On the chopping block

There's been a fair amount of Mega Man news lately and I think it's worth sharing my thoughts on some things.

First, Capcom community leader, Seth Killian leaks that there are some cool ideas heading our way in the Mega Man department. Speculation doesn't go on for very long before a patent hits the US Patent Office for Mega Man Universe.

The fans reactions vary all over the place with even more speculation, ranging from "I'll never buy this crap again," to, "I'm so excited I can't breathe anymore!" Without anything to go on, everyone begins digging hard to find out what's up with Mega Man Universe. Is it a new series? Is it a new type of game? Does it take place somewhere else? How does it tie into the rest of the franchise?

While this is going on, a Korean game surfaces, Mega Man Online. The details aren't very laid out just yet, but it appears to be a 2D Side Scrolling MMO, starring X and Zero. This game so far is only slated for Asian markets, excluding Japan. Is this Mega Man Universe? The words "Universe" and "MMO" certainly go together, but would Capcom file a US Patent for a game that currently has no plans to be released states side?

Capcom is asking about potential US interest in the title right now, but there aren't any plans yet. It has me wondering... could Mega Man Universe be something else? I guess they could be going with an early plan B and it could be, but you'd think if that was the case, they'd put "X" in the title at least. Interesting note, a few weeks before Mega Man Online surfaced, Inafune said X9 would not be the next X game. Was this cause he already knew this game was on the way.

While this rolls around, the Mega Man fan movie is finally completed, to mixed, but generally positive reviews among the fans. I haven't seen it yet, but it's on my todo list.

Udon meanwhile announces they'll be translating a Battle Network art book, similar to the Mega Man Complete Works, slated for November, which has me pretty excited!
And finally, released Tuesday was the Zero Collection for DS, which I have always considered the strongest series in the franchise.
What a hell of a lot of news huh?

We should get a lot of answers in a few days at the Japanese Summer World Hobby Fair, which has been a decent send off for new Mega Man games the past few years. My initial thoughts were that Mega Man Universe might be the name of the US release for Operation Shooting Star, but this idea isn't a new "rad concept" but more of the same, if anything. I'm also skeptical that Mega Man Online is Universe, for the reasons listed above, plus the fact that the game is being done by a team outside of Capcom, meaning that the Star Force/Battle Network team should be free to be working on something. But of course, that means if Mega Man Universe isn't Mega Man Online, then just what the hell is it? I guess we'll just have to wait and see, but I suspect we'll know in a week or two.
As for me, I've been doing a few things here and there. First off, I've been watching a Fan Sub of Rockman.exe, and have seen some notable difference of which I have a small post planned for in the future. In addition to this, I'm thinking about reviewing Battle Network 5 Double Team, as I recently played it a bit more extensively, and think it is different enough from the initial release of the game to cover more than I originally thought. Zero Collections is on my list of things to buy this week as well, so expect a review on that in the future, and possibly a review on the Mega Man fan movie.

The Future of Mega Man X

So with the last X game out of the way I'd thought I'd give some of my thoughts on the future of this series. Mega Man X is on hold right now according to Inafune but it's almost guaranteed that we'll see an X9 some day. Many fans think X9 should follow in Mega Man 9's footsteps and come back to the 16-bit era of the SNES days. I have to disagree and I don't think it's going to happen anyway. The X games have always been about the evolution of the series more than the roots of them. Mega Man X was the first on the SNES, the first to make it to a 32 bit system and the only ones to make it to the PS2 (not counting the collection). I think of X9 comes out, Capcom will push it for the PS3/Xbox 360 and I think they might put some real effort in those graphics this time.

Story wise X9 has to resolve the issues with Axl that X8 left, but after that the series has a lot of places to go, and Axl himself is likely to play a key role. Many speculate that Axl will go Maverick himself because of the purple glow, or he may gain some new ability from this, as in Command Mission his own copy chip is shown to be much stronger. He was also alluded to in ZX Advent by Inti Creates but they wrote it in as a potential red herring. I think though we might see Axl play a bigger role in the series.

Then again, X9 could easily bring back Sigma as well. Despite X8 practically promising he'll never come back, everything Lumine said could have just been bullshit all along from the Maverick Virus and he gets himself retconned in.

Another route the series can go is with the Elf Wars, the lead in to the Zero series. There's lots of potential to work with here, especially in exploiting X's Guardians from the Zero games which were fan favorites to begin with. I for one would definitely like to see them in more games.

Mega Man X has a definitive beginning with the start of the Maverick Wars and a definitive end with the death of X in Mega Man Zero 3, but everything in between is fair game for this series for now. Capcom has stated that if the fans want X9 they'll make it, and that could be coming sooner than later. So far though nothing new has surfaced about X9 in a long time, but I would expect that to change within a year or two.

Maverick Hunter X

I guess Capcom wasn't quite satisfied with the direction Mega Man X was heading so instead of working on X9 they decided to remake Mega Man X for the PSP. While PSP owners might have been satisfied with a straight port, Inafune wanted to completely rebuild the series. Maverick Hunter X would feature rewritten scripts, new graphics, animated cutscenes and a whole host of extras to whet the appetites of Mega Man X fans. If the game did well, X2-X6 would soon follow in succession. So how did it do?

Story
The story is essentially the same as Mega Man X with a few changes here and there, most of which aren't worth mentioning like how and when X fights Vile and the like. The game comes with a totally new and original prequel animated story called "Day of Sigma" which details some of the events of X's origin and what lead up to Sigma's rebellion and the start of the Maverick wars, even detailing where Sigma got those scars. A lot of effort went in to this and the animated cutscenes in game and I for one am glad to see it.

As a bonus, you can play as Vile after you beat the game and he has his own story and animated cutscenes. Basically Sigma breaks Vile out of Maverick... um... jail? He tells Vile that he needs him to combat X who is the future of the Reploids. Vile takes offense to this comment and decides to show Sigma that he's much better than X and goes around fucking up the mavericks working his way to Sigma himself.

I'll admit his reasoning is strange but Vile's voice actor pulls it off and you just get a sense that Vile is just fucking insane. On his way to Sigma Vile runs into X and Zero in the best fucking boss fight of the entire X series as you take on X and Zero at the same time. Despite winning the fight, Zero goes through the sacrifice to stop Vile and X blasts him to keep with the continuity of the main game.

