X8 was the last game in the X series, and this is one I'd heard was pretty good despite not being able to continue the franchise. It's also a game I'd been told by Gunstar was another quite divisive game in the series, and I definitely agree with that opinion as I came down pretty hard on one side of that division XD. It took me 6 hours to see the Japanese version of the game to its conclusion on normal mode.
X8 is yet another very standard entry in the series as terms as story goes. A new generation of reploids based on Axel's form shifting design has suddenly appeared on the scene led by a terrifying new leader, and tackling that new threat is the crux of the game's narrative. X is in it from the start this time, as him, Zero, and Axel can go two at a time to take down the eight main stages of the game before going for the final battles. It's another perfectly serviceable story, even if it does make the really weird choice of substituting out Sigma for this new bad guy. Sigma is still here, don't worry, but he's just at the direction of this new uber-antagonist who is still basically just Sigma in that he wants to make a master race of reploids ruled by himself. It's not a bad story so much as just a weird choice for one, especially given that this takes a very odd turn for a PS2 game and locks the actual final stage behind playing on normal mode or higher, so you won't even fight that real final boss if you're playing the game on easy. Playing the game on easy might be something you're quite inclined to do as well, because this game is easily the hardest out of the latter half of the Rock Man X games, but not for good reasons. This game looked at how X7 was a bit too easy and cranks the difficulty up in very unwelcome ways, throwing in the trash the very forgiving checkpoint system and having a slew of stages with some really mean and unfair sections (particular the smashing spike blocks) coupled with some pretty damn tough bosses. On top of all that, this also has what is easily the worst vehicle level in the entire series, which is saying something for a series that's no stranger to not very fun and overly difficult bike racing segments. By and large I'd even say this game takes the cake from X6 in being overall quite mean in its design, as the 3D visuals and quite long stages make for an even more grueling experience spread out over the whole game where X6 has its difficulty constrained generally to a few specific stages. This difficulty (albeit uneven, as many bosses are still quite easy despite how hard the stages often are) also has a really weird effect on the playable characters, as like in every other X game, you can find parts to upgrade X with. There are not only two sets of equipment to find, but you can even mix and match those parts. While Zero has his double jump and Axel has his hovering and 360-degree aiming, X gets these upgrades. This makes Zero and Axel quite strong at the start, but it also makes X laughably powerful by the end of the game, particularly with how good his charge shot gets and how super over powered his phase dash is. Introducing the Piccolo effect to your other playable characters is certainly something I never foresaw happening in the X series, but it's a wild and wacky problem that for me it overshadows even the staggering problems that X6 and X7 face with their multiple characters. The presentation of the game is overall fine, and it's really not much more than that. The new operator characters have nice designs as do the bosses (although Sigma's final form is hilariously over designed), and the music, while not exactly MP3 player-worthy, is fine for what it is. It refines the 3D style that X7 starts, but not to terribly great effect in most areas. Verdict: Not Recommended. I come down pretty firmly on the side of not enjoying X8. This is another case where I can see why people might feel this game is better than I find it to be, but I just can't agree with that frame of thought. With all the overly mean design, this is ultimately the weakest entry in the series for me. It isn't necessarily a bad game, and you might well enjoy it, but the "hard because Mega Man HAS to be hard" design philosophy it follows makes things frustrating far more often than they're fun as far as I'm concerned. It's been quite a time going through so many Mega Man games and the entire X series, even if it took me a while to get to writing about these last three games. My final (and to some I'm sure heretical) ranking of the X games is: 4 > 3 > 1 > 2 > 7 > 6 > 5 > 8 Mind you, that's how much I *enjoyed* each game. I will definitely concede that X6 is a worse game overall than X5, but X5 is just so bland and the RNG stuff in it drags it down so much that I ended up enjoying X6's flaws and madness more comparatively. X7 is also, as previously stated, a really weird case where it's SO different I find it really hard to compare it to the rest of the series in many ways, but I think sitting below X2 (or above, depending on the day) is fine for me. I'm really glad I took the plunge on the latter X games, despite all the advice against doing that (X3), as it gave me a really cool look into just how flawed yet still enjoyable games in this style and in this series can be. As much as blame deserves to be put on the X5-8 team for making the games the way they did, I think equally if not more blame deserves to be put on Capcom's management for the absolutely absurd production schedule they had these teams on, and I think the X series might still be around had these games been allowed dev cycles of even two years compared to the often sub-12 month productions they too often had.
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X7 is another game in the series that I had been very excited to get to because of how legendarily bad it seemed to be. Granted I played it without the infamously awful English voice acting (which isn't just poorly done but also badly encoded to the point of being literally painful to listen to), but I was still very hyped to get to this game. Imagine my surprise when it ended up being so much more than I expected it to be! This is definitely a game I understand the hate for, but I do think to a point it's not really deserved to such an extent. It took me about 5 hours to complete the Japanese version of the game.
