Game Review: Azure Striker Gunvolt
I first learned about Azure Striker Gunvolt not from any of his games, but rather from playing Blaster Master Zero. After the game came out, Inti Creates put out a bunch of DLC characters from other franchises they were connected to, and since all of them had a two-week period where they were available for free, I downloaded them all. Shantae, from the Metroidvania games that bear her name; Shovel Knight, from his own eponymous game; Ekoro, from some eroge rail shooter series called Gal*Gun; and Gunvolt. He's actually pretty well-realized for being in a complete different game. I beat the first level with him, back when I thought about playing through BMZ with the DLC characters (it's on the list...
), and I was intrigued by the way his weaponry worked. Tagging people with some kind of dart gun and then blasting them with lightning? Slowfalling when the lightning field is on? Who was this "Gunvolt"?
Not too much longer after Gunvolt came out as DLC, a game called Mighty Gunvolt Burst came out and I bought it immediately. And then I read that it was a sequel to Mighty Gunvolt, which was spun off from the original Azure Striker Gunvolt series. I tend to be pretty systematic about this sort of thing, so I waited until Azure Striker Gunvolt was on sale on Steam and now I've finally gotten around to playing it.
It's a good game, but it's not for me.

His real superpower is using lightning in the rain.
One of the reasons people love Super Metroid so much to this day is the culture of speedrunning that's grown up around it. Super Metroid has a short power curve, with very few necessary abilities required to beat the game, so it's easy to shave off time. It explicitly grades the player based on how long they take to win, so there's an objective scoreboard that can be compared. And it's fun to play.
Azure Striker Gunvolt comes out of that same design school. While it has a relatively extensive story, especially considering that it's a pretty short game, the gameplay is score-based. Each level takes maybe ten minutes, but finishing in ten minutes is good for only a B rank, or a C if you're extra cautious or die too often. To get the higher ranks requires finishing faster, taking less damage, not using Gunvolt's offensive abilities, or never being hit at all. To get the highest scores, the game expects multiple playthroughs of every stage, memorizing routes, practicing dodging traps and boss attacks, and optimizing the time taken to get it down to the absolute minimum in order to get that coveted S+ ranking.
Though weirdly, there's also an experience and leveling system. I was very confused why a game designed on speedrunning and score-chasing would have levels that would allow the player to trivialize all the systems. On looking it up, all that levels affect are hit points, and since the highest score only comes from never being hit at all--being hit even once resets the score multiplier--it's perfectly possible to beat the game at the lowest level.
There's still an item progression system, however. Once I got a ring that allowed Gunvolt to triple jump, a lot of fights became a lot easier. Since materials to craft items come from beating stages, and since I got enough to make that triple jump ring without having to grind for it, I can't complain too much, but it seems weirdly at odds with the focus on pure skill and area mastery. Levels don't matter, but airjumping certainly does.

Sure thing, boss.
That just ties into my complaint that the game does not explain its systems very well at all, and a lot of that is because the pacing is very odd. In a game entirely built around speed and precision, dashing through stages like a ballerina crossed with a traceur, there are enormous reams of dialogue that are constantly on the screen. Every boss battle is absolutely filled with trash talk between Gunvolt and the boss, or the boss explaining their evil plan, or Gunvolt expressing his resolve. Stages have conversations between Gunvolt and his fellow freedom fighters, overheard chatter from the enemies, Gunvolt's internal monologue, just constant
There's so much dialogue that even on my first trip through stages, when I was traveling at a normal pace because I was worried about enemies ahead, there were times when I'd have to sit still just to let the dialogue play out in order to avoid missing anything. Almost every single one of my screenshots has dialogue on it because for probably 85% of my playtime, there was dialogue on screen.
One of the controller's four face buttons is dedicated to turning the dialogue on and off.
Because of that, I was always worried about missing something. There's a ton of dialogue during boss battles and I often couldn't pay too much attention to it because I was busy fighting the boss. There was one line explaining how the "Prevasion" mechanic worked and, because I was fighting enemies at the time, I missed it and thought it worked the other way around. I thought that when Gunvolt had his flashfield up, the lightning field around him that attacks the enemies he's tagged, that's when damage was subtracted from his energy instead of his health. It's actually when Gunvolt doesn't have his flashfield up, and once I learned how it really worked by looking it up online, I got a lot better at beating bosses, albeit not at getting higher scores.
And even then, I still missed dialogue because I would have to just dodge boss attacks for a while in order to hear all of their speech. I don't think it's that important, but it does take up a big chunk of the screen. Between that, Gunvolt's flashfield, lightning chains, and enemy attacks, I often had a difficult time reading what was going on and took a lot of extra hits. It feels like Azure Striker Gunvolt is two games, a technical platformer focused on speedrunning and a visual novel with actions segments, and since those two elements are directly in competition with each other, you have to pick one way to play. It's a weird design decision to me, to have such an ever-present story and allow the player to turn it off with a single button if they just want to dodge enemies and shoot lightning, but I suppose I've heard from plenty of gamers who say they just fast forward through every cutscene, even in RPGs.