Sigma finds Vile lying in a broken scrap heap and says "Just what the hell would you have done if you made it to me anyway Vile?" Vile just laughs and says, "You know, I hadn't thought that far into it really." Sigma kinda rolls his eyes and walks off as Vile takes solace in the fact that he beat X as his body shuts down. This little bonus is worth the game alone, trust me.

Aesthetics
Imagine the original X levels with X8 graphics and you have the aesthetics for this game. The levels are virtually unchanged in appearance except for the graphical upgrade so I don't feel the need to go to much into it.

Otherwise you've got the animated cutscenes which look pretty good and the hand drawn stills that X8 also had. It looks good but doesn't distinguish itself from the original X game which was probably intentional as this is a remake.

Sound
All your favorite Mega Man X songs are back and arranged to meet new quality standards in sound. Mega Man X boasts some of the best video game music of all time and hearing your favorite themes with actual instruments only makes them so much better. The soundtrack for this game just went on sale in Japan as well and is certainly good enough to add to your collection if you have the resources.

The sound effects are much better than the original as well, but that shouldn't be surprising from a PSP game. The voice acting is once again the Ocean Group and Mark Gatha and Lucas Gilbertson reprise their roles as X and Zero and it's clear why Capcom had them come back. For those who think Gilbertson's Zero sounds too much like a surfer, need I remind you what it took to get here for Zero's voice?

Design
What can I say? Most of the levels are lifted straight out of Mega Man X which for the most part is one of the best Mega Man games of all time. There are a few changes to slip up the experienced X player such as swapping around some of the armor upgrades and changing how you get some of the heart containers but the main game is the same.

We'll talk about Vile mode a bit. Vile goes through the same levels but has three sets of weapons. A forward firing machine gun/rocket launcher, an arc firing mortar weapon, and a grenade firing mechanism that comes out of his knee. As you defeat mavericks they drop a whole shit load of weapons for you to pick and choose from, but you must do it before going into the level and you must take into account the energy cost of the weapons so you don't go over your limit. Not knowing what the weapons do or how they operate can kind of screw you over your first time through but it's unlikely you'll bring 3 shitty weapons to any particular level. The bosses are generally weak against weapons dropped from the boss that originally had their weakness for the X playthrough but not all of them. Vile doesn't gain anything in the way of armor upgrades though and even though Vile mode isn't quite as fun as say, playing Zero or something, seeing his angle of the story is quite enjoyable and unique.

Playability
Did you ever play Mega Man X? If so, you'll have no problem. If not... we'll you'll still have no problem because the game is very easy to play. I recommend you set your Dash to one of the trigger buttons though.

I will say, this game is much easier than the original, especially Sigma. That's saying quite a bit though as the original game wasn't especially tough either.

Extras

• Boss Order: Start with Flame Mammoth as this is where the Dash is no located. After that, Chill Penguin, Storm Eagle, Spark Mandrill, Armored Armadillo, Launch Octopus, Boomer Kuwanger and finally Sting Chameleon. For Vile, I started with Chill Penguin and stuck to the standard X route and it seemed to work ok since Chill Penguin gives an armor upgrade and a decent square button attack.
• Zero gives you his arm cannon just like in the original game if you didn't pick up the upgrade, however, this time it's better than the capsule upgrade. Unfortunately you have to wait till the second to last level to get it this time. It's worth the wait.
• The Hadouken is back in this game as well, but you'll need to try a different technique to obtaining it. Get all the upgrades and heart tanks for X, you can either have Zero's arm cannon or your own, and then make it to the end of Armored Armadillo's stage without taking any damage. It helps to used charged Rolling Shield and Chameleon Sting shots.

The quality of this game is pretty high, but unfortunately the sales were not. I have some mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I really want to see X9 come to fruition, and moving forward with the remakes might have taken away from that. On the other hand it would have been really nice seeing X4-X6 remade, and for that, I am a bit sad that Capcom doesn't have any plans to continue with this series as of yet. This month however Capcom is releasing Maverick Hunter X on the Playstation Network, and it is well worth your investment. If it does really well here the series could get a second wind, but I wouldn't count on it.

Playthroughs
Speed Run by Chris 'Satoryu' Kirk

Mega Man X8: Paradise Lost

Hmm, an X game with a subtitle? That's different. The game itself? More of the same... or rather, more of the same things that made the series great and less of the problems that made X6 and X7 terrible. Yes folks, Mega Man X8 is actually a good game, and thank god, it feels so long since I played a good X game.

Capcom has apparently given up on taking these action platformers into 3D and you won't find any of it here, unless of course you're on a set track in a couple of the boring levels. Mega Man X8 sticks to what the series knows and while playing it safe makes a decent game, doesn't make a lot of effort to experiment. Although as we learned from X7, if you're going to implement something half assed or badly, you might as well not implement it at all. While X8 is among the good X games, it is probably on most fans bottoms of that list. For what it's worth though Capcom touted this game as the last of Sigma... but then they quit making X games so that tells you what happened to the creativity there.

New Features

• New Characters Pallette and Layer. Apparently their artist was staring at his photoshop GUI when he came up with the names...
• A hit counter has been added to keep track of how many enemies you hit consecutively without getting hit yourself. This, in combination with a few other mechanics affects your hunter ranking.
• Heart Tanks and Reploid Rescues are gone. The upgrade system from X7 has been carried over and tweaked so that you'll use metal, the in game currency, to pay for your upgrades. Luckily this time you can power up each character all the way... though it may take multiple playthroughs.
• The two character team has returned in this game, and now you can execute a Double Attack with them that wipes out all smaller enemies and takes a good chunk off of the bosses. You'll also get to choose a mission navigator between Alia, Pallette and Layer, more on that later.

Story
Not much has changed since X7. Axl became a full fledged hunter, the world started building a space elevator to colonize the moon, and the cast got better voice acing.... Well I guess the space elevator is something significant.

So the space elevator is called "The Jakob Project" and is being built by reploids for mankind. One day one of the cars on the elevator flies off and crashes into the ground. X arrives on the scene first and spots Sigma getting out of the wreckage... but not just Sigma, a whole lotta Sigmas! X is just about ready to fight when a Reploid named Lumine explains that these reploids all have a copy chip, like the one Axl has, but it's improved to the point where the new generation reploids that have them can copy the form of any reploid they possess data of, and one of those reploids they have data of is Sigma, whose frame they used to avoid damage in the crash. Luckily the new reploids are immune to any viruses so copying Sigma won't cause them to go Maverick. Don't worry about the ominous camera angles and lighting, I'm positive this isn't any foreshadowing what so ever.

