the midddd... the middddd is coming
Umm... It's better than X6 and X7, so there's that.
holy fucking shit
Peak Megaman X game
X8 is what you get if you decide you're going to fix X7 but somehow figure that the only issue with that game was the camera, which is an incredibly daft way of looking at the problem. X7 was going to be a bad game from the moment they started developing the tech for it, trying to map a fast-paced 2D action game to 3D, without much regard for preserving the way it played.
The result was a tedious mess with a long list of issues, which includes: awkward physics that create problems not only during fights, but while climbing and moving around on platforms. 3D animations that are just not as snappy as 2D -- achieving that requires a lot of polish -- resulting in a game that feels slower overall. Characters feel unresponsive, as attack animations are far longer and unnecessary additions such as turning animations are added. In fact, while the playable characters are the ones for which this issue is immediately noticeable, almost every enemy in the game has this issue too, which means that bosses feel stilted and unthreatening.
There's more: back when the games were 2D, there was a clear distinction between foreground and background due to distinct rendering styles (X6 is arguably an exception, but it's not a bar for quality). When everything is 3D and stuff flies into and from the background, that distinction is a lot harder to make, resulting in stages that are more difficult to read, and hits or deaths you would have seen coming from a mile away before.
This is also an issue with lighting, color, and the use of perspective. For the former two, 2D games enjoyed well-defined color palettes with defined edges between one stage element and the other. You could see spikes in your peripheral vision as soon as it entered the screen, thanks to their marked shape framed by the clearly understandable platforms, whereas now they blend into details on floors and walls. Details which, by the way, you wouldn't normally see, if not for the use of perspective to accentuate that yes, this is a 3D environment you're looking at! It looks pretty, but adds more noise and makes distances harder to parse compared to the 2D analogues.
The PS2 itself factors in, its relatively low processing power for a 3D console contributing to the limited visuals, slower pace, loading times, etcetera. Only after all that, then you have the design issues, including the camera that seems like it belongs in an RPG of sorts. But forget about the camera for a moment, and look at everything else that comes before it. Can a good Mega Man X game come out of that mess? It can't. And that's what X8 ultimately felt like: a sequel that removes the 3D gameplay from X7, but keeps most of the other problems.
Which isn't to say the game is an exact copy of X7, it did bring new ideas to the table, among which are some very cool ideas and some terrible ones. On the good camp, characters have been reworked and are much more interesting this time around. All of them are available from the start, and power ups are no longer restricted to the character that picks them up. Each of their main gameplay issues have been solved, as well.
X is now back to having two armors, the Hermes and Icarus armors, both of which are crazy powerful and can be mixed and matched if you feel like it. The downside is that they're ugly as heck, but I'll take it after X7's pretty but anemic Glide Armor. His charge shot is back to being good, since it covers a larger part of the screen and there is no lock-on mechanic anymore. This also means Axl loses the spot of top ranged character, but as he can now hover for an extended period of time as well as control the direction of his shots, he finds himself a niche in shooting things outside of their attack ranges.
Something that also helps Axl is a newly added mechanic where switching characters allows the character in the back to restore HP, encouraging the player to not focus on a single protagonist. Still, I prefer having Zero in the back, who still feels sluggish compared to his X4 incarnation, but his Z-Saber now reaches farther, and if it doesn't fit your playstyle, he can collect other weapons to use, like a glaive and a hammer. It's all very stylish, and while I personally stuck to the Z-Saber, I hear the extra weapons are legitimately useful on the Hard difficulty setting.
That said, to get those weapons, you have to go through the upgrade system, and this is where things gets stupid. X8 decided just picking up the upgrade in a stage was too easy. Not only did they make the acquisition methods convoluted -- I don't think most of these are possible to figure out without a guide -- but you also have to grind metals in stages to be able to equip them.
How grindy is it? About a third of my final playtime was spent away from the controller while the shoot button was held down and Axl farmed metals for me. There are faster methods than the AFK one, but it's still hours worth of farming, and you have to do it to get all the upgrades. To add insult to injury, extra lives also have to be bought with metals: the EX-tank is gone, the game is back to booting you to stage select on a game over, and if you want to have more than two lives, you're going to have to fork over those valuable metals.
It's an awful system. Better than rescuing reploids for upgrades and having to redo stages over and over, I guess, but still awful. And then again, you still have to do that, since backtracking is at its worst since X5. In fact, X8's stage design is centered around frustration more than anything else. There are two Ride Chaser stages that play like X7 stages on steroids and can just eff right off. There's a Ride Armor stage that's infuriating in how the armor handles, and in the wonky stage gimmicks that force you to retry dozens of times. There are spikefests that call to mind all of the innate issues to the game I've mentioned above. It's all awful.
There's also a ranking system for the stages, NG+, multiple navigators you can experiment with on stages, but god, I am not submitting myself to this game one more time, and neither should anyone. Mega Man X8 is a sad attempt to salvage the franchise, and puts a long-delayed end to a franchise that kept going for at least three games too long.
