One of my favorite Vita indies to hit the handheld (and yes, PS3 / PS4) this year has been OlliOlli. Considered a ‘2D Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater‘, it combined quick (and addictive) score-chasing with excellent controls. You needed them too, what with the game’s devious goals— not to mention the ‘Pro’ stages.
Just in case you hadn’t had enough, Roll7‘s miniature skater is getting a new game in 2015. OlliOlli2 goes Hollywood… er… Olliwood, with the sequel, and it’ll once again release on Vita and the PS4. What’s new, you ask, besides the sharper art style and expanded Tricktionary? Go ahead and let the trailer do the talking.
Not nearly content to be making just one ‘retro platforming game with modern design that’s heavily-inspired by Mega Man’, developers Inti Creates and Comcept decided to go ahead and build three. The most-anticipated of the bunch (and guaranteed to be the most like the Blue Bomber), Mighty No. 9, is still a ways off, but Azure Striker GUNVOLT, calling the Nintendo eShop its current home, isn’t too shabby for a hold-you-over either.
The game’s protagonist, Gunvolt (or just ‘GV’ to his close friends and co-workers), shares some traits with Capcom’s prolific mascot; he controls similarly, traverses various themed levels filled with cut-and-paste robotic adversaries, and takes on plenty of fiendish end bosses. Though the two games end up remarkably different in summation, it’s still not hard to see the inspirations.
Gunvolt is an ‘Adept’, a superhero / science experiment of sorts that’s able to wield the power of lightning.
He works for the mercenary group QUILL on a freelance basis, taking on their contracts and sheltering ‘The Muse’, a dual-personality (named Lumen / Joule) that’s wanted by the Sumeragi Corportation— world-class bad guys— as a means to control the planet’s other adepts, and therefore, the planet itself. The story isn’t mind-blowing by any stretch, but features enough bits and twists to keep you moving forward. Said Sumeragi Corporation provides your assortment of baddies, which leads into combat and breaks with Mega Man‘s traditional form of fighting. This is one of Azure Striker GUNVOLT‘s defining mechanics.
While your pistol can defeat foes on its own, it will be a painful, time-consuming process. Rather, the game wants you to ‘tag’ targets with your gun, then destroy them with your ‘flashfield’, an electrified attack that shoots bolts of lightning at any marked enemies. This essentially allows you to ‘combo’ targets and clear rooms quickly, tagging them multiple times for even more damage and keeping the pace (and style) up. It’s effective and satisfying, adding a nice layer of depth on top of the core shooter mechanic that everyone’s accustomed to. You level up via combat, all RPG-like, adding to Gunvolt’s health and ‘supermove’1 set. Crafting is also introduced here, allowing you to build accessories to equip to every part of your body. These can range from additional weapon effectiveness to double / triple jumps, or let you take more damage, say, for increased Kudos (ASG‘s in-game scoring).
The way you tackle stages has been slightly tweaked as well. You’re still allowed to visit most in any order you choose (required ‘story’ missions will sometimes interject), but this freedom to pick is intentional. as you’ll likely have to revisit these stages many times, in order to acquire more components to craft parts, or to complete ‘challenges’— one-off tasks specific to each stage, that award you with even more rare components. It’s the typical ‘carrot on a stick’ type of reward system, handing out its goodies slowly. You don’t actually need any of these upgrades / boosts to complete the game, but they will certainly make your life easier.
That kind of grinding naturally gets repetitive, as do the slightly-mudane level layouts. It’s a good thing the boss fights in ASG are a highlight, showing off the developer’s stellar creative design and the game’s personality. Every Adept that the Sumeragi throws at you has his or her own style and way of attack, requiring patience and a strategic trade-off with your flashfield. These fights go through three stages of metamorphosis, adding a new pattern or higher-damage move to your rival’s repertoire each round. It can be challenging.
Azure Striker GUNVOLT is the slickest kind of 16-bit, impressing you with its fresh ideas, while simultaneously frustrating you with some old tricks.
