both for fun and to remind me about the various interesting points of the game. Only Battle and Chase I skipped out on, not because I hate the game, but just because I didn't feel it was interesting enough to revisit myself. Command Mission on the other hand I just don't want to ever play again. It's a piece of shit, possibly the most boring game I've ever played and that isn't hyperbole.With Battle Network being a break out success, I guess Capcom thought introducing some more spin off RPG ideas into other series would produce the same results. Unfortunately where as Battle Network had effort and thought into it, Command Mission copies other games and then just haphazardly throws together levels to run through. The plot is terrible, the levels are terrible and game play is also terrible. Let's delve into this piece of shit.
Story
Some time after Mega Man X8 but before Mega Man Zero a meteorite crashes into the Earth and new metal called Force Metal is extracted from it. Apparently this metal is really good for Reploid development. A new city is built called "Giga City" for the purposes of mining and smelting the Force Metal until an armed reploid rebellion began headed up by a Reploid named Epsilon.Colonel Redips of the eastern division of the Maverick Hunters dispatches X and Zero head out with some tutorial scrub named Shadow to stop Epsilon, but Shadow betrays them, gets rid of Zero and X runs off.
For some reason instead of kicking ass on his own like a normal X game, X decides he needs to form up a squadron of characters we'll never see again (to our pleasure really) as well as eventually reestablishing contact with Axl and Zero. It's a good thing that Capcom introduced the other characters before we had access to Axl and Zero again, because once you get them, chance are you'll never see the other characters ever again. What does it say when Axl is a preferred character?
Anyway, Epsilon gets himself some sort of more powerful Force Metal called, I shit you not, Supra Force Metal, and his team end up killing Spider, one of your more useless party members, in the process to retrieve it. X and his misfits beat Epsilon and turn over the Force Metal to Colonel Redips. Thank god that's over... AW FUCK IT A PLOT TWIST!?
Yeah, so it turns out Colonel Redips is a bad guy and needlessly disguised himself as Spider for some reason... I mean X was going to give him the stupid Supra Metal anyway right? We shoulda saw it coming though right? I mean, Redips is Spider backwards right? HURRRRRR! As if the promise of another horrible level wasn't enough at this point we also get a fucking boss rush in a god damned RPG, and the bosses are leveled up to account for your leveling up. FUCK! WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS TO ME CAPCOM!?
Anyway, you fight Redips and one of his minions in an effort to give the story some kind of
redemption arc or whatever blows herself the fuck up with the Supra Force Metal to give X, Zero and Axl a chance to defeat Ultra Redips Mach 12. Maybe you used a different party, but I really really doubt it.I didn't go into a lot of detail with this story but trust me, this game feels like it never ends by the time you get to this point and seeing the credits FINALLY roll gives you the same sense of accomplishment a holocaust survivor must feel... Okay, that reeeeeeally is hyperbole and probably really offensive... But yeah, this game is bad.
There's a bonus dungeon too I think, but fuck that. To it's credit though, Sigma isn't in this game.
Aesthetics
Why does X have a scarf? I mean, there are much worse things to complain about yeah, but who the hell decided to just start messing with the character concepts this late into the series?The graphics are alright I guess, it's how their used that's god awful. Every fucking stage in this game looks exactly the same. Ready to head to a ware house? Nothing but endless boring, featureless hallways. How about to a space rocket launching platform? Featureless hallways. A desert fortress? Hallways. How about the fucking forest? I mean, surely you can't fuck up something as simple as trees and grass and... I'll just cut my setup off right here and say yes, it's just a bunch of featureless fucking hallways. The game even taunts you in this stage by having some windows where you can see trees while you traverse your stupid fucking hallways. I hate this game, it even looks boring.
Attacks of course have that annoying final fantasy habit of if they do any damage they take fucking forever to cycle through the animation. I guess the battles themselves look alright
though, although I have trouble seeing them when I'm asleep from boredom.Sound
Oh hey! Something I can compliment! The voice acting in this game is actually decent! I am shocked! This is the first Mega Man game where the voice actors are from Ocean Group. Mark Gatha and Lucas Gilbertson make their first appearances and would continue to play X and Zero for the English games up until the latest release. Finally, some fucking effort for these roles. Lucas Gilbertson apparently really digs the Zero role because he's even gone back and rerecorded dialog for Zero in some of the more shitty performances *cough X4*.
The rest of the cast gives decent performances too, and I think the guy who does Spider also did Cliff Fitir in Star Ocean 3 and a billion other voices for games and shows I've never played or watched, but my source on that is Wikipedia and we all know how reliable that is. GameFaqs credits a different actor as well, but whoever the hell did it did a decent job.
The sound track is pretty mediocre though. Well, it could be that I was getting so bored I started to tune out everything, but I can't remember enjoying any particular tunes in this game.