The result was a tedious mess with a long list of issues, which includes: awkward physics that create problems not only during fights, but while climbing and moving around on platforms. 3D animations that are just not as snappy as 2D -- achieving that requires a lot of polish -- resulting in a game that feels slower overall. Characters feel unresponsive, as attack animations are far longer and unnecessary additions such as turning animations are added. In fact, while the playable characters are the ones for which this issue is immediately noticeable, almost every enemy in the game has this issue too, which means that bosses feel stilted and unthreatening.
There's more: back when the games were 2D, there was a clear distinction between foreground and background due to distinct rendering styles (X6 is arguably an exception, but it's not a bar for quality). When everything is 3D and stuff flies into and from the background, that distinction is a lot harder to make, resulting in stages that are more difficult to read, and hits or deaths you would have seen coming from a mile away before.
This is also an issue with lighting, color, and the use of perspective. For the former two, 2D games enjoyed well-defined color palettes with defined edges between one stage element and the other. You could see spikes in your peripheral vision as soon as it entered the screen, thanks to their marked shape framed by the clearly understandable platforms, whereas now they blend into details on floors and walls. Details which, by the way, you wouldn't normally see, if not for the use of perspective to accentuate that yes, this is a 3D environment you're looking at! It looks pretty, but adds more noise and makes distances harder to parse compared to the 2D analogues.
The PS2 itself factors in, its relatively low processing power for a 3D console contributing to the limited visuals, slower pace, loading times, etcetera. Only after all that, then you have the design issues, including the camera that seems like it belongs in an RPG of sorts. But forget about the camera for a moment, and look at everything else that comes before it. Can a good Mega Man X game come out of that mess? It can't. And that's what X8 ultimately felt like: a sequel that removes the 3D gameplay from X7, but keeps most of the other problems.
Which isn't to say the game is an exact copy of X7, it did bring new ideas to the table, among which are some very cool ideas and some terrible ones. On the good camp, characters have been reworked and are much more interesting this time around. All of them are available from the start, and power ups are no longer restricted to the character that picks them up. Each of their main gameplay issues have been solved, as well.
X is now back to having two armors, the Hermes and Icarus armors, both of which are crazy powerful and can be mixed and matched if you feel like it. The downside is that they're ugly as heck, but I'll take it after X7's pretty but anemic Glide Armor. His charge shot is back to being good, since it covers a larger part of the screen and there is no lock-on mechanic anymore. This also means Axl loses the spot of top ranged character, but as he can now hover for an extended period of time as well as control the direction of his shots, he finds himself a niche in shooting things outside of their attack ranges.
Something that also helps Axl is a newly added mechanic where switching characters allows the character in the back to restore HP, encouraging the player to not focus on a single protagonist. Still, I prefer having Zero in the back, who still feels sluggish compared to his X4 incarnation, but his Z-Saber now reaches farther, and if it doesn't fit your playstyle, he can collect other weapons to use, like a glaive and a hammer. It's all very stylish, and while I personally stuck to the Z-Saber, I hear the extra weapons are legitimately useful on the Hard difficulty setting.
That said, to get those weapons, you have to go through the upgrade system, and this is where things gets stupid. X8 decided just picking up the upgrade in a stage was too easy. Not only did they make the acquisition methods convoluted -- I don't think most of these are possible to figure out without a guide -- but you also have to grind metals in stages to be able to equip them.
How grindy is it? About a third of my final playtime was spent away from the controller while the shoot button was held down and Axl farmed metals for me. There are faster methods than the AFK one, but it's still hours worth of farming, and you have to do it to get all the upgrades. To add insult to injury, extra lives also have to be bought with metals: the EX-tank is gone, the game is back to booting you to stage select on a game over, and if you want to have more than two lives, you're going to have to fork over those valuable metals.
It's an awful system. Better than rescuing reploids for upgrades and having to redo stages over and over, I guess, but still awful. And then again, you still have to do that, since backtracking is at its worst since X5. In fact, X8's stage design is centered around frustration more than anything else. There are two Ride Chaser stages that play like X7 stages on steroids and can just eff right off. There's a Ride Armor stage that's infuriating in how the armor handles, and in the wonky stage gimmicks that force you to retry dozens of times. There are spikefests that call to mind all of the innate issues to the game I've mentioned above. It's all awful.
There's also a ranking system for the stages, NG+, multiple navigators you can experiment with on stages, but god, I am not submitting myself to this game one more time, and neither should anyone. Mega Man X8 is a sad attempt to salvage the franchise, and puts a long-delayed end to a franchise that kept going for at least three games too long.
A really lame theme park ride that occasionally stops by some rock-solid gameplay segments
This review contains spoilers
A part of my three way tie for the greatest game ever conceived. But this one holds the biggest spot in my heart, and I love a lot more about it.