Grant me the power to revolutionize the world!
The story is, as they say, anime as hell.
Gunvolt is a member of Quill (Japanese: フェザー, "Feather"), an organization of psychics striking back against Sumeragi, a megacorporation that is nefarious due to its practice of late capitalism. While on a mission to wipe out Lumen (Japanese: モルフォ, "Morpho"), a virtual idol that Sumeragi uses for propaganda, Gunvolt discovers that Lumen isn't virtual at all. She's the projection of a psychic named Joule (Japanese: シアン, "Shian"), kept imprisoned and forced to use her powers to help Sumeragi keep control. After being ordered to kill her due to Quill's leader deeming the chances of a successful extraction being too low, Gunvolt leaves Quill and rescues Joule himself. He takes her back to his apartment, enrolls her in school, and fights to keep Sumeragi from recapturing Joule and allow her to live her own life freely. There are battles to determine power level, treacherous betrayals, manly rivalry, a dojikko live-in pseudo imōto, everything you could want.
Also, Gunvolt is a middle schooler, because when you're an anime they put you out to pasture at 18.
I wanted to play Azure Striker Gunvolt in Japanese, since nowadays if there's a Japanese language option I almost always take it. And just from the previous paragraph, it's obvious that a lot of the names were changed. But I just couldn't do it. There was too much dialogue, and it came too fast, and too much of it was neologisms that I'd have to pause the game and look up. I certainly didn't immediately know what 高圧電流 (kōatsudenryū, "high voltage electrical current") immediately meant, especially when it was on screen for a couple seconds. And that's one of the words I'd probably be most likely to use in actual conversation!
It's a bit disappointing, because the Japanese does a lot with furigana. Furigana appear above kanji as a pronunciation guide, and they're often used in fiction to add extra meaning or a cool twist to the word. For example, Gunvolt's title in English is "Azure Striker," from the Japanese 蒼き雷霆 (aoki raitei, "Azure Thunderclap"), but with furigana above it that indicates it's supposed to be pronounced "Armed Blue." Sumeragi is from the furigana for the megacorporation's name, and the kanji are 皇神 (sumegami, something like "Divine Emperor"). Both psychics and the abilities they have are called 第七波動 (daishichi hadō, "The Seventh [Physics] Wave"), but with furigana of "Seventh." All of that was in the first few minutes of the game, and I assume that there's a lot more context later on. But as I said above, there was just too much story packed into too small of a space. I'll stick to playing RPGs in Japanese, when I can pause and read at my leisure without worrying that I'm sabotaging myself.

