The Shrine

So yet another one of those came out recently. Anybody following it? This series seems to have an obsession with Megaman X4 and while I think that was the best X game, it's kind of predictable when every game ends up with the Muse dying terribly ala Iris, and unlike Iris there's really no reason why the Muses would ever have to go through all this angst given they're the most powerful Adepts in the world and most of them are suicidal so they surely could've killed themselves at any time even if they're physically restrained since the Muse can always project her power electronically or randomly compel any Adept to kill herself.

I do think Gunvolt has like a more believable One Piece fruit system where the Adepts are basically fruit users but elementalize is not an infinitely absorbing barrier unless empowered by a Muse so Adepts are still beatable by humans, and how the whole conflict is really about which side the Muse, who are themselves Adepts but mostly neutral in the war ultimately chooses since whatever side they join pretty much is guaranteed to win the war. In Gunvolt 2 the battle against the Muse's Chosen seems to be going for either a Zero vs Omega or Hunter vs Hunter fight, except apparently you can neutralize the Muse's barrier by splashing water on it. It's like you got this battle which I think is supposed to project a sense of hopelessness because this is the first time you see Muses are actually going all out in a battle instead of just having some girl chat and getting randomly shocked into breaking their concentration and you know there's almost no way to get enough super moves to break the Muse's barrier long enough to actually win the fight, so you're wondering if it's a scripted battle and maybe some other Adepts are supposed to jump in and do their ultimates or something so you can actually do damage. But no it turns out it's a Megaman game after all and the previously invulnerable Muse barriers just gets knocked out for having the right sub weapon.

For iX itself it follows the adventures of the genocidal maniac Copen in an alternative universe where GV died. He seems to have dialed down some of his genocidal tendencies but I still feel like you're playing like a less likeable version of Axl or something. I guess Inticreates think Copen is their Zero except they're also the only ones who actually believe in that. I'm surprised with the series's obsession with the bad ending where you've to jump through many hoops like a Sonic game to avoid that we still haven't had one where one of the Muse just decided she's tired of randomly dying for no reason and just kill everyone for good. That'd be a pretty satisfying way to end a Gunvolt game without GV who is like the only likeable person on the good guy side.

I could never get into the gameplay, it was kinda like Megaman or MMX, only....not.

The whole game seems to be designed for a speed run demo. The song is supposed to be the theme of the game and you basically have to get perfect on everything. There's also a lot of grinding which is pretty dumb. I recall MMX8 did some of that to try to extend gameplay but honestly a Megaman game isn't something where you repeat stage to farm materials for stuff and in Gunvolt you have to repeat for rare materials if you didn't get S+ or whatever each stage since you get like X boxes and only a few of those are rare and you don't get all boxes unless you max out your score. The whole gameplay of Copen seems to be air dash into stuff and hope you don't accidentally bump into something once you bounce off something from air dashing. At least in iX they don't have dialogue taking up the whole screen and causing you to get hit if you want to actually know what's going on, and since the whole game is heavily weighted on how fast you beat stuff, if you fight long enough to actually see all the dialogue your rank would get hosed.

I think some of the fights are way too gimmicky. Looking at real people playing the game it's pretty clear most have no idea how you're supposed to disable the Muse's barriers when you fight them and it's really hard on some of them because you'd have to be air dashing while activating lightning field and then shoot at the same time which involves holding 5 things at once (direction, jump, dash, regular attack, lightning field) which is why I didn't even bother getting the real ending.