This is a wonderful evolution to the X series, and a great addition to the timeline that extends past X6.
The games theme of "Evolution" wonderfully extends the X Mega Man Franchise's theme as a whole, how we, as a species, are inept. We fail to care for our planet, and somehow destroy it further then our own war machines can.
By X8, our planet is lost. With the Eurasia crash wiping out 80% of human life, and possibly a few decades in between said crash, we're quickly dying out.
Lumine and Sigma are great symbolizations of this, Sigma representing the pure rage one can have towards this ineptitude, and Lumine, representing a harbinger, and a transport, for those worthy to move on from this ruined world, and make our own.
All of this, is to simply explain the meaning...Behind "Paradise Lost".
Gameplay wise, one could argue others did it better, like X4-X6. It's a different style for sure, but I think it handles beautifully, even if Zero is more then a little overpowered in this specifically, but it doesn't matter cuz he's still super duper fun.
My only two complaints with the gameplay for the entire game, is Axl and Hermes Armor. They both feel like simple lessers to their alternatives.
Axl has absolutely improved since X7, no longer a simply worse X, but he doesn't really have...Enough, to justify using him.
X has his Armor mechanic, Zero has his new and varied weapons, Axl has...being able to copy like 3 enemies. I really wish he was better, but he simply isn't.
Hermes Armor is still good, sure, and some parts of it are straight up busted, which makes both set bonuses typically not worth it, but Icarus's is absolutely better then Hermes.
Icarus provides less defense, but that buster alone makes up for Hermes's...Pretty bad buster. Shotgun compared to spam mid charge shots.
But, that's the beauty of Neutral Armor. You can take the best parts from both.
Axl...Cannot. So he is absolutely the lesser in everything here.
Anyways this is the longest thing I've ever written and I gotta do the same thing with Starforce 3 kill me
This is a wonderful evolution to the X series, and a great addition to the timeline that extends past X6.
The games theme of "Evolution" wonderfully extends the X Mega Man Franchise's theme as a whole, how we, as a species, are inept. We fail to care for our planet, and somehow destroy it further then our own war machines can.
By X8, our planet is lost. With the Eurasia crash wiping out 80% of human life, and possibly a few decades in between said crash, we're quickly dying out.
Lumine and Sigma are great symbolizations of this, Sigma representing the pure rage one can have towards this ineptitude, and Lumine, representing a harbinger, and a transport, for those worthy to move on from this ruined world, and make our own.
All of this, is to simply explain the meaning...Behind "Paradise Lost".
Gameplay wise, one could argue others did it better, like X4-X6. It's a different style for sure, but I think it handles beautifully, even if Zero is more then a little overpowered in this specifically, but it doesn't matter cuz he's still super duper fun.
My only two complaints with the gameplay for the entire game, is Axl and Hermes Armor. They both feel like simple lessers to their alternatives.
Axl has absolutely improved since X7, no longer a simply worse X, but he doesn't really have...Enough, to justify using him.
X has his Armor mechanic, Zero has his new and varied weapons, Axl has...being able to copy like 3 enemies. I really wish he was better, but he simply isn't.
Hermes Armor is still good, sure, and some parts of it are straight up busted, which makes both set bonuses typically not worth it, but Icarus's is absolutely better then Hermes.
Icarus provides less defense, but that buster alone makes up for Hermes's...Pretty bad buster. Shotgun compared to spam mid charge shots.
But, that's the beauty of Neutral Armor. You can take the best parts from both.
Axl...Cannot. So he is absolutely the lesser in everything here.
Anyways this is the longest thing I've ever written and I gotta do the same thing with Starforce 3 kill me
Way better than X7 but still not the best
tentou salvar mega man x e
não conseguiu
não conseguiu
I expected this to be awful but it actually kinda blew me away. One of the better games in the X series imo, a blast from start to finish. There's a lot of really cool level gimmicks, I love the combo system, the customization, how they made Axel not just feel like bad X, and I could go on. Really wish the series didn't end here, would love to see a return to this style someday.
I feel like people are a little unfair to this game. It's not as good as the older X games, but it's still a good game. It did a good job salvaging the mess X7 left behind.
Please make x9
Mega Man X8 is a step up from X6 and X7 and genuinely tries to do some things slightly different to the rest of the series, and I can appreciate what it did. Though, I think it still is ultimately a little bit of a mixed bag. I ultimately had a good time it was cool, though I'm not sure I'd always revisit this over X1, X2, X4 or even X5 to some extent
X8 é bom, sofreu muito ódio desnecessário por conta do seu antecessor que é um dos maiores desastres da indústria, mas é sim divertido especialmente no fator rejogabilidade. a trilha sonora é competente, (não acho melhor que X ou X6, mas é boa) o visual é legal (poderia ser bem melhor especialmente pra 2004), o plot é de longe o mais interessante da série e algumas fases tem bons conceitos (de cabeça lembro a do Anton, a fase do Pandamonium e aquela de noite meio stealth) e algumas nem tanto, ( a do Rooster, do Sunflower a de neve e a da moto voadora) o design de todos personagens são fodas demais (Lumine, Pandamonium, Trylobite, armaduras, etc.) e a gameplay é muito boa - não possui level design nojento que nem X6 e nem é uma desgraça como X7 - e pasmem, é a primeira dublagem na saga X que... PRESTA! - não é uma dublagem magnífica mas é boa!
resumindo : jogo competente e divertido diferente de seu antecessor.
resumindo : jogo competente e divertido diferente de seu antecessor.
