This is the YMMV for the first spin-off game.
- Alternative Character Interpretation:
- Sumeragi dispatching Rebellio to fight Copen so his sentence will be lightened. Since Rebellio was an inmate on death row over being forced to commit terrorist acts against Sumeragi and Copen has been pretty much fending off (and probably killed a few batches of) their Falcons for centuries, did they really meant to reduce his sentence, or they don't expect him to do the job and sent him into an Uriah Gambit?
- No, there's no ambiguity that Asimov is awfully heinous at this point. But how was he a person in the past? Did he used to be a better person (or at least, didn't just use the Adept Utopia as an excuse) before gaining unbridled power went into his head? Was he just a very clever psychopath who managed to fool the rest of QUILL and Gunvolt a century ago? Did he just took power for the sake of revenge against Dr. Kamizono? Or is his most heinous acts largely influenced by his transformation into a Primal Dragon? The series never explains this, and it's up to player speculation.
- Awesome Music:
- The Medical Center's theme, Before the Curtain of the Night Rises
, is such a wonderful piece to listen. - Painful Determination, the Sad Battle Music for a late-game boss battle, fits the situation of Copen putting his own sister Mytyl down perfectly.
- Avalanche Breakdown, a theme that makes use of motifs from the bad ending of Azure Striker Gunvolt, and sets the tone for the final fight against Demerzel -the power mad tyrant formerly known as Azimov- who killed Gunvolt and Joule a century ago, sacrificed his sanity for power, and committed genocide against the Minos to create an ideal world for himself.
- The Medical Center's theme, Before the Curtain of the Night Rises
- Breather Boss:
- Bakto is actually quite a tricky boss normally. Until you break out his weakness, at which point he becomes the easiest boss in the game because said weapon is capable of stunlocking him to death.
- Even without weakness, Isola is incredibly easy. Her moves tend to have huge telegraphs and are very predictable despite covering a decent range, and in the first phase she only has a single move that can hit Copen in the air. With her weakness she becomes almost a complete joke (though not to the degree of Bakto), as wiping out her energy projections removes a lot of the threat factor in her attacks.
- Captain Obvious Reveal: Despite being described using male pronouns it's clear from her voice that Blade is a girl, and her reaction to the name "Kohaku" makes it immediately obvious she's her missing sister.
- Catharsis Factor:
- The entire final battle with Demerzel aka Asimov. After seeing all of the suffering he inflicted on Blade, Mytyl, the Minos, and even some of the Falcons, getting the chance to take him down once and for all is utterly satisfying. And watching Kohaku, the sister of the very girl he turned into his new Azure Striker, kill him with Copen's gun is just icing on the karmic cake.
- Countering Asimov's Voltaic Chains with Twin Shredder will add to the above, especially if you know that Copen's original shield was broken by that same attack. Copen's not the type to fall for the same trick twice, it seems.
- Complete Monster: In this game based on the bad ending of Azure Striker Gunvolt, Asimov lacks the redeeming qualities that he has in the main timeline. After killing Gunvolt and Joule—the heroes of the first game—Asimov then overtakes Sumeragi Corporation and becomes an AI known as Demerezel. It was soon revealed that he initiated a genocide against humanity so that Adepts, humans with supernatural powers, would reign supreme. To crush the resistance, he forces all of the Adepts to fight against them, even using threats to do so. One of his victims that was forced to fight for his side was Blade, the sister of Kohaku, the leader of the Mino children, whom Asimov brainwashed by testing a Septima Transplant so that he could turn Blade into an effective assassin. Ultimately, Asimov's greatest evil is when he turned an ill girl, Mytyl, into an AI called Butterfly Effect by torturing her and reducing her body into nothing but a brain and keep her consciousness intact to control all of the Adepts across the world. In the end, Asimov is a genocidal madman who is obsessed with his own power.