Lightning and electronics don't mix.
Like I said, Azure Striker Gunvolt is a good game. Or a good two games that seem to be at odds with each other, one of which I like and one of which I don't. I liked the visual novel elements, talking to Joule in the apartment, the banter between Gunvolt and his fellow Quill members Zeno and Moniqa, the way that some bosses had a tragic anime backstory that they would reveal during the fight in order to try to create a moment of pathos. But all of that is built around a core game that I'm not a fan of, where speed matters, where making a single mistake is brutally punished, and where it's necessary to memorize level layouts and enemy placements in order to chase a high score. I engaged with those systems only once, when I tried for an S+ rank on the shortest stage in the game. I beat it in 26 seconds, took no damage, and got an S rank. That was enough for me.
I mentioned Metroid above because that's the series I have more experience with, but the real touch point for Azure Striker Gunvolt is Mega Man.
Themed bosses, a boss rush, and a focus on speedrunning and technical performance because after decades of play, that's how the Mega Man games are treated now. But I've never played platformers that way, and I'm not particularly interested in starting. If I'm going to S+ a game, I'm going to do it in a CRPG and S+ the quests. I played through this game to the end, did enough to get the true ending, and then stopped. I've seen the story and that's enough for me.

Not too much longer after Gunvolt came out as DLC, a game called Mighty Gunvolt Burst came out and I bought it immediately. And then I read that it was a sequel to Mighty Gunvolt, which was spun off from the original Azure Striker Gunvolt series. I tend to be pretty systematic about this sort of thing, so I waited until Azure Striker Gunvolt was on sale on Steam and now I've finally gotten around to playing it.
It's a good game, but it's not for me.

His real superpower is using lightning in the rain.
One of the reasons people love Super Metroid so much to this day is the culture of speedrunning that's grown up around it. Super Metroid has a short power curve, with very few necessary abilities required to beat the game, so it's easy to shave off time. It explicitly grades the player based on how long they take to win, so there's an objective scoreboard that can be compared. And it's fun to play.
Azure Striker Gunvolt comes out of that same design school. While it has a relatively extensive story, especially considering that it's a pretty short game, the gameplay is score-based. Each level takes maybe ten minutes, but finishing in ten minutes is good for only a B rank, or a C if you're extra cautious or die too often. To get the higher ranks requires finishing faster, taking less damage, not using Gunvolt's offensive abilities, or never being hit at all. To get the highest scores, the game expects multiple playthroughs of every stage, memorizing routes, practicing dodging traps and boss attacks, and optimizing the time taken to get it down to the absolute minimum in order to get that coveted S+ ranking.
Though weirdly, there's also an experience and leveling system. I was very confused why a game designed on speedrunning and score-chasing would have levels that would allow the player to trivialize all the systems. On looking it up, all that levels affect are hit points, and since the highest score only comes from never being hit at all--being hit even once resets the score multiplier--it's perfectly possible to beat the game at the lowest level.
There's still an item progression system, however. Once I got a ring that allowed Gunvolt to triple jump, a lot of fights became a lot easier. Since materials to craft items come from beating stages, and since I got enough to make that triple jump ring without having to grind for it, I can't complain too much, but it seems weirdly at odds with the focus on pure skill and area mastery. Levels don't matter, but airjumping certainly does.

Sure thing, boss.
That just ties into my complaint that the game does not explain its systems very well at all, and a lot of that is because the pacing is very odd. In a game entirely built around speed and precision, dashing through stages like a ballerina crossed with a traceur, there are enormous reams of dialogue that are constantly on the screen. Every boss battle is absolutely filled with trash talk between Gunvolt and the boss, or the boss explaining their evil plan, or Gunvolt expressing his resolve. Stages have conversations between Gunvolt and his fellow freedom fighters, overheard chatter from the enemies, Gunvolt's internal monologue, just constant

One of the controller's four face buttons is dedicated to turning the dialogue on and off.
Because of that, I was always worried about missing something. There's a ton of dialogue during boss battles and I often couldn't pay too much attention to it because I was busy fighting the boss. There was one line explaining how the "Prevasion" mechanic worked and, because I was fighting enemies at the time, I missed it and thought it worked the other way around. I thought that when Gunvolt had his flashfield up, the lightning field around him that attacks the enemies he's tagged, that's when damage was subtracted from his energy instead of his health. It's actually when Gunvolt doesn't have his flashfield up, and once I learned how it really worked by looking it up online, I got a lot better at beating bosses, albeit not at getting higher scores.
And even then, I still missed dialogue because I would have to just dodge boss attacks for a while in order to hear all of their speech. I don't think it's that important, but it does take up a big chunk of the screen. Between that, Gunvolt's flashfield, lightning chains, and enemy attacks, I often had a difficult time reading what was going on and took a lot of extra hits. It feels like Azure Striker Gunvolt is two games, a technical platformer focused on speedrunning and a visual novel with actions segments, and since those two elements are directly in competition with each other, you have to pick one way to play. It's a weird design decision to me, to have such an ever-present story and allow the player to turn it off with a single button if they just want to dodge enemies and shoot lightning, but I suppose I've heard from plenty of gamers who say they just fast forward through every cutscene, even in RPGs.


