The Discussion Thread | The 12th Annual Greatest Games Event

[Runa216]

05 – Mega Man X SNES Trilogy – 9.8/10 – SNES, PS2, Wii, WiiU, PS4, Switch

Oh boy it's a Mega Man X! This game's like a legend, it's pretty freakin' good. I mean I don't feel like I need to sing its praises but whatever! It's got tight controls, a simple objective, it's just freakin' fun to play; so go slap it in your SNES machine and have a grand old time. Alright, now that I have that Sequelitis reference done and over with, let's get to Mega Man X. Or, more specifically, Mega Man X, X2, and X3. The SNES trilogy. I considered including Mega Man X4 in the list as well, since it was on the Legacy Collection and I did in fact love it (as it is on my top 50 but not my top 25), but I felt that it was different enough in terms of look, feel, gameplay, and nostalgia to not be included in this entry. Plus, it would feel really weird to have some random PS1 game in my SNES top 5.

Ironically, Mega Man X2 and X3 don't actually have as much nostalgia as the rest of these games. I didn't play them until like 2006 or something, well after playing Mega Man X4-X8. Sure, I tried them out on emulators, but it's really not the same thing, is it? Alas, some history. As I mentioned before, Mega Man 2 was the first game I ever considered to be a favourite of mine. It was the first game I beat and my favourite for years. Also I knew that Mega Man 3, 4, 5, and 6 had all come out by this point, so when Mega Man X came out, I thought it was Mega Man 10. Because, you know, roman numerals. Plenty of games use roman numerals instead of the numbers we all know and love. Well, I was wrong but might as well have been right.

My aunt had the game and let me play it any time I came to her place. So it was something of an amazing surprise when, after years of playing it there, she gifted it to me for christmas, thus making it the first Mega Man game I owned. Sure, I played other ones, but they were all owned by friends or rented. I never owned one myself. I thought Zero was a girl because it was the early 90s in Canada and long hair was for girls (oh how wrong I was, but gimme a break, I was like 8 or 9 or something). I still remember the first time I beat sigma, it was 1 AM in Norwich in the townhouses. Mom used to let me stay up late to play games as long as I was in bed before dad came home, and I'd play Mega Man X most of those nights, struggling to get through Sigma's Fortress. Once I did it for the first time, I just stared at the screen, kinda scared when Sigma's face came up and assured me he'd be back.

Then, about a year later, I saw Mega Man X2 on the shelf, but nobody would rent it for me. We weren't a rich family and the 90s were rough. I just got to visit that game store every time I visited that town, and every time I asked and every time it was a no. It wasn't until my classmate invited me over and we played Mega Man X4 that I even realized the series had continued. It revitalized my love for the series and while it went through a rough patch (namely Mega Man X7, I hate that game almost as much as Final Fantasy XIII; I actually liked X5 and X6, unlike most people), I never truly stopped loving it. It wasn't until the Mega Man X collection on PS2 came out that I got a chance to play Mega Man X2 and X3. Same year as Final Fantasy XII.

And despite them being more rudimentary than the PS1 games, they invoked much the same feelings that the original had, so I assumed it was nostalgia speaking. But no, in spite of the fact that X1 had literally more than 20 years on X2 and X3 for me, personally, I liked them all equally. I loved the gameplay mechanics, I loved the secret items, I loved the subtle iterations they took without compromising quality. Sure, I do think X1 is the best of the trilogy for how refined it is (I think Sequelitis explains in pretty great detail just how well-designed the game actually is), I do think what X2 and X3 do greatly expand upon the foundations set in the first one. It actually made me like X4 a little less after playing X2 and X3 because X4's mechanics and gameplay was simpler than them.

The whole trilogy is truly fantastic from top to bottom. At this point I didn't even realize Mega Man had a plot, but the X games had a plot. The first game had some of the best music in all of gaming with a grinding metal soundtrack that I can still rock out to today, something its sequels never lived up to. The X franchise as a whole took the basic concept of Mega Man Classic and made it extreme for the 90s! 8 levels and bosses, able to be beaten in any order, you beat the boss and get their power with is strong against one of the other bosses. Pretty simple, but in Mega Man X, you also get armour upgrades that give you extra bonuses and drastically change how the game is played and how you grow strong. All three of the SNES games expand upon this concept, adding new options and bonuses.

One of the coolest ideas that was in Mega Man X1 but not in its subsequent games was that depending on what order you beat the levels, other levels might be effected. For example, if you beat Storm Eagle's stage before beating Spark Mandrill, Storm Eagle's ship will crash into Spark Mandrill's stage, shutting the power off and drastically altering the level. If you beat Chill Penguin's stage before Flame Mammoth, an avalanche will freeze much of Flame Mammoth's stage. If you beat Launch Octopus' stage before Sting Chameleon, then Sting Chameleon's forest will be flooded. It's cool shit like this that gave this game an extra something that its sequels didn't have.

