Video Game / Gal Guardians: Demon Purge

aka: Grim Guardians Demon Purge

On a certain night, in a certain place, a demon castle rises from Hell to wreak havoc on the Earth. Determined to combat the threat and put an end to the horrible night, two demon-slaying sisters set forth on a mission to save... their school?

Gal Guardians: Demon Purge (Grim Guardians: Demon Purge in Japanese^note The game was initially released under the Grim Guardians title in English speaking countries as well, but due to trademark issues, Intl Creates was forced to change the title to Gal Guardians in English-speaking countries. This does not affect the original Japanese release, which keeps its original title) is a 2D Gothic Horror Run-and-Gun game developed by Inti Creates as a Spin-Off of the Gal*Gun series (yes, really). It released on February 23, 2023 for the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via Steam.

Players take control of Shinobu and Maya Kamizono (from Gal*Gun: Double Peace), the latest in a line of demon hunters from the Kamizono clan. Shinobu wields a sub-machine gun and wields a multitude of ranged attacks designed to mow down creatures of the night, while Maya wields melee weapons such as a naginata, giving her strong attacks at close range. Players can swap between the two characters at will to capitalize on their unique strengths as the situation demands.

The reveal trailer can be seen here. See also the Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon series, another 2D Gothic Horror Run-and-Gun game made by Inti Creates.

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This game features examples of:

