Regardless of your opinion of the first Mega Man X there's little arguing that it nailed what it was going for; an evolution of the core Mega Man formula in all ways that were possible in 1993. Despite the foundation of the series remaining strong, none of Mega Man X's sequels were able to surpass it in any meaningful way. Some people vicariously patrol internet message boards constantly petitioning for Mega Man X9. However, it seems like it should be a low priority considering the guy behind the series has long since left them in the dust, they apparently hate him and he already failed to blow people's minds again within the series with seven attempts. To people who desperately want another Mega Man X from modern day Capcom I must ask; did you play that horrible remake of the first game they put out on the PSP years ago? God, they don't know how to make a good Mega Man game any more even when literally 100% of the work is already done for them.
Well anyway, Inti Creates have put out their own attempt to shake up the old Mega Man X magic with Azure Striker Gunvolt exclusively on the 3DS. It has Mega Man daddy Keiji Inafune on board as "Action Supervisor" (a perfect title for him) and some other guy in the director's chair. The results? Now, instead of finding cleverly hidden Heart Containers with earned equipment and weapons you just play the game a bunch to level up and have your health extend automatically. Also, you don't get anything for defeating bosses other than a rank based number of materials you pick at random, which you can use to craft new equipment. Also, you're not a robot fighting other robots (lovingly) designed for practical purposes to benefit society who have gone rouge, now you're just an anime kid with superpowers fighting other anime kids with different superpowers.
In other words; they didn't shake it up as much as they...uh...ruined it.
Okay that's not entirely fair, Azure Striker Gunvolt does come with a focus on speedruns and perfect runs. You receive a rank every time you beat a level, and you can also activate specific level-based challenges in the "faffing around menus" in between levels to earn extra cash and crafting materials. Getting through each stage itself is moderately easy, but achieving top ranks demands knowledge of the game. It's not a bad system by any means (assuming that you're the sort of person who cares about speedruns and perfect ranks, if you're not it makes the game duller if anything) but it does highlight how this game has too much going on under the hood for its own good.
First off, if the game 1) has stages that are for the most part, pretty easy to clear and 2) had a focus on speedruns and perfect ranks, then what exactly is the point of having a level up system that awards you with health bar extensions? It benefits neither the novice or the perfectionist. Secondly, in my relatively competent run of the game (got mostly B ranks, and cleared a couple of the bonus challenges) I wasn't able to craft ANYTHING with the materials I obtained until I was two stages away from the end of the game. Perhaps this was bad luck on my part, but if it was bad luck then my bad luck turned one of the game's systems in a superfluous chore that I simply ended up ignoring entirely. Maybe you shouldn't have randomly generated awards in a game this short?
This all speaks to my core issue with Azure Striker Gunvolt, it's a perfectly nice little 3DS eShop title that is stretched and padded and prodded to give the illusion that it's something more sophisticated than it really is. Stages are inflated with non-animated cutscenes and melodramatic dialogue which reads like it was translated over a lunch break. Fun quirks such as defeating bosses to utilise their weapons in stages is replaced with grinding stages again and again to get stuff you might not even want or find useful since you have no control of what you receive. Exploring stages with new toys to find more cool stuff is replaced with "hey man, just keep playing the game a LOT and it'll happen automatically". That's all you really want out of me isn't it Gunvolt? To play you over and over and over until I get my money's worth.
Is the game that I'm being demanded to play over and over to perfect actually fun? Yes and no. You can tell Inafune kept his "Action Supervisor" business card in his wallet, and put said wallet in his shirt pocket so it was as close to his heart as possible because "action" is the best thing Azure Striker Gunvolt has going for it. It's Mega Man X run n' gun action with dashes and wall jumps and changeable weapons as you'd expect, but it has the bonus twist of "tagging". Your core weapon doesn't do much damage, what you need to do is shoot enemies in order to "tag" them. Depending on your choice of weapon you have a limited amount of tags you can have on screen, you can shoot enemies multiple times to tag them harder, and you can tag several enemies at once too. Once tagged, pressing A will activate your fixed electrical attack which autolocks on and does damage to tagged enemies, the more tags the higher the damage. Your electricity regenerates, but if you use it all up you'll overheat and get locked out of using it which can leave you in a bind.
It works well! In situations where you're in tight spots against multiple enemies you have to make snap decisions on how you're going to tag enemies and how many would be optimal to get you out of the situation. Otherwise, it also helps the game maintain a decent flow as you can run head on into enemies, tag them, leap over them and take them out with electric attacks are you descend. Using the electricity also causes you to float down to the ground, causing satisfying encounters as you glide in between a pack of enemies obliterating all of them with one single attack. The boss battles (even though they mostly go on too long for their own good) also make good use of this system, giving you incredibly small windows to tag them and forcing you to learn patterns and when to strike.
Unfortunately, the level design lets it down. Not only does Azure Striker Gunvolt pad itself with superfluous ideas, it also lets it's genuinely good ones flop around and achieve little. The action I've just described might sound fun, but there's too much of the game where that's basically all you do. Levels are pretty long, there's not a huge enemy variety, and a lot the level design is running through the same packs of robots over and over again. One of the last stages in the game forces you to fight a boring and incredibly easy miniboss from the opening stage four times without shame. This is the kind of game where I often forget I have a dash and wall jump abilities because it does nothing interesting with them. The stages all have vague gimmicks related to their end bosses, but again very little is done with them. For example, there's a stage set in an underwater base, it has a section in the middle where you have to run from rising water that's done well. That's all well and good, but that's 1-2 minutes of a 7-9 minute long stage. The boss of this stage can manipulate space and create portals which also show up in the level. What does the game do with this? It throws you through a portal, you come out another portal into a straight corridor with two robots in it. You run to the end of the corridor and another portal takes you somewhere else. This stage does that THREE times.
To sum that up in a way that gives you an impression of how not interesting the level design in Azure Striker Gunvolt is; the only use they could think of for a portal in a videogame was to use it as a door.
In the end, Azure Striker Gunvolt didn't hold me, I blew through all the stages with few deaths in about two hours and that was in about four separate sittings. Not that there's anything wrong with that mind, a speedrun orientated game for a portable system where you play it in bitesize chunks is perfectly fine. Personally, I don't know if it's wise to focus your game on speedruns, because you know what game people love to speedrun? Mega Man X. It might not have a built-in timer or a ranking system, but it's an interesting and fun game and people sure love learning it inside and out. I think you should be more interested in making your game fun first so then people want to speedrun it.
It's a well-produced decent 2 hour action game with a few ideas loosely jingling around, the problem is that it presents itself as a game that you should be playing for 20 hours. The deviations from the Mega Man X formula only serve to distract and bore, but it looks good, it feels good and some of the bosses are good, so if you're into this sort of thing you still probably won't hate Azure Striker Gunvolt.
Then again, Mighty No. 9 is coming out VERY soon...
