Up to Sunrise Palace 3.

Once again, + for the bosses, but - for the story. They brought back some older bosses but they lose a lot of their fighting appeal with the nerfs. I expected their patterns to be buffed since Kirin is so much stronger than GV from GV2, but whatever. Also Kirin, agreeing with the bosses, calls GV a bastard in the past games and I don't understand where they're getting those opinions from? GV is no better in this game than the others. There's no moral high ground here. I don't know, the character changes are very off putting.

I think the ice priestess is my favorite boss thus far.

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😿 ...

Final boss was definitely highlight of the game. Easier than the rest of it, but still great sequences. Loved berserk GV. Disappointed by the boss music though.

Hopefully this is the bad ending.

TRUE ENDING COMPLETED

Feel good ending, hopefully the next game has GV as a lead now :)
Still don't like all the character modifications, but whatever, I'm hopeful for GV4

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[19/12/23]
Have thought a bit more on this, and all the story nonsense really brings the rating down again. It's such a downgrade from the genuine care they seemed to put in gv2, and the cope that "no one plays for the story" is really dumb to me when the standards were set in the previous entry. This is a followup, not a spinoff. And if the game expects you to play the levels twice to get the endings, obviously they should actually matter. But yeah, I don't like the direction of the story. I'll still check out the next game, of course, but I don't expect it to be any better than GV2.

Beat up to the 1st rival adept.
Having much more fun with the gameplay, the bosses have been cooler too. They're not as hard as the ones from GV2 though, and my strategy may be too OP (using GV to close out bosses is just straight unfair, and that's not even with his powered up Anthem form!!!) I've also been appreciating the care put into the environments and such.
Still don't enjoy the characters. I'm not annoyed by the new recruits, they just feel eh. I also think the butchered GV and Lumen's personalities, but whatever.
The rival org actually looks cool, so I feel like they're probably going to be the highlight of the game. We'll see...

Brought up my scores from B to A on the first two levels.
I've come over to appreciating the gameplay, but I still can't get over everything else. Plus, playing these levels properly made me realize that GV is way more broken than I thought, lol.

Cleared Christmas stage.
GV is way overpowered.

...they changed so much...
The UI is way better, sure, but the retconning is crazy. The way they explain it doesn't make any sense. It just feels really off, like this isn't Gunvolt but some mobile spinoff. I don't know, it's just disappointing when I was actually really hyped for this.

[Sidenote: Less than an hour in and there's already 3 spelling mistakes... doesn't give me much confidence on the translation quality.]