Azure Striker GUNVOLT 3

I went into Gunvolt 3 expecting a familiar electric-dash platformer and got something that genuinely surprised me in the opening hour. New protagonist Kirin is the center of everything here, and she plays nothing like her predecessor. Her core toolkit revolves around throwing enchanted talismans to tag enemies, then triggering the Arc Chain to warp-slash directly into them in rapid succession, chaining target to target without ever touching the ground. It is the kind of move set that takes maybe twenty minutes to learn and much longer to master, and when it clicks, the momentum it generates feels genuinely kinetic in a way the earlier entries rarely matched. The Kudos ranking system gives all that speed an actual reason to exist beyond looking cool. Every stage grades your performance, rewarding consecutive aerial kills, boss finishes with special skills, and clean runs that minimize hits. A full run-through of a level as a casual playthrough is one experience; hunting that S++ rank is a completely different, almost arcade-like obsession. Damage no longer wipes your Kudos outright but instead locks it behind a recovery threshold, which is a smart quality-of-life change that keeps the pressure intense without punishing one bad moment with a full reset. The scoring loop is where the game earns its replay hours. Gunvolt himself is still here, summoned as a time-limited powerhouse once a gauge fills. He brings his trademark infinite jump and flash field, and can teleport to tagged foes just like Kirin does, which makes switching feel complementary rather than arbitrary. Veteran fans, however, will have to make peace with the fact that he has been demoted to a support role, and the friction between his series legacy and his reduced function in the story is real. The narrative leans hard into verbose anime-style dialogue mid-stage, which can obscure hazards during play. The English dub solves this cleanly since text boxes can be disabled while the voice track keeps the story running, a genuine quality-of-life win worth knowing before you boot it up. The Image Pulses system layers on top of all of this, letting you equip over 150 passive and active abilities pulled from familiar faces across the franchise. Four active skills slot in at a time and range from shields to wide-area attacks, with passive buffs that tune experience gain and combat stats. The unlock method is random-drop based, which is the one piece of the design that feels lifted from a gacha template and does not mesh well with the otherwise tight, player-controlled skill expression everywhere else. It is not a dealbreaker, but it adds grinding to a game that otherwise respects your time. The presentation throughout is sharp, with Inti Creates' sprite work crackling with energy and the soundtrack blending J-pop vocal tracks with driving rock in a way that keeps the action feeling urgent from stage to stage. For newcomers, prior series knowledge is genuinely optional at the gameplay level. The action stands on its own. For series veterans, the divisive framing of Gunvolt as a supporting character is the hill you need to decide if you can get over. Everyone else who likes precision platformers with deep scoring loops and a character that controls like a ninja throwing playing cards will find a lot to work through here.

Alex · Scout Team

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