Game #1261: Gunvolt Chronicles Luminous Avenger iX 2

 Copen gets hit by the nerf-stick. 

 A few years ago I played the original Luminous Avenger game and I quite liked it, as a matter of fact, I'd say I enjoyed it more than the mainline Gunvolt games, so you could say I was excited about Gunvolt Chronicles Luminous Avenger iX 2 a fair bit. For this entry, they shook things up a fair bit, which may not be to everyone's liking.

 It seems they want to make Copen Gunvolt's Zero, as now his default attack is a three hit combo with a new energy saw. Copen was hit with the nerf stick quite hard too, as his entire Bullit Dash system was weakened. By default, only air dashes will tag enemies, ground dashes do not(Unless you buy the upgrade), and you can't perform another aerial dash until you touch the ground. You do get infinite aerial dashes once you reach 1000 kudos points, which arguably, has been made easier, as you don't lose all your points when you get hurt, only when you trade them to activate a checkpoint... or when healing. Another weird thing they chose to do with this game was to make stages exceedingly easy, but bosses incredibly hard, and this is offset by allowing the player to use Healing infinitely, at any point, if they wish. Yup, pressing X let's you use a powerful super move or use a full heal, and the healing power can be used at any time that you wish, and even though it drops your kudos back to 0, you can use it when your kudos points ARE at 0. It's... a curious choice.

 I'm not sure I'm too fond of the changes done to Copen, and reading through forums online... I'm not the only one. One post I saw summed up my suspicions entirely: "It's as if they didn't want Copen's games to be better than Gunvolt's". The new three-hit melee attack is alright, but there are a ton of enemies who will survive it, making it not so safe. And while tagging enemies, and then moving away and shooting is safer, it's very weak and doesn't grant you many kudos points, so Copen's new game plan is to try to use his melee attacks to build up kudos, and then playing with the tag system, hopefully reaching the stage's boss with enough health and over 1000 kudos points.

 And there is a hard mode that disables healing and gives you a hard-cap of 200 lives, and this hard mode is necessary to access the true ending, which is kinda lame. Unlocking hard mode is kinda lame since you need to find 36 collectibles throughout every stage. Can't say I could be bothered to.

 Inti-Creates also did players dirty with the DLC. This physical cart only comes with the Kohaku Boss DLC, but they released a bunch of other Boss DLC that must be paid for. This DLC is made up of a boss fight, no stage, and an ability you are rewarded with, including one that makes Copen play like he used to. Each boss fight is 8 bucks. What the hell?

 Luminous Avenger 2 is decent, but it wasn't as fun as the original game. It's still a fun time, and I can't fault them for trying something different, something different that while it wasn't as good as the original, they weren't horrible ideas, and they could work as a sort of alternate character option. Hopefully they'll learn from it and make LA 3 a bit more similar to 1.

 7.0