[Thanks to my good friend AbstractCactus for the banner image!]
Gungrave is a 2002 third-person shooter game for Playstation 2. It’s most notable for having character designs by Yasuhiro Nightow (creator of Trigun and Blood Blockade Battlefront) and mechanical designs by Kosuke Fujishima (creator of You’re Under Arrest and Ah! My Goddess, character designer for the Sakura Wars series and the Tales series), which helped to give the game its distinct art style. It was prominent enough to receive both a 26-episode anime adaptation and a sequel game, Gungrave: Overdose.
Gungrave is about a reanimated mercenary named Beyond the Grave, who is contracted to take down the Millennion Organization, also known as the Syndicate. The city is overrun with crime, in part thanks to Millennion and its spread of a drug known as Seed. However, cleaning up the streets isn’t the only goal Grave has in mind while blasting his way through the Syndicate’s bigwigs…
The game is a little odd because it plays more like a character action game than a shooter. The focus isn’t really on precise shooting and slower progression as much as it’s about racking up sweet combos in crazy firefights before setting off ridiculous super moves for high scores. It definitely feels clunkier than some of the higher profile games of the era, but it has a lot of style and a couple of nice features that help to keep the experience fresh and exciting.
I’m ChorpSaway and I’m not very good at video games, but I will do my best to show off competent gameplay for this weird but interesting series. Plus I have been revived into a blood pact with FutureFriend that requires me to do this. Running and gunning along with me are TheJayOfSpade, Hobotron, and FutureFriend. Together we’ll mow down everyone in our path and do our best to have a bit of fun as we take down drug culture and big business.
I will be playing through both Gungrave and Gungrave: Overdose on the Hard difficulty because I’m not nearly enough of a badass for Kick-Ass difficulty, but just enough of a badass to not play on Normal. I also have plans for covering the anime and its exclusive material.
Today, it’s time for the penultimate update! Grave returns from his airplane fight with Don Corsione unharmed, but finds the truck, and his team, in disrepair! Spike seems to have left with the enemy, so it’s time to track him down and figure out just what’s going on with the Corsione family, and Garino’s evil plans. Time to return to space to send Seed back to where it came from, but not before fighting our true foil…
So for people who might not know me from elsewhere, I run an anime podcast called Cocoa☆Disaster with my good friend JordanKai. Last week, we talked about our Anime of the Year picks, but we didn’t end up having enough time after our own deliberations to talk about everything we wanted to about the year, so we recorded this short bonus episode to help close out our thoughts on 2016 and its anime. Some fan poll discussion, some sales, and some general talk about the series we’ll take with us into the future. This is Cocoa☆Disaster, raw and uncut. Or at least a little looser than our discussion tends to be.
Feel free to talk about the podcast in this thread if you want! I don’t mind any kinds of discussion as long as it’s civil.
Today, it’s time to end the War on Alien Drugs! Grave and the crew have made their way to Garino’s church room on the spaceship, but it seems he’s more than prepared for the unwelcome guests. His powers have reached beyond the possibility of man, and he’s prepared to do whatever it takes to keep that power! It’s up to Grave in one final shootout to protect humanity from these crazed alien-loving nutjobs and bring peace for his team!
There’s one bonus update left in the thread, but this concludes all the story stuff. Thanks for watching!
And sorry for anyone overwhelmed by the dump, just porting over an LP. The next one will be much easier to jump in on.
That is, in fact, the final bonus video! I won’t be showing off much, because I don’t want to replay the whole game again twice to show off the cutscene differences and such, but I’ll at least talk about playstyle differences and show off the first unique Demolition Shots for each of them.
In this final bonus update, let’s take a brief look at the other two playable characters! I just play part of the first level with each of them to show off how they play differently from Grave, since I didn’t want to play through the whole thing two more times for a best-of montage, but these characters have different cutscenes and everything with the bosses, which is a nice touch.
Thanks again for watching me play through this weird little series, and next time you see me post a thread… it’s going to be a weirder little game.
Oh right, forgot I had to handle archive requests here. @moderators, I’d like to get this moved to Completed Let’s Plays, and might as well leave it open for replies in case someone wants to say something about it later.