Both in art style and presentation, this game starts out to seem to try and make a break with past X games and start something a bit new. Almost like Sonic Adventure 2 is a game largely about Shadow the Hedgehog more than Sonic, this game centers around a new character, Axel, far more than it does the titular character X. An AWOL member of the military group Red Alert, Axel escapes to join up with the Maverick Hunters after believing that a corrupting influence has mysteriously and suddenly changed Red Alerts leader Red (no points for guessing that that influence is Sigma :b). It's not exactly a great story, once again, but it does its job and hits the general watermark of post-X4 stories. When I say this game is more about Axel than it is about X, I really mean that, because X isn't even a playable character at the start, and you unlock him 3/4ths or so through the game (either by rescuing most of the injured reploids or by beating all 8 main stages). Axel has a directional aiming not unlike how Bass does in Rock Man & Bass, but he also has the ability to copy enemy forms and run around as them. Now, that's an ability that's never really utilized all that well, but it's still something cool in spirit. "Cool in spirit" is an issue this game has quite often, really, such as how you can swap between characters mid-mission on the fly, but you only have Axel and Zero at the start. That wouldn't be much of a problem in and of itself, but this game repeats one of the worst mistakes of X6 in how upgrades from rescued injured reploids are only applied to the character who did it. That's entirely aside from the fact that due to the heavy use of 3D in the game, Zero is quite often useless by virtue of the stage design. Before talking about the infamous 3D problem, I'm gonna give a brief aside to talk about how the injured reploids are handled in this game. Very much like the last game, they're scattered throughout the main stages and upgrades and extra lives are granted for rescuing them. They're theoretically more vulnerable than ever, as now any enemy can kill them and not just some special type, but they're honestly very rarely in actual danger compared to how the reploids in X6 were. They also give upgrades differently, as while the way health upgrades are still dived out to whomever rescued that reploid, the part system used in X5 and X6 is now just general upgrade chips that can be plugged into one of your characters at the end of the mission they were found in. There still aren't nearly enough of these parts to fully kit out two characters, let alone all three (not even close), but it's an improvement on the upgrade system, even if they do once again trivialize the presence of multiple playable characters through this system. Now, onto the stage design, which is a bit mixed. You have fully 2D sections (2.5D, effectively), you have side-scrolling 3D segments, and you have more top-down 3D segments. Compared to other X games, this game feels very awkward to play. Your movement is slow and heavy, and you're even given an auto-targeting mechanism for your guns (very similarly to Mega Man Legends) in order to make the 3D parts manageable at all. That said, taken as a 3D action platformer on its own merits, removed from the other X games, X7 is a surprisingly solid experience. It's certainly not going to win any awards, no, but compared to basically all of the other post-X4 Rock Man X games, I think it has some of the best stage design out of the bunch (and it definitely has my favorite final boss of the bunch). The stages aren't super hard, and the bosses are by and large pretty easy, but it also keeps the really forgiving and well done checkpoint system of X6 for when things do get tricky (and that's something I really appreciate). It all adds up to an experience so competent that it had me really surprised considering the train wreck I had been told to expect. The presentation is overall pretty nice. Some of the character models look pretty messed up, especially X, but a lot of the newer stuff looks quite nice (at least for an early 2000's PS2 game). This game also not only has VA (which is pretty darn good in Japanese, as stated earlier), but also 3D animated cutscenes that are pretty darn well directed (with the last one in particular being really fun). The music is probably the only more lackluster part of this, with none of the music really leaping out as really special in any one way or another. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This game feels like if someone looked at Rock Man X6 and thought "What if this was more like Sonic Adventure?" and then executed on that thought. They both have very similar feelings in that they're tentative first steps forward for each respective series (or in Mega Man's case, sub-series) into the 3D age (though Sonic has the very good excuse of being made like five years earlier XD), and while they don't really nail it, it's a pretty darn solid first try. A lot of the design was clearly based around Axel's playstyle, and he may as well be the only character in the game. With the way the upgrade system works and the way the levels are designed, the game is really best enjoyed acting like he IS the only main character, and had this game been called "Mega Man Axel" instead of "Mega Man X7", it probably would've been received a bit better. This is a game I have a much easier time recommending as a fan of 3D action platformers than I do as a fan of the Mega Man X games, and it's ultimately really difficult to meaningfully compare this to other games in the franchise in many ways. If you're a fan of 3D platformers and want something a bit different, this is something worth checking out (especially if you can handle the Japanese version, so you can get its much less outright broken voice acting ^^;). Rock Man X6 is where I'd been told the series really started to feel the pains of the absence of the original team, and it along with X7 were games I'd really been looking forward to in terms of seeing for myself just how bad they were. What awaited me was something I'm not sure I could've expected, at least not in this form, as it's both a game that greatly frustrated me as well as one I ultimately enjoyed more than I thought I would. It took me around 8 hours to complete the Japanese version of the game (with my in-game play time clock around 4 hours).