The same can’t be said of the difficulty elsewhere. For all its polish, Azure Striker GUNVOLT is the slickest kind of 16-bit, impressing you with its fresh ideas, while simultaneously frustrating you with some old tricks. Outside of the boss battles, which will test your mettle, it’s really easy to win. Part of this is due to the flashfield. So long as you have electric energy to spare, Gunvolt won’t lose health when hit. Your combo meter will take a dive, but you’re otherwise unscathed, taking away some of the threat and immediacy in each and any battle. Worse (or easier) still, The Muse will occasionally resurrect you when you do die, turning you into a nigh-invisible God. Then there’s the reused enemies, miniboss tanks / mechs2… even its clever bosses aren’t sacred. Like Shovel Knight, another modern / retro platformer, ASG parades some of its more colorful Adepts out for a second fight near the end, forcing to you fight them back to back to back. Much like that aforementioned game, it doesn’t work here either, and feels forced.
Thankfully, these sour points are mitigated by the inventive side of the combat, the otherwise excellent character design, and its tiny 8-bit brother. Azure Striker GUNVOLT still gets a lot right, and it’s (almost) everything you could ask for from a modern platformer. At least until Mighty No. 9 comes out, fingers crossed.
These moves use a ‘card’ system that fills up over time via kills / points, allowing you to pull off super attacks (like a giant sword), or recover a bit of health in a pinch. ↩
A far simpler experience, but excellent in its own right, MIGHTY GUNVOLT is essentially free DLC1, if you’re so inclined. That admittedly might lead to some confusion, as the game is a standalone title. A smaller part of the larger adventure presented in Azure Striker GUNVOLT(this is technically a prequel2, but you’ll hardly know it) MIGHTY GUNVOLT is a demake in visuals— 16-bit to 8-bit— and not nearly the same amount of content. Yet it’s no less competent.
The game stars the same protagonist from Azure Striker GUNVOLT, this time joined by Beck3 (from Mighty No. 9) and Ekoro (hailing from an obscure Japan-only title called Gal Gun). All three come with their own super move and style of navigation, and explore the same handful of stages, albeit in a different order depending on your choice of character. Those stages (with the exception of the ‘School’ level lifted from Gal Gun) are reused environments from ASG, filled with also-familiar enemies / bosses. It’s an extremely short adventure, lasting about a half-hour (or less), featuring a basic core with a very linear style and heavily-simplified gameplay.
If Azure Striker GUNVOLT felt like Mega Man built for modern times, then MIGHY GUNVOLT is Mega Man as you remember.
Shedding all of the seemingly-extraneous parts of ASG, like its RPG mechanics, storyline, and loot grinding, MIGHTY GUNVOLT is a pure side-scrolling platformer. If Azure Striker GUNVOLT felt like Mega Man built for modern times, then MIGHY GUNVOLT is Mega Man as you remember. Short of a few paragraphs of text at beginning and end, and some intentionally bad translation work (…I think), you’ll just be shooting your way through this one, kids.
Which is perfectly fine in this instance, as the game doesn’t aspire to be anything more than a throwback nod to the simpler times of platforming. Rather than reward you with gear / components or slick cutscenes, MIGHTY GUNVOLT tracks your high score just like the old days, with points gained by killing foes and picking up bonuses. It feels and controls as excellently as its sibling, and provides a sample-size serving of challenge, ultimately staying out of your way as you run and gun through each character’s ‘storyline’.
That breezy gameplay and lack of content may turn off some. It’s not meant to be a meaty adventure (hence the ‘free DLC’ bit), but even outside of the promotional push to sell the main game, MIGHTY GUNVOLT is well-worth its smallish price, especially if you have an unquenchable thirst for old-school design and aesthetics.
Until November 28th, you get the game as a free download for buying Azure Striker GUNVOLT. ↩
That said, you should really play Azure Striker GUNVOLT first, to properly enjoy the 8-bit incarnation here. ↩
Your first taste of the character in playable form. ↩
The storm was angry that day, my friends. Coming mid-2015 to the entire Playstation family (PS4, PS3, PS Vita), Shu is a platformer in two-and-a-half dimensions (2.5D, for you TL;DR folks), set across a varying landscape. As Shu, you are on the run from a terrible storm1 that has swept up most of the villagers. Those same villagers, when found, can offer Shu their unique abilities to escape the storm.
Co-developed by Coatsink Software and Secret Lunch, there even appears to be a bit of roguelike to Shu. Should your faithful companions get caught up in the storm and perish, you’ll lose those abilities for good. Good news is, the game doesn’t end. There will be multiple ways to survive. The moral of the story is, I guess everyone you know and love is expendable. Happy thought.
