Review #745: Gunvolt Chronicles - Luminous Avenger iX

 How much anime is too much anime?

 Early last year I finally got to play Gunvolt, and I wound up liking it a whole lot. The Megaman X successor that we never got, if you will. Gunvolt Chronicles - Luminous Avenger iX is an spinoff centering around Gunvolt's rival, Copen, featuring the same 2-D jump-and-shoot gameplay it so well mastered.

 The story is... hot anime garbage, as per usual. I didn't care about it and just read the dialogue out of guilt of actually not reading it. But it's bad and you can barely follow what's going on even if you cared about it. Dude, I like JRPGs, I'm all in for convoluted anime plots, but this is garbage. This game also follows the trend of sexualizing lolis, which is weird, but now Lola even gets to wear a metal thong bikini because why the heck not? Kohaku who's 10 at most also wears risque clothing. I know there's an audience for this kind of stuff, but I ain't it, and it clashes a lot with how the rest of the badass character designs are. If you like this stuff, good for you, if you don't, you can ignore it since it really doesn't get in the way of its fantastic gameplay.

 There's only a single playable character in the game, Copen, which kinda sucks since after Gunvolt 2's two playable characters this feels like a huge step down, particularly because this games are incredibly short, Luminous Avenger iX being no exception. Luckily, I loved Copen's gameplay and how he looks, and he plays pretty much exactly like he did in Gunvolt 2. Copen can jump and shoot, of course, but his gameplay is built around Bullits, which starts at 3. As long as you have bullits, you'll dodge most incoming damage, at the cost of one Bullit per hit, but you can also spend them to dash on the air. Dashing is the name of the game with Copen, if you dash into an enemy you'll recover the Bullit and proceed to lock-on to them, making all your basic attacks land right on them, even if you aim on the opposite direction. While Bullits recharge very slowly through time, you can also double tap down on the dpad to take a few seconds and recharge your stock, do it on the air and Copen will stomp downwards, reloading in the process.

 Every time you defeat a boss you'll get a new sub-weapon, and just like Megaman, every enemy is weak to a specific weapon. Not that it matters, I fell in love with the twin saws, and proceeded to spam them on every boss until the end of the game, doing just fine. There's a nice risk and reward system going on with the game. Landing hits and defeating enemies, without getting hit, increases your Kudos, get to a 1000 kudos and you'll enter Overdrive, until you get hit, enhancing all your abilities. Now, if you use your Super Attack you'll lose all your kudos, if you touch a checkpoint you will earn your kudos points, but it'll reset back to zero... so you'll have to juggle keeping overdrive, maximizing your points or just securing your progress in case you die, which is a pretty neat idea. Before each stage you can change how the Kudos System works, which is basically the difficulty setting: Get hit once and lose your points, get hit thrice and lose your points or never lose your points upon getting hit. Stages remain the same, boss patterns remain the same, it just changes how easily you can get and keep OverDrive mode going, which does make a difference in the long run. If the game ever gets too hard, you can replay any stage in order to get more experience points, leveling up increases your maximum health, as well as money to buy enhancements with.

 The game received a improvements over the Gunvolt mechanics that makes it quite better, and I hope they keep them for future games. Firstly, stage dialogue has been kept to a minimum, and when your NPC ally does speak to you, which you can turn off, the text bubble will only occupy a fraction of the screen on the side, much less invasive than previous games. And then there's the customization, no longer do you have to beat a stage in order to unlock missions which have you replaying the stage and then having to gather materials, oh no, screw that noise, now there's a set amount of abilities you can purchase with money found on every stage. Much simpler, less annoying, much better.

 I liked Luminous Avenger iX, I've liked Copen over Gunvolt ever since we got to play as him and the few tweaks to the formula really make it a much better experience. Sadly, while Copen is a blast to play, the game is incredibly short(2:40 hours, 3:20 or so after clearing the bonus stages) and there isn't a second playable character, bonus alternate colors for Copen or any other fun stuff for players to unlock. As it stands, it's just as good as the previous games.
 8.0 out of 10