A Tourist's Thoughts on the Mega Man X PS1 Trilogy

Ever one for pushing boundaries of what can be done with their games, Capcom jumped right on the high memory capacity the CD drive of the Playstation was capable of.  They didn’t exactly leave Nintendo in the dust for the Nintendo 64 era though.  They did release Mega Man & Bass Megaman 64 and the Xtreme games, but it’s clear the PS1 was where their priorities lie.  Thus we got a trilogy of Mega Man X games for the system and in the classic series we got Mega Man 8.  I’ll be the judge of how much improved with the new system’s horsepower.

Mega Man X4

Mega Man X4 introduces Repliforce.  At some point (I’m not sure exactly when), Repliforce was formed as an army to handle larger scale conflicts that the Maverick Hunters couldn’t.  It’s kind of like the Maverick Hunters are the police and Repliforce is the National Guard.  Even before things really go to shit in the actual game, Repliforce fostered a bad reputation, being known for ineffectiveness and causing more damage in their operations than they prevent.

At the start of the game, the Maverick Hunters and Repliforce both arrive at the floating city of Sky Lagoon to deal with a maverick attack, but thanks to a sabotaging effort from one of the members of Repliforce secretly working for Sigma, Sky Lagoon comes crashing down, causing a massive disaster and tons of casualties.

Not wanting to suspect their allies, the Maverick Hunters tell Repliforce to stand down so they can investigate, but the Repliforce representative on the scene, Colonel, does not.  Instead Repliforce stages a coup and declares independence from the humans with their ultimate goal to occupy a space station equipped with a massive weapon that they can use as a deterrent to keep their nation of reploids safe.  Since they’ve turned against humans, Repliforce is branded as mavericks and have to be taken down.  Of course, it was all a part of the machinations of Sigma, who wants to take that ultimate weapon for himself.

It might seem like a plot that banks on Repliforce being idiots who refuse to comply, but I think there’s something deeper here.

Something I’ve been told that makes some more sense of the premise is that Colonel is literally hard-wired to never surrender as a soldier, which is why he won’t drop his weapons and allow an investigation.  Other members of Repliforce include two plants working for Sigma and two borderline mavericks who are only in it for the carnage.  Repliforce has a really shit vetting process and I can’t help but think that’s the point.

The Maverick Hunters are a smaller organization, which implies that it’s more tightly-knit, as opposed to the massive army of Repliforce, which is apparently big and disorganized enough to let practically anyone in.  Sure, Sigma betrayed the Maverick Hunters in the first game, but as this game establishes, he literally turned evil one day.  He was fine when he joined.

It's also likely that General, the leader of Repliforce, doesn’t trust that things will work out if they allow for an investigation.  As Sigma says to him in one of the cutscenes, the Maverick Hunters act execute anyone branded a maverick at the behest of humans without question.
He has a point at face value, if nothing else.  Being labeled a maverick has to do with having a problem with humans and exercising the free will reploids have to disobey them.  Humans are the ones that determine whether or not a reploid is a maverick.  Even if Repliforce did turn themselves in for judgement, there’s no guarantee they won’t just get labeled as mavericks anyway, especially when they already have a bad reputation.  The idea of making a nation of reploids removes the maverick label altogether by taking out the humans that make a reploid considered a maverick.  The destruction and violence Repliforce uses, in their eyes at least, is to defend themselves from the inevitable retaliation of their goal for independence.  Freedom isn’t free.  Methinks the game should’ve made this more clear.

Sigma is once again a corrupting force, but Doppler’s antivirus must’ve worked (for now) because he never uses the Sigma virus to mind control anyone (Cyber Peacock was “reprogrammed”, but I think that’s different).  If he could, General wouldn’t be able to tell him off.  Instead Sigma uses the mavericks loyal to him working within Repliforce to cause the Sky Lagoon incident, banking on Repliforce turning against their human masters.  In a nice narrative touch, the health bars of Sigma’s agents have his logo under their health bars instead of the Repliforce logo like the others.

I sense a running theme with this plot.  Repliforce has people in their ranks that betray them and cause this mess (and work for the guy who betrayed the Maverick Hunters), they think humans might betray them, the assistant reploid X is assigned betrays him in X’s story and Iris betrays Zero after Zero betrays her trust by killing Colonel in Zero’s story.