X6's story ret-cons the ending of X5's story quite heavily, as X5 was originally intended to be the end of the storyline while the Rock Man Zero games were its tacit continuation. However, for the most part, that really doesn't matter. Of course Sigma is back, but this the reploid scientist Gate is unwittingly aiding in his revival. It all ends up to the whole usual "stop the super reploid fascist while cursing the need to continue this fight" song and dance that the series has become very familiar with by now. It's accompanied, however, by a return to having voiced cutscenes, though not animated cutscenes, and that's extra nice as (for convoluted reasons I find difficult to care about) Zero is back again, and his reunion with X is really sweet. It's a story that does what it needs to, as basically every X game's story does. The most important part of the story, in regards to the gameplay at least, is in regards to the new Nightmare Virus that's ravaging the globe. It's both driving reploids mad in the same way that the Sigma Virus did, but it's also causing observable phenomena that ranges from a phantom Zero taking pot shots at you, to fiery meteors raining down from the sky, to (by far the worst) stages plagued with darkness save for a couple of rotating spotlights that illuminate your view. These nightmare effects only affect stages when they're glowing red (which can be reset by visiting and exiting another stage) or upon a return to a stage, and they make some stages damn near unplayable with how vexing and difficult they make things (particular the darkness one). They're by and large a not very creative and quite vindictive way of making the game harder than it needs to be while not actually adding that much in the way of design, so in a way I kinda have to respect just how clever a design solution that is, albeit for a design choice that categorically makes the game a worse experience to play. And that sort of "clever yet definitely bad" design plagues a lot of this game. The stages are for the most part fine, although the bosses are pretty easy once again. However you still get the errant stage, such as the one with the junk crushers, that are brutally hard for a normal non-fortress stage, and the fortress stages themselves are really brutal at times in ways that feel ridiculous. You can mitigate the difficulty by collecting pieces of the two sets of special armor found in this game or by using Zero (who must be rescued via a semi-randomly occurring event at certain secret locations in certain maps), but that presents its own problems outside of those pieces often being very hard to collect due to how difficult those nightmare effects make returning to past stages. Like in X5, you need to collect health upgrades and parts to augment your abilities beyond just the new armors, but there's a new twist added to that that's technically an improvement but adds its own new slew of significant problems to the mix. One nice thing is that the boss level system has been cut back to be no longer dynamic but more of a signifier of how tough a given boss is compared to others, and honestly even calling it a "system" isn't terribly appropriate compared to calling it a simple aesthetic choice. Now, the parts you can equip between missions are found spread among the 16 injured reploids that are found in each of the 8 base stages, with certain reploids holding certain ones. Many of them hold nothing but an extra life for your trouble, but some do hold those special upgrades, and it's often worth going out of your way to look for them and try to rescue them (I rescued all but two or three during my own playthrough, myself). They're not often evilly hidden, but they're an extra thing to look out for either your first time or on return trips to a stage, granted that does mean that for some you'll need to brave those awful nightmare effects for some of the more well hidden ones. However, not all is happy in Reploid Rescue Land. First of all is that they're under threat quite often by special nightmare bot enemies, who will permanently kill a reploid should they touch it, and you'll have to load a save and retry the stage in order to get another chance at rescuing them. While most of the most important reploids holding upgrades aren't in mortal peril (you actually NEED the very well hidden jump upgrade to beat the game as X, but that one is perfectly safe from harm), some are, and those parts they're holding can be lost forever if you aren't quick enough to save them. Granted most parts aren't that useful and only a handful can be equipped at a time, but still, it sucks to lose stuff like that because you didn't know a reploid who needed such quick action was upcoming in the stage (and some are VERY tough to rescue from death simply by design of the stage). Additionally, these nightmare bots also contribute to the Hunter Rank system this game has. Abandoning the more speedrun-style grading system from X5, the Hunter Rank in X6 is determined entirely by the amount of Nightmare Souls you collect from these fallen special enemies, and you'll need a LOT of them if you want max rank. The thing is that max rank actually matters quite a bit, as how many of those findable parts you can equip at one time is determined by that rank, and you're gonna need to grind a LOT if you wanna equip more than two at a time (which is plenty, but three or four is certainly preferred). This is even MORE of a problem when you consider that X and Zero don't actually share Hunter Ranks, so you'll need to grind with BOTH if you want either to be usable. This is even MORE Of a problem when you consider that in addition to the health upgrades found in stages, extra health and max weapon energy upgrades are also given by rescued reploids, and those are ALSO exclusive to the character who picks them up, so if you've been using X the whole game, Zero is going to be damn near useless even IF you put in the time to get him to a respectable (let alone max) Hunter Rank, and that's extra sucky considering some of the harder platforming (as mentioned earlier) and boss encounters are far easier with Zero than with X, that is if the right character happens to be upgraded accordingly. I briefly mentioned the bosses earlier, but I need to go into a bit more of that now because it's a point worth elaborating on because holy heck does the game deserve it. In yet another weirdly self-inflicted wound, one of the game's best bosses is the first fight against a new rival robot called High Max, but he's only found in a secret boss room. However, not only are these secret boss rooms easy to stumble into unintentionally, but High Max can actually only be hurt by certain special weapons, making it very possible that you'll stumble into him while looking for Zero but not have any of the special weapons that can hurt him yet, so you just have to game over and pick another stage (or another path through that stage) instead. This is also combined with his second fight, and the stage leading up to it, being BRUTAL in their difficulty, and all of the fortress fights in general are some really not fun levels of challenge in the level of endurance they demand from the player. This game's bosses are split between brutally hard and pitifully easy with only two or three bosses in between, and it's a problem that's pretty bad even for a later Rock Man X game. Really one of the only good features of the game is the presentation, which has nicely given a step up since X5 with the addition of the animated stills for cutscenes and VA since that game. Though the story isn't that important, it's still competently done and entertaining for what it is. This game also continues the trend of later X games in making continues effectively the same as extra lives, with this game having a really forgivingly implemented checkpoint system that counterbalances a lot of the more mean design choices in a way to make them tolerable. They even cut down on all of those mid-mission calls from home base by making them optional, which is another nice change. The music is also pretty good, with the end credits song in particular being such a bop that I actually got it to listen to on my MP3 player X3 Verdict: Not Recommended. I'll fully admit that, despite all of the trials and tribulation this game put me through, I genuinely like this game better than X5. It's definitely not a better game, but it's just such a fascinatingly flawed and dynamic experience that it has utterly captivated my attention in a way that X5 could just never hope to do. It's definitely a game most people won't enjoy, and for very good reasons, but it's a badly executed game that I regardless enjoyed a fair bit, and although I can't really recommend it, I think X6 will always hold a weirdly warm place in my heart for just what a horrible mess it is XD I had originally planned to stop after X4, as I'd heard the series takes a pretty significant dip in quality after X4 (once the original team had largely left Capcom to form Inti Creates), but I'd heard that X5 was just "not quite as good X4", so i decided to give it a shot. I think it's a bit more than just "not quite as good X4", but that's what the rest of the review is for ^^;. It took me about 4 hours (game playtime given at a little over 2 hours though) to get everything in the game.
