Floating Lazily To Victory – Azure Striker Gunvolt 3 Review

If you’ve heard of Azure Striker Gunvolt 3, you’re already familiar with the series.  These spiritual sequels to the Mega Man Zero series have become a runaway hit for Inti Creates, the excellent company that’s still producing the modernized 16 bit games we all want to play.  Gunvolt is an outstanding series and it’s been a long wait for the new game so let’s take a look!

Things have changed this time around for Gunvolt.  A significant amount of time has passed since the last game and Gunvolt has been stuck as a Primal Dragon.  A battle princess named Kirin, working for Shadow Yakumo, a spinoff of the Sumeragi group has returned him to his senses by binding his powers with “Radiant Fetters”.  Gunvolt is conscious again but there’s a catch, he’s stuck in the form of an electric blue dog most of the time.  Shadow Yakumo is fighting rogue adepts who have are out of control due to the radiation that Gunvolt has leaked everywhere while he was a Primal Dragon and now he and Kirin have to clean up the mess.  Turns out there’s a lot more going on though, including a rogue foreign agency named ATEMS and a few other surprises.

If the paragraph above is confusing, you’re not alone.  Azure Striker Gunvolt 3 is a complete divergence from the previous storylines of the series and uses so much jargon that it’s almost nonsense.  The sheer volume of names for things with no background definitions is hard to process and the game absolutely revels in it.  Every move, backstory item, and weird physics effect is spoken of like the players have intimate knowledge of every nuance of the world of Gunvolt.  It’s a remarkable turnoff and players will have trouble following the rather pretentious story.

Sure, the story for Gunvolt 3 is weird and confusing, but what about the gameplay?  Well, therein lies the rub.  It turns out that Azure Striker Gunvolt 3 has significantly shifted the gameplay of the series as well.  Your primary playable character is Kirin who fires Radiant Fetters.  Her fetters hit an enemy and then you can warp to that enemy for a direct hit.  It’s called a Warp Slash Arc Chain.  This allows you to jump all over the screen in an instant, whipping here and there over pits and high areas like a ninja rope and slaughtering enemies with abandon.  Additionally, you have a close range sword attack which is moderately effective.   Finally, she has a special attack, Hidden 92^nd Right Divine Ruin Heresy, which covers the screen in electric flowers and slashes, killing minor enemies and doing significant damage to bosses.  Sounds pretty cool right?

Then there’s Gunvolt himself.  As a dog (a literal one), you follow Kirin around.  Her fetters keep you from going berserk but stick you in animal form until summoned.  Once the counter below Kirin’s life bar reaches at least 100, you can shift to Gunvolt.  As Gunvolt you can use your Dart Gun, fire Electrical Discharges, lock onto enemies with a Flashfield, and even create barriers to block attacks.  You also get a variety of special attacks much like Kirin and can wipe the screen of enemies with them.  It’s all a heck of a complex learning curve with a ton of things to master.

Here’s the thing about Azure Striker Gunvolt though.  All of those cool moves and neat abilities don’t mean squat in this game.  They’re completely meaningless for the most part.  Every stage in Gunvolt 3 consists of Kirin running about using her Warp Slash Arc Chain to zip around killing anything that moves and waiting for Gunvolt to charge.  When he does, you can just jump and keep jumping, floating over almost every level, open chasm, and vertical platforming section with no effort, all while radiating an electrical field that kills enemies just by being within his proximity!

You’d think that there was more to Azure Striker Gunvolt 3 than that but you can literally flail at the buttons to complete every single level of the game.  It really doesn’t matter if you learn the moves or not, Hidden Rite and Gunvolt’s attacks just kind of go off when you mash the buttons enough anyway.  Sure, you have to hit down on the d-pad to recharge Kirin’s fetters a lot, but other than using fetters and switching to Gunvolt to avoid platforming, there are only boss fights left and all of those are jokes.  The bosses simply hold no challenge, even if they yell a lot and look cool.  Don’t worry about damage either.  Kirin basically doesn’t take any and Gunvolt just reverts back to Kirin if he runs out of energy.  In fact, once you get a few Passive Image Pulses, some of them heal Kirin with every item dropped by enemies, leaving you at full health for the whole game regardless of the hits you take.

