Did you know this game goes by a different name now? It's true! As per Inti Creates's
announcement, the game fell under a trademark dispute from mobile game
Grimguard Tactics, so what we're left with is a quick rebranding to the more to-the-point
Gal Guardians: Demon Purge, making the game's series origins and connections nominally more transparent. Weird, funny stuff--and more than a small headache for anyone involved in publishing this thing.
Having scoured this game for everything it has to offer--at least by the metrics of achievement lists, of which I'm at full capacity--the critical axis that has presented itself has been mostly twofold: how does
Grim Guardians fare as a
Castlevania sendup, and how does it endure the baggage of its
Gal Gun lineage? The former is in my opinion a more interesting and substantial question than the latter, so for the purposes of providing a sort of PSA that people can consult so as to not be taken unawares by what this game is, I will detail all the potentially objectionable aspects of the production that, while proportionally minor, do still exist in the game. These are "spoilers", but I think the priorities of anyone who might be interested in this game for what it is would weigh awareness of this kind of content more:
- there is a boss encounter where a schoolgirl character is entwined in the grasp of a plant creature's tentacles; she keeps making suggestive commentary throughout
- the game has CG splash art on occasion, and one of these involves the leads dressing up in fetish bunnygirl outfits out of contrivance (it's limited to the one piece of art, not unlockable costumes or anything)
- the game's latter half involves a MacGuffin hunt at the behest of the erstwhile Gal Gun protagonist self-insert everydude, who has been fused with the castle the game takes place in, and the game contrives a situation in which he can locate the final boss for the heroes with his pheromone powers only by getting sufficiently aroused... thus the task of finding him relevant objects for the job, like girls' clothing and literal pornography.
- said former leading man is part of the final boss gauntlet, as the true final boss's enslaved minion, introduced by licking her feet around which he is entirely themed in the encounter. He does nothing but attempt to dive at the sisters' feet, dangling his chupacabra-like tongue as he does so.
- the game has thirty-something rescueable girls and women in the Rondo of Blood tradition, all sourced from the main Gal Gun games. That itself is pretty fun and benign, but the game's latter stages conjure up a large-scale sidequest that ultimately has no other "purpose" or reward for completion other than what it inherently is: revisiting stages to find dimensional fractures, inside which one finds the panties of each and every girl and woman character in the game, including the two protagonists. All of this underwear is rendered in detailed pixel art, customized and unique according to the person, and returning them to the respective owner prompts unique dialogue that constitutes a fair chunk of the entire game's script. As stated, in mechanical, game progression terms, this side venture leads into little--but it is inarguably something that was painstakingly integrated into the game just for its own sake, likely making it all the more flagrant.
- for those that don't know, Gal Gun proper's primary play verbs involve making girls orgasm on the spot and triggering a mini-game in which one leers and molests them to the same end. Those are the literal play fundamentals, and Grim Guardians does not have anything of the sort reflected in its base mechanics or even as a momentary nod... until one of the multiple ending variants, and seeing as it comes as a result of rescuing all the girls in the game, it may be considered the "truest" one. In it, final boss Adult Kurona (usually a child demon character, but now relatively mercifully played up as a mature sexy devil future self) is subjected to a rendition of the main series's "Doki Doki Mode", the aforementioned molestation mini-game. You're faced with her full body in lavishly produced pixel art and all the respective moans and protests that come with the territory as you build up her effective arousal gauge, which culminates in literal climax with all the expected iconography for the "genre"--a double peace sign and flush-faced ahegao to finalize the kink, namely. It's probably the closest the game comes to depicting an explicit sexual act veiled in the thinnest euphemism, and it's treated as the grand setpiece of the production.
That is what you have to deal with in this game in interacting with it, and the awkwardness of it all is that this is a pretty substantial in duration game, easily 15+ hours to "complete" it, and most of the listed content is concentrated from the halfway point onward or even at the very end of most people's time with the game. It makes one wonder if the somewhat low-key to nonexistent promotion of the game as being a
Gal Gun spinoff in truth--to the extent that folks like I feel the need to tell people about it in case they stumble into something they'd rather not deal with--has been a deliberate play on Inti Creates or the publisher's part, so as to not drive people away through association. The
Gal Gun faithful (who certainly exist) will know the score regardless at a glance, but the other way around is not so clear-cut, and what this game superficially, and I'd argue holistically presents is a fairly straightforward take on
Castlevania that only occasionally, but with increasing frequency the more time you spend with it, devolves into suggestions of exploitative smut. On the other hand, if there is a "shameless" developer as far as sexually intrusive content in games that would fare better without, it's surely Inti--
Gal Gun is its own category, but they maintain the creative voice in their other properties like
Blaster Master and
Gunvolt on a regular basis, so the studio name itself may act as bellwether enough for those sufficiently in the know. Whatever the case, it makes it impossible to approach or discuss a game like
Grim Guardians without a litany of caveats and qualifiers.
A fact which is an inordinate shame, because Inti have also demonstrated for a while now that they have a great grasp on what has historically made
Castlevania as a game template and style tick, and how to iterate on it in the present.
