Sets aside a lot of what was unique about the first game in favor of a more conventional world, progression structure and sense of setting. Levels themselves are often more mechanically distinctive and visually complex, but the game as a whole lacks a strong sense of identity and plays like something of a kaizo take on the X series. The story's largely carried by the presence of repeated, dead-serious use of the phrase "baby elf".

Borges, describing Kafka, says that great authors make their own antecedents, and the way the recurring bosses in this game are written with more of a psychosexual fixation on Zero confirms for me that the series is a premonition of Revengeance.