Mega Man X7

[Archon_Wing]

Many of you who have played console systems may have heard of the Mega Man series. It's had a long history of fast packed action and the amusing ability to co-opt your foes' powers. Sure, some of the games were mediocre and a few were too easy but it's relative simplicity and great play control (Yes, it matters!) has lead me to title after title. The graphics have always been nice too, even if they were on ancient hardware.

Now I do not own a console beyond a Super NES/ Nintendo 64, so the last game I really played was x3. I gave x4 a play at a friend's house and liked it quite a bit. I never had contact with any of the later game until my friend rented out just yesterday.

But, this is the same company (Capcom) who will make their merchandise for all its worth. Once they produce a good game, they continously produce sequels. It's ok for a while, but gets annyoing and sometimes degenerates into crap ( Something along the lines- Super duper ultra mega hyper Street Fighter Alpha turbo Gold 2 -_- or Diablo Vs. Capcom :P)

But what the heck? I'll give it a chance. And these were my first impressions:

I was greeted by a really cool introduction that made absolutely no sense. The music was cool too, but it really didn't serve to tell me anything. If I didn't know better, it looked more like a commercial. Graphics are great, in traditional Capcom quality. I've always loved the backgrounds.

Game Start:
Intro scene also made little to no sense. There was some old robot with a cane. (WTF! Reploids are mechanical. Why the heck would they age like people? Wouldn't they be fixed instead of having to resort to canes?) Anyhow, some crap happens and we realize that the old robot's assistant was really "Axel" in disguise. Axel is one of our new heroes. And now you play as him.

Well, the intro stage reminds me disturbingly of Mega Man legends; much like a shooter. There's also the traditional side-scrolling part which I'm more familiar with. I also had to shoot some panels to get through- but it would only work if it turned a certain color. Woo! Strategy! :D

So, some crap happens and suddenly Zero appears. He has the most boring voice ever. Is he taking a ton of drugs over depression since Capcom likes to kill him off so much? But he can deflect projectiles! That almost cancels out the obnoxious sounds he makes. (Which might be better than Axel going "Huh? Huh?")

So the big bad boss comes out and goes down. The next part is some set of annoying menus that appear at the end of the stage. It took quite a while to get out of it. The stage select screen appears, but takes forever since they were insistent in putting the stages one by one.

I end up in a stage and suddenly I hear this annoying girl's voice. "Can you hear me?" "Can you hear me" "Can you hear me" Anyhow, that's Alia who's supposed to help you by giving obvious advice. "There are spikes below you! You'll die if you touch them!"

Anyhow, the rest of the game goes downhill from there. I must be terribly incompetent because I've tried 5 of the stages and never got anywhere. The freaking minor enemies take forever to kill, even with Zero's sword, much less Axel's pea shooter. You take less damage by running through everything rather than trying to fight them. Which is what I did. Of course, you die really fast too even with that shock absorber that cuts that damage to half. It was always like that, but then the enemies didn't take this long to kill. They also don't seem to drop anything, so even less incentive to kill anything. Maybe that's why X became pacifist?

I do appreciate Capcom's attempts at innovation. The partialy 2/d 3/d stages make it a challenge to judge between background and foreground. The 3-d stages are a bit hard to control, but the freedom of movement you have (In an action game- reliatively speaking) is great. Also, the switching characters allows more entry for strats as you will need to switch to get through places more easily. The control for this game is pretty good, considering other 3-d games which have had subpar control.

But maybe people said the Mega Man series was too easy. So, is the solution to be frustrating? The upside down stage was incredibly annoying- I was about to play upside down as well. I got through most of it by randomly pushing directions. The racing stage looked cool in concept at first, but I was more like "WTF!!??" due to the relative half-assedness of it.

And what's up with the stupid enemy names? I don't remember most of them except for like "Sea Warfly" or something like that. What the heck does a warfly do in water?

It's ok though. I bash every game, even the ones I do like. Maybe I will grow to like this, assuming the game stops giving me heart attacks.

So, my friends and I stopped playing this and went to play Puzzle fighter, a great game worthy of its own mention.

So, did any of you play the game? Which boss do you pick first? ;)

And poor Zero :)