Design
I'm told the combat engine closely resembles Chrono Cross, a game I've never played. Essentially a meter at the bottom shows the next 9 turns and the order in which the players and enemies will go. In addition, the player's turn can be broken down into multiple actions, such as using a sub-weapon and a main attack, or using just a single charge attack for instance. Their position and number of attacks is affected by the characters speed, buffs and how the other characters use their turns. You can swap characters in and out mid battle.Characters have different attacks that require various inputs, such as Spider playing a card game, Axl and Zero having a bunch of button combinations and X holding down the charge
button until a certain point. This game is about as by the books as you get for a turn based RPG. Eventually you'll learn an ability called "Final Strike" in which all three characters pointlessly wail on a nearly dead enemy anyway while you mash buttons to increase your combo counter. I really don't understand the point of this since it requires you to deal 75% or more damage of the enemy's current health and they'll be dead within a turn or two after that anyway.Characters have different abilities as you would expect from your standard Tank character to your healers, to your rogues to X, Zero and Axl who even the game pretty much predicts you'll stick to once you reunite them. The healers aren't even a big deal since you'll get Subtanks which fill up pretty frequently anyway. The characters can also enter Hyper Mode after certain requirements are met where your character gets a few stat boosts and a new looking armor. Your strategy for all boss fights is, get into hyper mode with every character.
You'll get items and Force Metals that'll enhance some of your stats and give you some elemental powers, but they're limited to how you can use them based on what your characters capacity is to use them. This increases as you level up, but you almost never gain any new useful abilities or attacks or even weapons that look different. No matter how far you make it into this game, you'll barely feel like you've made any progress what so ever with your characters, and while the combat engine allows you to strategize a little bit, the lack of new features popping up really makes it get dull real fast.
As for strategy, aside from a few of those stupid arbitrary obtuse solution bosses, you aren't required to think very much. 90% of fights are as simple as tapping the attack button until it's dead. Even the final boss is a freaking joke in terms of difficulty.
The level design has you going from your hub town to buy and sell from a total of about maybe 6 merchants in the game then heading to a dungeon of which just about all of them look and play exactly the same.
This game doesn't even start out bad, it starts out really mediocre, than gets so repetitive that it gets a little boring... then pretty boring, then very boring, then so boring you'll begin to hate the game, and this probably happens by the second or third level for most people. There just isn't any variety in this game in looks or play, and the engine just isn't fun enough to support it the ten hours or so of gameplay. 10 hours is pretty short for an RPG to, but trust me, this one feels much longer.
If I had to give this game some credit though, there is a little mini game where you find broken robots and then send them into dungeons to find you cool little concept art things and what not, but you have to kill some time in between dispatching them and letting them return, and that usually means going to a dungeon or something and well... fuck that. If you do enjoy this game (you have very bad tastes), this mini game will keep you occupied for a while after you finish the game to collect all the cool little extras.
Playability
RPG's aren't known for being very complicated in user interaction but instead in their use of strategy. This game uses a rock-paper-scissors style of strategy with the elemental attacks, and even if you ignore that aspect of the game there are maybe only a couple of trouble spots. Strategy is hardly an issue in this game. The only playability concern is trying to maintain the will to finish this game.
Extras
- You might see a number of reviews to this game that actually give it a decent score. To most of them, I can say this game doesn't really really really start getting boring until a few hours in. For others I can say Mega Man fandom may have the better of people's judgment, but most professional reviewers are actually harder on Mega Man games than they should be. For them, they obviously didn't try to finish the game. To those of you who do like the game, all I can say is your tastes are very strange to me.
- If I didn't convince you to not pick this game up, you may be having trouble deciding between the PS2 and the GameCube version. The GameCube version features some exclusive content through the GBA link up. The PS2 version features less random encounters. So one version extends your gameplay, and one shortens it... I'd take the shorter version, or at least I would have if I had known how boring this game would be.
When I say Command Mission is the most boring game I've ever played I really mean it. Other games I've played can be bad, such as the DOS versions of the Mega Man games. Those games are terrible in their own right that you can almost derive some pleasure in their fundamentally flawed design. They're horrible games, but not really boring. Command Mission on the other hand doesn't offer anything so bad that it's worthy of mocking, doesn't feature broken combat or a god awful story (it's bad, but I've had worse), it doesn't feature anything! It's so bland and boring that you could repeat the entire game by having it take place in a long featureless hallway and having random encounters every ten steps. I'll give another game comparison to illustrate my point. Some games are so bad, such as Daikatana, that it leaves you curios to see how terrible it gets. Other games, such as Quake 2, are just so mediocre and featureless that everything past the first 10 minutes just seems like filler, and in a way that's almost worse than a shitty game. Command Mission is a game without any heart or soul, and even the best performances by the voice acting cast wouldn't be able to save this.
Playthroughs
Speed Run by Alex 'AquaTiger' Nichols (I am as shocked as you that one exist)
No comments:
Post a Comment