At least attempting to continue on from X4's foray into more serious stories, a rampaging Sigma virus has caused the space colony Eurasia to begin to fall to the Earth. If it does, it'll wipe out most life, so it's up to X and the Maverick Hunters to pull off a last minute plan to save the world with the little time they have left. This was originally planned to be the last of the X games, as Mega Man Zero would continue on from one of this game's various endings, and while it's hardly something the quality of writing in X4, it's not absolute trash. However, what it really isn't is conducive to a quality game design, as that "last minute plan" only as some dozen or so hours in-universe to work, and that reflects directly onto your game time. There are two potential plans to stop the Eurasia. One of them is to blow it up with a giant cannon, and the other is to send someone on a new suicide mission to initiate its self destruct sequence using a space shuttle. Both of these plans require parts to increase their chances of success, and both halves of the game's 8 Mavericks hold the four parts required to get each to their maximum chance of success. Now you only have some 14 or so times you can actually return to the stage select screen before your 14 hours are up and the Eurasia crashes, giving you a game over, so these things' chances of success are actually dictated by RNG as to how if they'll happen to work or not, and that goes for having only some of the parts or even all of the parts. Though the chance is very small, it is completely possible to get all eight parts and do everything else right and STILL have both the cannon and the shuttle fail, making for a quite irritating gameplay experience. Now one innovation this game brings to the table that the later X games would all use to some degree is the idea of boss levels. As you fail to kill bosses (or just tick down the clock), bosses' levels will go up and they'll have more max HP when you fight them. It's an interesting idea, but all it really adds up to is the by and large quite poor and far too easy boss fights (or in the case of most all the final stages, miserably and unfairly difficult) take even longer than they already do. This is all made even worse by the fact that you're heavily incentivized to kill them at a higher level to acquire parts to upgrade your characters. Now these parts aren't parts like X's armor parts. While both Zero and X are playable in this game (and can even be swapped between in the same playthrough, by selecting a different one at the start of the stage), X still gets armor parts in this game, and you can select armor sets just like you select the different characters when you're selecting a mission. These parts are parts you can equip into Zero and X as well as into X's different armor configurations in ways that give significant passive bonuses, and depending on the suit or character you can equip anywhere between 2 and 4 parts (with one suit unable to have any parts at all). The big stinker about these parts is that you only get them if the boss you're fighting is level 8 or above, and that's impacted not only by how much time has passed but also by your hunter rank, which is dictated by how long you took to beat the stage, how FEW enemies you killed (as few as possible is best), and how much damage you took. But the icing on the crap cake with these is that you're given a choice of two parts at the end, each coming with a maximum HP or maximum special weapon bonus, but you aren't even told what each part does! You're left to either do trial and error or use a guide to see which if either part is even worth getting, and that's on top of the health upgrades hiding in each stage as well as the not four but eight hidden armor parts for X's two sets of special armor (the Falcon Armor of the two being hilariously awesome as it allows you to basically fly). However, weird and bad parts system aside, the biggest reason I just didn't really gel with X5 is that it just isn't very interesting one way or the other. The stage design is largely more annoying that anything else, and even then it's more so just forgettably easy at that, and the same goes for just about every Maverick boss fight. Then that's contrasted with the awful Sigma stage bosses, but then even Sigma himself is really weirdly easy after how tough X4's was. The stages themselves are also punctuated with never ending calls from base to you to tell you far too much about the very simple obstacle you're about to face. Now wanting to give the player a heads up is one thing, but there are so many stages where the stage opens with a comms call warning you about an obstacle, followed less than a minute later by a second call warning you you're about to interact with that same obstacle, that they get so tedious you end up ignoring all of them. They're so dry and uninteresting that it feels like I'm playing a late 2000's Nintendo game with just how insistent the game is at holding your hand, and the Japanese version of the game is apparently even worse in this regard as it apparently makes these useless conversations EVEN longer. The presentation is also really subpar considering how X4 was. That isn't just on account of the writing, which is definitely more boring (despite a fairly flat supporting cast who don't all die at the end for once), but it is immediately obvious that X5 had a FAR lower budget than X4 did. Completely gone are the animated cutscenes, and it's to the point where this game doesn't even have VA for any of the dialogue. It's all just drawn stills with text underneath, and while that isn't in itself awful, it's a pretty big step down from the blockbuster presentation that X4 had. The one saving grace is that X5 has by and large a pretty solid musical score. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This is certainly, on a mechanical level, one of the more competent post-X4 games, but it's both so aggressively "fine" and such a step down in quality compared to what had come before that it's one of my less enjoyed entries. The time limit mechanic does stop being relevant once you blow up the Eurasia (you can revisit stages as much as you want after that), but it's still just not actually good design. It's a pretty sub-par action game that also just wasn't really spectacularly bad or weird enough to leave much of an impression for me, so it's one of my least liked entries in the franchise. Special shoutout to my friend DogStrong for walking me through the best route to get all eight special parts, as I wouldn't've had as fun a time as I ended up having with this game without them ^w^ This was a game I had originally just bought on PS1 to play before I ended up buying the X collections on Switch. I had heard it was the best of the series, even better than X1, so I figured it must be worth playing for sure with how good X1 is. I got to the end of X's route before getting stuck at the final boss and then thoroughly distracted by playing through the entire classic Mega Man series, so I just restarted it from the beginning on the Switch when I got the collection XD. I played through both routes in the Japanese version of the game, and together they took me about 6 hours in total.