However, what X2 and X3 lacked in stage manipulation, they made up for with extra armour parts and collectibles. All three games have three sets of items in common. Every level has a heart tank, which raises your max health by two tabs, and there are four armour pieces as well as multiple e-tanks which can be filled with life energy and stored for later. In X1, you get the dash boots that give you a boost of speed and momentum when jumping or just moving. It's the only armour piece that's forced upon you since this mobility is needed for the later levels and is paramount to the game's level design and flow. The helmet is useless, allowing you the ability to headbutt a few spots in the game to unlock items and collectibles. The chest piece upgrades your defence and halving the damage you receive, pretty basic.

The coolest unlockable is the arm cannon upgrade, which allows you to charge up your buster shot one level higher than you could before. So, not charged you get lemons, slightly charged you get a green plasma blast, and fully charged prior to the upgrade you get a plasma cannon blast that's blue and just as tall as you. However, if you get the arm cannon upgrade, you surround yourself in pink plasma and throw out a series of large pink balls that destroy everything in your path. Furthermore, it also allows you to charge up all the weapons you acquire from the bosses. IT's awesome, so awesome that the game forces it upon you once you finish all eight bosses and the first stage in the final dungeon, even if you didn't find it.

The second and third game do similar things by making your armor charge up a giga blast and help you find secret exits, making them far more useful and unique while also ensuring that you start the game with the dash. Rather than make you earn it again, it's just how you are because it is paramount to the game's flow and pace. The first one needed to give it to you because it was the first in the series and you needed to be eased in. While X2 and X3 do miss out on a few things that made X1 special, such as the rockin' soundtrack and some of the more nuanced game design and the way the levels interact depending on what order you complete the stages, they made up for it with a few new options. Well, X3 did. X2 had basically the same overall structure but I'll never complain about more of a good thing.

X2 introduced X-hunters. Three guys who appear after besting two of the eight mavericks. They appear in random stages, allowing you to seek them out on their own hidden boss areas. They don't do too much to the overall structure of the game, but if you beat them you do acquire a handful of collectibles and there will be some slight alterations to the final levels, utilizing one different boss. X3 took this a step further by replacing the X-hunters with Bit, Byte, and Vile (a recurring villain from X1). Their presence has basically the same effect as the X-hunters, they appear after a bit of the game, then randomly appear in the levels. Only, instead of you being able to see where they are on the map and having to find their lair within their game, you don't know where they are and their lair is baked into the level design and are unavoidable.

X3 also added two new collectibles. It does have energy tanks, heart tanks, and armour pieces, but they also add mech suits and armor chips. The mech suits are sadly mostly useless since they don't appear until later and by then you won't really need them aside from getting a handful of other collectibles. The chips are sadly also useless, but only because of this game's super-suit. See, in each game, if you get everything there is to collect, then you can acquire some sort of super weapon. In Mega Man X1, once you acquire everything there is to get (which can be achieved with the code 8-4-4-7, 4-6-6-6-, 6-1-5-6, yes I remember that code by heart), you can do a series of tricks to get the Hadouken, a move from Street Fighter's Ryu and Ken. It can only be used at full health and requires a quarter-circle-forward on the D-pad followed by the shoot button, but it's a 1-hit kill for literally every enemy in the game, even bosses. In Mega Man X2, same basic idea but it's the Shoryuken, which isn't a 1-hit kill but does massive damage and doesn't create invincibility frames so you can feasably insta-kill any boss.

But in the third one, there's no Street Fighter super weapon. Instead, there are four armor upgrade chips strewn throughout the 8 stages. The helmet chip allows you to self-heal if you stand still long enough, the leg chip makes it so that you can air-dash twice instead of just once, the armour chip further increases your defenses, and the arm chip gives you more firepower. If you get any of these chips, the other three are locked out, meaning that if you find them you want to not acquire them. If you do this and capture everything else in the game, then in the first of the final stages you can get the gold armour, which equips all four of the chips. In addition to that, this game also allows you to play as Zero, but he only has one life and if you lose him he's deactivated throughout the game. However, if you keep him alive until one of the later stages, then use him at a specific time and beat the boss there, the boss has a unique animation that insta-kills him and he gives X his Z-saber, further powering up his blaster.

Dammit I said this entry was supposed to be shorter. Ugh. Anyway, Mega Man X is about as close to perfection as you'll get, a game that's simple but refined to razor sharpness. X2 is more of the same with a few tweaks, some better than others and a handful of things removed. While X3 is an ambitious attempt to vastly expand the game that adds a tonne of content that sadly isn't implemented as well as it could or should be. All three of them are amazing games and I return to them every few months, but the original is the best while 2 and 3 are incredibly fun and original games that absolutely deserve their place. There's a clear ranking but they're all great.