Day 32: Gungrave Overdose (PS2)

I'm playing one randomly chosen title from my 611 game backlog every day that the UK is in lockdown. 
Today's selection is...

Gungrave: Overdose on the PS2
Previous days' games can be found HERE

If you've read any of the previous posts I've made in this series you may have picked up that my taste in games leans towards the 'action' end of the spectrum. I believe games can do 'story' well, and some of my favourites are of the slower and more thoughtful variety, but I grew up in the arcades; bunking off the last couple of classes on a Friday afternoon to head to Tavistock Street, where the arcades were in my hometown, shaped my preferences for that instant gratification style of gaming, and it has stayed with me ever since.

Additionally, although I don’t know how apparent this has been, I tend to prefer games outside the mainstream. I would never write-off a game just because it’s big budget or popular but I find that the kind of creativity and originality I most love is more often found away from the headline acts.

And so, finally, we come to Gungrave: OverDose, a full on action game that’s definitely not mainstream… remember when I said ‘expectation is the mother of disappointment’?

As you might guess from the name, this is a sequel. The original Gungrave was released two years prior and was annihilated in reviews for being simplistic, easy, and two hours long. These are all valid criticisms, Gungrave was definitely all of those things, but it was also a great looking game - the epitome of ‘style over substance’ - and when you take all that into consideration it’s easy to imagine that the developer was trying to make a playable anime action movie, but forgot that those didn’t retail for £40 a pop. I paid a lot less than that a long time after release and had a fun two hours, no complaints.

In OverDose you play as ‘Beyond The Grave’ a reanimated gunman who seems to have spent his interred years watching Desperado on loop. Yes, ‘Beyond The Grave’ is his name. Later in the game you unlock two additional playable characters; ‘Juji Kabane’, a dual gunblade wielding blind man with a bloodhound's nose (figuratively speaking), and the ghost of a man who haunts a weaponised electric guitar and goes by the name of ‘Rocketbilly Redcadillac’... Yes, really.

The back of the box boasts over an hour of original anime cut-scenes and, in addition to this, there is a fair amount of story conveyed in visual novel style, where each character has an illustration in a panel that moves about and shakes to portray what’s going on in the dialogue - it’s surprisingly effective and put me mind of the ‘Travis Strikes Back’ sections of the recent No More Heroes spin off. The gameplay is third person, viewed from behind the character at distance rather than ‘over the shoulder’. You can control the camera but only as long as you’re holding the right stick; let go and it swings back to the default position. In game, graphics continue the anime theme with simple, stylised shapes and cell shading. As with the original, this is beautifully presented.

The gameplay involves shooting everything on screen, moving to the next room, and then shooting everything on screen. There are melee moves for close combat, a charged move for additional damage, and a super move called a ‘Demolition Shot’ that fills as your death and destruction combo rises. The death and destruction combo counter is called ‘Beats’ - On my first play of the game I cleared the second-level opening stage in a Beats count that reached over 500; this, I think, gives a good account of the sort of gameplay we’re looking at.
There are bosses and mid-bosses in the time honoured fashion, and they vary from insanely creative (a gang boss in a mechanised robo-chair) to utterly infuriating (2 bulldozers that can only be attacked from the side in an area the size of my back garden).
It’s fair to say that OverDose rectifies all of the criticisms levelled at the original. The gameplay is (slightly) more complex, as is the structure, it offers more of a challenge and it was even released originally at a budget price. It’s about four times as long, too, but this is where the problems creep in.

The first Gungrave offered very little variety in it’s gameplay, but as it could be completed in a couple of hours it didn’t really matter. With eight stages and as many hours of game time, OverDose, despite the additional characters and gameplay elements, suffers through repetition. There are some well chosen locations that allow for level specific enemies; machine gun fruit machines in the Casino and bad guys rolling around on trolleys in a Supermarket, for example. But when they can all be defeated by hammering the square button in much the same way as the standard cannon fodder enemies they don’t actually add variety to the game. The irony is that after two hours I thought this was a fantastic game, another two after that I was getting bored.


Which is a real shame. Gungrave: OverDose has a lot to offer action game fans, particularly those with an interest in anime, and it is by no means a bad game, it’s just that, given the bonkers characters and non-stop action, it’s not quite as entertaining as it should be. 

Gungrave Overdose - Style over substance? Probably. But the bigger issue is one of quantity over quality.