Grant me the power to revolutionize the world!
The story is, as they say, anime as hell.
Gunvolt is a member of Quill (Japanese: フェザー, "Feather"), an organization of psychics striking back against Sumeragi, a megacorporation that is nefarious due to its practice of late capitalism. While on a mission to wipe out Lumen (Japanese: モルフォ, "Morpho"), a virtual idol that Sumeragi uses for propaganda, Gunvolt discovers that Lumen isn't virtual at all. She's the projection of a psychic named Joule (Japanese: シアン, "Shian"), kept imprisoned and forced to use her powers to help Sumeragi keep control. After being ordered to kill her due to Quill's leader deeming the chances of a successful extraction being too low, Gunvolt leaves Quill and rescues Joule himself. He takes her back to his apartment, enrolls her in school, and fights to keep Sumeragi from recapturing Joule and allow her to live her own life freely. There are battles to determine power level, treacherous betrayals, manly rivalry, a dojikko live-in pseudo imōto, everything you could want.
Also, Gunvolt is a middle schooler, because when you're an anime they put you out to pasture at 18.

I wanted to play Azure Striker Gunvolt in Japanese, since nowadays if there's a Japanese language option I almost always take it. And just from the previous paragraph, it's obvious that a lot of the names were changed. But I just couldn't do it. There was too much dialogue, and it came too fast, and too much of it was neologisms that I'd have to pause the game and look up. I certainly didn't immediately know what 高圧電流 (kōatsudenryū, "high voltage electrical current") immediately meant, especially when it was on screen for a couple seconds. And that's one of the words I'd probably be most likely to use in actual conversation!
It's a bit disappointing, because the Japanese does a lot with furigana. Furigana appear above kanji as a pronunciation guide, and they're often used in fiction to add extra meaning or a cool twist to the word. For example, Gunvolt's title in English is "Azure Striker," from the Japanese 蒼き雷霆 (aoki raitei, "Azure Thunderclap"), but with furigana above it that indicates it's supposed to be pronounced "Armed Blue." Sumeragi is from the furigana for the megacorporation's name, and the kanji are 皇神 (sumegami, something like "Divine Emperor"). Both psychics and the abilities they have are called 第七波動 (daishichi hadō, "The Seventh [Physics] Wave"), but with furigana of "Seventh." All of that was in the first few minutes of the game, and I assume that there's a lot more context later on. But as I said above, there was just too much story packed into too small of a space. I'll stick to playing RPGs in Japanese, when I can pause and read at my leisure without worrying that I'm sabotaging myself.

Lightning and electronics don't mix.
Like I said, Azure Striker Gunvolt is a good game. Or a good two games that seem to be at odds with each other, one of which I like and one of which I don't. I liked the visual novel elements, talking to Joule in the apartment, the banter between Gunvolt and his fellow Quill members Zeno and Moniqa, the way that some bosses had a tragic anime backstory that they would reveal during the fight in order to try to create a moment of pathos. But all of that is built around a core game that I'm not a fan of, where speed matters, where making a single mistake is brutally punished, and where it's necessary to memorize level layouts and enemy placements in order to chase a high score. I engaged with those systems only once, when I tried for an S+ rank on the shortest stage in the game. I beat it in 26 seconds, took no damage, and got an S rank. That was enough for me.
I mentioned Metroid above because that's the series I have more experience with, but the real touch point for Azure Striker Gunvolt is Mega Man.
