Here Are All 40 Gunvolt Stickers!

Joule, you burnt dinner AGAIN?! (OK, no, that's not really what this says)

At the Too Many Games event in Oaks, Philadelphia, Inti Creates released a special series of Gunvolt online stickers created by Yuuji Natsume, the artist responsible for Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. This was done in commemoration of their recent achievement of 120,000 downloads for Azure Striker Gunvolt. The company made this set of stickers available on the Line Store for ninety-nine cents a pop. If you'd prefer to check them out for free, though (albeit with JP text), a Japanese gaming site called Gamer.ne took the liberty of uploading each and every sticker to a single blog post. Now wasn't that nice of 'em!

The Easy (But Cheap) Way to Get S+

There's no denying that getting an S+ rank can be pretty difficult to do under normal circumstances. You have to scope out various situations, memorize enemy placements, determine what weapon would be best to snag a certain combo, not even take one hit, and on top of that all, you have to work within a time limit. It's a process that requires hours upon hours of practice, particularly in the Gauntlet stages (I remember spending days trying to get S+ in those).

There actually is an easy way to do it, though, which I'll be covering in this post. Before I get into this method, however, I'd like to reiterate that it's pretty cheap and can potentially take a lot of fun out of the game. You can get some pretty insane scores of out it, but it's much more gratifying to do S+ runs the normal way. That said, here's the lowdown on the method that the folks around the Interwebz like to call "Voltaic Chains Cheese".

"Nova's Memories" Drama Track Translated

Eclipse5632 aka "Sensei Hanzo" has just finished translating the second audio drama track for the "Justice Rage" album. This track details Sumeragi's "Project Gunvolt" tests and their struggle to find a test subject compatible with the electric septima gene. It's a short track, but provides some interesting info, such as Nova's last name being "Tsukuyomi". Also, unless I'm completely off the mark here, I think "Takefutsu" (whom the scientists speak of) is revealed as the real name of the true final boss. It's crazy to hear in this track that Nova's compatibility with the gene was predicted to be even higher than the true final boss, though!

Anyway, in addition to translating this track, Eclipse also provides some intriguing translation notes in the description of the video, so check that out, as well!

"I AM Electricity!"

Gotta say, this is probably one of the best Gunvolt art pieces I've come across thus far (and trust me, that's saying a lot)! This superb picture comes to us from Japanese fan Katagai on Pixiv. The huge amount of detail that this artist puts into the lighting is just super impressive! You have to wonder how Gunvolt isn't electrifying Joule while using his Flashfield, though. :P

Anyway, fantastic work on this, Katagai!

Gaijin Goomba Interviews Inti Creates' Matt Papa

Gaijin Goomba recently had an opportunity to sit down with Inti Creates International Coordinator Matt Papa for an interview at the Inti Creates HQ in Tokyo. Many things are discussed, including the English localization of Gunvolt, the huge focus on action in Inti's games, the company's future, and more. In short, it's quite a thorough interview. If you're an Inti fan, you might wanna check it out!

Gunvolt Speedrun in 49:13 Accomplished by Greenalink

Prominent DS/3DS speedrunner Greenalink from Speed Demos Archive just completed a speedrun of Azure Striker Gunvolt with a total time of 49:13. At the moment, this seems to be the best time on record for an Any% run of the game. And rightly so! Greenalink displays some very clever techniques for shaving off time, such as using the infinite jumps acquired by Lumen's Reincarnation to speed up his ascent through the second portion of Merak's stage.

All in all, it's a very solid run! If I may digress for a second here, I was actually watching one of Greenalink's attempts at speedrunning this game on his Twitch channel a couple weeks back. I wasn't around for very long, but I remember that he was having particular difficulty with getting Lumen's Reincarnation to activate in Merak's stage. Of course, that's perfectly natural if you don't spend much time talking with Joule, but yeah, I'm glad to see that he was able to conquer that RNG in the end and run with it! Heck, I certainly don't think I'd have the patience for that (though I personally think S+ runs are more fun anyway).

The Secret Kudos Bonuses

A while back I discussed the various secret icons that you can find in the seven Adept stages. Today I'll be covering the secret kudos bonuses that the game rewards you with from time to time.

You may have actually gotten these yourself on occasion. Have you ever noticed a "SECRET" caption pop up on your screen while you were playing? That's a secret kudos bonus. The game rewards you with them for performing various different feats. Unlike the secret icons (which just set your kudos counter to 1,000 regardless of how high/low it is), these bonuses are purely beneficial, as they always give extra kudos. I honestly have no idea how many of these there are in the game, but I've discovered three so far:

What's Your Reward For "S" Ranking All Stages?

Note: This is an outdated picture. My Total Time is maxed out now. :P

This is generally something that's missed by a lot of people, but did you know that there's actually a reward for getting an "S" rank in every single Gunvolt stage? If you are successful in completing this accomplishment, the game rewards you with a massive amount of money. I'm not exactly positive how much, but when I accomplished this feat, I found myself with a max 999,999 vig! And I don't recall having a large amount of vig before then.