A Rote and By-the-Numbers Experience

It’s been a while since I last reviewed a Mega Man X game. I slowly popped reviews out for the games over the course of a couple of years – Mega Man X in 2020, Mega Man X2 and Mega Man X3 in 2021, and then Mega Man X4 in 2022 – but each time it felt like pulling teeth to get back into the series. While I love the first two games from this branch of the Mega ManIn 1987, Capcom released Mega Man on the NES, a game featuring a blue robot that fought other robots and took their powers (so that he could then fight other robots with those powers, and on, and on). The series went on to release over 50 games in 30 years and become one of the most famous gaming franchises in the world. continuity, Everything from Mega Man X3 on really just bores me. I can’t get into the games the way I could with those first two SNES entries, and trying to sit down and enjoy them is a rough experience. I don’t want to be that guy that says “man, it really feels like Capcom should have stopped with two of these,” but considering the way the series played out… maybe they should have.

The thing that made this series of games special is that they played like Mega Man but with a little extra. You still had the Robot Masters (now called Mavericks) in interesting and creative stages based around their various thematic powers, getting blasted down by a Blue Bomber ready to take on all comers. On top of that, though, you also had items to collect and upgrades that could make your character powerful. It didn’t fully make Mega Man into a Metroidvania title, but it did add in a little of that flair in the process.

But from Mega Man X3 on it felt like the series focused less and less on actually making interesting, playable stages and more on simply cramming in more locations to check, items to grab, things to do. No one could argue that these games weren’t packed with stuff, but that didn’t mean they were actually interesting to explore and play. Mega Man X4 put even more emphasis on collecting, if you were playing as X, but it redeemed itself with a fully playable Zero that had his own, slightly different story and his own set of cool abilities to explore. It was clear even then, though, that the games were going to have to innovate if they wanted to keep being interesting to play and fun to explore.

Mega Man X5 doesn’t do any of that. Instead it seems to double down on all of the worst impulses of the series. Instead of focusing the collecting to make the stages more interesting, there’s now even more to collect (three full sets of armor for X, a special upgrade for Zero, robots to rescue, and heart tanks and sub tanks to find) intermixed into stages that fail to be exciting or interesting. And when it comes to the boss fights, they feel like a total afterthought. While I know fans rave about the story for this game, when it comes to actually playing Mega Man X5, the experience is a total dud.

This fifth entry in the subseries finds Maverick Hunters X and Zero battling against a newly resurrected Sigma once more. Sigma has spread a virus across the world, infecting a whole new set of Mavericks. He also enlisted the aid of a new foe, Dynamo, to hijack the space station Eurasia and send it on a collision course with Earth. X and Zero have to battle the robots to collect the parts needed to upgrade a laser and take out the space station and, if that failed, then upgrade a space shuttle to fly up to the space station and destroy the colony that way.

If all goes according to plan, X and Zero will then meet back up to continue taking on the evil robots. If any part of the plan fails, though, a new virus will crop up, a Zero Virus, and it will infect Zero and turn him into a Maverick. At that point X then has to battle his old ally. Zero sacrifices himself in the end, one way or another, to fight off the effects of Sigma’s virus so that X can defeat the villain and save the day. X stands alone in the end, hoping for a bright future, the one that he and Zero had worked so hard to ensure.

Storywise, Mega Man X5 is bold and interesting. It had a lot of moving parts that can fail or succeed based entirely on random chance. There’s the possibility X and Zero stop the space station from crashing into Earth, and while the damage to the station is still awful, it’s better than the alternative. However, because of that randomness, it’s even more likely that each phase of their plan will fail and X will end up having to battle Zero, watching his friend die to help ensure the future they’ve been fighting for all along. In the end, no matter what, Zero will seemingly die and X will have to go on into the future alone.

