Azure Striker Gunvolt 3

• Genre: Action Platforming
• Time Played: 6.5 Hours
• Too Short/Long: Maybe about right? Maybe a bit short, but I feel like I must have left the game on for a bit, because it felt much shorter.
• Pleased/Disappointed: Neutralish.
• Why I played: I have played through the previous two Gunvolt games and a bit of Luminous Avenger.
• Recommend to others: Not particularly. I wouldn't recommend this one first, and even so the Gunvolt series is a bit weird in several aspects.

Azure Striker Gunvolt 3 is the first in the... specifically mainline series where you don't play as Gunvolt - entirely. You're mainly playing as Kirin, a new character in the distant future of the other Gunvolt games. Gunvolt is there, because story reasons, but he's mostly a dog except sometimes when you need an easy mode to get through obstacles or beat a boss. 

Which I find odd because the whole game is pretty easy. It gives you so many "outs" of dying or losing in so many ways, you get various bonuses, the ability to heal, the ability to prevent damage, etc. The game does offer harder difficulties, after you beat it, and I suppose you could limit the use of some of these mechanics, but the primary method of circumventing damage is also your primary method of doing damage. "Fetters" which are used to attack an enemy with chip damage, but once you use them on your enemy, you can do some real damage to them, use your homing ability, and so on. The homing is essential to gameplay and some enemies you can't even damage without tagging them with fetters first.

In most cases, you only take actual damage when you have no fetters on hand, and you're constantly refilling them as it's necessary to proceed, it's basically the primary mechanic of the game, like how in the other games you needed to "tag" enemies with Gunvolts... gun, and then... volt them. Gun... and then Volt. This should have been called Fettersword, but I guess that sounds dumb. Also you can optionally Fettervolt them because Gunvolt follows you around as a dog when you're not playing as him and becomes lightning for you to teleport through.

The Gunvolt games are convoluted.

It was fine. It was a Gunvolt game. It wasn't the best Gunvolt game. Not that the story of Gunvolt games make any sense, but this one just felt like it had no clear direction. The main mechanic was fun but underutilized in interesting ways. The power ups from beating each boss were lackluster. It's weird that it took so many years in development for a kinda okay product that they made two spin-off titles to stave off hungry fans in the meantime. I feel like they had an idea with Kirin and tried to build around that and then filled it with random writing they THOUGHT was good/cheeky/cute/entertaining and a bunch of random elements to flesh it our in ways that were superficial and felt tacked on.