Now this is what I call MK8D DLC. For every wave that was released feels like an improvement over what came before, and this release was no exception. The track lineup is easily the best with Koopa Cape and Moonview Highway making a return, Squeaky Clean Spring was a fun new course, and the Tour tracks were actually interesting with Los Angeles Laps and Vancouver Velocity being my favorites. The new characters were also a pleasant surprise with Petey Piranha and Wiggler returning from their respective entries, and I'm happy that Kamek was here after being canned from Mario Kart 64.

Can't wait to see how Wave 6 wraps up the Booster Course Pass.

Capcom celebrates Mega Man's 15th anniversary with a new mainline entry, and what fans got was dogshit. Mega Man X7 is one of the more notorious examples of converting the series' 2D routes into the newfound world of the third dimension. It takes everything that I love about the core of Mega Man X and slaps me across the face with its pisspoor execution as a way to "freshen up the series."

When you first start the game, you're introduced to a new character, Axl. He was a member of the Maverick Hunter team named Red Alert before abandoning the group entirely after witnessing the changes that were happening around him. He is equipped with a pistol capable of rapid-fire shots and can hover in the air for a few seconds by holding the jump button. After the first part of the opening stage, Zero returns because Capcom cannot help themselves by fucking up the timeline once again. Zero sucks in X7; his saber speeds are slow and sluggish, and he swings his sword like a fly swatter, and his spin attack is like a poor man's version of a Beyblade. This is just a bizarre way to open up a Mega Man X game because you play as the titular X from the start as opposed to the previous entries, but we learn why that is after clearing the intro stage. I'm gonna skip the story this time because nothing is interesting about the plot in all honesty. X has stepped down from being a Maverick Hunter and instead becomes a supporting role for the Hunter Base after having second thoughts about fighting and violence. X has been through a lot, I get that, and it could've worked in the story somewhat, but all it did was made X into a whiny bitch. This is an awful way to treat the main protagonist of a long-running series, as he's been pushed to the sidelines in favor of the new loud and cocky character.

To unlock X, you have to rescue 64/128 Reploids scattered throughout all the Maverick stages which is a minimum of 4-5 stages you have to play through in order to play as him. Oh yeah, the Reploid hostage system returns in X7, and instead of Nightmare Viruses killing and hostage, anyone can kill a hostage this time with one measly hit. Unlike X6, they are placed in easy-to-reach locations, so my experience in searching for these things wasn't as cumbersome as before. The one stage I had trouble with was Tornado Tonion's stage, as the level is entirely straightforward. Still, you have to be cautious of your surroundings because there's a giant robot in the center of the tower and there's a chance it'll hit the hostages. This task was frustrating, but I did find a good strategy if you're trying to save all of the Reploids. What you need to do is to drain your lives to get a Game Over, and what this does is you have the option to save your game, and if you're unsure about saving the others and don't want to risk resetting the game, overwrite your save data and all of the Reploids you'd save, no matter if you clear a stage or not, they'll be on the list. Anyway, once you unlock X, he's genuinely the best character in the entire game. He plays similarly to Axl but his charge shot does crazy damage and was easily my go-to for the rest of my playthrough. Just make sure you're saving most of the heart tanks if you want to play as him because if you're not careful, Axl and Zero would've obtained all of the items, so be cautious with that. It just feels weird unlocking the main protagonist even though his name is on the freaking title.

So the main gimmick this time around is going 3D, well, sort of. There are certain sections where the playing field is in 3D, but some have strictly 2D areas. I guess to compensate for things, there's the auto lock-on mechanic, which was a staple for early 2000s games at the time. This was a radical change to how it was formerly played at the sacrifice of challenge that Mega Man is known for; all you need them to do is mindlessly shoot, and the enemies you encounter in a 3D section, you can just walk or dash around them. They're no longer a problem to be solved, they're a minor inconvenience that does nothing to engage the player. The camera is atrocious as I've never experienced a camera that is so against the player; the fight with Red is a perfect example of this. The battle wouldn't have been too bad if the camera wasn't moving around a lot setting me up for failure. The stages themselves are not that engaging either; they're all drab to look at visually, and this can be said with the game's visuals themselves, they don't look pleasing to the eyes at all. Sure, the graphics are a bit cleaner in the Legacy Collection, but the visuals haven't aged well.

Mega Man games are usually known for their rockin' soundtracks, and surely, a game such as Mega Man X7 has a soundtrack that is on par with the rest, right? Well, I'm sorry to say it, but I found X7's soundtrack to be underwhelming. It's not terrible, but most of the songs were mediocre and unmemorable, and I only liked three songs out of the entire album. I like the use of the guitar in Vanishing Gungaroo's stage, the Boss theme is pretty good, and the best song in the whole game for me was Code Crush, the Japanese opening theme. I've listened to this song so many times now that this is considered a Top 10 for me when it comes to ranking the Mega Man X music; otherwise, I didn't have much of an attachment to the rest sadly.

I do like to say one positive thing about the game, and that is the swap mechanic. You can pick two characters before you jump into the stage and you can freely switch between them on the fly. This is a nice needed change because we already know they are a fighting team and this mechanic displays why they are, as each character has their unique advantages like X's charge shot, Zero's double jump, and Axl's hover and copy abilities. Another positive thing I can say about X7 is the Armor upgrades; not the parts themselves, but the restrictions from X5 and X6 were finally lifted, Thank God. The only armor set this time is the Glide Armor, and the most beneficial part is the leg parts that let you glide in the air; the rest were just underwhelming.

