So remember how Mega Man X4 was great because it cut down on the bloat from X3 and presented a lean and refined Mega Man X experience that everyone loved? Well, X5 is here, and the series is back on its bullcrap!
It's a legitimate marvel how they managed to mess up X5 this much when it uses X4 as its base, and also when it was meant to be the series finale, wrapping the X series in a neat little bow so that Mega Man Zero would take the spotlight. While far from the worst X game, this is not a game worthy of ending a franchise at all.
Let's begin with the plot: something something Sigma returns, the Sigma Virus is blanketing the Earth, there's a space colony with another virus in a collision course with the planet, sharks are jumped, go kill the animal-like robots to obtain the McGuffin. You know the drill.
It's not so much the events of the plot that bother me, but the cheap way the story is presented. X4's cell animated cutscenes are gone, replaced by static backgrounds and text boxes that are as dry as they are tedious. And ironically, for as long as they are, they fail to communicate the plot or the urgency of its events in any meaningful way.
Basically, the Hunters have 16 in-game hours to stop a falling space colony from colliding with Earth. Every time you enter a stage, it takes one hour from the clock, and if it runs out, a catastrophe happens and you get the bad ending. You need to get items from the mavericks to fire a weapon to destroy the colony, but the outcome of doing so is random, meaning you can play the game completely right and still get the bad ending. It's stupid.
Bosses in X5 have levels that increase as the 16-hour timer goes lower, which increases their HP and also makes it so they drop extra upgrades in a very obtuse manner, but to summarize, it makes it so the correct way to play X5 is to begin by killing yourself seven times on a random stage so to advance the timer and fight bosses at a sufficiently high level. It's also stupid.
In fact, the entire upgrade system is a downgrade from X4. X has two armors instead of one, and unlike previous games, you can't equip them as you go, instead having to get the entire armor and then equip it on stage select. Both armors are worse than the Fourth Armor in a gameplay sense, but are required to obtain several items.
In practice, this brings two problems: one, the backtracking is obscene, worse even that X3. In one instance, you have to go through a stage to get the boss weapon, to then replay it to get an armor part with the weapon, then replay a third time with the armor for a heart tank. Two, Zero cannot access many of these power-ups, so you have to stop and play as X for a moment -- also, those three trips into the stage now become four.
In fact, Zero is no longer an entirely separate character -- you can choose to play as either character when you begin a stage, another strict downgrade from having two separate stories. The backtracking is one issue, and another is that heart tanks and other stat upgrades only apply to the character that picked them up. If playing as X, you inevitably end up with a gimped Zero, but X is the only one that can get several items, meaning Zero never reaches full power if you play as him.
Of course, the game never bothers to explain any of these obtuse, very important mechanics, but what it does do is overload you with tutorials. It's another departure from the series I do not understand: Mega Man X was thought of as a masterpiece of conveyance, carefully teaching the player its rules just from letting them experiment with the stage design themselves.
X5 not only has an ugly tutorial mode, it adds Alia, a navigator who will chime over the course of the stage. In practice, she will stop the gameplay constantly to overexplain every basic piece of information, every single stage contraption, every trap... I have a clip where she interrupts me four times during a 30 second interval in the volcano stage, just to explain a trap you can see coming from a mile away.
And the stages don't really need explaining: apart from the new ziplines, it's not like they are much different from previous games. Although -- there was a bit of a visual downgrade in some areas, with some props and enemies looking considerably worse. This, along with the cheap storytelling, would be explainable by budget cuts, however, the annoying systems, complex upgrades and mass tutorialization wouldn't, so again, I don't get X5. All in all, the game feels like a bootleg of X4, made by completely different people.
All of that said -- it's not a particularly terrible game. If you play as X, and come into the X5 knowing how it works and what to avoid, I would say it's a bit better than X3, if annoying in other ways. And unlike X3, it has two of the biggest bangers in the entire franchise among its tracks, which counts for something. But I do feel X5 reflects the decline of the X series very well.