I like the story.  I like Sigma acting as a manipulator without the need of powers until the very end when it all comes together and I like that we learn a little more about why he turned evil and why Zero, a creation of Wily, became friends with X.  We even get 2 stories for the price of one, with X and Zero’s having their own story events.

The power of the PS1 did a lot of favors for presenting the story, with big facial sprites and anime cutscenes excellently done by studio Xebec, at the time likely best known for Martian Successor Nadesico.

Then the characters start talking and I die a little inside.

There’s nothing more that needs to be said about how shit the English dub of Mega Man X4 is so I won’t harp on that.  What I will harp on is the people who try to justify this garbage by saying it was the standard at the time!  That is bullshit!  Mega Man X4 came out in 1997!  The following are games with voice acting that came out before or around 1997.
 
King’s Quest 6 came out in 1992.

Star Wars: Dark Forces, 1995.

Toonstruck, 1996.

Mega Man Legends, 1997!  Another Mega Man game in the same year!

And then just a year later we got Metal Gear Solid.

Not only was it the standard to have at least passable voice acting in games at the time, but Capcom made a game in the same year that met that standard!  They showed they could do it right, but for one of the mainline titles of their biggest franchises, they didn’t give a shit!

I've watched a few episodes of Astro Boy on Tubi and even though it was dubbed in the 80s, where this "Japanamation" thing wasn't given high priority, it still had better voice acting than Mega Man X4!  Even if we were to ignore any standards of voice acting, it’s common sense!  What lunatic listened to this acting and thought it was ok to release?!  Did they really think this wouldn’t get lambasted?!

The lack of any care is why I can’t even enjoy the acting in MMX4 ironically.  In order for something to be so bad it’s good, the person behind it needs to have put honest effort into it and for it to come out wrong.

When the creator doesn’t care, it’s joyless and pathetic.  That’s why it’s so agonizing to watch those videos from Dingo Pictures.

Mega Man 8 was just as bad, but at least with that game there wasn’t quite as much spoken dialogue and the classic series is lighter in tone so characters sounding silly doesn’t sting quite as badly.  Duo’s voice also wasn’t terrible so it at least did the ending somewhat right.

And if you thought it was just the acting in X4 that’s awful, don’t worry.  The translation sucks too.  It’s riddled with grammatical errors, flat, matter-of-fact dialogue when there’s supposed to be a tone to it and sometimes outright mistranslations.  The intro screen to Magma Dragoon’s stage says he betrayed the “Irregular Hunters”.  That’s the Japanese name of the Maverick Hunters!  How do you miss that?!

Mega Man X4’s crappy acting and crappy translation (mostly the acting) sucks me out of the experience.  The only thing stopping the story from becoming a complete storytelling shitshow like Final Fantasy 7 is the untouched visual aspects.

There should be a comma after "you".

At least the gameplay is on point.  X4’s stages are great.  They not only look gorgeous with the added power of the PS1, but they almost all allow for speedy progression if the player so chooses and there’s not a lot of cryptic bullshit the player couldn’t possibly know about this time.  Things that are hidden have generally visual cues to guide an eagle-eyed player to them.
No more railroading either.  It’s probably a good idea to get the leg parts easily found in Web Spider’s stage first, but they don’t feel strictly necessary this time.  I got through 3 stages and still got some collectibles without needing the air dash.

Zero doesn’t even have to deal with the armor parts.  He’s much more straightforward and his hack and slash gameplay style is a blast to play with, doing huge damage with up-close and personal sword swings at the risk of taking higher damage.  X already has a good sense of speed, but Zero can kill enemies so quickly that he can blow through stages in record time if the player using him is good enough.  It’s by far the biggest and best contribution X4 adds to the gameplay.

Where X4’s gameplay drops the ball for me is most of the bosses.  Web Spider, Storm Owl and Cyber Peacock are the “wait your turn” kinds of bosses that I gave X2 shit for, Frost Walrus has fewer moves than Chill Penguin and Jet Stingray is a repetitive slog that’s hard to hit with most of X’s weapons.  Slash Beast and Colonel are fun fights, but both of them use attacks that you once again have to dash under when it would’ve been much more convenient and practical to just duck.  Let me duck!