Enfim um bom jogo.
Eu acredito que este é um dos jogos mais controversos da série MegaMan, muitos consideram ele como um dos melhores da série X, (eu incluso) e alguns só não conseguem gostar dele não importa o quanto tentem.
E eu entendo.
A migração dos gráficos pixel art lindos para um 3d datado de ps2 não agradou a maioria e também não me agradou.
(Não foi exatamente no x8 que essa migração aconteceu, mas do mesmo jeito)
Esse jogo pode até não ser bonito, mas eu garanto que você vai se divertir.
A história dele é muito boa para os padrões MegaMan X, e temos pela primeira vez um Final Boss que NÃO é o sigma!
MegaMan tava realmente precisando de um bom antagonista que não fosse substituido por sigma no final, e o Lumine cumpre bem esse papel, tendo uma das melhores boss battles de MegaMan inteiro.
Eu achei que faltou um pouco de desenvolvimento no Lumine uma vez que a gente vê ele no começo do jogo e outra no final, mas isso não impede ele de brilhar.
A Jogabilidade do jogo é a melhor de MegaMan X, tudo foi aperfeiçoado e está perfeitamente rápido e funcional.
Esse jogo tem sistemas de loja, armas novas, upgrades, armadura customizável, definitivamente o MegaMan X mais completo.
A trilha sonora de MegaMan X8 é minha segunda favorita em MegaMan X, só perdendo para MegaMan X6.
VS VAVA FEELINGS
O level design do X8 é bom no geral, mas com algumas fases ruins, e quando são ruins são MUITO ruins, tem uma fase de perseguição 3D, aquela fase é pior do que todos os defeitos de todos os MegaMan juntos.
Em suma, é um ótimo jogo, vale muito apena e por mais que os gráficos não sejam a melhor coisa do mundo, você se acostuma uma hora e começa a se divertir de montão.
8.4/10
E eu entendo.
A migração dos gráficos pixel art lindos para um 3d datado de ps2 não agradou a maioria e também não me agradou.
(Não foi exatamente no x8 que essa migração aconteceu, mas do mesmo jeito)
Esse jogo pode até não ser bonito, mas eu garanto que você vai se divertir.
A história dele é muito boa para os padrões MegaMan X, e temos pela primeira vez um Final Boss que NÃO é o sigma!
MegaMan tava realmente precisando de um bom antagonista que não fosse substituido por sigma no final, e o Lumine cumpre bem esse papel, tendo uma das melhores boss battles de MegaMan inteiro.
Eu achei que faltou um pouco de desenvolvimento no Lumine uma vez que a gente vê ele no começo do jogo e outra no final, mas isso não impede ele de brilhar.
A Jogabilidade do jogo é a melhor de MegaMan X, tudo foi aperfeiçoado e está perfeitamente rápido e funcional.
Esse jogo tem sistemas de loja, armas novas, upgrades, armadura customizável, definitivamente o MegaMan X mais completo.
A trilha sonora de MegaMan X8 é minha segunda favorita em MegaMan X, só perdendo para MegaMan X6.
VS VAVA FEELINGS
O level design do X8 é bom no geral, mas com algumas fases ruins, e quando são ruins são MUITO ruins, tem uma fase de perseguição 3D, aquela fase é pior do que todos os defeitos de todos os MegaMan juntos.
Em suma, é um ótimo jogo, vale muito apena e por mais que os gráficos não sejam a melhor coisa do mundo, você se acostuma uma hora e começa a se divertir de montão.
8.4/10
a nice way to finish the X series i suppose, i like that it goes back to basics but the backtracking is insane even for X standards, levels were alright, but overall a fitting way to end this series i'd say.
hooooooooly shit this game is AWESOME i love it i love videogames
Welp, here we are: the end of the X series. With the double whammy of back to back terribleness in the form of X6 and X7, at the very least I was somewhat hoping the X series would end on a high note, and if not a high note then something I wouldn’t end up hating at least. Thankfully at the very LEAST X8 manages to bump itself into the latter category, but just can’t quite grasp the former.
Don’t have much to say about the story, there’s a lot of religious themes and symbolism in this game oddly enough, and as a religious person myself, I don’t really have much of an opinion on it. I find it more so amusing than anything, the first stage being called “Noah’s Park” made me laugh a little bit. The voice acting is leaps and bounds better than any Megaman X game I’ve played thus far though which is a massive step up, apparently it’s the same actors who did that “day of Sigma” short which I really ended up enjoying. Honestly the only voice I’m not a fan of is Alia’s but everything else is pretty good.
