This was the game that introduced Fire Emblem to the western audience, and I gotta say, damn what a great first game. Going into it, I thought it would be a middle of the road, 6/10 experience, but it honestly surprised me that this game was excellent.

Yeah the story isn't really all that special and gets pretty after awhile, but the cast of characters is really strong. My personal favorites were Lyn, Hector, Sain, Matthew, Florina, Ninian, Nino, and Jaffar; all were excellent characters that had me invested in their stories.

The gameplay was also really fun. From what I've heard, this game is pretty much the most down to earth Fire Emblem game with its mechanics and combat. However, that didn't really hinder my experience. In fact, in ways, it was a bit of an improvement from Three Houses, which at times felt a little overcomplicated with its gameplay. That isn't to say that there isn't any strategy involved in this game, though, because you still need to think about your choices carefully due to some of the maps in this game being pretty difficult, which made it fun to play through.

The graphics also hold phenomenally well. The pixel art for each of the characters is gorgeous and battle animations are also really flashy and fun to watch. It kinda made me wish Fire Emblem nowadays was still a 2D game, not gonna lie.

I do have my issues with the game, though. As stated before, the story in this game got pretty boring by about halfway through the game, and, aside from Sonia (the evil bitch), none of the villains could distract me from the boring writing. The bloated tutorial also really didn't really give that good of a first impression since it was slow and tedious to get through (although once you finish Eliwood's story, you don't have to play through it again when starting a new game, which is a nice addition). Also, even though I love the characters in this game and their support conversations were fun to listen to, the support system in this game is whack. I only learned that there was one in this game through complete accident, and even then, the way you get supports (having two characters stand next to each other for a certain amount of turns) is unintuitive and having a limited number of supports for each character per a play through is really questionable.

Overall, though, this game was a lot greater than I thought it was going to be. It was fun going through the first western FE game and learning why a lot of fans are fond of it and consider it their favorite game in the series. I still love Three Houses more, but I can understand the appeal of this entry and I would love to get around to Hector's story sometime in the future.

Hearing the game being talked about in such a negative connotation over the years, I was hesitant to even think about playing this entry in the Mega Man X series. However, truth be told, I actually didn't dislike it as much as I thought I would.

Now, don't get me wrong, I still overall didn't like playing this game, but there were many aspects of it that I thought were big improvements from the previous entry in this series. First of all, unlike X5, Alia won't interrupt your gameplay every two seconds to explain something really obvious to you; her tutorials are now optional.

The backtracking has also been improved a bit, as there aren't many sections in the stages that require a certain armor to obtain certain items, fixing the issue I had with X5 where many of the heart pieces weren't obtainable as Zero. Now, the heart pieces can be evenly distributed between the two playable characters.

I also think the gameplay is much faster here than in X5, as the two new armors in this game, the Blade and Shadow armor, feel less like gimmicks to obtain items and armor parts and more like additional tools to help you get through the stages easier. For example, the shadow armor has the ability to get across spikes, so it's really helpful in a stage like Metal Shark Player's. However, unlike X5's Gaea armor, the Shadow armor feels really fun to use and isn't slow and clunky.

There are a lot of other things I liked about X6 as well, such as the music, the ideas in its story, making parts slightly easier to obtain by having to save reploids, and some aspects that make the game so broken sometimes that it makes it more enjoyable.

That last point, however, brings me back to this: even though X6 improves a lot upon what X5 did wrong, I still think X5 is the better game. First off, many of the stages in this game just aren't fun to play. With the exception of Rainy Turtloid's stage, a pretty good level where you traverse through acid rain to try to get to each healing pod as fast as possible, all of them end up being at best kinda boring (i.e. Blizzard Wolfang's level) and at worst fucking awful (i.e. Ground Scaravich, Metal Shark Player, and especially Blaze Heatnix's abomination of a stage (WHO AT CAPCOM THOUGHT IT WAS A GOOD IDEA TO HAVE TO FIGHT THE SAME DONUT-SHAPED BOSS 4 TIMES IN ONE LEVEL?!!))

The bosses in this game are also a mess. Most of them are pathetically easy because they either don't have very interesting patterns or they can easily be cheesed with Zero. (This is what I was mostly referring to earlier when I said the game is so broken sometimes that it becomes enjoyable; Zero breaks the maverick boss fights in this game due to his dash-cancelling technique, and it's honestly the most fun I had while playing this game) Some of them, however, are just straight up annoying. No better example than the last three bosses you have to fight before facing Sigma; the less said about them, the better.