Well just at that moment a bunch of mechlanoids go Maverick at nearby Galapagos Point. X, Zero and Axl head down to investigate and find... Vile? Aren't you supposed to be scrap metal? Vile laughs and has kidnapped Lumine in order to take over the Orbital Elevator. The hunters return to base to find out that 8 of the new generation copy reploids have gone Maverick and started tearing up sites related to the the Orbital Elevator. Since this contradicts what Lumine just told X about being immune to the maverick virus the hunters start doing investigations on these mavericks in addition to taking them out.

Alia discovers that all the Mavericks are carrying Sigma's personality and not only do the Mavericks not seem to be under his control be seem to "be him." Axl on the other hand has not gone Maverick because he is a prototype and his copy chip is weaker and doesn't contain Sigma's DNA. Eventually Sigma reveals himself as the one behind the rebellion and says "Long time no see, X" again. Does he say that in just about every fucking game? It's like his catchphrase. They end up chasing him down to the Moon where Sigma explains that all the new generation reploids are his children since they contain his DNA in the copy chip and he'll be able to regenerate forever and blah blah blah the hunters take him down.

Then Lumine shows up and says Sigma is dead for good now and that the new generation reploids never went maverick, they made a conscientious decision to rebel. I.E "We new generation reploids can go Maverick at will!" Alright... kind of an odd way to put it. Lumine says he'll (yes it's male I guess) usher in a new age for the evolution of reploids by killing all the humans and obsolete reploid models. While he's cackling, Axl shoots him. Axl is a lot more tolerable this game, thumbs up for that one.

Anyway in a real twist, Sigma is indeed not the final boss and Lumine is. Take him out and he goes on about how they have no idea what's coming and they can't stop it and then his chassis cracks and a big black tentacle thing smacks Axl upside his head and breaks his crystal. X says he's damaged but he'll survive. Zero seems glad and wonders if Sigma is really dead and if he'll ever have to fight again (maybe and no), and X is worried about what Lumine said, but Zero reassures him that they kick ass. What they don't see however is a strange purple ominous glow in Axl's broken crystal. Hmm, just what the hell is that all about?

We then get an epilogue about how the Copy Chips ceased production for a while then people said fuck it and started them back up thus making the epilogue entirely pointless.

What's up with Axl? Did the purple glow contain maybe the Maverick Virus? Something else? Well the answer to these questions might never be answered because this was the last X game in the series to be made in the last 5 years. Great Capcom, just quit the series just as you make the annoying character suddenly have something interesting happen. This is especially great as Axl is never mentioned again in the entire series except for what could possibly just be a red herring in ZX Advent.

So the X series now stands on a cliff hanger with a few possible routes to explore in sequels. X9 will probably be made some day, but Inafune says it's on hold right now. Don't fret though, it's not anywhere near the same boat as Legends 3 is.

Aesthetics
I guess technically the this game is the highest end in graphics that the franchise has ever gotten, making use of fully rendered 3D models and cutscenes.... but... I dunno, the characters look weird, really flat faces and the texture work isn't that good either. The rendered cutscenes though show some understanding of cinematography noticable from the foreshadowing lighting and camera angles on Lumine for instance.

Character design is much better over all, at least for the mavericks. I mean... yeah there is a character named Optic Sunflower... You know what, I rescind my previous statement. I think Pallette and Layer look really strange for my tastes... a bit too anime in my opinion but that's really subjective nitpicking and you might even like their design. Alia got a redesign herself and she looks alright, oh and now you get the nice option to finally shut her up for good!

The stages themselves are kinda bland to look at. I mean, the first stage looks pretty good despite X6 telling us all the worlds ecosystems were totally fucked up and people were living underground... I guess it got better? The rest of the stages though just seem pretty deviod of any interesting aesthetic features or designs. Compare this game to Zero or Battle Network or ZX, or even the PSX games. Those games just make better use of their screen's canvas I think.

This game doesn't look bad by any means, I just don't think Capcom put as much effort into the visuals of this game as they could have. I know they have modelers, texture artists and concept people capable of doing much more, this is the same company that pushed out Resident Evil and Devil May Cry after all.

Sound
If you're someone that thinks the X game's soundtracks got too much into the metal genre, this game is going to support your position quite a bit. Just about every track on this game has a guitar wailing away, whether accompanying your descent into a volcano, tip toeing through a power plant or riding a hover bike through the city, there will be a guitar.

That said, at least the PS2 is capable of producing the sounds much better than it's predecessors, and for what it's worth the game features over 50 tracks and there are some good tracks, but this game is about run of the mill as far as Mega Man music is concerned.

The Ocean Group returns for the voice acting and gives decent voice acting performances all around, although I am really getting sick of Sigma pretty much spouting out the same stupid lines over and over. Not that the voice actor did a bad job, this is a writing complaint. "Long time no see X!" Yes, I know you say the same fucking thing every game, fuck. Overall though this is the best acting Job the X series has ever gotten... though Lumine sounds like a woman, although as my understanding goes this is supposed to be intentional, but wow is it weird to here them keep referring to Lumine as a male.

Design
The best way to sum this game up is better than X6 and X7, but not quite as good as most of the other games. Really, mediocre would have been a huge step up for this game, but there was some ambition here that kept it from stopping at mediocre. What we have here is a game that is mostly good with a few boring or annoying stages.

For your good stages you've got Optic Sunflowers gauntlet of mini games, Bamboo Pandamonium's ride armor stage, and Gravity Antonion's fun but incredibly difficult stage where you manipulate the gravity of the room to shift around boxes and spike positions.

But then you have your boring stages. Gigabolt Man-O-War's stage is a boring rail shooter as is Avalanche Yeti... they made two of those fucking annoying ride a vehicle and shoot shit levels. My hate for these types of levels has been noted through out the series. Then you've got stages like Burn Rooster where the hit detection on the spikes is so fucking finicky coming into this stage without the Prickle Barrier isn't recommended.

Bosses are fun, but have this annoying mechanic where for a limited time in the fight they are invincible while they unleash a desperate attack that all you can do is dodge. This pops up regardless if you have the bosses weakness or even if you use the Giga Attack from X's Ultimate armor, it'll reduce the boss to one hit point and you'll still have to wait through this sequence. It didn't bother me initially but has gotten more annoying as I replay the game.

