Gunvolt Chronicles: Luminous Avenger iX 1+2 Dual Collection

Copen finally gets the collection treatment, and the Director's Cut label is doing some heavy lifting

Inti Creates loves double-dipping on its own back catalog. Most of the time that works out fine for whoever's buying. The Gunvolt Chronicles: Luminous Avenger iX 1+2 Dual Collection is the newest one, two spin-off action games in a single bundle, every scrap of DLC baked in, plus a fresh mode and some balance tuning. Out July 9th, 2026. It's already up on Steam.

If you've never touched these, the iX games are the Copen offshoot of the Azure Striker Gunvolt line. No Gunvolt. Just Copen's dash-heavy, lock-on-and-shoot approach, spun off into its own dystopian mess of a story. Faster and meaner than the mainline stuff, built around flying around instead of Gunvolt's tag-and-flash rhythm.

The actual changes are worth pulling apart, because "balance adjustments" can mean a total rework or two nudged damage numbers.

First game: the Darkness Trigger, that berserk mode you pop when things fall apart, got a buff. In iX 2, Copen's Razor Wheel now has a Spike Smash system stacked on it. That's the more interesting one on paper. The Razor Wheel is what you lean on constantly, so anything structural bolted onto your core loop tends to ripple out across the whole game's feel. Does it change how iX 2 actually plays, or is it a shiny extra button? You won't know until you've got a controller in your hands.

Then Endless Battle. Both games get a version. You set the dials, then throw yourself at random bosses until you die. Boss-rush with knobs, basically. Inti Creates games live or die on their bosses, so bolting a configurable survival mode onto both is a smart way to reuse stuff that already exists. The bosses are the best part of these games anyway.

That "all DLC included" line is bigger than it looks

Some of the iX content used to be limited-availability, the kind of thing that disappears and leaves latecomers on eBay or just going without. Rolling all of it into one purchase kills that problem dead. Skipped these when they came out? This is the version that finally has everything.

Here's a quieter wrinkle. The Dual Collection reshuffles the voice cast. The Japanese lineup carries across both games, but the English dub only exists for iX 2, with Alejandro Saab as Copen and Cassandra Lee Morris as Lola. So if you play in English, you're reading text through the first game and getting full voice work in the second. Not a dealbreaker. Just something to know before you start.

Early hands-on coverage has been mostly positive, with one recurring asterisk. At least one reviewer flagged a "major flaw" while still calling the whole package a gem. That framing tells you plenty. The games underneath are strong, but this isn't a spotless port. Community playthroughs are already leaning hard on the opening stages and the moment-to-moment movement, which is exactly where these games sell themselves. The dash-cancel movement is the hook. If that feels good, people stick around.

Who's this actually for

A spin-off of a spin-off, aimed at people who already know what a Copen dash-boost feels like. Newcomers can jump in, the Dual Collection is a clean entry point, but nobody at Inti Creates thinks this is fighting for the Hollow Knight buyer or the Dead Cells crowd. It's a precision 2D action series with a devoted following and a hard ceiling on how wide that following ever gets.

And that's the wall any studio hits the day a game drops into the Steam release firehose, where a hundred-plus titles launch and most vanish without a ripple. A broad, spray-and-pray marketing push just burns money chasing people who were never going to care. The pitch for a combo-driven, high-execution action game doesn't land on a general audience. It lands on a specific player who follows a specific creator. The people who actually shift copies for something like this are the speedrunners hunting S-ranks, the retro-and-Inti-Creates lore channels, the boss-rush and challenge-run streamers, the anime-adjacent reviewers whose viewers recognize Copen on sight. Hitting those exact pockets instead of yelling into nothing is the strategy that survives. Infrastructure like CreatorFetch is built to run that kind of targeting, matching a game to the handful of creator categories whose audiences convert instead of scroll past.

The parts are all here for a solid re-release. Two well-regarded action games, all the DLC, tuned combat, a survival mode that plays straight into the series' biggest strength. The one thing hanging over it, per the early word, is whatever that "major flaw" turns out to be and how much it personally bugs you. For iX veterans this is the definitive version. For everyone else it's a fair spot to find out whether Copen's chaos is your kind of chaos.