• Alliterative Title: "Grim Guardians", much like "Gal*Gun" - even the full name has the same GG:DP initialization.
• And the Adventure Continues: In the Golden Ending, Kurona appears while the girls are walking to school to announce she's plotting a new "prank", leading to the girls chasing after her in their demon hunting outfits.
• Arbitrary Weapon Range: Shinobu's basic gunfire only covers a certain distance (roughly over half the screen).
• The Bad Guy Wins: Played for Laughs in the Normal Ending. Although the Kamizono sisters defeated Adult Kurona, the fact that the school and the girls are all still stuck in the demon world has Kurona happily declare that her "prank" was a success. Shinobu, although angry enough to be marching on Kurona fully intent on beating her with her bare hands, can't actually disagree with that assessment.
• Bloodier and Gorier: In sharp contrast to the previous Gal*Gun titles, this game is much more violent, featuring blood splatter whenever enemies are either sliced or riddled with bullets. You can even decorate both walls and floors with blood.
• Boss Bonanza: At the tail-end of the game, when assaulting the pinnacle of the castle one last time, you need to fight four bosses in sequence, with only a very short platforming segment between the first and the second to catch your breath: Kurona, a copy of Houdai with a fascination for licking feet, Adult Kurona, and then either Adult Kurona's second phase or a rail-gun-esque alternate phase. Making matters especially difficult is that the third boss is exceptionally strong and fast, and you get no chance to rest at all between the second and third, and must fight the second again if you lose to the third.
• Bottomless Magazines: Downplayed. Shinobu can manually reload her MAC-10 (or automatically if its clip is completely exhausted), but the feed system holds an ammo count of 100, far more than what a machine pistol can realistically hold, and upgrades scattered throughout Kurona's castle can give her an even larger clip capacity.
• Call-Back: Adult Kurona utilizes a more powerful version of Kurona's Hell-acious Special Attack during her fight.
• Collection Sidequest:
  • After rescuing Chiru, the girls are encouraged to backtrack through the castle using their new abilities in order to help her find the parts for a machine that can disconnect the school from the demon realm and unlock the Golden Ending option.
  • Hidden throughout the game are tiny portals containing the missing panties of the entire female cast, which the demon hunters can collect and need to in order to access the True Final Boss.
• Color-Coded Characters: Shinobu wears blue while Maya wears red.
• Combination Attack:
  • With enough weapon energy, Shinobu and Maya are able to activate one, unleashing a torrent of blade swipes or a massive laser against their opponents.
  • If the Golden Ending requirements were met, then during the Final Boss, all of the girls that were rescued during the adventure are able to join in the attack against Adult Kurona, launching their own combination techniques.
• Company Cross References:
  • As with many games developed by the company, gameplay prominently features melee and ranged options, with a focus on the player figuring out which option works best for what enemy. Maya also has Zero's triple slash combo, and her first slash is the same 'duck and fling your hand outward' maneuver Zero is fond of using. Her aerial slash attack works exactly like Zero's as well, though she forms an axe instead of using a sword. It's likely no coincidence that Shinobu, who focuses on ranged combat, wears a lot of blue clothing like Mega Man X, while Maya, who is primarily an up-close-and-personal bruiser, wears red clothing like Zero.
  • The Demon Nanako fight is a massive pile of references to the Prometheus and Pandora boss fights from both Mega Man ZX games. Most of its attacks are taken from the duo, including Pandora's cross-shaped blast formations, Prometheus' summons (here taking the form of floating eyes), and the final attack in one of the twins' combos from Advent, where Promtheus flashes vertically down the screen and leaves fire in his wake. Fittingly, it also has an attack borrowed from the inspiration of their Model W forms, Weil, where it conjures spears that strike the ground in different positions that release bolts of energy.
  • The way the enemies can be gibbed or bifurcated can also be seen as a reference to the enemies in the Zero and ZX series exploding upon defeat (bifurcation optional).
  • This game borrows quite a few elements from Curse of the Moon duology.
    • The 1UP score counter is displayed as a gauge as it was in Curse of the Moon 2, instead of a traditional number.
    • Multiplayer takes a few cues from Curse of the Moon 2, such as being able to stand on the head of the other player to reach higher ground and turn into an invincible mascot.
    • When you deplete a boss' health, it will launch a Last Ditch Move that you can either dodge or cancel by killing the boss. The exceptions are a midgame boss^note Compare this game's Living Armor boss to Curse 1's Valac and Curse 2's Vepar and the Final Boss, who go into phase two instead.
  • There are also a few references to Azure Striker Gunvolt Series:
    • From Luminous Avenger iX 2: A certain event at the end of your first playthrough will throw you back to the beginning of the game, forcing you to do a second run against beefed-up bosses.
    • Adult Kurona borrows one of Copen's attacks, Doppler Destroyer/Final Lust Doppler from Azure Striker Gunvolt 2, during the boss fight.
• Co-Op Multiplayer: A 2-player mode is featured in the reveal trailer. One player can take control of Shinobu while the other takes control of Maya, allowing both sisters to be on-screen simultaneously. They can perform actions such as standing on each others' heads for extra height and resuscitating each other if they fall in combat.
• Cutting Off the Branches: The game's dialogue indicates that Double Peace ended with Houdai starting a relationship with both Shinobu and Maya.
• Darker and Edgier: A downplayed example. While it retains the series' usual humor and most of the cast (including minor characters) — the environment is much darker and sinister, the enemies are life-threating monsters with nightmarish designs rather than harmless (but brainwashed) schoolgirls, and the castle bears a gothic aesthetic reminiscent of Castlevania series (particularly the Metroidvania titles). It also feature a dark artstyle evocative of the first two Gunvolt games as opposed to Gal*Gun's soft artstyle. To drive it home, the Big Bad is the Future Badass self of Kurona who's completely fine with killing the protagonists out of both revenge for past slights and because she thinks it could be pretty fun to watch them struggle for their lives.