Speaking of armor upgrades, everyone's got one this time, even Axl has a hidden one you can pick up. Power Up's in this game work differently than the other ones though. From now on you collect metals in each stage and buy the power ups. Each character has their own set of upgrades you can buy and they keep track of what percentage of upgrades you have on the character, although some of these items need to be first collected in the stages to unlock them first. While it is possible to upgrade everyone in one game, it's certainly not practical (without cheating) as metals come really really really slowly. The good news is the game saves your character progression through playthroughs so you can set goals for yourself each time you replay it.

While you're going through with the actual game though you'll only be able to take a couple of characters and the levels are suited to different characters. X has his charge shot and armor upgrades, Zero his Z-Saber melee attacks and different weapons and double jump, and Axl has rapid fire and a hover move. You'll need all three of them to collect all the items, and quite a number of them are rather obtusely hidden, such as certain areas where you need to use X's charged Crystal Wall ability to grab items out of the ground... damn it Capcom, I thought we learned our lesson about arbitrary item placement when we fixed Rush Search in Mega Man and Bass! Others require you to use Axl's A-Trans ability, which is once again 90% useless, although at least some of the animations associated with it are kinda funny.

As far as difficulty goes this is one of the tougher games in the series. It's not full of stupid overwhelming bull shit like X6, nor is the game as broken as X7. Sure, Burn Rooster's still a cock (pun intended) but what helps this game immensely in the difficulty department is that because you'll always be collecting metals as your playing, the game will continually get easier and easier as you upgrade your character. All the games are like this, but X8 doesn't require you to find anything hidden to do it. If you're persistent enough, you'll eventually reach a point where the upgrades have made the game beatable for you and that's a good way to bring in new players 8 games in.

Playability
You should have no trouble picking this one up. Only two stages are particularly annoying and it's because of spike placement. Watch out for Gravity Antonion's and Burn Rooster's stages. You'll probably want Zero for these stages as he is the most maneuverable.

Extras

• Boss Order: It's been awhile since I've had to collect items in this game, but my boss order after doing all that is Earthrock Trilobyte, Gigabolt Man-O-War, Avalanche Yeti, Burn Rooster, Bamboo Pandamonium, Dark Mantis, Gravity Antonion and then Optic Sunflower.
• Having trouble S-ranking Optic Sunflower's stage for some of the items you can collect? Beat Dark Mantis so Zero has the Rasetsusen and then buy the Durga Glaive. It's reach combined with Zero's speed will wipe out just about all the minigames.
• Although AAA ranking the stages doesn't have any tangible benefits it can still be satisfying to do. Bring Axl along to help you do this as his rapid fire can boost the combo meter to astronomical heights against certain enemies.
• Collecting Metals can be a pain after you've played the game so many times. If you want an easier time with it, buy an Energy Refill for your E-tank when you have less than 50 metals. The counter will fuck up and next time you collect a metal the counter will go to 999,999 metals.

Mega Man X8 actually has some decent ambition in it to put itself at a much higher standard than X7, and I think anyone can appreciate that. Still, it's not as good as the past games and the Zero series blows this game away. Still this entry adds hope for continuing the series... that is if Capcom hadn't shelved it for now. We got one more X game left, and it's a remake, but it's been a while now and with Mega Man 9's success, I wouldn't be surprised to see X9 soon.

Playthroughs
You loathe it, I play it - Megaman X8 by Kung-Fu Jesus
Speed Run by Patrik 'Cremator' Salonen, and 100% speed run by Chris 'Satoryu' Kirk

Mega Man X Command Mission

Before writing these reviews I've made sure to play each game, 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)

Mega Man X7

You know, I was going to be kind to X7. I mean, I was still going to call it a bad game, yeah, but I attributed a lot of the game being bad was a harsh transition into 3D. I should mention I had only played X7 twice... a long time ago, and time tends to heal all wounds. Luckily I played this game again before reviewing it, and that reminded me JUST HOW FUCKING SHITTY THIS AWFUL GAME IS!

I was going to give this game a break and call it a failed experiment, after all sometimes innovation comes at the cost of failure, but NO! This games problems lie much deeper than that. This game is fundamentally broken, lazily designed and horribly written. I don't think any game designer aspires to make a bad game, but I'd swear effort went in to killing the X series with this game. Not only did X7 play like shit, Capcom would learn the wrong lessons with why the game didn't work, and probably killed the chances of a real 3D Mega Man game for a long fucking time.

New Features

• New Character Axl is introduced, who pretty much controls similar to X but comes with a stupid gimmick to collect a couple of items.
• Parts as you know them are gone. Now you get upgrade points when you rescue reploids.
• Like Xtreme 2, you can swap between 2 characters during play. Unlike Xtreme 2, you have this from the start and every level.
• Now in TREEEEEE-DEEEEEE!

Story

This game makes X look like such a fucking whiny bitch. I mean, X was always a pacifist but this game ramps him up into an arrogant cock about it.

"X, they're killing everyone! You gotta do something!"

"No! I'm going to brood about it and whine instead!"

Even Zero is a fucking dick, giving a pompous "whatever" like attitude towards anything. When X finally does join the fight again, Zero doesn't even give a shit.

And then their is Axl, the new guy. He's basically a dumb kid who thinks he's hot shit. Then there's Signas, the incredibly bored commander, and Alia the high pitched annoying navigator. Congratulations X7, you have made me literally hate all of the good guys with this game!

So basically X has retired from Maverick Hunting because this game decided to make him a bitch about his pacifism. I'll grant that X4-X6 tried to blur the line a bit between Maverick and Reploid fighting for... I dunno... some stupid reason or another, and they tried to make the Maverick Hunters a bit more morally ambiguous. They'd have done a better job of this if all the non-Maverick fights didn't have really fucking stupid motivations for fighting, but hey, we're complaining about X7's story now aren't we?

So yeah, X retired leaving pretty much Zero as the only hunter left. It seems weird to me that they go from a full huge force from X1 to just Zero in X7, with just about no explanation but whatever. To fill the void of Maverick Hunters, a group of Reploids takes to vigilantism calling themselves Red Alert, following the lead of the charismatic (if your sound is off) reploid Red. Red Alert goes around lawlessly taking out Mavericks with their good buddy Axl, a young reploid with a strange ability to copy reploids DNA and take on their form. God Capcom, enough with this Robot DNA shit...