Image pulses are a new mechanic in Gunvolt and as you play you can acquire Skill Image Pulses and Passive ones.  Skill ones add attacks from adepts you have rescued to your combat abilities.  They’re one-offs that need to be recharged before repeated use.  Passive ones add bonuses like increasing jump heights, adding healing abilities, and lots more.  For every image chip you find in the levels, you end up with more images until finally you’re so ridiculously overpowered that the game is a tedious walkthrough.  The Kudos system is back too, allowing you, um, earn vocal performances by another adept.  Yay?  If you take damage, your Kudos get locked and honestly, you can almost entirely ignore this mechanic.  Focusing on style during gameplay doesn’t seem to matter in Azure Striker Gunvolt 3.  In fact, during the course of this review, every single stage was B-Ranked or A-Ranked for gameplay without focusing on learning the controls at all.

That’s right, you can literally spam your way through the entirety of Azure Striker Gunvolt 3 without learning any of the combat nuances, bothering to practice special moves and new abilities, or really doing anything other than using radiant fetters and floating past complex areas with Gunvolt.  Can’t make a jump?  Stand there, wait for Gunvolt to charge, and float past the rest of the level.  Can’t kill and enemy?  Mash some buttons and they just die.  Walk right into laser beams?  Heal fully in seconds by killing a popcorn enemy or two.  There’s essentially no challenge here and that includes the bosses, who for all their bluster, fall inside 3 minutes almost every time and barely manage to do damage to Kirin.  Well, there’s a bit of challenge since Kirin essentially has no jump capabilities and there are wide chasms all over the place, but you just wait and float past all that crap with Gunvolt anyway.  God forbid you kill the wrong enemy too fast and can’t actually proceed the way the game intended…

Bosses in Azure Striker Gunvolt 3 are about what you’d expect.  Cool sprites, some trash talk and a bunch of over the top attacks.  The thing is, those attacks basically don’t do any significant damage to you and if you’re jumping about and only taking the occasional hit, between fetters, special attacks and a few Flashfield attacks, you can walk through every boss with no deaths.  Dying at all in Gunvolt 3 is nearly impossible and for this review, the only deaths suffered were literally on the final boss.  A 1CC until the end without learning any moves.  That’s a significant issue in terms of game design.

Azure Striker Gunvolt 3 looks cool as heck though.  Inti Creates is unmatched for sprite work and every aspect of the game’s visuals is lush and beautiful. The  quasi-anime style is cool too and even the special attack screens are neat…at first.  Once you’ve seen Hidden 92^nd Rite about 50 times, you rather wish Kirin would just knock it the heck off and stop messing with your game’s flow though.  There’s a lot of that in Gunvolt 3 and it’s almost like the devs knew it.  Bosses chat with you and literally hide behind the chat windows while you’re fighting them.  Naturally you’re not paying any attention to the dialogue at that point either so it’s all just a meaningless stream of banter and Gunvolt 3 is chock full of that.  Gunvolt and Kirin are jabbering at each other constantly, blocking parts of the gameplay with their talks and bosses are no better.  When you beat a level, it’s time to talk some more as well!  Halfway through the game, the plot basically stops mattering entirely because it’s no longer interesting, just a bunch of stylized banter.  By the time you get to the end of the game you honestly just want everyone to shut up so you can play.

The audio in Azure Striker Gunvolt is fantastic too, which makes its flaws even more irritating.  The fully voiced cast is excellent and voice acting is solid.  The music is well-designed and energetic and the Kudos songs are good too.  Musically this is a great game and the sound effects and voice work are AAA level.  Of course all that gets interrupted, sometimes literally mid-sentence, every time that you happen to hit another special attack.  It happens a lot too since you’re playing through the level while characters are continuing to talk non-stop on screen.  This is a game that could do with some pacing shifts, making the story a bit more interesting between levels and leaving the focus on gameplay during stages.

Azure Striker Gunvolt 3 is a conflicted game.  On one hand, it’s absolutely gorgeous and goes deep into the Gunvolt world for plot and game design.  That’s awesome.  On the other hand, the gameplay is so overpowered as to be painfully unbalanced and the deep dive into backstory actually takes away from what ostensibly is an action game.  If you live to learn complex moves and master battle systems, you’ll likely have a different experience with Gunvolt 3.  The game really is as hard or easy as you want to make it, but at a certain point, it almost feels like you’re fighting the game to make it into a passable platform action game due to the ridiculous power of your characters.  While Azure Striker Gunvolt 3 is assuredly a sequel, it’s probably not the sequel that people are expecting.  Even with all the bells, whistles, and polish, it’s hard to recommend this one to any but the most determined fans of the series.

This review was based on a digital copy of Azure Striker Gunvolt 3 provided by the publisher.  It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes and played equally in both. Azure Striker Gunvolt 3 is also coming for Xbox, PC on Steam, and PS4.