There are enough good bosses in the game to make up for the bad ones, especially the ones outside of the 8 main bosses, but for the final boss X4 doesn’t fully address the problem I’ve had with the past 3 games with how much the player is forced to do in one go.
Mercifully the game saves after each stage of the endgame for once so you don’t have to do all that in one go, but you still have to go through the final boss that way and this time Sigma is rocking 3 phases, meaning if you die at the final phase, you have to do 2 phases over again.  Yes, the first phase is a joke and easy to beat without taking damage, but it’s still time consuming and yet another boss that makes you wait your turn to hit him.  Sigma’s final form isn’t too hard once you get the method to deal with his attacks down, but that still requires dying as part of the learning process, which kicks you right back to dealing with the first 2 forms again, wasting your time and not giving back your sub-tanks!  This game needs save states!  The endgame frustration isn’t nearly as bad as it was in the SNES games, but it’s still there.

Even with my gripes, overall I think X4 is a decent game where the negatives in the gameplay are outweighed by the positives.  The story, on the other hand, has its potential badly hurt by Capcom deciding to put a team of what I can only assume are meth heads who should never be allowed to touch games in charge of their English version and that is a bummer.  If Capcom had gotten someone competent to translate it, Mega Man X4 might have been a great game.  Instead it’s just good enough to be fun to play.

Mega Man X5

X5 escalates the story from the usual fight against an antagonistic force to a fight to save the world from a world-ending cataclysm.  X4 established that space colonies are a thing and X5 both rolls with that and brings back the Sigma Virus as a plot element.

At the start of the game Sigma seems to be stuck in space after the events of X4, but he comes up with a new way to spread his influence.  Instead of manipulating others he hired a mercenary named Dynamo to set his plan into motion.  Dynamo spreads the Sigma Virus (I’m not sure by what method) around a space colony named Eurasia.  The ensuing chaos has X and Zero on the scene and after destroying a giant statue taken over by the Sigma virus, the resulting explosion causes the virus to fall to the earth below, causing mass panic as reploids turn against their human masters.  I’m not sure how a virus, computer or biological, would make it to earth in such a large capacity instead of burning up in the atmosphere, but this won’t be the last time this franchise fails to understand the harsh effects of falling from space.

Things go from bad to worse when someone or something (not sure if it’s the virus or sabotage from Dynamo) causes Eurasia to go off its orbit and begin falling toward earth.  With the planet in a total panic and much of the rest of the Maverick Hunters infected, the ones left put their hopes in an old, unused weapon called the Enigma Cannon, which is supposed to have such power that it might be able to destroy Eurasia and either destroy it or blast it apart into much less destructive pieces.  In order to use it at full capacity, X and Zero are tasked with gathering parts for the Enigma cannon by getting them from various reploids that won’t give them up without a fight, usually thanks to the Sigma virus getting to them.

When the cannon (very likely) doesn’t work, plan B is getting a space shuttle to ram into Eurasia, which requires a separate set of parts.  Since the auto-pilot is down with a case of the Sigma virus and can’t be used, Zero volunteers to pilot it and eject at the last minute.  Yes, Zero can eject himself and fall all the way down to earth from the stratosphere and live.  He’s banged up and has to recover afterward, but he’s either made of impossibly strong stuff (that somehow takes more damage than X) or, again, the writers don’t understand just how ultra hot and destructive falling from space is.

While this is happening, Sigma gets a new body by teaming up with some kind of AI recreation of Dr. Wily, like an evil counterpart to AI Dr. Light and his armor capsules.  Their ultimate plan calls back to X2, where Sigma and Wily have the common goal of trying to make Zero into the evil robot he was made to be.

This story is awesome.  I love it.  The stakes are raised with Sigma’s most successful plan yet, we have a villain team-up connecting to the classic games, X and Zero have the duel that’s been hinted at (with the real one this time, not the fake X2 one) and from a world building standpoint I like that X5 shows more of the Maverick Hunters.  Up to this point all we saw of them (that didn’t go maverick) was X, Zero, Dr. Cain and Green Biker Dude.

Maverick Hunter X helped with this a little by including a few background Maverick Hunters, but they were only there as set dressing.  With X5 we finally get to see more of the hunters acting as a team.  We have mission control girl, tech guy, leader guy and medic guy, all of whom have something to contribute.