Anyway, all is find and dandy until one day Axl gets concerned with Red Alert changing its methods and decides to leave the group to join the real Maverick Hunters, who you would think would love to have new recruits, but like I said in the intro, all the main characters in this game are stupid assholes. Red Alert changes its mind about Axl leaving and starts to stir a bunch of shit up with the Maverick Hunters to get him back. Red challenges them to a duel... which apparently to him a duel means sending 8 Mavericks across to globe to cause havoc.

X is like "Fuck Axl, we don't want to fight on his behalf!" but Zero goes "like they give a shit X. I'm going to go fight for the hell of it." and Axl is like "yeah!" The dialog is so stilted and awkward its hard to determine any of the characters stupid motivations beyond "HURRRR I REFUSE TO FIGHT FOR ANYTHING EVER" and "HURRR COMBAT GUD!"

As the game goes on, Axl mentions Red Alert was using his Copy ability to take DNA from Reploids to power up their force. He notes they started doing this out of no where and completely changed. Then we see a series of what I hope to god are flash backs because if they take place as the game is going on it would make no fucking sense at all, but knowing this game I wouldn't put it past them. Red is approached by, Guess Who? Sigma who begins to manipulate him and his men. He says he needs Axl to retrieve X's DNA. Red finally objects to this, but Sigma has infected his men with the Sigma Virus and forces him to comply for his men... why doesn't he just infect Red with the Virus and fuck all to his objections?

You know, I'd like to say something about Sigma. Dr. Wily is the recurring vilian of the Mega Man games, but it's done in a pretty silly way to fit the atmosphere and you kinda look forward to it during the game. In the X series on the other hand, Sigma is always a stupid after thought who just shows up at the end, and they always play up on it like it'd be a huge surprise. Sigma is a parody of himself by this point who's motivations seem to be "blarg! Bad guy!" He's so uninteresting by this point in the series that even the protagonists don't give a shit about him anymore. What does that say about the writing of this game?

Anyway, if you rescue 64 reploids, which by that point you're about half way done with the game, you unlock X and he joins the fight again. Yeah, you heard me right, you have to unlock the character who the series is named after. Ugh... fuck this game...

You know, I'm not entirely sure this game takes into account that you could theoretically beat it without unlocking X in the story. It might, but fuck if I'm going to play it again to find out, not to mention playing with Zero and Axl is a kick in the balls as it is anyway. No offense to Zero fans, but he blows in this game.

So anyway, after you beat all the mavericks, Red Alert's base shows up on the radar and Alia comments that it's "almost like they want us to find them." Blah blah blah, you fight Red, he self destructs the place, Axl screams for his fallen comrade that... he shot all up to hell? Sigma reveals himself, the cast doesn't care, Sigma starts to win after you fight him but Axl uses his transformation trick to save the day. It'd almost be cool if by this point in the game you weren't so pissed off by the horrible story, bad game play and god awful voice acting that you're just pissed you wasted so much time on this game.

You know how you can get a satisfying feeling from beating most games? Not this one... it makes you want to break the game disk.

From here we get a different cutscene depending on who delivered the final blow to Sigma. If X did it, Signas asks X to train Axl to become a hunter, but X whines about how "no one can train to be a hunter like me! It isn't possible!" God, get the fuck over yourself X.

Zero on the other hand has a dream that X is trying to shoot him for being a maverick. Either this is an attempt at some shitty foreshadowing of... you know... TWO GAMES AGO, or Zero is having some unresolved betrayal issues since X5.

Axl's ending has him begging to be a hunter and doing a lot of junk for the Hunters, but X keeps telling him that he is doing wrong by being so violent and shit. Alia tells X to cut him a break, but X is worried that he'll make the same mistakes X made. Whatever, I fucking hate this game's story.

Aesthetics

X just looks awful, both fully rendered and his hand drawn cutscene representation. The characters all have the same retarded "duuuh" expression on their face. The animation's not bad though.

The stages don't look terrible, although Tornado Tonion's stage is boring as all fuck, and they did the X1 highway again. Speaking of which, who the hell thought the X series needed a ballerina maverick onion for a boss? This is beyond the stupid character designs of previous games. Give me Charge Man and Centaur Man for Christ's sake. Shit.

On the other hand Vanishing Gungaroo is an awesome idea. A baby Kangaroo that drives a Mech version of a mother Kangaroo from it's pouch. Then it boxes you. Fantastic, the highlight of the game if any, too bad it came in this horrible game.

The other bosses are rehashes of shit you've fought before. I mean, come on, Wind Crowfang is just another carbon copy of Storm Eagle. And Sigma... where do I begin... he shoots lasers out of his crotch... yeah.

This the first game where the camera really becomes a fucking problem too. Half the time you're shooting at shit off screen and in the 3D sections your view is almost always obscured.

Sound

Everything that is wrong with the sound in this game can be said with this video. If you've played this game before, you know exactly what I'm talking about already, if you haven't... turn down your volume. We won't discuss that any further.

Every voice in this game is horrible, but especially X's. It's not as if his part isn't written to be horrible enough, but the actor has to give a terrible performance as well. He says really annoying shit when you shoot a charged shot with him as well. "STOP IT!" I hate to say it, but I prefer X4's voice over this shit.

Props to Signas for giving the most emotionless delivery of his lines ever. You know when someone says "Yeah! We'll show em what we're made of!" like a bored actor reading a bad script, it's something special. Zero's voice is so deep and ridiculous it's laughable. To be fair, the voice acting for Zero until this point hadn't exactly been stellar itself.

The sound track is sub par for the series, but passable, but one thing that confuses me is that if you look at the sound track names, X's theme is really... odd. It sounds like a techno... vomit...diarrhea? What the fuck?

Design

Levels in this game fall into 3 categories. Unplayable because they are terribly designed, unplayable because they're broken, or unplayable because they are terribly designed AND broken. Don't be so quick to blame the 3D for this games failings, the 2d levels suck ass too.

Where to begin... should we start with the really boring forest level? The annoying, repetitive radio tower? How about the horribly planned Cyberworld level that plays like an upside down maze? The completely fucking broken air force level where the players platforms can slide right out from under him without any input at all? Let's just make it easy, every level sucks, every level is unfun, and most of them are impossible to play.

In the 3d world, enemies teleport on screen to you at a really close distance. Not only does it look incredibly tacky, but half the time these assholes will spawn into you... ugh.

Next, you've got the problem with Zero. In previous games Zero's primary draw was his functionality in completing stages because his Z-Saber could take out most enemies in just a few hits. In this game, the Z-Saber been neutered. Many enemies take FOREVER to kill, Z-Saber or no, but even if you power the hell out of it, Zero just doesn't have the safety of X or Axl. Not that he's completely useless, he can reflect shots back at enemies, making him somewhat essential to Sigma's final form at least.

