I had originally planned to stop after X4, as I'd heard the series takes a pretty significant dip in quality after X4 (once the original team had largely left Capcom to form Inti Creates), but I'd heard that X5 was just "not quite as good X4", so i decided to give it a shot. I think it's a bit more than just "not quite as good X4", but that's what the rest of the review is for ^^;. It took me about 4 hours (game playtime given at a little over 2 hours though) to get everything in the game.

At least attempting to continue on from X4's foray into more serious stories, a rampaging Sigma virus has caused the space colony Eurasia to begin to fall to the Earth. If it does, it'll wipe out most life, so it's up to X and the Maverick Hunters to pull off a last minute plan to save the world with the little time they have left. This was originally planned to be the last of the X games, as Mega Man Zero would continue on from one of this game's various endings, and while it's hardly something the quality of writing in X4, it's not absolute trash. However, what it really isn't is conducive to a quality game design, as that "last minute plan" only as some dozen or so hours in-universe to work, and that reflects directly onto your game time.

There are two potential plans to stop the Eurasia. One of them is to blow it up with a giant cannon, and the other is to send someone on a new suicide mission to initiate its self destruct sequence using a space shuttle. Both of these plans require parts to increase their chances of success, and both halves of the game's 8 Mavericks hold the four parts required to get each to their maximum chance of success. Now you only have some 14 or so times you can actually return to the stage select screen before your 14 hours are up and the Eurasia crashes, giving you a game over, so these things' chances of success are actually dictated by RNG as to how if they'll happen to work or not, and that goes for having only some of the parts or even all of the parts. Though the chance is very small, it is completely possible to get all eight parts and do everything else right and STILL have both the cannon and the shuttle fail, making for a quite irritating gameplay experience.

Now one innovation this game brings to the table that the later X games would all use to some degree is the idea of boss levels. As you fail to kill bosses (or just tick down the clock), bosses' levels will go up and they'll have more max HP when you fight them. It's an interesting idea, but all it really adds up to is the by and large quite poor and far too easy boss fights (or in the case of most all the final stages, miserably and unfairly difficult) take even longer than they already do. This is all made even worse by the fact that you're heavily incentivized to kill them at a higher level to acquire parts to upgrade your characters.

Now these parts aren't parts like X's armor parts. While both Zero and X are playable in this game (and can even be swapped between in the same playthrough, by selecting a different one at the start of the stage), X still gets armor parts in this game, and you can select armor sets just like you select the different characters when you're selecting a mission. These parts are parts you can equip into Zero and X as well as into X's different armor configurations in ways that give significant passive bonuses, and depending on the suit or character you can equip anywhere between 2 and 4 parts (with one suit unable to have any parts at all).

The big stinker about these parts is that you only get them if the boss you're fighting is level 8 or above, and that's impacted not only by how much time has passed but also by your hunter rank, which is dictated by how long you took to beat the stage, how FEW enemies you killed (as few as possible is best), and how much damage you took. But the icing on the crap cake with these is that you're given a choice of two parts at the end, each coming with a maximum HP or maximum special weapon bonus, but you aren't even told what each part does! You're left to either do trial and error or use a guide to see which if either part is even worth getting, and that's on top of the health upgrades hiding in each stage as well as the not four but eight hidden armor parts for X's two sets of special armor (the Falcon Armor of the two being hilariously awesome as it allows you to basically fly).

However, weird and bad parts system aside, the biggest reason I just didn't really gel with X5 is that it just isn't very interesting one way or the other. The stage design is largely more annoying that anything else, and even then it's more so just forgettably easy at that, and the same goes for just about every Maverick boss fight. Then that's contrasted with the awful Sigma stage bosses, but then even Sigma himself is really weirdly easy after how tough X4's was. The stages themselves are also punctuated with never ending calls from base to you to tell you far too much about the very simple obstacle you're about to face. Now wanting to give the player a heads up is one thing, but there are so many stages where the stage opens with a comms call warning you about an obstacle, followed less than a minute later by a second call warning you you're about to interact with that same obstacle, that they get so tedious you end up ignoring all of them. They're so dry and uninteresting that it feels like I'm playing a late 2000's Nintendo game with just how insistent the game is at holding your hand, and the Japanese version of the game is apparently even worse in this regard as it apparently makes these useless conversations EVEN longer.

The presentation is also really subpar considering how X4 was. That isn't just on account of the writing, which is definitely more boring (despite a fairly flat supporting cast who don't all die at the end for once), but it is immediately obvious that X5 had a FAR lower budget than X4 did. Completely gone are the animated cutscenes, and it's to the point where this game doesn't even have VA for any of the dialogue. It's all just drawn stills with text underneath, and while that isn't in itself awful, it's a pretty big step down from the blockbuster presentation that X4 had. The one saving grace is that X5 has by and large a pretty solid musical score.


Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This is certainly, on a mechanical level, one of the more competent post-X4 games, but it's both so aggressively "fine" and such a step down in quality compared to what had come before that it's one of my less enjoyed entries. The time limit mechanic does stop being relevant once you blow up the Eurasia (you can revisit stages as much as you want after that), but it's still just not actually good design. It's a pretty sub-par action game that also just wasn't really spectacularly bad or weird enough to leave much of an impression for me, so it's one of my least liked entries in the franchise.

Special shoutout to my friend DogStrong for walking me through the best route to get all eight special parts, as I wouldn't've had as fun a time as I ended up having with this game without them ^w^