X4 actually tries to bring something a bit different to the table in terms of story for once, and is very much a first entry in the more complicated and character-focused stories that this team would go on to do with the Mega Man Zero games once they went off to make Inti Creates. Though Sigma is still the final boss at the end, he actually isn't the main arbiter of the plot. Instead, Repliforce, an army of reploids created to protect humanity, decide to rebel to make their own nation of only reploids. They're branded as Mavericks, and lacking any ability via their programming to back down or surrender, immediately plunge the planet into war as the Maverick Hunters try to take down this new massive threat to humanity. While it isn't a super feat of writing, the concept of a group who literally cannot back down from the fight they're waging is certainly a far more interesting one than basically every other X game offers. It's complete with animated and voice acted cutscenes as well as a good deal of VA for the normal text as well. This is the first entry in the series on the PS1, and they really flex that extra memory space's power with this game. The Japanese dub is excellent, and while the cutscenes themselves as well as the story aren't exactly a super present thing through the course of the game (they're largely just at the beginning and end), it's a huge step forward for the series that they land pretty gracefully considering that Rock Man had really only ever paid lip service to a larger story before this. Something really excellent that this game does, first and foremost, is split the game between its two characters. No longer is Zero just some special power-up you only get to use one time. He's a fully fleshed out character with his own personal move set, and he and X even have quite different perspectives on the game's narrative, with X's being more traditionally Mega Man and Zero's dealing much more with his own identity crisis (the very one that the Mega Man Zero games spend their entire course exploring more in full). Each character even gets radically different abilities from defeating the eight Mavericks in the game. While X can find hidden armor capsules (complete with two different options for upgraded mega buster fire) and gets new special weapons for defeating the Mavericks, Zero gets genuinely new moves. Some of these take the form of elemental attacks that can take advantage of bosses weaknesses, but others are just movement upgrades like a double jump that increase his mobility to make him better at fighting everything. Almost none of Zero's abilities even cost weapon energy. Both characters are fleshed out really well and they give really different play experiences playing either, and it's very very worth playing through the game as each of them to get the best parts of how both play. The game overall is polished super well. The bosses are once again super fun to fight with just the mega buster, and the stages are even better than they were in X3. Thankfully, the most welcome change is a serious scaling back of the hidden collectibles and secrets from X3 back to more like they were in X1. It gives a much better gestalt experience and I never really felt like I needed to use a guide to enjoy this. I'd say Zero is a bit harder to fight with compared to X, but a lot of that just has to do with getting used to the more up close and personal playstyle he has as your main weapon is a sword instead of a gun. Sigma's final form is a bit too hard for his own good, at least compared to the difficulty of the rest of the game, but it's regardless an excellently balanced and polished experience with either character, from the stages to the story to the boss fights. The presentation is excellent as well. As previously mentioned the story is told through very pretty animated anime cutscenes with full VA, but the gameplay is also very beautifully animated. If Capcom wanted to make a big splash with X's first adventure on PS1, they sure hit the mark dead-on, because this game even gives the later Mega Man games on PS1 a run for their money with how nice it is visually. The music is also very good, with Jet Stingray being one of my favorite songs in the whole series~. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is definitely the top of the Rock Man X series for me. It has a high reputation that it absolutely deserves. If you enjoyed X1 but are a bit wary of the reputation that later X games have, 4 is absolutely one you should not miss out on, since it's easily one of the best 2D action games I've played from that generation. The last of the SNES Rock Man X games, Rock Man X3 picks up the torch where X2 left off. While it is very clearly highly derivative of the previous two games, and while it definitely still has some shaky relationships with just how it handles its hidden stuff, it manages to combine that with some really solid design otherwise and make something that manages to stand out despite its tough competition. It took me about three hours to get all the collectibles and beat the Japanese version of the game.