- Contested Sequel: iX is either a step up or step down from the well-received Azure Striker Gunvolt 2, depending on the player. For players who didn't like how Gunvolt played and preferred Copen's style, the game manages to further improve upon Copen's gameplay, as well as up the difficulty and streamline the core gameplay for a faster, more fluid experience. Those on the other side of the line dislike how the story took a backseat more than usual for the series, as the removal of mid-mission dialogue took away potential character development opportunities, the last stages recycling the same theme, and at some points the story borders on Excuse Plot.
- Continuity Lockout:
- While minor, Copen and Lola talk about Mytyl's brain as if it were a previously established character, which may be confusing if you never played Gunvolt 2.
- The Reveal that iX is a Distant Sequel to Azure Striker Gunvolt will be lost on you if you never played said game, as you will see the bad ending the first time through no matter what.
- Game-Breaker:
- Photon Detonator is an expensive but extremely powerful EX Weapon that deploys massive explosions that eat enemy HP for lunch. In addition to being good against damn near everything, it's also super-effective against two extremely relevant bosses, including the Final Boss. If you didn't think that was enough, turning on Darkness Trigger allows you to produce burst fire homing explosions for free.
- Orbital Edge is extremely useful for stages with awkward enemy placement. It's cheap, spammable, covers a considerable radius around Copen, and if an enemy is directly above or below him, it will hit twice.
- It's Short, So It Sucks!: A common complaint is that the game is relatively short even in comparison to the previous Gunvolt games. The main story of iX can be finished in just a few hours, and the Special Missions are just truncated harder versions of main story stages, adding on an extra hour of gameplay at most.
- Moral Event Horizon: Sumeragi's genocide of all normal humans, or "Minos" as they call them, is bad enough as it is, but then there's the person in charge: Asimov, having successfully killed Gunvolt and Joule in this timeline and lived on to become a murderous tyrant that would even tear Mytyl's brain from her body to harness it as a tool of control without mercy. Whereas he was a Well-Intentioned Extremist in his original appearance, Asimov has crossed the line so hard that he's singlehandedly become the most vile person in all of the series so far, which is no small feat.
- Player Punch: The entire boss fight with Mytyl's brain, especially for any long-time fan of the Gunvolt series. Remember that ill, innocent girl who was one of Copen's few humanizing traits in the main series who eventually got a second chance at life after merging with Joule? Here's she's been condemned to a fate worse than death by Asimov, forced to bend to his will for over a hundred years. Remember how she used technology to speak with Copen and Lola because she couldn't speak? Now she's projecting a message on a wall begging him to kill her. Remember Lumen? Now she's being used as a weapon to attack you. And then there's the reveal that this takes place in an alternate continuity where the Bad Ending of the first game was canon and Asimov won, complete with a gut-retching flashback shot of Asimov standing over Gunvolt and Joule's dead bodies. If you didn't hate him before, you will now.
- Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Having already received this treatment in the second game, this game continues this treatment with Copen. His hatred for Adepts, his defining characteristic in the previous two games, is toned down to the point of nonexistence in favor of playing up his more heroic and noble traits. His bonding with the Minos of the slums also helps flesh out his character.
- Tear Jerker:
- The boss of the penultimate mission (Hidden Bunker 2). Copen is forced to perform a Mercy Kill on his own sister, who has been reduced to a brain hooked up to life support and made to use her Septima to serve Sumeragi for decades. At the start of the fight, the server lights in the background spell out the words "PLEASE KILL ME", and at the end those same lights simply say "THANK YOU".
- Heck, even The Reveal of the entire game taken place a century after the Bad Ending of the original game can be seen as such.
- That One Attack: Boss EX skills return with a vengeance in this game, and they are certainly far more difficult to evade this time around. Some notable examples:
- Stella's Graviton Pandemonium creates clumps of debris that home in on your location and try to crush you (bypassing Prevasion in the process), before lowering the gravity to send you careening into the massive saws that cover the ceiling. In the Special Mission rematch, she follows this up by dropping said saws to the ground, leaving you with only three safe places to stand.