I even like Alia’s messages.  Alia gets a lot of shit from players for interrupting the game with her dialogue and yes, sometimes she’s just pointing out things that are rather obvious, but I really like it when she goes over the setting and context of each stage, explaining what it is and why you’re there.  It’s more world building.

One of my favorite things about X5’s story is how replayable it is.  There is so much that can be different in X5 that can make each playthrough of the game unique.  The good ending in which either plan A or B works is nice and conclusive, but almost like a “what-if” scenario are the possibilities of the cannon working or the shuttle NOT working, the second of which leads to Sigma succeeding, laying waste to the earth and turning Zero into an evil maverick, at least until X snaps him out of it.  The only other game I’ve ever played that has such a scenario is Julius mode in Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow and X5 did it first.

There’s also all the dialogue variations.  The bosses have the most varied backgrounds in the series, including an ex-Repliforce, ex-Maverick Hunter, researchers and a strange mutation brought about by the Sigma virus.  Each of them gets different pre-fight dialogue depending on what has happened in the game’s story and which character is being used.  In X4 you only got 2 variants with 2 of the regular bosses.

The story presentation took a bit of a hit, but I don’t mind the route Capcom went with with the cutscenes at all.  There are no more anime cutscenes, but the still images used are plentiful and well-drawn.  I would’ve liked the game to be voiced, but on the bright side there’s none of that shitastic English dub to turn the story into a joke.  It’s engaging the whole way through.

This is all done with a translation that’s actually ok this time, but just ok.  I think this was a time when a lot of localizers didn’t quite know how to translate Japanese dialogue in a manner that sounded natural.  There are lines peppered throughout the game that seem off, like it was a literal translation that didn’t consider how some Japanese words can be translated in different ways or how sentences can be rephrased in ways that more naturally fit.  Still, it’s coherent, some of the emotionally charged moments still land and there are almost no spelling or grammatical mistakes so it’s a hell of a lot better than that shameful clown show that was X4’s translation.  Now it’s a good clown show with a big comfy couch.

The gameplay is just as good as the story and has just as much replay value.  The ability to play as X or Zero at any time in the game offers all kinds of approaches.  You can go the X4 route and stick with only one of them or you can use either of them in select stages if you think it would be easier with one character than the other.  The parts add even more replay value, allowing for more approaches and gameplay variation with their different perks.
The downside to this is the game implicitly encourages sticking with one character because the heart tanks and sub-tanks only apply to one of them and they’re finite, but using both characters in tandem is still a doable tactic if you know the game and use the parts.  If nothing else rookie hunter mode and/or the final armors in the endgame can be a safety net if one character got neglected.

In the level design department, X5 has some of my favorite, most gimmick-filled stages yet.  All the things you do like disarming bombs, fighting a fully armed submarine, hiding from a sea of flames and jumping from train to train make each stage unique from each other moreso than any other X game before it, all still retaining that sense of speed and action.  There’s only one genuinely bad stage.

The bosses that come with them are the best selection in the franchise yet.  They not only have great names that add to the Mega Man musical naming conventions (fuck you Legacy Collection 2), but they also strike the perfect balance of having attacks that are slow enough to be reasonably dodged while still requiring the player to make single-second decisions at a moment’s notice.  Bosses like Squid Adler and Duff McWhalen are a lot of fun because they have platforming challenges in their fight, with Adler electrifying the floor and McWhalen spawning ice blocks, though the insta-kill spikes in his second phase are a bit much.

The Skyver brings back Storm Eagle’s challenge with having to stay on the stage while dodging the different ways he charges at you and Izzy Glow has you jumping all over the place at an increasing pace to dodge his firefly shots, his teleportation movement and his full sweeping lazer attack that has you hugging the wall and ducking.

Yes, ducking!  You can duck in this game!  You can finally duck!  Quack quack quack!

Ducking comes in especially handy against the Shadow Devil.  I’ve complained about “wait your turn” bosses before, but I don't hate the fight against the Shadow Devil because
1. It’s a throwback to the classic series and throwbacks are what X5’s endgame is all about.
2. It isn’t hard to dodge its segmented movement, certainly not as hard as the Yellow Devil’s.  You only really need to duck and watch when to jump over the bottom cube.
3. As long as you hit it with his weakness, the one or two hits you get on it at a time do a ton of damage so the fight doesn’t drag on too long.
4. You can bypass the dodging by constantly wall jumping in the corner for safety.