• Denial of Diagonal Attack: Downplayed with Shinobu. Her MAC-10 can only fire straight forward until the sisters start the second climb up the castle, where a Power-Up from Risu gives her the ability to shoot straight upwards, but she has several sub-weapons (including her starter sub-weapon the Knife) that can be thrown diagonally to make up for it.
• Disc-One Final Boss: After Shinobu and Maya reach the top of the castle and defeat Kurona in battle, it turns out that the plot was actually masterminded by Kurona's future self, who warps the demon hunters all the way back to the castle's entrance while taunting them to climb back up to face her.
• Double Jump: Played with. Neither Shinobu nor Maya have a conventional second jump after their first, but they can obtain an ability that lets them perform essentially a second jump. Shinobu can use her grapple hook sub-weapon after jumping and if she successfully connects to a wall or ceiling can jump again, while Maya after using her Charged Attack after jumping in mid-air will be launched further skyward.
• Falling Chandelier of Doom: The rocker bunny boss' Last Ditch Move is to jam so hard it causes chandeliers to start falling onto the boss room, including a massive one which falls onto the boss during its outro and crushes it.
• Final Boss, New Dimension: The final level, including the final boss fight, take place in a dimensional rift connecting the present to the future, created by Adult Kurona.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Although the school's transformation into a demonic castle is initially suspected to be a prank by the foolish demon Kurona, it turns out that the culprit is Kurona's grown-up future self, who is trying to genuinely kill the demon hunters that bullied her in her youth.
• Future Badass: Adult Kurona is essentially every bit the intimidating and powerful demoness Kurona wants to be (not to mention downright gorgeous) in the future. It's just a shame that she's lost a lot of her childhood humor and her goal to kill Shinobu and Maya is not Played for Laughs.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: Making contact with Houdai is supposed to give the girls the ability to move between different checkpoints in the game, but you can actually do so after beating the first boss.
• Genius Loci: After defeating the Disc-One Final Boss, the demon hunters learn that Houdai, their male friend who was suspiciously absent during their initial climb of the castle, had his spirit bound to the castle itself. Once they make contact with him, he's able to help them navigate the castle by letting the girls teleport to checkpoints.
• Genre Shift: The Gal*Gun games are Rail Shooters, making this game as far away from its parent series as you can possibly get.
• Glass Cannon: Maya's attacks are much stronger per hit than Shinobu's gunfire, but she needs to get up-close and personal to deal damage and she has less health than Shinobu, meaning using her recklessly will quickly result in death.
• Going Commando: One Collection Sidequest is to collect everyone's panties from tiny portals hidden throughout the levels, as it's explicitly stated that they were left behind when their wearers were warped to the demon realm.
• Guide Dang It!: The panties collection falls into this hard; there's no indication of how many of them you have collected, how many of them you need to collect, or whether or not there are any left in a stage. You can't even use a checklist since the pantie's owners are randomized every playthrough, and to top it all they're the only item that doesn's show up on the treasure radar.
• Half the Man He Used to Be: Whenever enemies are killed by Maya's naginata, they are sliced into two. This is ironically considered a clean kill as finishing them (particularly the more monstrous or zombie enemies, as humanoid monsters will simply fade away) off with grenades, projectile sub-weapons, or Shinobu's MAC-10/M202 FLASH will result in them being torn to pieces.
• Harem Ending: In the joke ending, Shinobu and Maya end up as the focus of an all-girl harem after using the Pheromone Shot against Adult Kurona, with Houdai assuming this means they're attracted to other girls instead of him and feeling rejected.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: Nanako's and Chisu's possessed demon transformations all but outright reveal their true demonic and angelic origins respectively, which are big personal reveals in Gal*Gun 2. The fact they engage in Suspiciously Specific Denial just cements it, and only the fact Shinobu and Maya don't pry much further into it after the fights even partially keeps it a spoiler.
• Literally Shattered Lives: The fate of any mook hit by Maya's Penguin sub-weapon before being struck by her or Shinobu's next attack. This can happen to both the sisters if their HP reaches 0 while frozen or petrified.
• Magic Mirror: Adult Kurona uses one in her plan to reach into the present day to cause havoc. This mirror is essentially a portal, which Shinobu and Maya use to travel to Adult Kurona's realm for the final showdown.
• Medium Awareness:
  • Played for all its worth for the sake of comedy. The game pokes fun at the usage of tentacles in Japanese media with the characters directly addressing how silly and contrived a student getting caught by a tentacle-bearing plant monster is, and after the fight with Kurona and the arrival of Adult Kurona, who is far greater a threat than her younger self, Shinobu has this to say;
  Shinobu: Aren't we going off the rails a bit here?! You can't introduce someone that OP ^note An abbreviation for 'overpowered,' a term used in the gaming medium to denote a feature that is much too powerful for the scope of the game being played, such as an item that grants an obscene bonus to damage that kills bosses quickly in a platformerwithout proper foreshadowing first!
  • Both sisters make multiple allusions to the fact they're in a video game, the story will occasionally have Shinobu not understand Maya's more direct allusions to the fact. Of the two, Maya definitely seems more 'aware.'
• Metaphorically True: When Shinobu and Maya initially meet Kurona, she claims she has obtained an "absolute power" that has granted the ability to morph the school into a demonic castle. This is technically true only with the omission that the "absolute power" in question is actually her adult self from the future.
• Multiple Endings:
