Place your random thoughts (video games in general edition)
- Thread starter Yanrima~
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tazmily menace
SOUNDWAVE: SUPERIOR.
steam summer sale!!
i wanna save for OFF but there's a bajillion games in my wishlist i wanna play too... hmmmm
i wanna save for OFF but there's a bajillion games in my wishlist i wanna play too... hmmmm
rocketspruggs
♡ Introverted Artist ☆
I made a funny mistake while trying to redecorate my house on Stardew Valley, I accidentally put one of the chairs on a tableーnow it just looks like a chair showcase. This ended up being so funny that I decided to leave it there like that. 
tazmily menace
SOUNDWAVE: SUPERIOR.
look at how tiny my joltik is!!
ive grown attached to this xxs joltik ever since i encountered her
ive grown attached to this xxs joltik ever since i encountered her
xSuperMario64x
love of my life 💙💜
omg so smol
I'm thinking about playing New Leaf again.... I haven't played since the day after the online service shut down. I miss playing it honestly, it's one of my favourite games of all time. I started a new town back in 2023 I think? but I didn't get very far with it. maybe I can go back to that, clear some weeds and whatnot.
speaking of that, it's kinda sad that I have little desire to go back to New Horizons. I'd probably only play it if I was playing with friends. the breaking tools just aren't it
ZeldaCrossing64
Sugary Cynic
I hope modding The Binding of Isaac isn't too difficult. I need to get the Specialist Dance mod. XD
I know nothing about TBoI so it'd be nice to know if I got a good item, lol.
I know nothing about TBoI so it'd be nice to know if I got a good item, lol.
You know what time it is… it’s time for that needlessly long post about why X7 is ****.
TL;DR: this might (unintentionally) be one of the funniest games ever made, so many things about it make me laugh. Other than that, it’s so bad that I’d rather call it a walking simulator and/or legalized torture than a video game. I constantly thought to myself “maybe X5 and X6 were better than I thought,” while playing this game. They’re not, but they’re still both leagues above this trash. At the very least the controls in those games are good. It’s not just the 3D that’s bad in X7. It’s everything. Everything that could possibly go wrong did. It’s a complete disaster.
I decided to use wordcounter.net to see how long this post is… wow, it would take 30 minutes to read this entire thing. But I feel like I have to do that to fully describe how soul devouring this game is. I do definitely take pride in having what might be the longest post on the site, if this is actually it. This video pretty much explains how the game is trash in 3 minutes.
While this game was probably rushed, it’s not as unfinished as X6. They took into account X6’s poor reception and wanted to make a fresh, new Mega Man X experience by combining 3D with classic 2D action. They were ambitious with this one, but I think one of the leading issues was that they treated 3D like an art style. They pretty much made a 2D game and gave it an extra dimension, failing to realize that not everything that works in 2D works in 3D, something other games had realized since the 90s.
Like X6, X7 quickly became a contender for the worst game in the franchise. Capcom was taking L’s like crazy in 2003. I mean, they cooked with Mega Man Zero 2, but they also released Devil May Cry 2, Dino Crisis 3, Mega Man Battle Network 4, and Mega Man X7. While X6 has seen more love over time, almost no one tries to defend X7 or say it’s good. Instead, the topic of debate is whether X7 is worse than X6. People who think X7 is worse will probably say everything I’m going to, but people who think X6 is worse will usually say it’s a broken mess and that X7 at least tried something new while X6 failed at things the games before it got right. I would agree if I thought these games were of similar quality, but as bad as X6 is, it’s nowhere near X7’s level. It’s hard to appreciate how innovative the game was when it’s this bad, especially when I think it’s worse than X6. And yeah, I’m not even trying to hide my thoughts on X7. Trust me, it sucks.
In X7’s plot, Maverick crime is on the rise, but the Hunters haven’t recovered from X5’s events, only made worse by X retiring to find more peaceful solutions. A new vigilante group called Red Alert forms to deal with Mavericks led by a Reploid named Red. While they do a good job at first, they suddenly start getting crueler in their methods. One member, a New Generation Reploid child named Axl, and decides to flee because of the change. Zero finds him and takes him to the base, but Red challenges them to a duel. He releases their generals and says that they can keep Axl if they win. Axl takes the opportunity to become a temporary Maverick Hunter and fight with Zero, against X’s wishes. Axl also eventually reveals to Zero that the reason he’s so important is his ability to shapeshift into other robots his size because he’s a New Generation Reploid, and it’s also also eventually revealed that, as a shock to absolutely no one, Sigma’s behind all of this.