- Dystnine's Total Blackout covers large swathes of the arena with his cloak, restricting the space you have to dodge with every wave. The timing to dodge is very strict, and getting caught at any point will open you up to a powerful slash that will take off more than half of your health bar.
- That One Boss:
- Among the Falcons, Stella stands out. Her attacks come out fast and cover large areas, and several of them will empty Copen's Bullits if they connect, leaving him vulnerable. She also has a habit of orbiting her discs around her to dissuade Copen from dashing in, which wouldn't be a problem if her weakness weapon weren't based around doing exactly that.
- Asimov's true form Demerzelis a hefty difficulty spike befitting a Final Boss. Every single one of his attacks is either tricky to dodge, has an extremely short telegraph, or covers a large portion of the screen. His weak point is often awkward to dash into without getting hit yourself, and since every single one of his attacks is electrical in nature, Prevasion won't help in the slightest. If this wasn't bad enough, dying to him sends you back to the last checkpoint, meaning you have to fight his fake form all over again. The only saving grace is that his Limit Break Voltaic Chain Meteor has a long wind up, clear safe spots in the corners when it's charging, and moves in a regular, predictable pattern that can be evaded by hovering above the top of the screen.
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The side materials for Azure Striker Gunvolt implied Asimov may have been the Azure Striker who killed Copen's father, thus starting his path as the Adept Slayer. Despite being a Distant Sequel where the two are able to confront each other again, the opportunity to confirm whether or not this is actually true (or if someone else did it) is never brought up.
- The Woobie: Being a Gunvolt game, there's no shortage of sympathetic and tragic characters. The Reveal that this game takes place a century after the first game's Bad Ending only adds to the tragedy.
- Kohaku. She's a young girl who's forced to be the leader of the Minos of the slums after her friends and older sister were killed in a Sumeragi Raid. Though we later find out something worse happened to her instead. And later in the game, she nearly succumbs to a disease and Copen has to find medicine for her. After everything she's been through in the game, watching her deal the final blow to Asimov is utterly satisfying.
- All of the Falcons, with the exception of Crimm and Isola, are just innocent Adepts who don't want to hurt anyone and are conscripted into working for Sumeragi, usually under the threat of death to them or their loved ones. For specifics:
- Blade. It's revealed that Blade is actually Kohaku's sister who, after bravely sacrificing herself so Kohaku and the others could escape during a Sumeragi raid, was captured and experimented on by Sumeragi. She was then placed under mind control and implanted with the Azure Striker Septima, turning her into Asimov's personal servant and forcing her to kill all of her friends. Thankfully, Copen helps free her from Asimov's control and encourages her to use her newfound powers for good.
- Rebellio. Despite being a death-row inmate, he's a kind and gentle soul who dislikes violence and is only fighting Copen so he can have his sentence commuted and see his family again.
- Stella and Dystnine. Stella is the head of a company and Dystnine is her faithful android butler and closest friend. When Dystnine inexplicably manifests a Septima, Stella is forced to become a Falcon to protect Dystnine from being disassembled. When Stella is defeated and killed by Copen, Dystnine goes mad with grief and is enlisted into the Falcons to kill Copen, fully aware that even if he succeeds, he'll likely be taken apart by Sumeragi for examination.
- MYTYL. Mytyl's existence in this game is a tragedy wrapped in a nightmare. After Asimov took over Sumeragi, Mytyl was put under horrific experiements, her brain extracted and hooked up to machinery and allowing him to use her Muse Septima to control and enhance the Septima's of other Adepts under his rule. When Copen and Lola finally find her, all Mytyl can do is beg Copen to put her out of her misery, thanking him when he does so.
- Woolseyism: In the original Japanese, Bakto's dialogue makes it clear that he's part of a Yakuza gang, but in the English script the references were changed to The Mafia; this is likely because mafia are commonly considered the Western counterpart of the yakuza and are thus easier for Western players to grasp as a concept.
