I feel like a fucking crazy person.

For context on this psychological self report, I was already a fan of the original Gungrave. On a recommendation, I had picked up Gungrave along with the sequel for mere pennies on the dollar in an ebay lot circa 2017. I was a massive fan of Yasuhiro Nightow's work — Trigun being the inspiration for my username — so a game where his characters bearing their signature boldenly squared shoulders to carry freakishly huge, thematically blunt objects as weapons was a perfect fit for the medium of video games.

The original game was an arcade style third person shooter, where you play as the titular Grave himself, aka Brandon Heat. It's simplistic moveset involving diving while shooting, standing still to release a frenzy of bullets, and it's frequent special moves and heat mode squeezed an immense amount of enjoyment out of me. This was nothing massively complicated as a concept, but Gungrave provided the feeling of being this massive brick of a human being carrying a fucking coffin on my back with zero subtlety. The character had a massive sense of weight, the coffin would grind against the cramped walls of these desolate street rat hide outs, causing sparks to go flying. You'd shoot out in these fantastically stylized arenas where the music would kick into high gear and would elevate everything on screen as you blew away goons with your twin shooters. It was massive style, jam packed into a small, replayable shoot'em'up.

The sequel was more or less the same, though expanding on the insanity that is the story and the lore to Gungrave, but never quite provided anything new or substantial. As a sequel, it felt like it was by the numbers, but the gameplay was the core of my interest, and what it provided was more Gungrave style carnage.

These two games weren't necessarily jaw dropping, life changing experiences. They were fun, action packed, playable anime sci-fi gangster movies with a great sense of style. They managed to leave such strong impressions on me despite their brevity. I'd always come back around thinking about that first game and just how neat the experience was.

So imagine my shock when years later, a brand new game in the series had appeared abruptly in front of me.

What's this? The same studio behind the original games is working on the game? What?

Oh? A cool new cinematic trailer with a brand new character that's reminiscent of Nicholas Wolfwood, one of my favorite characters ever to exist? Oh me. Oh my.

Needless to say, my mouth was watering like Pavlov's dog. Each time a new trailer would be revealed at a gaming event, I would be that one guy yelling and foaming at the mouth in the voice call as this obscure game no one has ever heard of appeared on screen to the confusion of everyone. This was my shit, and I was absolutely here for it.

... Until the reviews came out.

The game was absolutely raked over the coals. One critic said that Gungrave Gore was "destined to become dead and buried". Ahh, clearly the media just didn't understand a cool game once again. I then decided to check the public opinion of a forum I would sometimes frequent. The reception wasn't great either. I distinctly recall one user on the forum posting a clip and stating a paraphrase of the following:

"This game is absolutely awful, holy shit. I used to love the original game, but this game is just awful. It feels like a fucking PS2 game, and not in a good way. I'm on the third level and this level is absolutely the most bafflingly bad experience I've ever had. Somehow it just keeps getting worse."

I was crushed. Here I was, hyped for a sequel to a niche series I liked, and everyone around me was aggressive in stating that the game was terrible. So, I did what was sensible. I passed up on buying the game. No one seemed to enjoy it, so I figured, why waste my money?

A week ago, I discovered the game was 7 bucks on Steam, and I just couldn't resist the temptation. I had to know how bad the game truly was. I had spent all this time getting hyped for the game, I might as well see it through to the end, yeah?

Upon first gaining control of my character, I could tell the game was different from the original. The sense of weight Grave carried was off, feeling rather floaty in comparison. Diving and shooting didn't have the same sense of weight to it either. Despite this, I was actually enjoying moving around and shooting at guys in the traditional Gungrave fashion. Killing dudes felt about on par to the original game, now with added mechanics like grappling enemies towards you, beating them down in a stunned state to regain shields, amongst other things. So far, this was alright.

