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?
2 Comments
yo I just looked wtf, bro got that hair thinner going
Cathya
1 year ago