Grim Guardians wraps itself in the outward semiotics of later exploration-driven series games, leading to the comparison in the thread title and premise, but its form and function is a more complicated tapestry than a simple lift of a proven formula. If anything, Inti are borrowing from themselves, in how the
Curse of the Moon duology looked at the older strain of '
vania and chose to expand and twist the fundamentals toward a distinct and unique identity; the same occurs here through familiar building blocks arranged just differently enough to keep anyone guessing what the foundations may be forming into. It is on one hand a linear-in-progression jaunt through seven or so stages with a boss waiting at the end of each, but the practical side of the journey diverges from that expectation, with each stage going for a sort of wide breadth of alternate routes and hidden passages that unravel through the course of the game, as repeat visits are built into the overall play arc. Even when sticking to the limited pathing of initial passthroughs, there is a sensibility of looping paths and weird tangents and dead-ends at the crossroads of the castle's layouts, making the mental mapping (in absence of anything else, save a preview of the stage's overall layout when selecting it) a sometimes unreliable and convoluted act to navigationally obscuring and pleasing ends. It's not a game where one will necessarily be "lost", as forward propulsion is always easy enough to isolate... but the branches taking one from point A to B cross over and wrap around themselves in ways that never leave the level design feeling vacuous of intent and how you interact with it, especially when justified further by the accruing of hidden power-ups and collectibles over the course of the game's structure.
What makes engaging with the game for the length of time it takes to complete worthwhile is the satisfaction inherent in its fundamental play mechanics. Inti have varied their approach to a multiple-character game design template throughout this lineage of vampire-killing games:
Curse of the Moon presented four characters at once but built itself very friendly and doable for solo character play or challenge runs; the game's sequel in turn responded by supercharging the puzzle-like question-and-answer mechanics of inhabiting a veritable RPG party as a cohesive and collective platforming unit, and made any absence of the whole sting harshly on the player end to a greatly punitive degree.
Grim Guardians is somewhere in the middle space of the previous iterations, with its dual-character setup providing focus and clear delineation between protagonist strengths, weaknesses and their niche utilization, highly emphasizing the need to use the proper character's skillset according to the situation, but also remaining flexible enough that in duress both are independently capable to survive and endure most situations until they can reunite. There's some real grim synergy achieved with the balancing of Shinobu and Maya's toolsets and how they function, with it being unlikely that either will land as the "main" character to use while the other is only brought out for the necessary problem spots; either one is an equal lead in capability, but so distinct that they cannot carry the whole game by themselves--very unlike the nominal comparison point in something like
Portrait of Ruin, where it was ultimately player preference and whim to decide whom between Jonathan and Charlotte was cast as the "primary" character. Even then, Jonathan arguably had the play focus and emphasis in efficacy and diversity, while the Kamizono sisters can truly present an unified front in what each of them has to offer and what nuances there are to learn in both of their arsenals.
The baseline enjoyment of applying the player abilities is a sensation that grows over time, as new wrinkles are introduced and the options gradually expand, both offensively, passively and what lies inbetween. There is permanence to the powerups you get, with some of them tied to sub-weapons that expend a resource upon use while some do not, always making every tool you have feel versatile and multi-purpose in what they can do offensively and explorationally simultaneously; the
Metroid principle is well-observed by the game throughout. Some of the movement abilities gained later on completely transform the game and its level design in how you interact with it, prepping one for the second round of stages, all of which provide shuffled layouts, enemy placements and boss encounters. This is a veritable Inti tradition at this point, but no less appreciated or impressive for its consistency, lending the game real sustainable staying power by smartly utilizing the most of its present assets. With those new abilities, the stages also open up to their fullest, providing previously unseen entire sections and alternate paths through them, none of which are presented as binaries to follow--often you come to a junction and can resume on whatever route you previously charted, and may find it changed somehow too. This kind of game state in flux sensibility plays well with the ancillary emphasis in discovering secrets within the environment: none are the most taxing things to suss out, but they play into the attention to detail inherent in every aspect of how you interact with the world around the characters and how it responds to them.
Castlevania was often at its best when it could sell its settings as something to believe in the context of its own fiction, and that fixation on minute detail and small moments of verisimilitude--even in as farcical a premise as
Gal Gun musters--is evident here as well, able to impress confidence in the presentation through the thoughtfulness of how every aspect of it is integrated into play and how well it coheres under scrutiny.
I'm not going to say that
Grim Guardians should be played by anyone into its ostensible premise, or that "the game itself" is uniformly great--whatever it does with itself in those more questionable moments is as much part of it as how it feels to jump in it or how the boss fights come off. All I can really do is state that compartmentalizing the parts of it not cared for is not the most difficult task to do, because the game through intent or accident already does the same; it's only sometimes that it reminds one of where it came from to begin with. For most of the game, I wasn't thinking about its exploitative aspects because I wasn't actively being reminded of them--it's only with time that relationship crumbled and it forced one to confront its sleazy core that is not absent, only hidden behind an obfuscating layer or two. Whether that's within acceptable or endurable limits in proportion to the positive qualities the rest of game might offer is a personal judgment that no one else can really make. For my part, the game turned out better than I feared and worse than I hoped, and it's probably in that conflict that I found its merit, whatever it may have been.