The fight against Zero in the bad ending is my favorite from the setup alone.  Even if the fight itself isn’t especially complicated, the dialogue between the evil Zero and his former friend is great and the music goes hard.  It’s so good it’s one of only 2 tracks from the X series to be in Super Smash Brothers Ultimate.

The initial 8 bosses can also be manipulated to be made harder and you can reap greater rewards in the process, which just further adds to both replay value and customization in the way you can play the game.

Mega Man X5 does so many things right that I have to try to find anything to complain about.  Even the final boss isn’t as frustrating this time around.  Once again the final boss makes you re-fight its first phase if you lose against the second without refilling sub-tanks, but if you come prepared it’s not hard enough of a final boss form for that to be a consistent problem and it’s a fun as hell fight.

I know people don’t like that endings are determined by random chance regardless of how many parts are collected, but they’re preaching to the guy who decided what units to take to battle in a Fire Emblem game by rolling his Oogie Boogie dice.

The meanest thing I can say about X5 is that Squid Adler’s stage sucks.  The bike section sucks and the tedious plug connecting sucks, but even then X5 allows stages to be skipped at the cost of parts and upgrades in them.  Hell, you can skip right to the endgame if you’re a hardcore challenge gamer.
The only other negative I can think of is that the Gaia Armor sucks too, but that’s not much of a complaint when it’s just another option given for the player to take or leave and the Falcon Armor is so fun that it makes up for the Gaia Armor’s shortcomings.
It says something when my only two problems with X5 are both minor and skippable.

Some of the other Mega Man X games may do some individual aspects better than X5, but X5 is the one that’s almost consistently a joy to play from start to finish.  With all the different options the player is given they can play the game their way and all the different variants to the ending and dialogue compliments the replays that result from that.  This is on top of the game design itself having great stages (if squids aren’t involved), great bosses and a great story.  Mega Man X5 is so far my second favorite in the series next to Maverick Hunter X.

Mega Man X6

Right off the bat Mega Man X6’s story starts off on the wrong foot with me.  It follows the good ending of X5, where the day is saved, but puts a damper on the victory by explaining that the day, for the most part, was not saved after all.  While Sigma was defeated and Eurasia was destroyed enough for the earth not to get obliterated, the pieces of it that were blown apart still dispersed over the earth and since Eurasia turned into a giant nesting ground for the Sigma virus, that means it was spread all over the earth along with it, leaving the planet devastated and forcing what remained of the human race to retreat underground to escape the ecological effects.  Reploids were forced underground too, but were able to return to the surface much sooner, since they can survive the harsh atmosphere.

I’m not exactly understanding the explanation about why the surface is uninhabitable to humans.  It’s supposed to be because the Sigma virus is polluting the earth’s atmosphere, but isn’t it a computer virus spread through some form of contact?  I thought it only affects robots.  If the surface was uninhabitable to humans because mavericks are running wild on it, that’d be one thing, but the Legacy Collection 2 specifically says it’s affecting the atmosphere and making it so humans can’t live there.  That only makes sense if the virus mutated and found a way to infect biological beings, but I’ve seen no evidence of that being the case.  I think that happens in Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite, but doesn’t Sigma need the Infinity Stones for that?

While I’m not thrilled at the thought that my triumphant victory in X5 wasn’t really much of a victory at all, the major change to the setting does demonstrate how the X series is willing to shake things up.  It’s not just mean ol’ Dr. Wily constantly coming back to cause trouble before everything goes back to normal.  The Mega Man X games’ plots have real consequences.

The plot of X6 kicks off proper when a reploid scientist named Gate is observing some of Eurasia’s rubble and finds a piece of Zero, which is infected with the Sigma virus.  In X5, it’s established in both gameplay and story that Zero’s body interacts with the Sigma virus in a way that benefits him rather than causes any ill effects like other reploids.  This means his body is one in which the Sigma virus thrives and since Eurasia was one big concentrated virus hive, it was able to live on in Zero’s body or pieces of Zero’s body even after the virus spread across the planet dissipated.