There is also nightmare phenomenon, which activates randomly on the maverick's stages and makes it so random effects occur on them, such as parts of the screen becoming pitch black, a silhouette appearing at random to attack you, parts of the ground being covered in ice, and other frustrating elements. This is honestly the worst part of the game for me. It's so annoying to be playing one of the stages in this game, which most of them already weren't that good to begin with, and to have these random effects occur that make the game even worse than it already is. It gets even worse when there is such thing as the nightmare virus, an enemy that appears ad nauseam in the stages to try and either swarm the player or, worse, try to infect the reploids you need to save. And if they so happen to infect a reploid that has an item that you wanted, then GUESS WHAT?! THAT ITEM IS LOST FOREVER! AND THE ONLY WAY TO GET IT BACK IS IF YOU RESET YOUR GAME AND DEFEAT THE NIGHTMARE VIRUS BEFORE THE SAME THING HAPPENS AGAIN! WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU'RE NOT HAVING FUN?!

As for the story, I think it has a lot of good ideas, especially the one where Alia and Gate, the main villain of the game, have a relationship with each other that is shown throughout the game, but the problem is that the translation for this game is awful, probably the worst it has ever been. A lot of the lines in the english translation just don't make sense, and as a result, it leaves players like me confused as to what's happening. I recommend looking up J's Reviews's video titled "Learning to Love Mega Man X6"; it's a great video where he explains the positives of X6, and he details the story of the game better than I ever could.

If I had to describe X6 in two words, it would be "artificial difficulty". So many parts in this game feel like they're hard because the game designers didn't play test them. As a result, I can understand why so many people detest this game and even call it their least favorite game in the series. For me, though, I think the game has many things to appreciate about it, such as the improvements it made upon X5, the new armors, the ideas in its story, and other positive things I mentioned in this review. Yeah, I had to put up with a lot of bullshit, but honestly, in the end, I'm glad I played X6. It's such a broken mess of a game that I kinda respect it in a way.

Next time, however ... pray for me.

Mega Man X5/10

But seriously, I wished I liked this game more, as there are things to like about Mega Man X5. The bosses are mostly pretty good, the music is excellent as usual, the controls are tight, and the story is great, even if it is presented poorly.

That said, there are multiple issues that dragged this game down for me, the biggest one being the backtracking. Backtracking is something I don't like to do in Mega Man X games, and this game has a lot of it; you will have to go through every stage in this game at least twice due to how poorly scattered the collectibles are here. This is thanks to the addition of the Falcon and Gaea armors. I think on paper that these are nice additions to the game, but the problem is so much of the level design revolves around using these armors to get the collectibles in the stages.

And this wouldn't be that big of a deal if it weren't for two factors. The first is that the levels themselves aren't really anything special. They aren't bad (aside from Duff McWhalen's stage. Seriously who thought that level was a good idea?!), but they aren't really special either, and having to replay them multiple times just gets tedious after a while. The second factor is that you have to find the parts in the stages, which, again, wouldn't be so bad if you didn't have to backtrack through the stages multiple times to get certain parts. Hell, in Duff McWhalen's stage, the head part for the falcon armor is trapped behind a wooden crate, and in order to get said part, you have to ... beat Duff McWhalen so you can obtain his weapon, and then go through the level again until you can get to where the part is located and then blow up a bomb that destroys the wooden crate.... WHAT?!

And the story, while very well written, is also presented very poorly. This is partially due to the bad English translation, but mostly due to the game's usage of still images to tell the story. I loved the quality looking anime cutscenes from X4, so to see how much of a downgrade X5 had in terms of cutscenes is pretty depressing to me.

Overall, X5 isn't a bad game and has some good ideas, but the horrendous amount of backtracking and the poor presentation kill my enjoyment; a massive step down from X1-4 for me. Anyways, next is Mega Man X6, so wish me luck.

Edit: Oh yeah I forgot to mention it but Alia sucks. She breaks the pace of the game even more by constantly stopping you to tell you stuff you can figure out on your own. Thankfully, from what I heard, this is the game where she is at her worst, so I’ll see how she improves in the later games.