X7 retains all the fundamental stuff you see in the past games; the vehicles, the Armor Parts, the same gameplay structure, it's got all that. But here's my main issue with Mega Man X7, it's so painfully slow and monotonous. Dear God, if you want to play this game, please play it on the Legacy Collection because I heard the PS2 version has long load times, but even so, there are an obnoxious amount of load screens. To add insult to injury, there are so many tutorials explaining everything. Mega Man X5 had this issue, but X7 feels like it paved the way for forced tutorialization in modern gaming. For Christ's sake, they have a tutorial for selecting a stage and characters and all it does is impede the pacing. The most egregious example of this is the explanation of how chips work. Alia explains how these chips give special abilities, every single time you obtain one, and it doesn't matter if you're like halfway into the game, she'll repeat the same thing over and over. The enemies have so much health it's ridiculous. Remember the copy abilities I mentioned earlier for Axl? You need to use the copy shot as the last hit to obtain the core, and it's more so guesswork to know how many shots till an enemy is down. The copy ability is an interesting concept in theory if it was utilized more. The special weapons are useless against Mavericks as they drain easily and take pitiful damage. It is so much faster and easier to shoot either rapid-fire or a charge shot, but even so, these fights last a few minutes.

The voice acting is some of the worst in the Mega Man franchise. Say what you want about X4's English dub, but at least it earned its reputation by being "so bad it's good" which was typically common in the 90s, and I cannot help but love it thanks to it. X7 has an actual English voice cast, but the direction ended up being bad in an unendearing way. X is a whiny bitch in this game, and he sounds like a whiny bitch; Zero's attempt at sounding cool is to have a voice as deep as possible, and Axl's voice sounds loud and obnoxious (like how they intend him to be). The Mavericks spout out the same one-liners every few seconds as that wasn't annoying enough, and then we have some broken ones like Flame fucking Hyenard. After hearing his voice, I rather burn myself to the ground; his voice does something to a person.

Mega Man X7 is the worst Mega Man game I've ever played. It has interesting ideas of moving the series into the next generation but was poorly executed. Even with its positives, it does little to alleviate my problems, and I think the game would've worked best if it stuck to its 2D routes or have a different production studio to handle the project. X6 is a broken mess, but it's a fun broken mess that I can enjoy even with its faults; X7 was a slog to play through from start to finish, and when a game bores me is a game that fails me, and X7 falls into that category. If you want to learn more about the development of this game, I highly recommend Matt McMuscles's video about this trainwreck.

https://youtu.be/wlIIwgQmVIU

Now if you excuse me, I'm going to listen to some more Code Crush.

https://youtu.be/fJXJStIzTxE

Frogun is an interesting little game that has garnered divisive opinions. It's a 3D platformer with visuals that harken back to the PS1/N64 days. Before I even started the game, I was enamored by its visuals with a few screenshots and a glimpse of gameplay. The characters and their facial expressions remind me of Mega Man Legends, and I think that's what Molegato intended to aim for, and it just oozes charm.

The game's plot is simple; Renata's parents have gone missing, and she has to rescue them. There are six worlds to traverse with linear progression plus a seventh world post-game. The gameplay mechanics are pretty simple; you jump, and you shoot with Renata's primary weapon, the Frogun. The Frogun is like a grappling tool, where it can stick onto walls and grab onto enemies from a distance and chuck them like they're yesterday's garbage.

Each level consists of these main collectibles; two emeralds, one obsidian skill, and coins. When you clear a level, you obtain an emblem, and you can decorate them by finishing the level in a short amount of time, and another one for the expert time trial, one for clearing the level without dying, and the collectibles I've mentioned earlier. Sadly obtaining all of them in every single level doesn't reward you anything outside of a few trophies, but it looks cool, and I had fun searching every nook and cranny in every level in the first few hours of the game, but later on, it was starting to get tedious when I progress to the later worlds.

Every world consists of six levels, with a race between you and Jake, and a boss battle at the end of every world. I like how there's a bit of variety within the levels, but they follow a similar progression pattern, and like with the collectibles, they start to get a little dull when progressing further on. Every level is structurally grid-based and is designed with speedrunning in mind, and I love using the level design to my advantage to take shortcuts and shave off time if the Frogun was precise. My main issue with the game is that the Frogun can feel kind of cumbersome; it's great for chucking and killing enemies, but it's not great for the time trials. It felt as if some of the shortcuts I take, whether it's reaching for a wall for a spring pad are luck-based, and this can be infuriating for people attempting to go for completion like I am. The camera isn't the greatest either and it does contribute to the Frogun issue, but only minor.

The game is also glitchy, but the only thing I've ever encountered was the timer glitch. There are a few occasions where the timer was stuck on 0:00, and it was just an easy ticket to earn those time trial emblems. You'll encounter these sorts of bugs eventually, but nothing that breaks the game. The boss battles can be tedious as trying to dodge their attacks patterns tend to drag on for long (more so the final few bosses), but once I've got the hang of it after dying and battling them again via the Boss Rush and Brutal Rush, they weren't that bad. No, the tedious part for me was grinding for coins to spend on different hats and gallery pieces, and if you're going for 100% this is a necessity if you want to go for the platinum or get all the achievements in the game. The best farming spot for coins is in the third level of the first world, "Twisty Bridge." This'll take you roughly two minutes to collect every coin in the level and keep replaying the level until you have enough.

Despite my issues, I enjoyed my time with Frogun. I can understand where people are coming from after feeling disappointed with the game itself; the game leans close to the jank you'll find in 90s platformers, and the game's structure can feel repetitive. But after playing the game myself, I didn't think it was that bad. My original rating was a 3/5 after beating the game, but after experiencing the post-game content, I'm bumping it up to a 3.5. It's good for what it is, and I recommend it if you're curious, but don't expect it to be a top-tier 3D platformer when coming into this. It's a decent little game, and I hope it gets a sequel someday.