Luminous Avenger iX 2 is a MASSIVE step back from the previous game on almost every level. Inti Creates nerfed Copen, they really had to. He just completely ignored the level design of LAiX1 and was damn near a joke character, only he made everything else the joke. But all they managed to do was take an axe to his core abilities and leave him with a bunch of half-designed unfinished features to make him less than his former self, less than any MM game style protagonist, and not up to the task of carrying this game.
Just a brief history lesson, every Gunvolt game is a score attack game first and a Mega Man game second, if at all. Gunvolt has always looked like Mega Man Zero and never once played like one. Terrible score systems and a series of utterly insulting easy mode features that you need to manually disable are a series staple. LAiX1 followed Copen and his utterly insane playstyle of air-dash pinballing through levels and racking up massive combos by killing everything in the level and never hitting the ground. It was the only remotely fun score system Inti Creates has ever done in all their terrible rank systems going back to MMZ, so of course they killed it here lest anyone think they were good at making this sort of game. Copen now can only air-dash once. He still slams into enemies and floats and locks onto them. Alone, this is understandable. They HAD to nerf him. But they went way beyond that. The air dash is no longer safe. It goes off the edge of the screen from when you start, and there are several enemies who are immune to it and several terrain features that will just damage you if you air dash into them unwisely. So now your big fun move not only demands surgical precision but refuses to grant you enough camera length to accurately wield that precision. They gutted the air dash, added completely unnecessary pace-destroying counters to it, but never actually changed it mechanically to let you work within the new limitations. Even worse, a ground dash now has completely different properties and does not result in a lock-on. I have absolutely no idea what purpose they intended this to serve.
In addition to that, Copen lost his gun. Now unless you score an air-dash lock-on his only attack is a chainsaw pizza cutter melee that is slow, unwieldy, and unsatisfying. It locks you into attacks and is mostly incredibly random in how it functions. Will it stagger the enemy or will they attack you? Will you score a Quick Melee score off it or not this time? It's a surprise! Every time you whip this stupid thing out you're playing a slot machine to see if it will actually work or if the flame thrower enemy will laugh at you before roasting you. Again. Does the ground dash chain into the melee? Of course not. It knocks enemies too far back and they recover from it by the time you can get into melee range! The boss weapons don't do anything to alleviate this except raising your DPS in brief bursts or, in one instance, letting you cheese with time stop for some reason in case you thought this could ever be made a hardcore game. Even MN9's Beck had better boss weapons for general purpose use.
The score system is back to Inti Creates garbage again. There is ONE improvement: Chains don't drop if you get hit any more, thankfully. But now instead of prevasion you can heal at any time, for free, all you want, with the only cost being cashing in your combo. But beyond that, you now have to trigger the completely random Quick Melee score bonus until you breach 1000 Kudos and engage loli singing mode. Once you do that, you get the old Copen infinite dashes back for as long as you can keep the chain going. From there you are back to chaining Air Combo EX Weapon kills again but the new stage and enemy hazards that are now immune to your dash will keep messing you up until you memorize each level. I'd prefer my games to be a bit less passive aggressive about it: If they don't want me to fly around and ignore the levels, just let me walk and shoot like a normal platformer protagonist. It worked for MM11 and MMZ3.
The bosses are still the usual stuff Inti Creates has been doing since MMZ: Generally good, but full of patterns that have garbage tells that you can only know how to react to through rote memorization: The boss is in the middle of the screen and has the green rings that means he will instantly hit everything not in the corners with no other warning in about half a second. That sort of thing. That complaint aside they are still the best part of anything this team puts out. The nerfs to Copen wouldn't be so bad if they were put together in a smarter, better designed way. The enemies being immune to dashes wouldn't be so bad if Copen actually HAD useful weapons that weren't the dash but they took his gun too. The makers of MMZ gave us an edgy pretty boy robot man with a melee weapon that is almost the polar opposite of Zero's sword: Clunky, unreliable, unwieldy, and not fun to use. Gunvolt has always been right on the edge of good and bad and this one makes so many mistakes it is impossible to accept them all. This is a major misstep for the franchise and one that does not give me hope for Gunvolt 3.
(PS: One improvement the game made, and I honestly cannot believe it took them this long because every single GV game needed this: You can manually turn off HP gain from leveling in Normal mode. You do not have to permanently be stuck with a 3x long HP bar in Normal thankfully.)