Even though Sigma himself is not around to mind control him, the Sigma virus still causes Gate to become manic and he creates something called the Nightmare, which may or may not be another mind virus.
The Nightmare seems to be something of an equivalent to Scarecrow fear gas for Reploids, causing hallucinations, but since it only seems to occur in specific areas, it appears to not linger in a Reploid’s system.  This is evidenced by conversations with Alia, where she doesn’t detect the nightmare effects from a long distance.

Gate’s ultimate goal is a little different from Sigma’s.  Instead of wanting to destroy the humans, Gate wants to create a world of perfect and better reploids like the ones he is renowned for creating.  That means he wants to subjugate to destroy all humans AND reploids he deems inferior.  Humans are in such a bad state that he doesn’t need to worry about them yet and he plans to weed out the weak reploids through the use of the Nightmare.  The first such superior reploid worthy of inheriting the earth that Gate builds is High Max, a powerful, nearly invincible super reploid.

With the Nightmare wreaking havoc on the planet, Gate plays a game of deception to keep suspicion off of him.  He uses the Nightmare to create a phantom version of Zero to make it look like Zero is in some way behind the Nightmare phenomenon because since he’s missing and possibly dead, he can’t defend himself.  To further boost Gate’s image, his assistant Isoc declares they have gotten 8 investigators to look into the Nightmare at various points of high activity when in reality the investigators are there to make sure the Nightmare plan is running smoothly.  The Maverick Hunters don’t trust these investigators and thus go to investigate them, which for some reason or another leads to the investigators picking a fight.

Each of the investigators has a tragic past that resulted in their death before they were brought back to life by gate.  Since “DNA resurrections” are against the law (I think it’s different from having the control chip like in X2), Gate was the one willing to go against society and bring them back, meaning the investigators owe him a debt of gratitude.
Just like in X5, each boss has pre-fight dialogue depending on which character is used so there’s a good establishment of emotional stakes.  Some of them have a past with the Maverick Hunters, Shield Sheldon seems to know X from the incident that led to his suicide and Alia remembers contributing to Blizzard Wolfang’s death.  They’re villains that hit closer to home than the guys in X5, where the X Hunters only knew OF them at most.

Zero coming back could’ve been handled better.  I’ll give Mega Man X6 credit in that for a while the game doesn’t so much as imply that Zero is coming back and the box art has Zero in the background, which does imply he might be a factor in the plot, but not that he’s still alive.  The way he’s colored can give the impression that the Zero on the box art is a memory of him that X holds with his Z saber.

It’s just that it fumbles how he comes back after defeating the phantom Zero.  Instead of being a tearful reunion where X is awestruck that his friend is back when they couldn’t find a single one of his parts, it’s kind of brushed off.  The explanation as to how he came back could’ve used some more elaboration too.  The implication is that the AI Dr. Light was able to help him recover somehow, but the game never elaborates.  I don’t need another game dedicated to bringing Zero back, but I would’ve liked more than a badly translated meme line.

That aside, when taking all the plot elements into consideration, I like what X6 does for a story.  Sigma is not the villain this time.  Sure, Gate brings him back at the very end, but he has no agency to the plot and is little more than an attack dog that Gate brought back as a robot zombie with some screws loose.  Unlike Sigma, Gate doesn’t seem the type to throw away pawns when he’s done with them because, after all, they are the powerful reploids he wants to inherit the earth.

Further distinguishing himself from Sigma, Gate has his own big chungus robot enforcer, High Max.  There have been bulky enforcer characters like Byte or Violen before, but High Max actually matters to the plot beyond being a flunky.  He’s a reploid Gate made to be the perfect example of the kind of reploid he wants the new world to be filled with: powerful and nearly invincible.  His whole existence is to show that he’s better than other reploids and if you beat him, Gate and Isoc are surprised because he’s supposed to be unbeatable.

The opposing faction of Mega Man X6 is a refreshing change of pace for a Mega Man X plot, but my biggest gripe has to do with something I typed earlier: “when taking all the plot elements into consideration”.  Much of the initial premise that kicks off the plot is withheld from the player until the very end.  It doesn’t say that what Gate picks up is a piece of Zero, doesn’t say that he was infected with the maverick virus because of it and doesn’t say that Gate created the Nightmare in the first place.  It’s not an intriguing mystery.  There’s no twist that happens when they reveal it.  All it does is make the plot hard to follow.  It’s vagueness for the sake of being vague and when these things are explained all I feel is that I wish I had known sooner.

