Copen just broke the sound barrier—again. Inti Creates slipped a free update into the Nintendo Switch eShop overnight, and it’s already warping the Azure Striker Gunvolt Trilogy Enhanced meta. The new “CONNECT iX (Speedrun)” mode drops the white-armored anti-hero from Luminous Avenger iX 2 straight into Gunvolt 3’s engine, handing players five bespoke stages, a fresh scoring ruleset, and a single directive: finish faster than everyone else. After clocking a 4:37 personal best on the first stage, I can confirm the mode is more than a novelty—it’s a precision-engineered dose of adrenaline that makes vanilla Gunvolt 3 feel like it’s running in molasses.
Copen’s Toolbox: Bullit Dash, EX Weapons, and the Overdrive Sweet Spot
Inti didn’t simply transplant Copen’s sprite; they imported the entire iX 2 moveset and tuned it for break-neck routing. The Bullit Dash—a momentum-preserving air hop—remains the star of the show. Chaining dashes while hugging pixel-perfect corners lets you skip entire platforming gauntlets, but the mechanic now feeds a visible timer that taunts you to shave hundredths of seconds. Seven EX Weapons unlock as you clear each stage, and savvy runners will recognize the hierarchy: Orbital Edge for burst damage, Comet Tail for horizontal skips, and Reflex Blade for deleting shields without breaking stride.
Score chasers will obsess over the revamped Overdrive trigger. Fill your Kudos gauge past 1,000 without taking damage and Copen enters a neon-soaked fever state: fire rate doubles, EX cooldowns evaporate, and every kill spits out time-shaving score orbs. Miss the activation window and your run hemorrhages both seconds and points. It’s a risk-reward layer that pushes high-level play past mere memorization into improvisational jazz—one mistimed reload and the leaderboard ghosts leave you in the dust.
Five Stages, Five Bosses, One Brutal Clock
CONNECT iX condenses the Gunvolt experience into a gauntlet that lasts, at world-record pace, just under six minutes. Stages are reconstituted tilesets from Gunvolt 3’s campaign, but enemy placement is remixed for sprint lines. Expect aerial drones positioned exactly where your post-dash arc peaks, forcing mid-air weapon swaps, and turret corridors that reward reflex parries over passive shielding. Each level caps with a boss pulled from the series’ rogues’ gallery, re-balanced to die in under twenty seconds if you’ve mastered the new damage multiplier system. The final encounter against a souped-up Serpentine demands that you juggle three EX weapons while maintaining a 2.5x Kudos multiplier—frame-perfect play is no longer optional.
Inti’s level designers hid multiple sequence breaks behind destructible walls and vertical wrap-arounds. Community sleuths on Discord are already documenting skip compilations: a ceiling clip in Stage 3 saves nine seconds, while a DeathWarp after the miniboss in Stage 4 shaves four more. Expect patch-note cat-and-mouse if any single route becomes too dominant; the studio has a history of micro-tuning hitboxes when speedruns dip under their internal “par” thresholds.
Trilogy Enhanced: The Quiet Power Move
What makes this drop especially sneaky is that CONNECT iX isn’t a standalone DLC—it’s a free patch sitting inside a compilation most players bought for the bonus vocal tracks. The Trilogy Enhanced bundle already stuffed all three mainline games, every piece of legacy DLC, and 37 character-performed songs into one $39.99 package. Adding a brand-new mode that cross-pollinates protagonists across timelines is the kind of value play triple-A publishers would gate behind a $29.99 “Year 2 Pass.”
From a preservation standpoint, Inti is also gifting Western players content that was Japan-exclusive until now—fully voiced interludes, re-balanced difficulty spikes, and UI polish that fixes the long-standing controller-prompt bug when playing Gunvolt 1 & 2 with a keyboard. In short, the trilogy isn’t just a convenient launcher anymore; it’s a living, mutating platform that keeps rewarding anyone who leaves it installed.
Speedrun DNA: How Inti Creates Engineered a New Meta
Inti Creates didn’t just bolt a stopwatch onto existing stages—they rewrote the underlying ruleset. Every CONNECT iX level is seeded with frame-perfect triggers that swap enemy placements and platform heights depending on your split time. Cross the 42-second threshold in Stage 2 and the mid-boss spawns two screens earlier, letting you delete it with a single Orbital Edge cancel instead of the usual three-cycle dance. Miss that invisible gate and the route collapses, forcing a restart if you want a top-tier board time. It’s a brutal but brilliant way to keep world-record attempts from calcifying into identical ghost replays.
The patch notes quietly mention “action revisions,” but the real magic is in the new input-buffer window. Copen can now queue a Bullit Dash during the last six freeze-frames of an EX Weapon flash, letting you slingshot out of a kill animation with zero velocity loss. Old TAS-level tech is suddenly human-viable; my controller’s macro paddle now stores a 2-frame micro-dash that clips through the Stage 3 security door without triggering the 1.3-second lockdown animation. On the leaderboards, the gap between 7th and 1st place is currently 0.89 seconds—entirely attributable to that single skip.
| Tech | Frames Saved | Consistency (casual %) | Consistency (pro %) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bullit-Edge cancel | 14 | 23 % | 91 % |
| Security-door clip | 78 | 4 % | 67 % |
| Overdrive orb funnel | 9 | 55 % | 88 % |
Soundtrack as Speedfuel: Lola’s Adaptive Vocals
CONNECT iX also hijacks the Gunvolt series’ trademark vocaloid layer. Lola, Copen’s Support Unit, now switches between four short lyrical motifs that correspond to your current pace. Dip below par time and her chorus drops to a lower BPM, subtly nudging you to push riskier lines. Maintain a 1.2× pace multiplier and she layers in a fifth harmony line that doubles as an audio cue: the instant the harmony resolves, your Overdrive gauge maxes—no eyeballs required. Headphone-only runners are already mapping song phrases to routing checkpoints, turning the soundtrack into a metronome for muscle memory.
Inti’s sound team confirmed on the official site that every CONNECT iX track is rendered at 96 kHz with a dynamic range toggle. Flip it on and environmental explosions duck the melody by 3 dB, freeing up frequency space for hit-marker clarity. It’s the kind of audio engineering usually reserved for competitive shooters, not a 2D platformer, and it means you can hear the exact frame an enemy’s invulnerability window expires.
Physical Release Implications: Cartridge vs. Cloud
Because the Trilogy Enhanced collection ships on a single Switch cartridge with no mandatory download key, CONNECT iX is permanently burnable to ROM. Speedrun event organizers can hand the cart to a runner and guarantee identical checksums across consoles—crucial for record verification. Expect to see this category at Games Done Quick sooner rather than later; the current Any% route already sits under 11 minutes, and the community is voting on whether to allow the optional motion-control gyro nudge that Inti snuck into the settings menu (off by default).
Final Spark: Why CONNECT iX Matters
This isn’t a throwaway bonus mode—it’s Inti Creates flexing twenty years of 2D toolkit mastery. By fusing Copen’s break-neck movement vocabulary with a scoring system that punishes hesitation, they’ve birthed a speed-runner’s playground that feels native to the Gunvolt universe instead of a tacked-on novelty. The adaptive soundtrack, frame-perfect tech, and leaderboard micro-meta prove that small studios can still push the genre forward without open-world bloat or live-service grind. If you’ve ever wanted to see a franchise iterate on itself in real time, boot up CONNECT iX, slam on some headphones, and chase that neon ghost line—just don’t blink, or you’ll miss the future of 2D speedrunning.