliberately plays into, to great effect, but here it's all an accident. The writing doesn't play into the idea that it's SUPPOSED to be inane, it's just truly as insipid as the readers desire to experience it in the first place.
A fascinating work, in all of the wrong ways.

This game feels like a student project more than a commercially released game. The assets all feel super low budget (and not in the charming way), and the game basically only does the bare minimum required to be Pac-Man, with a few extremely undercooked mechanics added in an attempt to make it even slightly unique. I seriously wonder why Infogrames even bothered putting this out when they had already inherited the obviously superior Adventures in Time from Hasbro Interactive anyways.

Of course, it's still Pac-Man, and assuming you don't have literally any other way to play Pac-Man, it's fine... is what I would say if this game didn't have the worst sound design known to man. I seriously have no idea how you manage to fuck up the sound design for Pac-Man of all things. Every other game from the past 40 years lifts its sound straight from the original arcade machine, but Quest for the Golden Maze, with it's very high production value, has decided to grace us with completely new sound effects. And surprisingly they all sound like ass. This alone is a feat so impressive that I don't really think I could call this game anything other than "bad".

What on earth compelled me to give this game another chance is beyond me, but this game still sucks.

The biggest issue by far is the DSS system, the games main gimmick. While the system itself isn't that terrible, a lot of it's implementation IS, and a lot of the games other issues seem to stem from this system as well.

The idea of the system is that you combine two cards from the different sets to create different abilities, which isn't terrible, but it makes the ability equip screen a bit tedious to navigate (especially since you can only equip one ability at a time). The biggest issue comes from the fact that this means that players who don't actively seek out the cards will have access to disproportionately less abilities.

During my previous time playing this game, I ignored collecting them. After all, the game practically hands the first two cards to you, so I figured I would get at least a decent amount of abilities just playing the game naturally. That was not the case. Almost all of the cards after the first two have abysmally low drop rates from the enemies. I think I ended up with something like 6/20 cards. 6 cards, while 30% of all cards in the game will give you AT MOST access to a measly 9 of the games 100 abilities (and they're unlikely to be the good ones either).

During said first playthrough, I was also severely underleveled throughout the entire 2nd half of the game. Normal enemies would take 10-20 hits to kill, and could beat me down in 3 or 4 hits. It's as if the game EXPECTS you to grind, which is completely ridiculous in this type of game. But this new playthrough has at least allowed me to understand HOW the game is balanced.

This time, I decided to collect all of the cards, and getting these damn things requires a real grind. You could spend a good 10-20 minutes just farming one enemy to try and get a card. It's tedious and obnoxious. But it becomes immediately clear the game EXPECTS you to do it. Playing through the game while farming enemies for cards makes the game feel so much more balanced. It can still be challenging near the end, but it never feels impossible or tedious (at least, not outside of the farming). Why on earth the developers thought this was a good way to balance the game, and how they expect you to know which enemies to farm for cards is another question though. Which enemies do and don't drop cards is indicated nowhere in the game itself, and the drop rates are far to abysmally low to just go around killing random enemies and hoping you find the right one. There's basically no way to know without looking up a guide for it, which is insane given how the game is balanced around it.

And don't even get me started on the fact that the game locks two of the cards behind enemies at the end of the Battle Arena, a gauntlet of enemies that you fight, in complete silence, and cannot grind, since each room locks behind you. They aren't even all that good! Especially with how broken some of the other abilities are.

And if that wasn't enough, they just had to fuck up the card system in one more way: IT DOESN'T TELL YOU WHAT THEY FUCKING DO UNTIL YOU USE THEM. Who the hell thought this was ok? What, do you just expect me to equip the card and bash my head into a wall until it does something? Some of these cards require you to input "Down, Right/Left, Up, Attack" to activate them, how the hell are you supposed to do that without the game telling you? There's literally no reason for it to hide the abilities, and it just makes getting a new card obnoxious, cause I have to look up what half the abilities I can't get to work are.

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But if you can get past the awful balancing and the sub-par gimmick you get to experience... the most mediocre Metroidvania of all time. Seriously, everything else about this game is just... slightly worse than acceptable.

Compared to all the other Metroidvania-style Castlevania games, this one is by far the ugliest. It doesn't look BAD or anything, it just looks whatever, especially compared to something like SOTN, which is one of the greatest looking game of all time. All of the sprites and animation are just... fine. All of the areas in this game look bland and uninteresting.

Of course, this was clearly in part thanks to the choice to take a more zoomed out perspective, so the player can see more. And what did they use this additional screen space for? Why some of the most mediocre level design of all time, of course! Every room in this god damn game is just slightly annoying to navigate, and the game falls into one of my Metroidvania irks where every item in the game unlocks like 5 different paths, but only one of them will actually let you progress, and the rest are just dead ends with so-so stat upgrade items at the end of them. It feels like the developers were just like "Backtracking is a staple of Metroidvanias, we gotta have backtracking" without actually thinking about what makes "backtracking" work in a game like Super Metroid or Symphony of the Night.

As if dedicated to making everything feel bad, the controls also don't feel good. The walking speed is absolute garbage. What was even the point of having a walk this slow when you get running shoes like 5 minutes into the game? So you're gonna be running everywhere. Except running in this game requires you to double tap the d-pad. So I hope you like double tapping the d-pad every time you move.

The game also gives you a wall jump ability, which is awkwardly tied to the games dedicated "ability" button rather than the more natural feeling jump button. And this wall jump sucks. It sends you forcibly flying away from the wall at an awkward angle, with no control of your character for a whole second. It might be the most unsatisfying wall jump ever, which is impressive given that Fusion and Samus Returns exist.

The story is also literally nothing. Like somehow more nothing than Harmony of Dissonance. At least that game had some ties to Castlevania lore going for it though, this just feels completely disconnected from everything.

Anyways, it all culminates in an appropriately mediocre fight with Dracula, that ended with me looking at the screen in for a few seconds before going "Oh, it's over?"