And boy, what a decline it is. I wish X5 had been the end of it.
It's a legitimate marvel how they managed to mess up X5 this much when it uses X4 as its base, and also when it was meant to be the series finale, wrapping the X series in a neat little bow so that Mega Man Zero would take the spotlight. While far from the worst X game, this is not a game worthy of ending a franchise at all.
Let's begin with the plot: something something Sigma returns, the Sigma Virus is blanketing the Earth, there's a space colony with another virus in a collision course with the planet, sharks are jumped, go kill the animal-like robots to obtain the McGuffin. You know the drill.
It's not so much the events of the plot that bother me, but the cheap way the story is presented. X4's cell animated cutscenes are gone, replaced by static backgrounds and text boxes that are as dry as they are tedious. And ironically, for as long as they are, they fail to communicate the plot or the urgency of its events in any meaningful way.
Basically, the Hunters have 16 in-game hours to stop a falling space colony from colliding with Earth. Every time you enter a stage, it takes one hour from the clock, and if it runs out, a catastrophe happens and you get the bad ending. You need to get items from the mavericks to fire a weapon to destroy the colony, but the outcome of doing so is random, meaning you can play the game completely right and still get the bad ending. It's stupid.
Bosses in X5 have levels that increase as the 16-hour timer goes lower, which increases their HP and also makes it so they drop extra upgrades in a very obtuse manner, but to summarize, it makes it so the correct way to play X5 is to begin by killing yourself seven times on a random stage so to advance the timer and fight bosses at a sufficiently high level. It's also stupid.
In fact, the entire upgrade system is a downgrade from X4. X has two armors instead of one, and unlike previous games, you can't equip them as you go, instead having to get the entire armor and then equip it on stage select. Both armors are worse than the Fourth Armor in a gameplay sense, but are required to obtain several items.
In practice, this brings two problems: one, the backtracking is obscene, worse even that X3. In one instance, you have to go through a stage to get the boss weapon, to then replay it to get an armor part with the weapon, then replay a third time with the armor for a heart tank. Two, Zero cannot access many of these power-ups, so you have to stop and play as X for a moment -- also, those three trips into the stage now become four.
In fact, Zero is no longer an entirely separate character -- you can choose to play as either character when you begin a stage, another strict downgrade from having two separate stories. The backtracking is one issue, and another is that heart tanks and other stat upgrades only apply to the character that picked them up. If playing as X, you inevitably end up with a gimped Zero, but X is the only one that can get several items, meaning Zero never reaches full power if you play as him.
Of course, the game never bothers to explain any of these obtuse, very important mechanics, but what it does do is overload you with tutorials. It's another departure from the series I do not understand: Mega Man X was thought of as a masterpiece of conveyance, carefully teaching the player its rules just from letting them experiment with the stage design themselves.
X5 not only has an ugly tutorial mode, it adds Alia, a navigator who will chime over the course of the stage. In practice, she will stop the gameplay constantly to overexplain every basic piece of information, every single stage contraption, every trap... I have a clip where she interrupts me four times during a 30 second interval in the volcano stage, just to explain a trap you can see coming from a mile away.
And the stages don't really need explaining: apart from the new ziplines, it's not like they are much different from previous games. Although -- there was a bit of a visual downgrade in some areas, with some props and enemies looking considerably worse. This, along with the cheap storytelling, would be explainable by budget cuts, however, the annoying systems, complex upgrades and mass tutorialization wouldn't, so again, I don't get X5. All in all, the game feels like a bootleg of X4, made by completely different people.
All of that said -- it's not a particularly terrible game. If you play as X, and come into the X5 knowing how it works and what to avoid, I would say it's a bit better than X3, if annoying in other ways. And unlike X3, it has two of the biggest bangers in the entire franchise among its tracks, which counts for something. But I do feel X5 reflects the decline of the X series very well.
And boy, what a decline it is. I wish X5 had been the end of it.