My thoughts on this are mixed, to be clear. I like the idea of the heroes having to work together to prevent a dire threat to the planet, and I think the idea that the heroes could fail but the adventure continues is quite interesting. If that were done through game play and choices made by the players, that would be something truly special… except, it’s not. Instead the whole story hinges on random chance, and more than likely (due to the way the odds are weighted) the heroes will fail and the player will get the bad ending through no fault of their own. This is something that shouldn’t have been random but should have been up to the player so they could choose if they wanted the good or bad ending all on their own. It feels like a massive oversight that this wasn’t the case.

The other issue with this story, though, isn’t really the fault of Mega Man X5 but where the series went after this. Originally this game was intended to function as the end of the Mega Man X series, with the continuing story picking up with Zero getting revived and rebuilt in the future for the Mega Man Zero series. But Mega Man X5 was a massive success, selling well above expectations, and Capcom demanded further sequels. So instead of X looking forward to the future, hanging up his arm cannon to build a peaceful colony while Zero moved on into the distant future for new stories, four further games were made that muddied the continuity and ruined this game’s ending. It’s hard to care about the events of this game when a direct sequel contradicted it just a year later.

Even if this were the last game in the subseries, though, I likely still wouldn’t enjoy it. While I appreciate the bold narrative swings the game takes, the actual gameplay is awful. I really hate working my way through this game because it plays like crap. While the controls are fine, everything I’m doing is just tedious. To start, the stages are all largely boring. The game feels like it was built with blocks, stages composed of these blocks strung along randomly, sometimes with a single gimmick thrown in, but there’s very little care towards design or platforming. It feels muddled and basic instead of tightly plotted and interesting.

The game also relies way too heavily on auto-scrollers. There’s a long stage (Duff McWhalen) with the heroes battling a slow moving whale sub. There’s a stage set on a motorbike. There’s a stage with lava flows set on a global timer. On and on parts of these stages, or the whole stages themselves, have these auto-scrolling sections that suck all the energy out of the game. These sections pad the runtime without adding anything to the experience. It’s slow and plodding without adding in any actual fun.

Adding to that, the collecting in the game is pretty boring as well. Oftentimes it doesn’t feel like the designers even tried, simply placing items out in the open for you to grab while you’re traversing these boring stages. The few times you do have to go out of your way to get something it frequently requires double-dipping a stage so you can come back with a powerup that gets you the rest of the way there. And for some of these stages, like Duff McWhalen, you really don’t want to have to do these long, boring sections more than once. And that doesn’t even get to collecting all the hurt Reploids in need, who are in obnoxious places and you’re really rather leave them to die. It sucks.

And that doesn’t even get into the boss fights, which are so boring. The big issue with the game is that it isn’t much fun to play as X, who is underpowered for much of the experience, at least until he gets his ultimate armor. So instead of playing as X it’s better to play as Zero… assuming you don’t lose him halfway into the game due to the random contrivances of the plot. Zero is hella fun to play as being fast, lithe, and very powerful. However, Zero also has a beam combo you can master that melts all bosses. Boss arrives, Zero gets in close, and then five seconds later the boss is dead. You can repeat this, over and over, until you get bored or the game takes Zero away and forces you to play as X for a while. And, by that point, you should have the Ultimate Armor unlocked and then you can melt bosses via X’s air dash. Seriously, there’s no challenge to this game.

It all leads to an experience that doesn’t feel very well plotted. The heroes get too powerful too quickly, the bosses are never much of a challenge, and the stages aren’t much fun to explore. I wish the game were good, that enough stuff was changed to actually make this experience one I wanted to play through. If the story were under my control, if the stages had a bit more going on in them, if the heroes really had to work to get to their ungodly power level, that would be something, but nothing here fits right. It’s like the designers had a couple of good ideas, but were so bored with making these series by this fifth entry they couldn’t find the drive to build it all properly.

Deep down, I really think this series should have ended with Mega Man X5 instead of dragging along for a few more games no one asked for or wanted. Although, hell, I would have been perfectly happy with just the first two, if we really get down to it. Still, this game is better liked by fans than Mega Man X6, which many consider to be the worst of the franchise. We’ll get to that one sooner or later, whenever I have the drive to force myself through another of these titles…