X3 is often considered the worst of the SNES trilogy, and people will tell you that, by the time X3 came out, new consoles were coming out and/or the X formula was becoming dated, and that's why the game is not very well loved. I'm here to denounce the unfairness of it all: regardless of when it was released, X3 is bad on its own merits.
It's curious -- on the surface, it doesn't seem all too different from the previous two games. That's because it's not about X3 having a single big issue: instead, it brings to the table multiple bad or poorly executed ideas that end up making it consistently awful to play.
For instance, there was an attempt to make the game harder than the previous one -- which is fair -- but a lot of the time this is achieved either through frustrating enemy placements or attacks that are random or erratic. Several boss battles devolve into damage races, and that's bad, because damage values have been reworked and are now all over the place.
Then there's the upgrades. There's a mess of armor and chips and ride armor forms and whatnot, with extensive backtracking and convoluted acquisition methods. But what makes it really bad is that most of these "upgrades" are questionable: ride armors are a trivial addition to the game you have to go out of your way to even unlock, and having the Third Armor equipped actually makes the game harder, because it gimps your charged shot and makes it sure you won't hit anything ever again.
There's an overuse of breakable walls, there's the awkward empty boss rooms -- which are, by the way, one of the ugliest design solutions I've seen to not having a real reason to fight an extra boss -- but the worst, the very worst thing in the game is the bait and switch involving Zero. He's playable, alright -- except he's sluggish and can't enter boss rooms. And hope to god you don't ever die playing as him, otherwise you've just screwed yourself out of the best weapon in the game.
It's not the worst X game -- god knows the second half of the franchise reaches completely new lows -- but it's not worth revisiting.
It's curious -- on the surface, it doesn't seem all too different from the previous two games. That's because it's not about X3 having a single big issue: instead, it brings to the table multiple bad or poorly executed ideas that end up making it consistently awful to play.
For instance, there was an attempt to make the game harder than the previous one -- which is fair -- but a lot of the time this is achieved either through frustrating enemy placements or attacks that are random or erratic. Several boss battles devolve into damage races, and that's bad, because damage values have been reworked and are now all over the place.
Then there's the upgrades. There's a mess of armor and chips and ride armor forms and whatnot, with extensive backtracking and convoluted acquisition methods. But what makes it really bad is that most of these "upgrades" are questionable: ride armors are a trivial addition to the game you have to go out of your way to even unlock, and having the Third Armor equipped actually makes the game harder, because it gimps your charged shot and makes it sure you won't hit anything ever again.
There's an overuse of breakable walls, there's the awkward empty boss rooms -- which are, by the way, one of the ugliest design solutions I've seen to not having a real reason to fight an extra boss -- but the worst, the very worst thing in the game is the bait and switch involving Zero. He's playable, alright -- except he's sluggish and can't enter boss rooms. And hope to god you don't ever die playing as him, otherwise you've just screwed yourself out of the best weapon in the game.
It's not the worst X game -- god knows the second half of the franchise reaches completely new lows -- but it's not worth revisiting.