To start off with the good stuff, the pace is noticeably much MUCH faster than X7, feeling much closer to how a traditional 2D X game usually feels. In fact, despite still being 2.5D, 3D sections are removed altogether aside from a couple of vehicle sections which I feel was a smart decision. Wall jumping, dashing, airdashing, all of that felt as good as before. You can have 2 characters simultaneously that you can switch between on the fly, and now you also have this super attack that you can pull off to either screen nuke any enemy in your vicinity, or it can be used to take a huge chunk out of a boss’s health bar. I also really like how they handled the armor upgrades for X, you get the benefits of the armor part as soon as you get them again, but now you can freely mix and match armor parts to simultaneously mix and match the different properties they have, the drawback being you don’t get the special properties you would get if you equipped all parts of the same set. I thought this change was pretty cool, even if I thought the design of the 2 armors you get were super bland looking. Axl got a bit of a rework from the last game, he now fires rapidly in all directions making him ultra-precise with aerial threats instead of having an autolock feature. His copy ability is still here too and while it’s still too situational I didn’t find it AS pointless as before and it did eventually lead to some neat hidden extras. In the end though I still ended up sticking with Zero and X, not particularly because I found Axl bad or anything, he’s perfectly fine, I just happened to like what Zero and X can do more, and thankfully I can say that as Zero is nowhere near as clunky to use as last time. In fact, he gains some pretty crazy abilities to use that I might as well get into:
New to X8 is the chip system. Well, alright, a chip system in and of itself is not necessarily NEW for the X series, but the way it’s implemented here is. Chips in X8 sort of act as a mix of both temporary and permanent character upgrades: you can use them to get extra lives, subtanks, weapon tanks, and other extra items that you need to refill constantly once used up, but they’re also used to permanently upgrade a character’s health, weapons, and used to give characters additional perks as well. You can even give characters new weapons entirely, Zero in particular gets an assortment of completely bonkers weapons. The D Glaive has such a ridiculous range and was basically my go to pretty much any common enemy encounter and could even be used to cheese bosses. In order to equip chips though, you need to buy them with in game currency scattered throughout every stage no different from like, coins in Mario. You get them from killing enemies and can get a huge amount from finding hidden secret areas. You can even find rare metals in these secret areas which are used to unlock the more powerful upgrades you get for specific characters. I actually really like this addition, it feels very arcady in nature and offers a fun feedback loop of “killing things, getting things, upgrading things”, a solid sense of progression throughout the game. I almost ended up maxing out every character before the final fight, X being the only one I got to 100%. There are a lot of other extra things you can unlock with this system too, apparently you can unlock the navigators as playable characters which is a cute bonus. Speaking of navigators, alongside Alia, you get 2 other navigators alongside her, Pallete and Layer. Each of them specializes in different areas, Pallete specializing in finding secret areas and Layer focusing on a boss’s weakness and attacks. I actually really like this idea: I stuck with Pallete for the most part though if you don’t like any of them the game does give you the option to turn off navigators altogether which is much appreciated. Also, I don’t know where else to put this and this may be a hot take, but I think that they FINALLY made the ride armor unironically honest to god fun to use this time around. Ride armors in the previous titles felt very superfluous, it felt like they were supposed to be this “massive spectacle mash buttons and go crazy and kill everything” gameplay mechanic but they never felt good to use. Not least of which because controlling them felt clunky and unnatural with much of a pain it was to dash and dash jump, but the “powerhouse” aspect never felt fully realized both because they still felt somewhat fragile and blew up too quickly, and the attacks themselves not having a whole lot of oomph to them, X3 in particular decided that it would be a fantastic idea to lock pretty much all of its secret areas behind Ride Armors that never felt fun to use. Meanwhile in X8, as dumb as it is that you only can use the Ride Armor in a single stage and if you lose it, it’s gone for good unless you restart the stage entirely, the Ride Armor in X8 is by far the best Ride Armor in the entire series. You can dash basically forever by holding the button down and this dash can also kill enemies, you can hover for better platforming, you can airdash, the armor itself completely shrugs off weaker attacks making it truly FEEL like the “crazy strong powerhouse machine of death” that it was supposed to be, you can even jump on enemies and squish them to death. It’s just kinda a shame it took them like 8 games to make Ride Armors fun but I digress.