The same nicely drawn artwork that I liked in X5 is back to present the story, but this time there’s actual voice acting, but only in Japanese and only for the full cutscenes; there’s none of it for boss conversations.  If you needed even more reason to not bother with the old Mega Man X collection, the Japanese voice acting is taken out of the version in it.
I don’t get why Capcom didn’t just dub the game.  They could’ve made up for X4 and made a good English dub for once, but I guess I shouldn’t bet on that when the translation alone is already dire.  It’s full of mistranslations, typos and weird phrasings.  What happened here?  X5’s was generally pretty ok.  At least it was proofread.

The translation is just the beginning of X6’s problems.  I’m aware of this game’s infamous reputation, but I want to be clear that no matter how much bad I have to say about it, there are genuinely good things in it that make it worth a try and I have to give credit where it’s due.

• The soundtrack is pretty great.  I think even this game’s haters can agree with that.
• I like a lot of the game’s boss ideas.  Things like a turtle with a shell you have to hit the weak points on, a shark that summons scrap simulacrum of previous bosses in the franchise, a water flea(?) that constantly multiplies to overwhelm you.  Those are really cool concepts.  I also like the good old “villain using a hero’s powers” with Gate donning a golden armor upgrade like the one in X3.
• Sometimes the boss ideas pan out and are really fun.  It was fun cutting through Infinity Mijinion’s clones with Zero, jumping over Ground Scaravich’s ball of increasing size, ducking and jumping over Commander Yammark’s advancing option fire and I sure felt like a smarty smart when I realized that I could use Shield Sheldon’s weapon to block all of Blizzard Wolfang’s overhead projectiles.
• One of the problems with X5 was that there was a finite number of Heart Tanks and upgrades that could be given to each character, incentivising sticking to one of them.  This is alleviated a little bit in X6.  Health upgrades from rescued reploids are shared and not only is the nightmare energy in abundance to begin with, the returning Dynamo can be fought an infinite number of times to get nightmare souls, meaning the upgrade resource is no longer finite and using both characters is more viable.
• Both characters now have a long and short ranged option for some versatility, but without taking away what makes their play style unique.  Zero has a much better Z-buster than the one in X5, but can’t rapid fire it the same way X’s can and X has the Z-saber, but can’t do blade combos.

That’s enough positives.  This is possibly the worst action platformer I’ve ever played in my life.

It’s crazy how much bullshit is in this game.  X6 has it all.  Enemies are put in the most inopportune places, bottomless pits and insta-kill spikes are everywhere and so many sections seem designed to piss me off.  Where do I even begin?

How about a reflecting lazer puzzle in cramped rooms where the lazer hits you?  How about sliding around on ice platforms that can’t be wall jumped on?  How about fire and ice raining from the sky, hitting you at all times?!  In that same stage there are ice blocks that fall at random and can potentially trap you between two of them before crushing you to finish you off.  This is all while enemies (a common one of which can attack you through walls) harass you to throw you off the tricky platforming to your doom, by the way.

There are so many “gotcha” moments too.  In one stage I jump to avoid something and then a formation of skyward enemies swoop in to hit me.  There are leaps of faith and then other times where the leap makes you question that faith.  When I see a row of spikes on both sides of a corridor leading down, I’m expecting it to be a section where I need to adjust my jump to avoid the spikes on the sides to reach the bottom.  The NES Mega Man games had a lot of those.  Instead I fall down the corridor of spikes into spikes.

That’s not even the worst use of those insta-kill spikes that X6 seems to love.  The worst comes in the final part of Rainy Turtloid’s stage, where there are several hallways of spikes on the ceilings and floors off to the side.  Any normal player would safely assume that you’re supposed to use the shadow armor’s spike protection to walk through.  There’s just one problem: one of the pieces of that armor is through those spikes!  What the game wants you to do is a ridiculously precise, pixel-perfect air dash at a ground level, even though the camera does not show that there’s any safe area past it to dash to, and it wants you to do it twice in a row!

Enemies are always getting cheap shots in, being put in places where you can’t immediately fight back or right in the way of areas you have to go to avoid instant death.  Metal Shark Player’s stage is full of this.  You’re supposed to run from safe spot to safe spot, but they put the strong, hard to kill enemies in the safe spot to sucker punch you while also making small enemies with deceptively small hitboxes move through walls to hit you while you’re waiting!