X3's story is very much like X2's in that it is more or less just changing the flavor of Sigma you're fighting rather than providing any larger or more thought provoking experience. Dr. Doppler manages to invent a "vaccine" to help stop reploids from turning into Mavericks, but suddenly the good doctor goes mad and the Mavericks he supposedly cured start rioting and breaking stuff up. Turns out, surprise surprise, that Sigma is behind it all in the end, but either way it's up to X and Zero to go and put a stop to all of this. We get a few new cool faces like Doppler and his two cronies Bit and Byte, as well as the return of Vile from the first X game, but it's really all just "does what it needs to" set dressing that the early to mid-life Mega Man games are so well known for. In a cool change, this game actually makes Zero playable instead of just an NPC! But it comes with the huge catch that, while he may be super strong and powerful with his Z-Saber, he only has one life. If he dies, you never get to use him again. You also have a lot of other weirdness in terms of hidden collectibles and secrets. Bit and Byte aren't hidden like the Counter Hunters were in X2, but they'll just randomly appear in a designated room in a stage whose Maverick you haven't beaten yet, but unless you beat them with their weakness, they aren't actually dead and they'll come back later. Vile has the same thing with him, but his stage is actually hidden and you'll need to use a teleporter hidden in another stage to reach it, but only AFTER defeating Bit and BEFORE beating Byte. You also have special chips you can get to upgrade yourself (instead of the super one-shot kill moves X1 and 2 have), but you can only pick one. But if you pick none of them, there's a super secret super chip that has the power of all four that's found in one of Sigma's stages but it'll ONLY appear to use if you have full health when you enter the space it's hidden in. It's all stuff that's very manageable if you have a guide to help you like I did, but it just goes full bore on hidden weirdness in a way that I'm not a super huge fan of if you're going for a more gestalt experience. That said, the stage and boss design has gone way up in quality from X2, and I honestly like it even more than X1 in most ways. Bosses are actually super fun to fight with the mega buster in a way I never really found to quite be the case with the first two games, and the stages have fun but not intrusive gimmicks, and are mostly concerned with just being well designed stages. They even fix the two-step powered up buster from X2 to be far more useful, and your normal armor parts are also much better. Your air dash that the leg upgrades give you is very good, just like they were in X2, but now you can even air dash directly up! That ability is honestly pretty finicky and one of the least good parts of controlling this game, but it's thankfully rarely used, and the game otherwise controls and plays just as excellently as you'd expect a Rock Man X game to play. The presentation is also far more up to snuff in this game than in its predecessor. Bit and Byte have really cool designs as do the Mavericks, but as an extra bonus this game also has a banging soundtrack that X2 was sorely lacking. It definitely doesn't have quite the level of iconic status that X1's soundtrack has, but it's actually bringing something to the table unlike X2's did. Verdict: Highly Recommended. I really loved this game. I think your enjoyment of it will definitely vary depending on how much you do or don't gel with all the weird hidden and secret stuff, but even then, what's there beyond that is still excellent. This is definitely going to be a game I replay just like I do with X1, because it is just that fun to go through and do those fights and stages again. I'd heard the second game in the Rock Man X series was just about as good as the first, but decidedly the lesser of the two, and I found that to be more or less correct. Though the second entry does try to bring a fair bit more to the table, a lot of it is for questionable gain in the end. It took me about 3 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game with the good ending.
The story of this game is quite light, much like the first game was. X has continued fighting the remnants of Sigma's forces after his battle in the last game, and that's led him to his current battle against the "Counter Hunters" (or X-Hunters, as they're known in English), a trio of reploids specifically built to hunt down Maverick Hunters (or rather very specifically X, as their English name implies). They've also taken it upon themselves to try and gather up the parts of the destroyed Zero to try and resurrect him for their own evil purposes, and preventing them from doing that is what will net you the best ending. The Counter Hunters are a neat idea, but the story isn't ultimately any more substantial than the first X game. It sets the stage for the action at hand, and that's all it needs to do. X2 is very much like X1 in terms of how its set up. You go through eight Maverick stages before going onto the Sigma (who, surprise! ain't really dead) stages, and in those stages are hidden four armor parts to upgrade your abilities as well as heart containers to increase your maximum life amount. There are also hidden rooms that the Counter Hunters will be waiting for you in, if you manage to go there while they're in that particular stage. That's right, they swap the stages they're in every time you return to the map screen. It's an interesting gimmick, but I wouldn't really stay it makes the game any more fun. The stage design itself is quite solid, but "not quite polished enough" is what a lot of the game sorta feels like. The bosses are all around not quite as good as the first game's (although the last few fights are a little better balanced, I thought), and the X armor isn't really as fun or powerful either. Your upgraded charge is almost outright worse, as the two-step double shot freezes you in place long enough that you'll likely be taking a fair deal of unwanted damage from being unable to move after a charge shot as quickly as you could before. A good deal of the hidden stuff in this game is SUPER hidden, and leaning harder into that almost Metroid-y sort of hidden upgrades is something this game fumbles on a fair bit, with the hidden Counter Hunter rooms only being part of that problem. There are some parts where it's a bit better than the first, like how this game's equivalent of the hadouken is nowhere near as unfindable as the first game's, but that sort of improvement is the exception rather than the rule. It isn't bad by any means, not by a long shot, but it's also decidedly not as good as the first game's design, by and large. The presentation is quite solid but largely more of the same. The Mavericks and Counter Hunter designs are as cool as could be expected, and the stages are bright and colorful, but the music is overall not so memorable compared to the first game's stellar soundtrack. Verdict: Recommended. This is a super solid entry in the series, but it is a very safe albeit not nearly as polished followup to the first Rock Man X game. If you enjoyed the first game, you'll almost certainly enjoy this one, but if you didn't like it, this isn't gonna change your mind. After playing through Mega Man 1-10 a while back, I had a good few people tell me I should play this game as well to genuinely finish out the classic series. I had the GBA version as a kid, and I got fairly far in it but never managed to beat it. I had hesitated for a bit, as this version actually isn't available for sale digitally anywhere (not in any of the collections, and the only versions on Virtual Console are the very inferior GBA port), but I discovered much to my joy that I actually did have this ROM sitting around in my collection (it was just filed differently than I expected it to be). I broke out my Xbox One game pad and it took me about 4 hours to complete the game without save states or rewinds using ZSNES.