If I had to pin down what I didn’t like about X8 in a nutshell, it would be the level design. There are a select few stages that are fine at best, but most of them are either dull or completely obnoxious. I don’t know who exactly thought that Gigabolt Man O War’s stage was a good idea but both his and (to a lesser extent despite being much longer) Avalanche Yeti’s vehicle sections are genuinely terrible and drag on for an absolute eternity. Optic Sunflower’s stage feels like a giant drawn out gimmick, even if the Cutman easter egg was pretty cute. A whole lot of X8 is just enemy rooms, being stopped in a thin hallway needing to kill a specific number of enemies to proceed, I think this happens like every single stage too. I didn’t get much out of the boss fights either, if anything a lot of minibosses in the main stage were more irritating than the main bosses, Earthrock Trilobyte’s miniboss being a not so flattering standout. Vile sometimes appears randomly to attack you but he doesn’t even reward you with anything when you beat him, he just leaves. I don’t really get the point of his encounters. Burn Rooster’s stage consists of 3 drawn out incredibly mundane autoscrollers. Does that sound like fun to you? Also, while I praised the movement of X8 compared to X7, I HAAAATE how they gutted the dash in this game. In X4 to X6 (heck I think even X7 had this, it was just unnoticeable with how agonizingly slow the movement was), if you held the dash button down while jumping you could dash jump repeatedly which felt extremely fun and fluid to pull off consistently, in X8 it’s just…gone. The only way you’re gonna move faster is to spam the dash button over and over again, it’s such a jarring feeling game where some aspects feel tight while others feel completely gutted.
Megaman X8 comes so close to being a genuinely decent game, if it had a few tweaks to movement and better level design, I think it could likely be one of the best X entries in the entire series. The chip system is fun, the combat is back to being fluid, the new ideas it introduces gameplay wise are pretty good but the level design is just either too boring or too irritating for me to really get super invested. Not the worst, not the best, just kinda ok. With the X series over and done with, I now have to ask the very real unfortunate question –
WHAT AM I FIGHTING FOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooor?
Don’t have much to say about the story, there’s a lot of religious themes and symbolism in this game oddly enough, and as a religious person myself, I don’t really have much of an opinion on it. I find it more so amusing than anything, the first stage being called “Noah’s Park” made me laugh a little bit. The voice acting is leaps and bounds better than any Megaman X game I’ve played thus far though which is a massive step up, apparently it’s the same actors who did that “day of Sigma” short which I really ended up enjoying. Honestly the only voice I’m not a fan of is Alia’s but everything else is pretty good.
To start off with the good stuff, the pace is noticeably much MUCH faster than X7, feeling much closer to how a traditional 2D X game usually feels. In fact, despite still being 2.5D, 3D sections are removed altogether aside from a couple of vehicle sections which I feel was a smart decision. Wall jumping, dashing, airdashing, all of that felt as good as before. You can have 2 characters simultaneously that you can switch between on the fly, and now you also have this super attack that you can pull off to either screen nuke any enemy in your vicinity, or it can be used to take a huge chunk out of a boss’s health bar. I also really like how they handled the armor upgrades for X, you get the benefits of the armor part as soon as you get them again, but now you can freely mix and match armor parts to simultaneously mix and match the different properties they have, the drawback being you don’t get the special properties you would get if you equipped all parts of the same set. I thought this change was pretty cool, even if I thought the design of the 2 armors you get were super bland looking. Axl got a bit of a rework from the last game, he now fires rapidly in all directions making him ultra-precise with aerial threats instead of having an autolock feature. His copy ability is still here too and while it’s still too situational I didn’t find it AS pointless as before and it did eventually lead to some neat hidden extras. In the end though I still ended up sticking with Zero and X, not particularly because I found Axl bad or anything, he’s perfectly fine, I just happened to like what Zero and X can do more, and thankfully I can say that as Zero is nowhere near as clunky to use as last time. In fact, he gains some pretty crazy abilities to use that I might as well get into:
New to X8 is the chip system. Well, alright, a chip system in and of itself is not necessarily NEW for the X series, but the way it’s implemented here is. Chips in X8 sort of act as a mix of both temporary and permanent character upgrades: you can use them to get extra lives, subtanks, weapon tanks, and other extra items that you need to refill constantly once used up, but they’re also used to permanently upgrade a character’s health, weapons, and used to give characters additional perks as well. You can even give characters new weapons entirely, Zero in particular gets an assortment of completely bonkers weapons. The D Glaive has such a ridiculous range and was basically my go to pretty much any common enemy encounter and could even be used to cheese bosses. In order to equip chips though, you need to buy them with in game currency scattered throughout every stage no different from like, coins in Mario. You get them from killing enemies and can get a huge amount from finding hidden secret areas. You can even find rare metals in these secret areas which are used to unlock the more powerful upgrades you get for specific characters. I actually really like this addition, it feels very arcady in nature and offers a fun feedback loop of “killing things, getting things, upgrading things”, a solid sense