Happy 30th Anniversary Mega Man X!!!!

[DSC]

Its my favorite game of all time and a major player in leading me down the path of loving retro gaming, so I just couldn't let it go by without celebrating!

[Rudolph]

Really odd how they still have not made a Mega Man X9. Mega Man got 9, 10 and 11, but X only got X Dive. :(

 

Then again, given how X8 ended, I am not sure I really want to see what is next...

Edited December 17, 2023 by Rudolph

[DSC]

To mark this special occasion, I played through the entirety of the game, something I hadn't done in a long while. It's so funny... Back when I first played it, it was an amazing struggle over an entire week to achieve completion, and now I just casually do it no problems in a single day!

[LadyMistDragon]

Happy 30th to a great game!

[Rudolph]

Still hoping that the fan-made Mega Man X: Corrupted gets released, as it looks like the next best thing!

 

 

[Dragonsbrethren]

It's truly impressive how good of a game X1 was considering it was launching an entirely new spinoff series from the originals. It iterated on the NES gameplay just enough to feel like a major improvement over the classic series in practically every way.

[PsychEyeball]

Mega Man X was a great game, but in overall a pretty poor game series. The first two games were absolute keepers and ranked among the SNES' best games, but X3 was where things went south. A huge amount of bloat was added to the series, slowing everything down to a crawl with progressively diminishing returns.

 

X4 was a return to form but couldn't quite match the first two games in quality.

 

X5, for being planned as the series finale, felt incredibly haphazard. There was a growing amount of instakilling in level designs, Alia repeatedly stopping the game dead in its tracks to tell you obvious things like "don't fall in the pit" and other slightly nagging details.

 

X6 is just an evil game. It's X5 again but with the difficulty slider set to Extremely Hard. I could maybe see this appeal to a select few but I can't get behind it. Every time I play this game, I get in a bad mood.

 

X7? It feels like it was the first 3D platformer ever made. Except it was on the PS2.

 

X8 is the epitome of so close, yet so far. I liked a bunch of the decisions that X8 attempted, but why oh why did they make game overs a thing again. For all their faults, X5-X7 did the lives system right and made game overs stop mattering. Why walk back on this design choice? 

[Rudolph]

Luckily for us, there are always the X5 Improvement Project and the Mega Man X6 Tweaks romhacks. If you own the original games, apply these to enjoy some much-welcome quality-of-life features and - in X6's case - a better translation as well as brand-new story content and art assets!

 

What I hate the most about the Playstation 1 entries is that they reduced the number of subtanks from 4 to 2. Just... why?

 

Anyway, back to romhacks, be sure to check out Zero Project, which makes Zero fully playable from beginning to end - complete with different dialogues and cutscenes when playing as Zero!

Edited December 20, 2023 by Rudolph

[Dynamo]

For all the hate X6 gets, I must say it has some of my favorite music tracks in the whole Megaman series. As for Corrupted, I remember seeing that a long time ago, just how long has it been in development for at this point?

[Mystic 256]

X7 is the only truly bad one imo

I like all 7 other mega man X games and also mega man X command mission

[betabox]

X6 is not genuinely hard (save for the Extreme difficulty it has, but everybody talks about the game in general). The difficulty is only artificial and the game as a whole is tedious, both of which lead to it becoming boring and repetitive to play through. None of it's helped by the fact that it's full of ideas and concepts that may have been good as that: on paper. But they fell flat in execution. I'd say X5 has more genuine difficulty than it though, and at that, I have a harder time getting through several parts of it than X6.

Edited December 23, 2023 by betabox

[Rudolph]

17 hours ago, Mystic 256 said:

X7 is the only truly bad one imo

The Xtreme games on Gameboy Color are the bad ones.

 

For all its flaws, X7 is an original game with new ideas; in contrast, the Xtreme games are just worse versions of the SNES games made for a handheld console that could not run them properly in addition to lacking the number of buttons you would expect for a Mega Man X game.

 

To draw a comparison to Doom, X7 is Doom 3 whereas Mega Man Xtreme is... I do not know, a NES Doom demake?

Edited December 21, 2023 by Rudolph