Since your stuck with Axl and Zero until you unlock X who, as I'll remind you, the series is named after AND he has top billing in the cast, you'll have to trade off between their styles and their health bars. Axl himself controls like a gimmicky X, using range to his advantage but lacks a charge shot. Axl kinda has his own take on the variable weapons system, getting a new gun after defeating each boss. Not that it matters, because almost all the weapons are useless, for all the characters.

The only weapon worth a damn is Tornado Tonion's and probably not by design. Having Zero use it wrecks everything's shit and it costs no energy. Using this on Flame Hyenard for instance makes that horrible fight go way shorter. As a whole, the boss fights are just boring, and the stiff controls don't help any either. X tears bosses apart, but since you don't have him to start with, you might wanna spend your time rescuing reploids to power up.

Speaking of, the parts system is gone and is replaced by an upgrade system. Essentially you rescue a reploid and he'll have on him a part. There are two reploids with parts per level. After you rescue them, at the results screen you must spend the part, no saving up for X. There are 16 parts in the game, and 12 upgrade spaces per character. Not a huge problem, but unless you go out of your way to avoid rescuing the reploids who drop the parts and rescue all the other reploids, X is essentially impossible to power up all the way. I guess this is made up for by giving X armor upgrades like all the other games. This time we get the Glide armor which allows X to... well Glide across the screen. Actually the appearance of armor upgrades don't make up for it. First of all, you have to use X to open the capsules, meaning either back tracking or careful planning. Heart tanks are distributed a bit different this game too, there are 24 of them in total. You get one in the stage, 1 for saving a reploid and 1 for beating the boss. Which ever character completes whatever action will get the heart tank. So count X out for upgrading his health too high unless you go to crazy lengths to do so, but I should point out that about 8 heart tanks is decent enough to carry any character along anyway.

Good luck if you do actually plan to hold off on rescuing some reploids though as the slightest breeze will kill them the second they appear onscreen, or hell, sometimes off screen. You need to haul ass to a reploid as soon as you see them or they will die. If the game was harder, this might be a problem getting upgrades, but more or less the difficulty comes from poor controls.

Playability

Speaking of... yes this game plays horribly. I maintain that doing a Mega Man game in 3D is possible, but not like this. The game wants to make up for the fact that you can't aim X's or Axl's weapons by giving an auto target function. The problem is, it never aims at what you want it to, and drops target way to fast. Not only that, but half the time it aims at something off camera as it is.

Let's talk about the air force level for a little bit as this level articulates everything bad about this game. First, the design of the level isn't that bad on paper. The player has to hop from jet to jet to reach the main sky-base. This would probably work great in 2D where the designers don't have to worry about programming the hit detection as well as they do the 3D sections. Not to say it can't be done in 3D, but it certain won't be done if the programmers rush the fuck out of it. In this level you'll slip and slide all over the god damned place while the platforms barely move. It's horrible, and every death I've had on this stage was a result of the game bugging out on me. FUCK THIS STAGE! It is the stage that speaks volumes about how much though went into this game.

Oh here's another joy, the camera controls are with the L2 and R2 buttons, but if you press them at the same time, you unleash X's Giga Attack. Guess how many times I've wasted that one?

Extras

• Boss order: Everything is pretty tedious until you unlock X, but Tornado Tunion and Ride Boarski are the easiest, and Snipe Anteater is the only actual hard boss. To save yourself some backtracking if you plan to get X's armor, just hold off on Wind Crowfang, Flame Hyenard, Snipe Anteater and Soldier Stonekong.
• I found in general that rapid half charge shots with X will take out the enemy quicker than the slower paced full charged shots.
• The most important upgrade is the increase in invincibility time in the special slot, followed by half Damage in the power slot. Try to get your main guys these two upgrades above everything else.

The only reason you should consider buying this game is because you want to own the entire collection and because it's dirt cheap at $5. This game isn't even fun in a so bad it's good way. It's just so bad, it's bad. It introduces Axl whom many fans hate with a passion, but trust me, he's the least of the problems with this piece of shit. This game is a rip off a dollar if you find it for that much and extols the worst things about Capcom milking the hell out of the Mega Man franchise. If you're a collector, get it and shelf it, if you want a game to play, just avoid it. Thanks to this game though, we may never see Capcom attempt a 3D Mega Man game ever again.

Playthroughs
PAL Version low% Speed run by Patrick 'Cremator' Salonen

UPDATE: Upon further review you can max out all the characters on a New Game + and you'll start with X in it. Sorry that I was initially wrong about being able to do this, but can you blame me for not wanting to replay this piece of shit?

Mega Man X6

I've often said that any game engine can be used to make a good game and a real bad game. Play a round of Doom and then take a chance on a random fan-made wad (albeit chances are better for a good wad these days), play Super Mario World and then try a Romhack. It's all about design. A weak engine can still produce something worth playing with good design and a strong engine can turn up a pile of shit with bad design. Mega Man X6 is the latter example of design theory.

There are all kinds of problems with this game. Mega Man X6 is a really hard game, but instead of relying on well thought out challenges the game pulls out "fuck you" instant death traps left and right expecting you to memorize every inch of it. Gate's stages really test your patience and are practically intolerable.

X6 also has a terrible story to accompany it. Nothing new for Mega Man, but this one really asks you to take a hell of a lot of bullshit this time. We'll start with the biggest problem, Zero is back. Why is he back? Why does this game exists? Money. X6 had a ridiculously short development cycle coming out exactly 1 year minus a day after X5. Not only that, but without Keiji Inafune on board the project as well. He went off to Inti Creates, which is basically smaller developer that Capcom publishes for, to work on the Zero series.

If you read any article about X5 and X6 they say that X5 was supposed to be the end of the series and Inafune had to rewrite the Zero series when he heard that X6 was coming out. Just about 99% of these stupid sites copy and paste the same article from Wikipedia where the actual source of this rumor is not listed anywhere at all. For awhile I was actually starting to doubt the validity of this rumor because technically the next game Inafune is credited with is battle network, of which he is the producer, which came out the same year and that was an in-house development.