Coming out on the Super Famicom in the mindbogglingly late year of 1998, Rock Man & Forte (better known as "Mega Man & Bass") was the last of the classic Mega Man games until Mega Man 9 a decade later. You can play as either titular character (I myself picked Mega Man) as you fight against the mysterious new robot King, who has raided Wily's lab and Dr. Light's Robot Museum to collect blueprints of past robot masters to create his new master army to make a world devoid of humans where robots can live in peace. It's got a fair amount of text for a Mega Man game, but the story still boils down to a very familiar formula where King was actually being used by Wily the whole time. It does the job just fine, and King himself is a well-designed new character (even if he has the life expectancy of most new Mega Man antagonists ^^;). The game recycles two robot masters from Mega Man 8, Tengu Man and Astro Man (who both fight quite differently than their PS1 counterparts), but then has six more original robot masters for you to fight in addition to the fortress at the end. However, this is definitely one of the weakest of the classic series, and it is arguably also the worst of them for similar reasons for why Mega Man 10 isn't very good. Sure, the bosses vary between some of them being really weirdly easy (especially with their weaknesses) or being trials of frustration to deal with (the category into which most of them fall), but the big bugbear here is the stage design and how it relates to the two playable characters. Mega Man 10's big problem comes from its stages feeling too homogeneous because they need to be completeable with all three main characters. Rock Man & Forte has the opposite problem but for the same reason. Mega Man has the charge buster and the dash-slide he has in every other classic series game between Mega Man 4~8. Bass, on the other hand, has no charge beam but an 8-way rapid fire (which are each a little weaker than Mega Man's normal shots), as well as a Mega Man X1-style dash ability instead of the dash-slide. This means the game is divided into two significantly difficult variations depending on whomever you picked to play as, because you can't change character midway through the game. If you picked Mega Man, your charge shot will allow you to generally have an easier time with most bosses, as will your ground slide in dodging attacks. If you're Bass, your dash ability will give you a generally much easier time with the stages, but your eight-way shot and lack of a charge shot will make certain bosses easier and certain bosses harder. I would tentatively put Bass as the easier to play of the two, as it doesn't much matter if you can beat bosses if you can't even GET to them, but the problems are there all the same. The stages are generally really meanly put together in ways that remind me of games like Mega Man X6 and Rock Man World 3. Particularly as Mega Man, there are some jumps he can JUST barely make due to his lacking a dash ability, and the difficulty curve of the game is all over the place as a result. Inafune apparently wanted this game to be made for the more "hardcore" of the Mega Man fanbase, but the effect is similar to how the original Super Mario Bros 2 was also made for "super" players. The overall experience feels designed to be difficult rather than fun, so it's far more often frustrating that you're dying to cheap deaths rather than satisfying as you conquer a good challenge. The game also has a shop where you can buy a bunch of (very good) upgrades, though only one of them can be equipped at a time, for most of the best ones. There are also a bunch of collectibles to find scattered through all the levels in the form of little ID cards of genuinely all of the boss and allied robots that have appeared in prior Mega Man games (even super obscure ones like the bosses in the Wily Tower in the Mega Man: Wily Wars). However, just to add insult to injury in one more tiny way regarding the playable characters, some of them can only be gotten as either character, so if you want a completed collectible database, you'll need to play through the game at least once as each character. The presentation is pretty good for the most part, particularly the graphics. This is pretty damn amazing looking for a Super Famicom game. Tons of assets are taken right out of Mega Man 8, sprites, animations, and all, and the game still runs great despite that (though that could easily be due to my running it on an emulator). You do have the problems that Mega Man 7 has with Mega Man being a bit big and overly animated so it's hard to do the platforming, but it's nowhere near as bad as it is in that game. The music is also pretty good, but that part of the game is overall nothing special. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This game is veeeery close to being not recommended, but while it may be mean as heck, it's still got a baseline level of quality in its design that can make it an enjoyable time. If you're a BIG Mega Man fan and just have to play every game in the series, or just really like action platformers and don't mind a bit of a sub-par experience, this is worth playing (although likely not importing with how expensive it can be ^^;), but if you're a more casual enjoyer of either of those two things, I'd avoid this one like the plague. This is easily the worst of the classic series, as far as I'm concerned, and you'll need to be really dedicated to conquer this bugger and see the adventure through to the end. This is another game I heard about so long ago I don't even remember how I heard about it, but I remembered it being recommended from whomever it was X3. Among weird Japan-exclusive Konami games, I'd reckon this is one of the better known of ones outside of Japan, at least in retro gaming circles. It didn't come as cheap as I'd hoped I could find it, but I was honestly just happy to find it for the normal Famicom (as I'd somehow thought this was a disc system game XP). I finished the game in about 40 minutes on the original hardware.
