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Gungrave is a high octane third person shooter that is heavy on style. It was developed by Red Entertainment and published by themselves in Japan, Sega in North America, and Activision in Europe. The game is heavy on style, looking completely awesome and giving setpieces that feel right at home in what is a nearly mindless action game.

The Gungrave series was created by Yasuhiro Nightow. He might not sound too familiar to the video game crowd, but the anime fans will instantly recognize his style from his popular creation Trigun. I love Trigun, and its one of the reasons I've been tracking this game down for years despite mediocre reviews.

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Graphically, the game resembles anime. The characters are cel-shaded and the animation is quite fluid. This is a result of Nightow's experience as an animator. The cutscenes are fluid and in most cases, action packed. All of these scenes tell a story of a drug dealing Syndicate, which the main character is on the warpath against because of a thirst for vengeance.

The gameplay is a bit flawed, and some parts of the game feel almost broken. Technical issues really hurt the overall experience and could have turned this game into a stylish classic in the vein of Killer7 or XIII. There is an unforgivably high amount of slowdown in the game. When there are a lot of enemies on screen with projectiles then the game can grind to a standstill. There's not this much slowdown in freaking Gradius III!

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Despite all the slowdown the game is still quite short. I managed to beat it in less than 2.5 hours. That's not a typo. The game has unlockables which you can earn through multiple playthroughs, and the story might make a little bit more sense, but that it is the extent of the game and its story. The extras are actually cool to look through. The enemies in the game are collected and shown off like action figures, still in their original packaging and everything! On higher difficulties you can unlock concept art and just more stuff to mess around with in the game.

This game could have been much more, with some polish it could have been more fun to play. The animations were quite enjoyable, highly detailed and quite fluid. For the most part they were quite short, leaving a bit more to be desired. The ending was rather underwhelming as well. It was a cliche save the girl and ride a motorcycle into the sunset ending. I'm not even trying to crack a joke here.



All in all this game is still rather interesting, with a nice premise behind the story. The gameplay was underwhelming, but the style was certainly there and was presented in a satisfactory way. The story is a bit cryptic at first, but there is a sequel, and anime, that came out after Gungrave. While the game is short at least it is mostly sweet, and doesn't drag on and on like Dirge of Cerberus.

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