Cool on paper, bad in execution. I like them giving Axl a connection with the main villains, but it just feels like another way to shaft X. That’s not at all new, but X was still a main character in X4-X6. In Mega Man X7, the title character is barely in the cutscenes, so it’s no shock why Axl was hated for a while even if I like him. I think he’s a good character that was introduced in a bad game. But ironically enough, my biggest gripe with the story, besides Sigma, is X himself.
X is meant to be a pacifist who fights anyway because he hates injustice more than violence. He despises the innocent lives that are lost because of Mavericks, which is why he’s always the first to charge in to battle. That’s what makes X such a good character. He’s a complete badass that you want to hug. But. A story where X gets tired of fighting is a logical next step for him. It’s just that X7’s writing makes him unsympathetic. His retirement alone caused severe damage to the Hunters and forced his best friend to work alone. And sure, Zero is fine with fighting, but he has to deal with so many Mavericks on his own and I just feel bad for him instead. Then X never even brings up injustice. All he ever does is complain about how much he hates war, which makes him come off really whiny and selfish, like he’s not at all considering the damage he’s caused by quitting. Finally, he just sits on his ass the entire game rather than actually try to achieve this ideal world he wants. And he’s a total dick to Axl too. X in this game is not a shell shocked war veteran. X in this game is an insufferable, selfish crybaby.
A well written version of this would have a last straw that makes X retire. As is, it comes out of nowhere and if anything, he was getting more confident in X6. For example, someone he cares about gets hurt or killed. It can’t be some redshirt newcomer, it has to be someone who’s important. If this was really planned out, it could even be someone introduced in a previous game just for this purpose. This, combined with some other recent act of violence, would cause him to retire. But we actually see him doing things to achieve peace that instead reassure him that he does need to fight, and he clearly doesn’t know if retiring was the right decision.
Another thing that affects the story is the presentation. I’ll go over this more later since it’s a game wide issue, but something I want to talk about now is the voice acting. Unlike X6, X7 had time to make a dub. I criticized this in X6 because it’s incredibly lazy to leave the Japanese voices in the English version, but that’s still better than what this game did. X7 is up there with X4 and 8 as one of the worst dubs in the series (and in gaming). And it might be a hot take, but I think X7 is the absolute worst in this regard. 8 and X4 released when voice acting in video games was still new, and according to interviews, the recordings were done years before that. And while the dubs are pretty bad, both are at least very entertainingly so. Neither of those apply to this game. This was 2003, standards were significantly higher. But X7 has terrible delivery and direction everywhere, and it’s not funny bad. Red is actually good but everyone else? Axl is bratty, but is tolerable compared to X, who sounds sooo whiny. Especially with how he yells “stop it” every time you shoot a charge shot. Zero’s voice is way too deep, Alia’s annoying, Signas is just phoning it in, Sigma’s a chain smoker, and the less said about the bosses the better.
They butchered the gameplay, too. On paper, the controls are the same. But in execution, it’s awful. One of the most fun things about X1-X6 was how you could blast through stages with enough practice because of the smooth controls, but X7 doesn’t have that. Everything’s heavy and doesn’t chain together in a satisfying way like it used to. When you get hit by strong attacks, you get knocked far back and over for a few seconds, which only further slows down the pace and gets you killed in cheap ways. Something as simple as wall jumping will often just glitch out and leave you floating in place. For some reason, the camera is moved with the front shoulder buttons. They instead delegated switching weapons to the right analog stick. Considering that switching weapons in X1-X6 was already done with the shoulder buttons, I have no idea why they did this. You can’t even change it. And it’s not like the camera is good even when it can be controlled. When it can’t, it tends to be really zoomed in or at an awkward angle that artificially increases challenge.
X7’s controls are just clunky and slow, and the characters aren’t good either. I like how you pick a combination of characters before starting a stage and switch between them at any time, but no one is fun to use. X is the same as before, just now being able to air dash by default. And Axl is pretty much just X with a hover. But instead of having a charge shot, Axl has a copy shot. He can charge a shot and if it kills a humanoid enemy, it drops DNA data that he can touch to transform into it temporarily. The copy shot is very weak, yet must be charged, so it either takes an eternity to actually kill an enemy with it or you try to weaken them first, then accidentally kill them. The transformations aren’t even good, most of them are even slower than you already are and only have one attack, which usually stops all your momentum and takes seconds to use. And you can’t even switch back to normal or your other character with it, you have to wait for the timer to run out. Because of all this, you might think that there’s no reason to use Axl since he’s just a worse X, but remember that X has retired. In order to get him back on the battlefield, you have to either save 64 Injured Reploids (more on those later) or beat every stage. Since there are 16 Reploids in every stage, you’d have to beat a minimum of four levels before you can use the main character of the game. And that’s if you’re actually going after Reploids, which most people won’t. It really feels like a way to force players to use Axl and warm up to him when instead players would hate him even more for it.