Luckily for you, I have found the quote of which this rumor originates. It comes from an interview with Inafune from the now dead retro faction website. Inafune says this:

"I was originally planning on ending the series at around X4 or 5," Inafune reveals. "I really expected that to be the ending. And so I was all happy... 'OK, done with X5. That series is now closed off, now let's start Zero. I'm really excited to start Zero series.' Here's Zero, you know, he's kind of dead, and you power him up and he comes back to life, right? In my mind, in X5, Zero died. And so I'd always planned to make Zero come back to life in the Zero series, but then X6 comes out sooner from another division and Zero comes back to life in that, and I'm like, 'What's this!? Now my story for Zero doesn't make sense! Zero's been brought back to life two times!"

The site is dead as I mentioned and you can't find the interview anywhere to my knowledge, but there is a good lot of evidence to support that this is genuine so I'm inclined to believe it myself now but keep in mind I haven't seen the actual interview page myself.

As bad as this game is though, it still has it positives, keeping it from being the worst official Mega Man game in the franchise. Trust me, there are a few that are much worse.

New Features

• The parts system has been revamped so that in order to gain parts you now must rescue reploids. Watch out though because the Zero Nightmare can actually turn them Maverick right before your eyes.
• The ranking system is now based on how many Nightmare Souls you collect.
• X gets his own sword through out this game.

Story

"Zero!? I thought you were dead!?"

"Nope!"

"Cool."

LATER

"Sigma! I thought you where dead!?"

"No you didn't"

"Yeah I guess you're right."

The End

Aesth... what you want more than that? Bah alright. Three weeks after the events of Mega Man X5, the Eurasia colony disaster has completely wrecked the ecosystem of Earth forcing the humans underground while the reploids help rebuild the planet. One reploid named Gate goes to Ground Zero (pun intended) where he finds a mysterious circuit board looking object. A week later he's gone maverick and hatched a plan to build a Reploid utopia with him as the ruler.

X has been having dreams related to Zero every night and is then called to the scene of one of the colony clean ups where a giant Mechlanoid has gone Maverick. X battles it but then he sees something in the shape of Zero come down and destroy it. Just then a huge Reploid named High Max shows up and fights X. He determines that X is a Maverick Hunter and stops. He is investigating what him and a guy he is with named Isoc are calling "The Zero Nightmare." Apparently a virus in the shape of Zero is going around infecting reploids, screwing up the environments and creating these little bastards called "Nightmare Viruses" which you will hate a lot. Isoc and High Max send 8 investigators around to world to examine the areas mostly contaminated by the Zero virus. Gee, what an odd number... 8...

Commander Signas sends X to investigate the areas as well but every time he meets an investigator they appear to be controlling the virus instead of stopping it. Furthermore all of the Maverick investigators are former Reploids that a former colleague of Alia built. That would be Gate our villain.

From here our story splits depending on what the player does. If you go out of your way to stop the Zero Nightmare itself, Zero becomes a playable character. He shows up saying "I hid myself away to recover." What the fuck ever Capcom. Anyway eventually Gate reveals himself and you can go battle him with X or Zero. You also can choose to not bring Zero back but that only slightly tweaks the story.

Anyway X or Zero fight Gate and we find out that what Gate found was a piece of Zero's DNA from the crash site. Damn that Zero virus making people reploids go crazy. After he is defeated, he activates Sigma who he had rebuilt for some unexplained reason. Sigma is like "pfft, I can't die" and then Gate dies. Zero and X are literally rolling their eyes when Sigma shows up, as if even they are sick of this games predictability. So you fight an unfinished Sigma who is the easiest fight in the entire game which is really disappointing when you've just finished all the other bullshit to get here.

If X beats Sigma and rescues Zero, the two of them bring Gates fallen body back to Alia and talk about how they are going to build a new future for Reploids and Humans.

If X doesn't rescue Zero, the same thing happens except Zero is hidden from Alia and X but within earshot. He laughs smugly that he has to do something before returning to the Hunters, and X and Alia wonder if they heard Zero. So this ending is Zero just being a lazy fuck the entire game.

If you finish the game with Zero, well this gets interesting... Zero meets up with some Reploid scientist. He feels responsible for all the troubles caused by the Maverick Wars because... you know... technically they are his fault and decides the only way to end them for good is to seal himself away for a hundred years in a capsule to purge the virus from his body. This ties the X series to the Zero series which takes place next canonically. But because Zero shows up in X7 and X8 this scene doesn't make sense until Capcom blatantly said in the complete works books (Classic series coming in October and X series in December) that this scene takes place some time after the X series concludes. In other words they can make as many X games as they want so long as this is what happens at the end of it.

Anyway, the story is terrible and in addition to its very poorly translated as well.

Aesthetics

X6 doesn't really have much in the way of improvements over X5. The levels are more diverse in look compared to X5 and X4 to be sure so I can't fault them there. There aren't a hell of a lot of enemies in this game though. Most of the stages are made up of the Nightmare Viruses, killing any chance of variety. The ones that aren't Nightmares are mostly X5 enemies you've already dealt with.

Some of the bosses look alright like Rainy Turtloid but a few feel all to familiar in design. Blaze Heatnix, Blizzard Wolfang for example feel like rehashes and High Max isn't particularly interesting looking. Commander Yammark feels a bit like a throw back to Gyro Man design wise and the Mother Nightmare is just a couple of Squares... bleh. Sigma looks cool in Zombie form, but he's disappointing in other ways.

X has a new armor in this game that just looks awesome though. The Shadow armor is a black ninja like suit that is completely different from standard X armors and is really the high light of this game, both visually and design wise. However this game doesn't do a lot to distinguish itself visually from X4 and X5 although it's not like it's a particularly ugly game.

Sound

The best part of X6 is the sound track. There are a couple of reused tracks from X5, but only with certain characters themes, such as Dynamo who makes a hidden appearance. Where to begin on my favorite tracks in this game, they're all so good showing that even in their shitty games Capcom dominates video game music.

I think my favorite is Blizzard Wolfang whose whole level is a diamond in the rough so to speak. Commander Yammark's music is also really a nice relaxing Jazzy tune that fits the level well. The boss fight music is good too without being over the top metal thrashing. Infinity Mijinion appears to be a tribute to "The Final Countdown" itself.

Few games I would say would be worth buying strictly for the music (ZX comes to mind), but the sound track in X6 at least add to the small list of reasons as to why this game is playable. Other sound effects are pretty much straight from the X4, X5 sound library.