of progression throughout the game. I almost ended up maxing out every character before the final fight, X being the only one I got to 100%. There are a lot of other extra things you can unlock with this system too, apparently you can unlock the navigators as playable characters which is a cute bonus. Speaking of navigators, alongside Alia, you get 2 other navigators alongside her, Pallete and Layer. Each of them specializes in different areas, Pallete specializing in finding secret areas and Layer focusing on a boss’s weakness and attacks. I actually really like this idea: I stuck with Pallete for the most part though if you don’t like any of them the game does give you the option to turn off navigators altogether which is much appreciated. Also, I don’t know where else to put this and this may be a hot take, but I think that they FINALLY made the ride armor unironically honest to god fun to use this time around. Ride armors in the previous titles felt very superfluous, it felt like they were supposed to be this “massive spectacle mash buttons and go crazy and kill everything” gameplay mechanic but they never felt good to use. Not least of which because controlling them felt clunky and unnatural with much of a pain it was to dash and dash jump, but the “powerhouse” aspect never felt fully realized both because they still felt somewhat fragile and blew up too quickly, and the attacks themselves not having a whole lot of oomph to them, X3 in particular decided that it would be a fantastic idea to lock pretty much all of its secret areas behind Ride Armors that never felt fun to use. Meanwhile in X8, as dumb as it is that you only can use the Ride Armor in a single stage and if you lose it, it’s gone for good unless you restart the stage entirely, the Ride Armor in X8 is by far the best Ride Armor in the entire series. You can dash basically forever by holding the button down and this dash can also kill enemies, you can hover for better platforming, you can airdash, the armor itself completely shrugs off weaker attacks making it truly FEEL like the “crazy strong powerhouse machine of death” that it was supposed to be, you can even jump on enemies and squish them to death. It’s just kinda a shame it took them like 8 games to make Ride Armors fun but I digress.
If I had to pin down what I didn’t like about X8 in a nutshell, it would be the level design. There are a select few stages that are fine at best, but most of them are either dull or completely obnoxious. I don’t know who exactly thought that Gigabolt Man O War’s stage was a good idea but both his and (to a lesser extent despite being much longer) Avalanche Yeti’s vehicle sections are genuinely terrible and drag on for an absolute eternity. Optic Sunflower’s stage feels like a giant drawn out gimmick, even if the Cutman easter egg was pretty cute. A whole lot of X8 is just enemy rooms, being stopped in a thin hallway needing to kill a specific number of enemies to proceed, I think this happens like every single stage too. I didn’t get much out of the boss fights either, if anything a lot of minibosses in the main stage were more irritating than the main bosses, Earthrock Trilobyte’s miniboss being a not so flattering standout. Vile sometimes appears randomly to attack you but he doesn’t even reward you with anything when you beat him, he just leaves. I don’t really get the point of his encounters. Burn Rooster’s stage consists of 3 drawn out incredibly mundane autoscrollers. Does that sound like fun to you? Also, while I praised the movement of X8 compared to X7, I HAAAATE how they gutted the dash in this game. In X4 to X6 (heck I think even X7 had this, it was just unnoticeable with how agonizingly slow the movement was), if you held the dash button down while jumping you could dash jump repeatedly which felt extremely fun and fluid to pull off consistently, in X8 it’s just…gone. The only way you’re gonna move faster is to spam the dash button over and over again, it’s such a jarring feeling game where some aspects feel tight while others feel completely gutted.
Megaman X8 comes so close to being a genuinely decent game, if it had a few tweaks to movement and better level design, I think it could likely be one of the best X entries in the entire series. The chip system is fun, the combat is back to being fluid, the new ideas it introduces gameplay wise are pretty good but the level design is just either too boring or too irritating for me to really get super invested. Not the worst, not the best, just kinda ok. With the X series over and done with, I now have to ask the very real unfortunate question –
WHAT AM I FIGHTING FOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooor?
Gostava tanto desse que sempre que o CD pirata da feira dava pau eu comprava outro... E foi nessa que fiz meu pai comprar 5 vezes o mesmo jogo.
Infelizmente os gráficos envelheceram muito mal.
Infelizmente os gráficos envelheceram muito mal.
Renascimento
I would say something about this game if I could remember a single thing that happen.
I really didn't liked this game. It started pretty alright, but then I couldn't enjoy it that much. Also that cliffhanger can rot in hell since we won't ever get X9 at this point.
Pra mim o terceiro melhor Mega Man X, os 3 personagens jogáveis são todos ótimos de se joga e as fases são extremamente divertidas, uma pena que o X7 sujou tanto o nome desse jogo e praticamente assassinou a franquia
It's alright, I don't know why I played it like four times for 100% completion.
It's alright. Shame about the last 3 games.
I mean, this game was decent in all honesty. I enjoyed it.
Much better than Resident Evil Village!
O jogo continua em 3d, porém sem aquelas seções horríveis em 3d e level design melhorou. O jogo continua meio feio, mas da pra se divertir.
This game is just high quality all around.
With renewed visuals and grasping 2.5D gameplay, MMX8 is the finest entry of the franchise, brought alongside it's elements of combos, character swapping and the most mature plot ever, this PS2-era gem is usually underlooked, but it gives an almost perfect experience from beginning to end.