This game has a plot that is simultaneously very strange and also really vile (I've described it to my friends as "fat shaming: the game"). The main character Penta loves to eat, but he's getting dumped by his girlfriend Penko because he's gotten too fat, and she's started dating a big, buff jerk penguin named Ginji. Penta is determined to lose weight to win her back, but Ginji sends his goons after Penta to literally hurl food down his throat to keep him fat. It has probably one of the most awful morals I can think of among games of the era, but the silver lining is that it does make for some quite interesting game design. This game is an action side scroller, but you don't really die unless you fall down a pit. You don't even actually have a life bar. Your goal here is to get fit, and accordingly you have a "fitness meter" at the bottom of the screen with a marker of how fit you need to be by the end of the level. You achieve this by collecting weight loss shakes scattered through the levels and being carried by Ginji's goons, and your method of attack actually changes as you get larger or thinner (from an awkward belly slam at your largest, to a projectile firing scream attack at your thinnest/smallest). But you can't grind out shakes forever, as you also have a (quite generous) time limit to finish each stage within. While this does lead to some odd ludonarrative dissonance in the case of things like the final stage, where you're saving Penko FROM GINJI who has kidnapped her yet you still need to avoid getting too fat so she'll love you again, it makes for a very interesting (albeit a bit short) action platforming experience. The presentation is what you'd expect from a late-life Konami-made Famicom game: sprites are colorful and highly detailed, characters are cute and very charmingly designed, and the music is also quite good. The goons and bosses Ginji sends at you in particular are very oddly and charmingly designed, and the whole thing has a very Parodius-y feel to it. Verdict: Recommended. If you can get past just how awful the premise is, this is a pretty darn fun and not too tough Famicom game to kill an afternoon with. It's not the cheapest game or the easiest thing to find, but it's well worth trying out if you're in the mood for an action platformer that's a bit weirder than your usual fare. From Wai Wai World, I'd known for quite some time that Konami had made a King Kong game, and years ago I looked it up expecting some side scroller only to be surprised that it's a top-down adventure game of some kind. I wrote it off back then, but looking for fun Famicom stuff to play, I couldn't pass it up for the couple bucks it was going for. It's certainly an odd game, but it's also quite a solid one as far as Famicom games go. It took me about 40 minutes (according to the game's clock) to beat the game using maps online to help me.
Now despite what the title may make you think, this isn't actually the sequel to any other King Kong game. (as Gunstar so kindly taught me) This is actually the movie version of the movie "King Kong Lives", which was localized into Japanese as "King Kong 2". King Kong is brought back to life with an artificial heart and a blood transfusion from a new "Lady Kong", but then she's stolen away from him and he's locked away. King Kong awakens in his prison furious at his lady love's capture, and he effortlessly breaks his bonds and sets off on an adventure to find her. Now, the game actually has amazingly little to do with the movie, beyond aesthetics like the artificial heart and the basic mission to save Lady Kong, but it's more than enough for a Famicom game from 1986 to give you the overall idea of what you're doing. What exactly you're doing is going through eight stages collecting power ups and fighting bosses to collect eight keys. Those eight keys unlock the door to a final boss in the ninth stage who you of course need to vanquish to save Lady Kong. The gameplay itself involves going around in a Zelda 1-style overworld punching things to kill them. Punching is quite dangerous, as it naturally involves getting very up close and personal, so the thinking kong's way of taking out enemies is your other attack: throwing boulders. Now, you CAN go through each stage taking out each boss as you go, but that's the hard way. The other way is to do what I did, and go around collecting max health upgrades, max boulder upgrades, speed upgrades, and (most importantly) boulder power upgrades until you're beefy enough to mulch those bosses down as fast as possible, because those guys have quite a lot of health and are basically impossible to take down with only wimpy punches. However, that's easier said than done. I used maps I found online, and hoo boy am I ever glad I did because this game is absolutely out to kill you. Once you get beyond the first stage, you'll very quickly find that not only are these stages designed like non-euclidean mazes (as screens aren't necessarily connected to the screen "next" to them), but you might not even be in stage 2. Permanent upgrades (those being health and boulder capacity, as speed and boulder power reset to default upon death), extra lives, as well as bosses and portals to other stages lie inside doors hidden under destructible debris found around each map, and there are several doors in each stage leading to different other stages. There really isn't any need to do all the stages in order, but exactly what leads where and how can get very confusing. If you played this without a map, you'd definitely be making one yourself, as you are really gonna need those upgrades to take down the bosses and survive the onslaught that the normal enemies throw at you. Playing with a map is basically easy mode, while making your own is basically super hard mode, and there isn't much difficulty balance between the two, unfortunately ^^; The presentation is alright, but it's above average I'd say for '86. There isn't a ton of music, but what's there is nice enough and well done. The otherworldly landscapes and weird, surreal bosses you're fighting are nicely detailed, albeit there's very little internal consistency of setting between stages. Heck, you don't even start in the city the opening cutscene puts you in. You start in a canyon, and that city(?) is stage 5. This is firmly in the category of licensed games of the era that are only very tacitly connected to the source material, and they could really be anything else (which only makes it even stranger that the game never came out in other territories, as it would be super easy to just edit the Kong stuff very simply to just make this about nearly anything else with the same stages and gameplay). Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This is a quite solid game, but I think only certain types of people are going to find much value out of it these days. It's an interesting curiosity on the Famicom, for sure, but you've gotta be pretty hardcore into retro stuff to be into this sort of thing enough to play it without looking up maps like I did, and if you DO look up maps like I did, you'll likely find the game a bit too short and easy. It's a cool historical piece that will likely never be re-released anywhere because of the license, and if what I've described here sounds cool to you, you'll likely enjoy this cheap, very text-light action adventure import. |
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
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