This game contains the original Japanese intros which sound alright I guess, and the PSX version even has the original Japanese voice acting... which sounds terrible to to an English speaking American like myself who isn't a numb nuts Otaku, not that Capcom exactly did the other X games justice on the voice acting front for the US anyway, but hey Legends was good so it's not like they couldn't have put in the effort. They really just wanted to get as much cash as they could out of this one.

Design

The design of this game is developer vs. player to a point where the game is not fun. Some stages are great as I already stated with Blizzard Wolfang and I enjoy Infinity Mijinion's as well. Others...

Blaze Heatnix's stage is a series of mini-boss fights. You fight the same stupid mini-boss 5 times in a variety of arenas that restrict your movement more and more. The mini-bosses biggest challenge is his size as the bosses patterns are essentially moving in a straight line and firing occasionally at the player. These fights are so fucking boring and you have to do it every time you come back to the stage. Its tedious as hell.

Metal Shark Player's level is a nice way to lose all your hair until you learn how to do it, but CHRIST, parts of it are so long without check points in between putting all the really dangerous parts JUST before one. You are likely to die here a lot.

Ground Scaravich's level is also randomly generated from a set of about 10 or so different make ups all filled with Nightmare Viruses, really annoying enemies that shoot at you and teleport into you. You will hate these fucking things. To make matters worse, there's a piece of X's Blade armor in this stage that you might not find until multiple visits and the Blade Armor is REQUIRED if you want to finish the game with X. You'll either need it to get through Gates god awful fucking stages, or to get the Shadow Armor or Jumper part as alternatives to make it through that stage. What the hell Capcom?

Speaking of Gates stage, there are spikes EVERYWHERE. Just to start the stage you need to set down a block of ice from one of your weapons, jump on it, then with either the use of the Blade armor or Jumper part, scale your way up the stage in that fashion. OR you can go out of your way to get the shadow armor which makes you immune to spikes, but gets rid of your weapons and you'll have to make a really fucking tricky jump in Gate stage 2 if you go with that instead.

Another problem with the stages are the "Nightmare Effects." Essentially depending on which stage you just left, one of the other stages will turn red on the stage select screen indicating that a nightmare effect is taking place. It'll stay like that until you get it highlighted again. The Nightmare Effects are almost always stupid extra pains in the ass, such as little dragon flies blocking your shots, placing extra blocks in your way to fuck up the precision sections of the game and the worst of the worst, the screen goes black and lights up a small section of the window lights up blocking out most of the screen... UGH FUCK THIS NIGHTMARE!

Let's talk about boss fights though. X6 for all it's bullshit, probably has the best boss fights in the series until you get to the final stages. Each Maverick has it's own little gimmicks that make it a lot of fun. I tend to go at the stages in an order that minimizes the bullshit of the Nightmare effects, so I myself usually buster duel these guys. Metal Shark Player despite having the stage I hate most, is the coolest boss, a hammerhead shark who summons bosses from the SNES games to fight you. Awesome! Oh and his weapon summons Storm Eagle for you if you charge it!

The final stages are hell though. The Nightmare Mother as I said is a couple of Squares rotating around the room. Words cannot describe how horrible this boss fight is, check out HideofBeast's run through of it to see it. Next you fight High Max who is just an exercise in tedium. He's not particularly tough to dodge but he has a shield around him that gives him an incredibly small hit box that you have to hit with a charged shot, but that's not what does the damage. You have to hit him with one of X's special weapons or Zero's extra moves to actually damage him. God this fight takes forever.

Speaking of Zero, this game is hell to play with him, especially Nightmare Mother. Zero's design in X4 and X5 made him better at stages but tougher at boss fights. Well since X gets a sword and a suit of armor that makes him immune to spikes, Zero isn't quite as appealing as he once was.

It should be noted that you can power him up all the way this time as the heart tanks are better spread out. A few parts still require X to get though. Speaking of parts, you get them by rescuing reploids, which is actually a fun gimmick of this game and it stuck around for X7. If you let a Nightmare Virus touch a reploid however, they'll go Maverick and you won't be able to save them unless you reload the game. A bit annoying for anyone who wants to 100% the game in this respect, but for what it's worth most of the important reploids carrying things like extra heart tanks and parts are usually out of range of the Nightmares so don't worry too much about it.

This game also has an XTREME mode just like X5 and the bosses and levels will take new moves and setups into account. Unlike X5 though, X6's XTREME mode is actually really really really fucking hard. Don't even bother touching this one until you have a good idea of the bosses patterns and a general knowledge of where the items are.

Oh by the way, Alia's conversations are optional this time! HOORAY!

Playability

This game is hard by design, not by any fault of the controls like Legends 2. One thing that is annoying is you can't cancel a dash from the Blade Armor and on occasion you'll trigger it on accident and send yourself flying off in the wrong direction. That's a real minor complaint though and the rest of the game plays as fluidly as it's predecessors.

Extras

• Boss Order: Forget the weakness chain here. Get the annoying shit out of the way. Commander Yammark, Rainy Turtleloid, Infinity Mijinion, Metal Shark Player, Blizzard Wolfang, Shield Shelldon, Blaze Phoenix, Ground Scarab. This should avoid most of the annoying Nightmares during your normal run through. I usually mix up my runs through this game though so I may revise this in the future.
• You need Nightmare Souls to raise your rank. Raising your rank allows you to equip more parts. Nightmare Viruses won't drop new souls until you switch the Nightmare effects back on their stage after clearing it. The best way to farm souls however, is to get Zero, fight High Max, and then fight Dynamo. Use Meteor Rain on him and it'll stun him, then hit him with a buster shot and he'll drop a soul worth 200 points. You can do this three times during the fight for a total of 600 points per fight. I find the quickest way to get to him is through Infinity Mijinion's stage.
• Speaking of Infinity Mijinion, if you want to unlock Zero as soon as possible so you won't power up X to much, pick his stage first, then take the teleporter when it comes up. You'll fight Nightmare Zero whose weakness happens to be the Z-Saber so he's not an especially hard fight. Congratulations, you'll now have Zero who you can easily fully power up at this point.
• Mega Man Xtreme 2 gets a nod in this game when Alia mentions the Erasure incident.

X6 has a lot of questionable design decisions that make it frustrating beyond belief, but has a few saving graces to make it playable. There's no reason to skip picking this one up since it's part of the X collection now, but take your time with it and don't jump straight into XTREME mode if you value your sanity.

Playthroughs
X6 Minimalist Speed Run by HideofBeast (the most impressive run of this game ever done)