#gunvolt 2

[thewonderousjaysky]

[alexandriaisburning]

065: Azure Striker Gunvolt 2

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This entry is part of a retrospective on the Azure Striker Gunvolt series.

Gunvolt 2’s story doesn’t give it much gravity, but it’s bizarre to play as a character basically attempting to personally enact a genocide. His dialogue mirrors language used by real world bigots to justify a variety of prejudices, and while there are slight complications to his storyline, his worldview is never properly challenged. 

Unfortunately, as it turns out, Copen is pretty cool. In addition to being able to use a variety of boss techniques, Copen’s basic moveset builds elegantly on Gunvolt 1’s existing systems. 

Copen carries over Gunvolt’s Prevasion and Flashfield, but instead of using energy it consumes Bullits, ammo used for Copen’s air movement. Copen has an 8-way airdash which travels a huge distance, and can tag enemies by dashing into them. Tagging allows both his regular and special weapons to home in on the target, and rebounding off enemies and walls refills one Bullit, allowing him to chain air moves indefinitely if played skillfully. 

Should Copen run out of Bullits he’ll no longer be able to perform air actions, but he’ll automatically hover the ground after air actions, letting him still cover a good distance. Alternatively, he can slam to the floor to refill his full stock of Bullits, making him able to get into and out of the air at high speed. The moveset calls to mind DS era Sonic games, where you can instantly accelerate to high speed, and chain enemies together to gain extended air time. 

Beating a boss with Copen will also unlock their EX Weapon, an ability that adds to his long and short range arsenal, and dramatically powers up his tag attacks. These cover a variety of trajectories and functions, enabling you to cover wider areas and cut through areas and bosses even faster. Weapon energy is shared between all of them, so you’re not given a lot of incentive to switch on the fly, but it recharges quickly enough that you'll have almost every weapon available within moments. 

By comparison, Gunvolt’s moveset is nearly unchanged, and feels limited. Aside from a few new EX moves, his kit is essentially the same, including the same situational trajectory changing weapons. Gunvolt’s grounded movement is slower and his tag mechanic is less immediately parsable than Copen’s, making him almost redundant in his own game. 

The dual protagonist structure does at least allow for a more interesting narrative, with events playing out through multiple perspectives, and the boss order mixed up depending on which protagonist you’re playing as.The finale even presents a memorable climax, with Gunvolt needing to summon the Muse’s song to resist the overwhelming might of Copen, requiring you to use the microphone to sing the lyrics of the song that’s been playing throughout the game to power him up. 

It’s enough to justify the return of Gunvolt’s playstyle to the second game, and alongside Copen’s fantastic movement and gunplay, it marks the second game as a more confident and refined entry than the first. 

Still, Copen is still limited to being half the focus of the game, and his moveset begs a bigger sandbox than the tight stages that could fit onto the 3DS hardware. 

That’s where the next entry, Gunvolt Chronicles: Luminous Avenger iX, comes in. 

[strapstreams]

Go check it out!

I still love that I was able to spend an entire year playing this series (after a very loooong break between the 1st and 2nd videos). If you're enjoying the Battle Network series playthrough (which is almost at the end of BN4 on the stream side of things and wrapped up BN1 for the archive side), then I highly suggest you check out this playlist of my entire Gunvolt series playthrough through the image below or the link here!

The playlist goes through all 5 Gunvolt games that have currently been released to my knowledge, I'd be excited to check out if a 3rd iX game or GV4 was announced without my knowing, especially since I only knew about GV1&2 and it wasn't until seeing casting announcements for GV3 that I learned the series had gotten more games, including the iX line (Alejandro Saab was an amazing pick for Copen's english VA, love seeing Kaggy getting roles!)

So when I found out there were three more games that I hadn't gotten to play for a series that I loved so much, I honestly had no choice but to get them, and that meant reviving the Gunvolt playthrough after I think nearly a year of no videos or streams for it since the first one. Which meant I got to spend the next few months playing all five games live on stream (with only two videos out of all 26* needing to be archive exclusives) having the time of my life.

So please, if you're a fan of how things are going with the Battle Network streams, and a major fan of the MegaMan franchise (especially if you love the Zero and ZX line), please check out the videos and if you like them, go grab the games and maybe we'll see more down the line!

* Even though the playlist says there are 33 videos, the official count for the series is 26. The last 6 in the playlist are the ORIGINAL playthrough I did of GV3 with the English dub on because I needed to rest my voice only to learn the audio was still set to the level I have for the Japanese dub, so I needed to replay the entire game again once my voice had recovered (this time with the OG Japanese to fit with the rest of the official vids) which replaced them for the official GV3 playlist. The 27th video in the playlist is from the 1st time I finished the series and is more of a personal review of the series as a whole and the games as individual pieces. Had I gone to redo the review after finishing the series a second time, I think I might have given GV3 one more point than I did originally, but the overall rating of the series remains the same: 10/10

[cendrilloncd]

i’m glad inti creates made their own zero

[pastel-axle]

GUNVOLT - THE AZURE STRIKER

There was a 3DS themed art collab going on in a discord server, and I couldn’t help myself! ASG2 is my favourite game in the series, so naturally I had to depict Gunvolt’s design from that game.

[cyanremalia]

i made something stupid while losing to ex frozen city gv

it also comes in a clearer variant for reduced coping

[azelf101]

I remember I found this post about how Tumblr isn’t the fandom site because there are bad hot takes. However as a Gunvolt fan, I don’t see it. So far Tumblr has much more reasonable Gunvolt 3 takes than a large chunk of Gunvolt Twitter. It’s like people actually fucking read and pay attention to the story here for the most part.

Look all I am saying is that if the “worst” Tumblr take I have found so far is “I wished Gunvolt 3 was more connected to what was happening in Gunvolt 2,” then Gunvolt Tumblr is fineeeeeeeeeeeeee.

[lefiate]

Bunch of gunvolt art from my twitter