The gun is good. The volt is evil.
Well, I wasn't expecting this (blog entry) to be a thing. Mighty Gunvolt, as the name suggests, is a title from Inti Creates, also known as "those people working on Mighty No. 9." While it won't be commercially available by itself until December, it's being given away for free to two groups of people:
1. People who buy the recently-released Azure Striker Gunvolt, and
2. People who backed Mighty No. 9's Kickstarter.
Mighty Gunvolt plays, sounds and looks like the retro Mega Man games, so I'll try and make clear where it's different. For example, the translation job on the game is so shoddy I can't tell what's going on. Take this excerpt from the opening crawl:
The other time, the other place: experiments on humans started by massive media group "Sumeragi" to audition for next "muse" idol. their magic hand even reached female schools. Female students vanished, and no new couples formed. Love was in danger.
"Gunvolt," it's the name who we call the only one to fight them. It's no accident he was involved in the troubles. Together with angel "Ekoro" and robot "Beck" he fights to free successivefuly occupied major city facilities.
Mission: Successivefuly.
As the text suggests, there are three different characters to play as which affect the order of the stages slightly. You can't switch characters as the game goes on, but the game's only five levels long so whatever.
Each character has different abilities that affect how you might approach certain parts of each stage. Gunvolt can double jump and has a mid-range pillar of sparks he can shoot which can be moved slightly up and down. Ekoro can hover (think Toadstool in Mario Bros. 2) and charm enemies to fly with her and shoot other enemies, as well as launch them into other enemies. Beck has a dash attack, which he can also use to enter narrow passages.
There honestly isn't much to say about the levels as they're all pretty basic jump-and-shoot sidescrolling platforming. As someone who doesn't play a lot of Mega Man I had no problem reaching and beating the end of the game in a single playthrough, much less the two other playthroughs I did afterward. The one sticking point is being able to defeat the bosses at each level, which comes down to the old newbie Mega Man strategy of sacrificing a life to see what their attack patterns are like. The bosses do tend to throw out an extra attack when they're low on health, but by then it's too late for them.
The game doesn't run smoothly though, save for when you're playing as Ekoro and try to grab onto a ladder while holding a charge shot; you can get stuck to the ladder doing this.
Overall I'm glad this was just a free game, and allegedly it won't cost very much when it does release by itself. It's a fun diversion for a half-hour or so but I can't see myself playing it anymore beyond now.
Anyway, once you complete the game you'll see the following text:
In order to prevent a "muse" auditions, "Copen" infiltrated Sumeragi group, to rescue "muse". But his plans ware shattered by "Zonda" easily defeated him. "Zonda" would use her, to fill the world with ultimate love. But "Zonda" was a failure.
What was the true planning of "Zonda?" With his death, no one may never know. The first place it is unknown if anything really existed in that world was real. So, perhaps all "Zonda" has showed may have ben illusion...
Who the fuck is Ben Illusion?
MIGHTY GUN REX