Gameplay-wise, it plays like any other MMX game, but there are now segments where the game wants you to stack combos and damage enemies as fast as possible, alongside it's much better working character switch feature that, in the case that your character gets grabbed, you can swap them out quickly to get back on the fight. Bosses also function a lot better here, suffering much less from being stuck on the same spot for an infinite amount of time (aka Spark Mandrill Syndrome), now with an invincible enrage state where they do a mechanic that the player is forced to dodge around. Not only that, but when you do get damaged your HP bar still maintains a bit of the damage you took as Red, so if you swap your character out you can regenerate a bit of health (much like MVC, for instance!),I also really like that the chip mechanic swaps out finding heart tanks in the stages, specially considering the micromanagement of 3 different characters would become hell.
Now, I praised most of MMX's stories before, but they were always a bit undercooked. X5 and X6 had a bit more to themselves, sure, but it suffered from bad translations, etc. X8 just.... feels so mature. It talks about this new generation of reploids replacing the old one, the cast being treated as somewhat obsolete by those Reploids, and what does it mean to become a Maverick. Is it a virus or do Reploids just have that free will to know what's best for them? These are themings that I'd expect from a Yoko Taro game, not a MMX one.
The soundtrack is so pristine, it shocks me how diverse it feels. I'd say "oh go listen to Jakob Elevator or to the boss theme, but... Gateway truly feels like the right pick. It's almost angelical vocals mixed with a calm guitar.... gosh, what a beauty of a track.
As for the main antagonist... I do wish he was a bit more fleshed out before the "reveal", but... oh well, this is Mega Man we are talking about here. They hardly take the effort to make a villain that charismatic in such short notice. However, the little presence he has, I really like him.
And as for the post-credits text (which is hilariously followed by bad grammar).... yeah, the cycle repeats. Quite a shame we never got a X9 to see what would be of Axl, and maybe what X and Zero would do now that this new generation is bound to replace them.
In many ways, it's almost meta how Mega Man X was left behind, never getting a proper new game (besides X Dive), being replaced by this new generation of games that seem to tackle it's subjects a bit better (Nier Automata being the first that comes to mind).
I really, really hope a sequel comes someday, but... I'll probably be long gone and that won't have happened. However, what I can say is that MMX8, albeit not perfect, it's a fantastic experience from beginning to the end. A found paradise, at last.
With renewed visuals and grasping 2.5D gameplay, MMX8 is the finest entry of the franchise, brought alongside it's elements of combos, character swapping and the most mature plot ever, this PS2-era gem is usually underlooked, but it gives an almost perfect experience from beginning to end.
Gameplay-wise, it plays like any other MMX game, but there are now segments where the game wants you to stack combos and damage enemies as fast as possible, alongside it's much better working character switch feature that, in the case that your character gets grabbed, you can swap them out quickly to get back on the fight. Bosses also function a lot better here, suffering much less from being stuck on the same spot for an infinite amount of time (aka Spark Mandrill Syndrome), now with an invincible enrage state where they do a mechanic that the player is forced to dodge around. Not only that, but when you do get damaged your HP bar still maintains a bit of the damage you took as Red, so if you swap your character out you can regenerate a bit of health (much like MVC, for instance!),I also really like that the chip mechanic swaps out finding heart tanks in the stages, specially considering the micromanagement of 3 different characters would become hell.
Now, I praised most of MMX's stories before, but they were always a bit undercooked. X5 and X6 had a bit more to themselves, sure, but it suffered from bad translations, etc. X8 just.... feels so mature. It talks about this new generation of reploids replacing the old one, the cast being treated as somewhat obsolete by those Reploids, and what does it mean to become a Maverick. Is it a virus or do Reploids just have that free will to know what's best for them? These are themings that I'd expect from a Yoko Taro game, not a MMX one.
The soundtrack is so pristine, it shocks me how diverse it feels. I'd say "oh go listen to Jakob Elevator or to the boss theme, but... Gateway truly feels like the right pick. It's almost angelical vocals mixed with a calm guitar.... gosh, what a beauty of a track.
As for the main antagonist... I do wish he was a bit more fleshed out before the "reveal", but... oh well, this is Mega Man we are talking about here. They hardly take the effort to make a villain that charismatic in such short notice. However, the little presence he has, I really like him.
And as for the post-credits text (which is hilariously followed by bad grammar).... yeah, the cycle repeats. Quite a shame we never got a X9 to see what would be of Axl, and maybe what X and Zero would do now that this new generation is bound to replace them.
In many ways, it's almost meta how Mega Man X was left behind, never getting a proper new game (besides X Dive), being replaced by this new generation of games that seem to tackle it's subjects a bit better (Nier Automata being the first that comes to mind).
I really, really hope a sequel comes someday, but... I'll probably be long gone and that won't have happened. However, what I can say is that MMX8, albeit not perfect, it's a fantastic experience from beginning to the end. A found paradise, at last.