  • If the game is beaten by telling Adult Kurona that they'll fight to the end, then the school ends up on the wrong side of the dimensional rift after Adult Kurona's defeat, leaving everyone stuck in the demon world. Most of them are more annoyed than anything, and Kurona celebrates that this technically makes her "prank" a success while an angry Shinobu can only sputter in anger.
  • If the game is beaten by entering the Mirror by completing Chiru's machine, which allows the other girls to follow Maya and Shinobu into the Mirror and unlocks the option to tell Adult Kurona that they'll never leave anyone behind, then the Golden Ending where everything goes back to normal happens.
  • If all of the girls' underwear was collected and returned, which unlocks the option to tell Adult Kurona that they believe in the power of love, then a True Final Boss is fought and a joke Harem Ending occurs in which using the Pheromone Shot against Adult Kurona makes all of the other girls fall in love with Shinobu and Maya.
• Painfully Slow Projectile: Shinobu's massive laser Combination Attack is initiated with a silver bullet that travels very slowly.
• Paper Master: Maya's weapons are all made from origami- she crafts swords, naganitas, axes, and shruikens for her basic attacks, plus skills that cause a variety of effects like an origami penguin that freezes enemies and an origami umbrella she can glide with.
• Paper Talisman: One of Shinobu's sub-weapons is an Ofuda, which is noticeable for being the only mystical weapon in her arsenal while Maya generally has that covered. She can use it to exorcist spirits that are otherwise invulnerable to harm at no cost to Weapon Energy, and if she charges it can create health for her and Maya to scoop up at the cost of a whooping 6 WP. The upgraded version mitigates the cost by providing more health for the charged technique.
• Playboy Bunny: At the end of the penultimate level, present Kurona admits that her future self is waiting for the girls in a dimensional rift accessed via Magic Mirror, but the Mirror is picky and will only let Shinobu and Maya through if they dress in bunny outfits. The girls can either agree to this, force their way in, or (if Chiru's Collection Sidequest was completed) find another way in via Chiru's machine.
• Pre-Final Boss: The final sequence of the game has the player fight Kurona, do a very brief platforming segment, and then fight Demon Houdai before they start fighting the actual final boss Adult Kurona.
• Production Throwback: The True Final Boss fight is shooting Adult Kurona with the Pheromone Shot until she has an emotional climax, exactly like in the mainline Gal*Gun games.
• Promoted to Playable: Shinobu and Maya, the lead heroines and love interests of Gal*Gun: Double Peace, make their playable debut in this game.
• Reforged into a Minion: The majority of the game's boss fights are against the main love interests from the original Gal*Gun and from Gal*Gun 2, who have been transformed into demons similarly to how the school itself was transformed into a castle and need to be purified through combat.
• Rise to the Challenge: When you deplete the giant mechanical angel boss' health, she will send her head upwards, forcing you to chase after her while the sawblades that rest at the bottom of her boss room rise up to shred you.
• Rogue Protagonist: The first phase of the final boss fight is against Adult Kurona's minion, a demonic version of Houdai, the male protagonist of Double Peace.
• Retraux: The game features sprite work evocative of the handheld Castlevania games, such as Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin.
• Short Range Guy, Long Range Guy: Maya is the short-range gal who primarily fights with her naginata, while Shinobu is the long-range gal who shoot enemies from afar.
• Shout-Out:
  • Like Curse of the Moon, Gal Guardians has quite a few references to Castlevania.
    • Maya and Shinobu's dynamic and colors resemble Jonathan and Charlotte from Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin.
    • The first boss is a giant bat, reminiscent to how giant bats have served as first level bosses in several Castlevania games.
    • Nothing says "Castlevania" like the Final Boss throwing a wine glass while sitting on a throne.
    • The first phase of Kurona's boss fight is highly similar to the Legion boss fight, where Kurona covers herself with a shell that you have to break through while she drops her mini clones to clutter the floor and fire lasers at you as you navigate the platforms.
  • Kurona's second phase is a shout out to Mega Man (Classic): She teleport all over a dark and featureless boss room while firing all sorts of projectiles, similar to Wily Capsule boss fights (particularly in the NES games where the background is simply black).
  • One of Maya's lines if Shinobu revives her is 'Maya's back and not so black!'
• Sinister Scythe: One of Maya's sub-weapons is a red-and-black scythe that for its hefty WP cost and slow start-up can One-Hit Kill any regular enemy in the game and do significant damage to bosses. Upgrading it allows her to throw it forward spinning to give it extra range.
• Three-Strike Combo: Just like Zero, Maya has the classic three-hit combo common in Inti Creates games.
• Temporary Platform: By using Maya's Penguin talisman, certain frozen objects and enemies can be used as platforms, which are necessary to reach certain secret areas or items.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: If you go for Harem Ending, the final boss fight becomes a Rail Shooter level reminiscent of Gal-Gun.
• Wham Line:
  • After saving Chiru, she uses this statement to clue you further in on the true Big Bad's identity and further foreshadow the existence of Adult Kurona than when present Kurona said she had absolute power.
    Chiru: D-dimensions have been fused, right? That much is obvious. I dunno how Kurona of all people managed to pull that off, though. There's no way she should be able to do it. If anything, I'd say there's someone pulling strings behind the scenes.
  • After you defeat Kurona, the true mastermind reveals herself, looking strikingly like her, and the following dialogue comes in, leaving Shinobu and Maya in a huge shock:
    Kurona: Waugh! Adult me! I need your help!
    Shinobu: D-did she just say "adult me"?!
    Maya: It's... an adult version of Kurona?
    Adult Kurona: Heh. We meet again, demon hunter siblings. I must say, the sight of you fills me with both nostalgia and rage. What you see before you is a glimpse into the distant future. You may address me as Adult Kurona.

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