Gunvalkyrie is a 2002 mech action game created by the Japanese studio Smilebit, formerly the creators of the cult hit Jet Set Radio, and published by Sega as one of the first Xbox exclusives in Japan and North America. The player controls one of two mercenaries wearing an advanced combat suit equipped with jet propulsion that enables flight, sharp evasive dashes, and combat against giant alien monsters on a distant planet. The game's world is styled in a neo-Victorian aesthetic with period uniforms, brass, and steam, so the technology feels both futuristic and old-fashioned at once—a visual audacity typical of Smilebit.
The studio's ambition was to create a game with total freedom of movement in three-dimensional space, and in that it truly succeeded. The pilot can hover, sharply change direction of flight, and attack from every angle, but at the cost of an extremely complicated control scheme that used both sticks and both triggers in an unusual way: one stick handles aiming, the other movement and thrusters, so the player has to think about flying and shooting at the same time. It was precisely this steep learning curve and confusing camera that put off a large portion of players and reviewers, causing the game to underperform commercially and remain one of the console's worst-selling major titles.
Still, over the years Gunvalkyrie has earned a cult reputation, praised for its boldness, ambitious technical execution, and an utterly unique sense of flight that no other mech action game of the time offered, and it's now often cited as a textbook example of a bold but commercially risky experiment from the Xbox's early era. Anyone who masters the controls gets an experience unmatched even two decades later. Sega promoted the title as the technological flagship of the console's Japanese launch, which only underscored the disappointment of its subsequent commercial failure.
Game 59 of 176 for Microsoft Xbox