In some screenshots and the trailer, that ‘storm’ takes the appearance of a monster, so it’s probably a safe bet to assume there’s more to this ‘storm’ than meets the eye. ↩
I guarantee you somewhere right now, Tim Burton and Johnny Depp are kicking themselves …
for not having a part in Murasaki Baby. That said, Burton is just as likely to have inspired the group at Ovosonico to craft their game, a touch-screen puzzler with a distinctly deranged setting that is visually striking at any angle. Ditto for the too wide-eyed Baby, who, for lack of a better description, has her head on upside down, mouth up top. She’s still oddly adorable and expressive. Carrying a purple, heart-shaped balloon with her at all times (it functions as a pacifier and as a single ‘hitpoint’, if you will), wielding a toothy grin and an innocent nature, the game asks you to take her hand and become her protective overwatch for a short while, ushering her around a beautiful and perilous world.
And be forewarned: Murasaki Baby‘s macabre art can be distractingly-pretty, like penciled drawings coming to life1. Effort has been taken, and it deserves credit. Though it’s not quite the same art style, the game often reminded me of Escape Plan, another Vita title that crafted unique visuals and took great advantage of the system’s touch controls. Both games have you solving puzzles, and interacting with strange (yet alluring) characters over gorgeous backgrounds and pieces of art. Yet for Murasaki Baby in particular, it all feels refreshingly-simplified and easy. It helps that the Baby (and the game) has a straightforward demand— reuniting her with her lost mother. As you venture forth, the mission becomes two-fold: guiding the Baby, and helping out some tormented, outcasted kids.
Those other children, in essence, are the game’s form of ‘enemies’, but they’re really the means to creating Murasaki Baby‘s clever and occasionally-challenging puzzles. You do spend a good amount of time interacting with the front of the Vita’s screen, but the game’s big claim to fame is in changing the backgrounds (via the rear touch pad) to match whatever obstacle or threat is put in your way. Over the course of the game’s four themed ‘levels’, those backgrounds can perform a number of tasks, including freezing liquids, reversing gravity2, distracting a monster with TVs, or generating electricity to power up vehicles and platforms. Though it may sound complicated, the backgrounds are doled out like powerups at opportune times, and the puzzles themselves are presented logically. Well, as logically as they can be in a world like this.
But first and foremost, you have to keep the Baby cheerful. Ironically enough (considering her home and surroundings), she gets scared easily, cowering in fear whenever she gets near the dark (shadowy hands outstretched to grab her) or too close to would-be enemies. Separate her from her ‘comfort balloon’, or let that thing pop, and it’s Game Over. Simply said, you have to keep that balloon in her hands at all times, warding off dangers and swapping out backgrounds to manipulate the characters and the environments in new and vital ways. Sometimes all three simultaneously, requiring some nimble fingerwork (and maybe a few retries).
Okay, truthfully, safety pins with wings are scary in any reality.
It can be a lot of keep track of, and the world can be a dangerous place, with Baby chasing after ‘sentient hair’ she thinks is her Mother, or you racing to fill a leaking balloon, the result of a run-in with conjoined twins and opposing personalities. The whole thing drips atmosphere, and the scenes get busy with activity. Yet you’re rarely at a loss on what to do next, and the moves remain challenging enough to provide a real sense of accomplishment at completing them. You’ll still have some issues with the touch controls in spots3, due to darker backgrounds or inaccurate positioning, but frustrations are at a minimum. Even if you should fail the Baby (banish the thought!), checkpoints are generous and designed for enjoyment.
Murasaki Baby is a heartfelt and sincere adventure from start to finish …
And enjoy you shall. The game is a pleasure to play and a beautiful showpiece for multiple oddities, but Murasaki Baby is not weird for the sake of being weird. It uses the handheld’s tricks in meaningful ways to tell its equally-impactful story (despite the lack of dialogue, I almost teared up at the end and at a few other story bits). Above all else, Murasaki Baby is a heartfelt and sincere adventure from start to finish, certainly among the best experiences you can find on Vita.
And as gorgeous as the game is even in static screens, it’s best appreciated in-motion, along with Gianni Ricciardi and Akira Yamaoka’s (Silent Hill FTW) moody soundtrack. ↩
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