The enemies themselves don’t actually do that much damage, especially not to armored X.  The problem is you’re constantly getting hit by them!  Playing this game is like doing an obstacle course while getting attacked by a swarm of bees!

You have to hit their tiny heads to kill them and they can potentially respawn.

The bosses aren’t much better.  As I stated, some are fun, but a lot of them are aggravating, especially to the unprepared.  The bosses in the endgame are far and away some of the worst bosses in the entire franchise.  I like Gate’s golden armor concept, but the fact that you can only hurt him by destroying his attack means that he’s both the dreaded “wait your turn” boss and one that might as well rely on luck because he’s darting around the stage so much it’s impossible to actually aim.  This is all while having to platform over a bottomless pit that he’ll eventually start breaking the platforms for!  Holy shit!

Before that is the Nightmare Mother, a boss so big that, at first, it’s nearly impossible to get out of its way without pinpoint precision, but then it speeds up and becomes literally impossible to dodge!  Eventually you just have to tank the hits and try to kill it before it kills you!  Did the designers fail the Game Design 101 course?!

This is all without bringing up all the fucking nightmare effects that turn levels into a living hell, making is so you can’t see, can’t attack right or can’t avoid taking damage!  They make what’s already a relentlessly difficult game even harder!

Granted, it can be made a little easier.  I think most people like to ignore, or aren’t aware of, the game’s easy mode.  Not rookie hunter mode in the collection.  I mean the easy difficulty in the game’s options menu.  Easy mode makes much-needed changes to the game that can make some parts more tolerable and even, dare I say, fun.  It increases the damage enemies take and give, making High Max a lot less tedious, and removes several enemies altogether, reducing the number of times you get sucker punched while trying to do the tricky platforming.  The awful platforming section in Rainy Turtloid’s stage was a breeze in easy mode.If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear easy mode is the game’s normal difficulty, but someone goofed and labeled it as easy difficulty.  It doesn’t fix the awful level designs full of insta-kill scenarios though so I found myself having to use rookie hunter mode anyway.

Normally I don’t use rookie hunter mode because my Saiyan pride won’t allow it, but I made an exception for Mega Man X6 and even then only when I got sick of the game’s shit.  That ended up being a moot point because I got sick of this game’s shit for about 70% of the game!
Rookie Hunter mode noticeably changes more about Mega Man X6 than it does any other game in the Legacy Collections, like they knew they had to go the extra mile for how unfair it is.  For X6, it doesn’t just give the usual attack and defense boost.  It also adds things to certain areas as a band-aid for the shitty platforming.  The most standout thing it adds is a floor to the stretch of wall jumping in Rainy Turtloid’s stage so you can completely bypass it and another floor to the fight with Gate.  This is the only game in the collections where you use Rookie Hunter mode to get an achievement, as if to point out that it’s needed.

When I use rookie hunter mode and easy mode to power through the worst of it, I can sometimes enjoy the things I like about X6, like the music, graphics, story (badly translated as it is) and some of the bosses, but when that fun time is over it beats the shit out of me.  It’s like being in an abusive relationship except maybe not because I enjoy the pain.

This is a funny game and I do mean “ha ha” funny.  Easy mode tones it down, but the default difficulty is so bullshit that it creeps into the territory of I Wanna Be The Guy and Kaizo Mario.  It was such suffering playing it, but when I took a step back I laughed at my own gamer rage.

That combined with the shoddy translation makes Mega Man X6 rife with ironic “so bad it’s good” enjoyment and is perfect for shitposting internet memelords.  It was practically made for drunk streams.  I’ve seen more memes about X6 than any other Mega Man X game because there is so much to make fun of.  Every discussion about this game I’ve ever heard has everyone laughing at some point and I can’t bring myself to hate a game that has led to such joy, even if that joy comes from bashing it.

It keeps winning more memelord points into the final boss, where, like a grand finale, he opens his mouth and

Mega Man X6 is a game where the goods things about it can be enjoyed unironically and the bad things about it can be enjoyed ironically, making for a weird mix where good is good and bad is also good.  It’s not a good game on the whole, but it sure is an entertaining one.

Next time I’ll be concluding my touristy look at the Mega Man X games with the PS2 duology.