Slowly but surely, I'd make my way through halls of baddies. These metallic halls held a very Unreal engine aura, like the game was primarily utilizing pre-built lighting systems or something. You could count the money allocated for the graphics through the textures. I'd clear waves of poorly voice acted Engrish mafia men, and eventually made my way to the third stage.

This was it, I thought. This is where the game was going to become one of the worst games I've ever played.

... And that time never fucking came.

I have never been more confused about the public's reception of a video game than I have with Gungrave Gore's. I'm typically fairly in tune with public opinions. Not that I fear of going against the grain, but I've often found that when I would demonstrate this act as a bitter sad sack pre-teen, I'd be unconsciously doing so with rejection of the status quo for it's own sake. I'd still try and be fair to the piece of media I'd butt heads with, but I'd often overlook/dismiss the game for surface level reasons without ever really giving an open mind to what was in front of me.

This feeling has nearly become extinct within me, and as a result, I've become more in line with the public's perception of good. I have my moments, Doom Eternal has been exemption for that, but rarely are they this drastic feeling.

First of all, what on earth was that guy in the forum saying? The third level is a sewer level with gross little mutant leeches popping up out of green mucky water from time to time, but they provided a break up to the rest of the combat loop. Sometimes, you'd have to run away from a spikey grinder that would attempt to crush you to pieces. But, like, so what? These diversions were fairly basic in their implementation? And I dunno, they were even kind of... Fun?

After playing Gungrave Gore to completion, the only thing I could really think of was that, it was fun. It wasn't anything unbearably bad, it wasn't anything masterful, it was just an incredibly enjoyable budget title.

It was another Gungrave game.

Granted, it's not the best Gungrave game to be made. GORE provides a leg up over Overdose with it's inclusion of multiple playable characters, a fairly decent progression system, and just being a more fascinating attempt in expanding Gungrave's core gameplay loop, but it's never quite as solid as that original title. But still, ultimately, GORE is another Gungrave game.

I have a feeling that many have forgotten what exactly Gungrave was all about as a game. Never was there a focus on exploration; you were here to shoot and kill bad guys. Never was this system meant to be complicated; Gungrave was never a complicated game. Their nostalgic perception of the game clashed with their modern sensibilities, and because of that, they forgot how unpolished and barebones the original game was in comparison to other combat driven action games at the time.

Of course, there are reasons to dislike this title. Perhaps in the heads of some fans, the lack of appealing style to the original was enough to dismiss the game outright. The game certainly doesn't look the best, washing out whatever shading was used originally for a more realistic art direction, albeit slightly more stylized to fit Nightow's concept art. Perhaps it's length overstayed it's welcome. The game has 31 stages, and while for the most part they do a decent job at mixing up combat situations with the mechanics at hand, by the remaining third of the game, they ramp up the difficulty and start chucking bigger and bigger boys towards you. Maybe these fans played on a higher difficulty than me, and struggled more due that experience. Normal was a relatively painless experience for me, but I could easily see how a higher difficulty on a first playthrough might be bone crushingly annoying.

However, many of the arguments I've seen from fans revolve around being fans of the original game, and the expectations from their fond memories of that game, so I believe there's at least a portion here that believes that original premise.

Of course, I come with my own set of biases. I didn't play the game at full price. I wasn't a mega fan of the original games, so I might not be aware of all the intracracies I'm missing out on. My expectations were set to the very bottom from public discourse of the game. But this game's goal was to be a sequel to Gungrave, from the same developers of that original title, and in that respect, they nailed the core of the game. From the stellar heart pumping music, to the insanely stupid and benign plot, to the absolute dumb coolness of every single character's design, they all are the epitome of what a Gungrave game is like. And for that, I honestly genuinely enjoyed Gungrave GORE.

Gungrave GORE has been a great teacher for me. Sometimes, your opinion on a game will be drastically different than what the majority believes. It's best to figure out for yourself if something is worthwhile to you. Experience is the best teacher.

But it makes me feel like a crazy person to be the one guy rooting against the rest of the crowd. Maybe YOU guys are the crazy people, not me.