Selling itself as a cool little crossover between Gunvolt, GalGun, which is the weird FPS thing where you shoot pheromones at girls, and the game that exposed Keiji Inafune as a hack, Mighty Gunvolt wraps itself in an 8-bit Mega Man style skin and comes out as an incredibly aggressively boring game.

Like, goddamn, this feels like it was started with the prospect of the crossover idea first and then the team collectively floundered the part where they make the game, and that's kind of a shame. Visually, it's really cool to see the cast rendered in the 8-bit Mega Man style, but there's just barely anything to the game beyond being a really dull rehash of Gunvolt and MN9's stages, with a little of original GalGun stuff thrown in too. At least, from what I could tell, I'm not enough of a degenerate to play GalGun. The levels are all pretty flat and uninteresting, as they were in their original games, and it doesn't have Gunvolt's signature style and flair. Hell, the core mechanic of the flashfield is toned down to a multi-hitting beam you need to be at a standstill to use, and there aren't even any alternate weapons or anything. But there IS a weird emphasis on score... in a game with no ranking system to speak of, which is really weird. Makes you think back to why the score counter was abandoned after Mega Man 1, but maybe there was a single guy at Inti Creates who fucking LOVED it.

Incredibly poetic that the Mighty No 9 content, from the levels, bosses and Beck himself, are the absolute low points; especially wanna focus on that last point, since Beck is absolute dog ass to play. MN9 had the dash mechanic at its core, both as a movement tool, and a really ill advised method of killing enemies, or even dealing damage to bosses. It sucked, and it's somehow even worse here, with it being tied to Beck's charge shot input, so not only is there a delay, but you're also dealing with hitboxes that are permanently active, leading to a really good chance of running into the enemies you're trying to kill. So you've basically got the Charge Kick from Mega Man 5, except it takes longer to activate on top of it. Fuck you, Beck, but I also hope whoever decided to bring back Elise's boss from Gunvolt 1 is given a stern kicking.

So yeah, not too much to say about Mighty Gunvolt. It's inoffensive, but it's also dull, cheap, and a really lackluster title on the whole, surprisingly weak as far as Inti Creates' offerings go. But I hear the sequel is a lot better, so here's hoping that'll blow my socks off!