I need to mention the lock on, because that’s what ruins X and Axl. I get the idea behind this. In 3D environments, the depth perception would make the usual “lining up your shots with enemies” gameplay impossible. But since the game automatically targets enemies and does all the work for you, all you have to do is mash attack. Over and over. That’s bound to get dull before the intro stage is over, and it’s like this for the entire game, even in 2D. This results in multiple sections where you don’t even try to dodge, you just spam attack. But what about Zero? He doesn’t have the Z-Buster anymore, so how does he fix the issue?
He doesn’t. He’s actually even worse. Zero was so fun to use on PS1 but now? He’s so close ranged that you’re more likely to hurt yourself than your target, which is most noticeable with his air attack. And the combos are super slow as well when they used to last a second. 3D swordfighting in games has been understood since Ocarina of Time, but X7 doesn’t and Zero’s simply impossible to use in combat without taking tons of damage. Plus, with any boss that shoots at you from afar, all Zero can do is deflect their attacks at them when X and Axl can just spam them to death. Once I got X, I never touched Zero again until Crimson Palace for reasons I’ll explain when I get to that abomination.
The combat is broken in this game. X7 doesn’t consider the fact that in 3D, you can just walk around enemies if you feel like it. That should NOT be a thing. Other 3D action games remedy this by either offering incentives for fighting enemies or forcing you to, but X7 only rarely does that latter. Most of the time, you’ll just actively avoid combat because it’s a waste of time, gives you nothing, and isn’t fun either. There’s an upgrade system tied to the Injured Reploids, so what about this instead: make enemies occasionally drop parts that Alia (or Douglas, bro is just gone now) can use to build upgrades. This isn’t new for the franchise or X series, it’s existed since the Game Boy.
The stages are terrible. At least X6 had some good levels. Every stage in X7 blows. They switch between 2D and 3D, but in both dimensions, they’re straight lines with almost no platforming and full of enemies that again, you just press attack over and over to kill. Combine that with your pitiful speed and the other pacing issues, and it’s pretty hard to stay awake playing X7 because it’s just so boring. I’m not going to go over every level since most of them can be summed up as this, but I’ll say a few highlights. Mostly ones where they try something different but fail spectacularly.
The opening stage instantly sets a low bar. You play in both dimensions, starting as Axl. Then you play as Zero where you fight the bumblebee jets from X1, except now you’re able to just stand under them and slash away penalty free as they have no way of hitting you down there. Then you kill Mega Scorpio and it ends. The stage goes on for 6 minutes, longer than any other intro stage, yet it feels like you’re doing nothing the entire time. And if you game over, you’re going back to the start. Every other game has a good intro, so of course X7 had to be the exception. It’s not even well tutorialized. It immediately leaves a bad taste in players’ mouths before they continue and realize it only gets worse because this is the best stage in X7.
Central Circuit is the worst Ride Chaser level in the series. In X4 and X5, the gimmick of these levels is that you’re on a hover bike, a Ride Chaser, and the screen is quickly autoscrolling while you react to one hit kill obstacles. These are annoying because of how trial and error they feel. Shockingly, X6 doesn’t have one of these, but X7 does. This one doesn’t autoscroll, but the controls are horrendous. At base speed you’re barely even moving, but if you try to accelerate, you go uncontrollably fast. There’s zero middle ground. What’s worse is that you’re not trying to get to the end, there’s an objective to complete. Disarm all 20 bombs on the course by… running them over? Okay… you have 3 minutes, which is enough time, but the control issue makes it so bad to play, especially since you can’t turn around. The best you can do is drive until the course loops.
Air Forces is a marvelous display of how janky this game is. It’s entirely 3D, but the worst part is the beginning, where you start off jumping from jet to jet. Since it’s X7, you’ll often die to the horrible camera or the nonexistent collision detection. And whenever you die in this section, you have to wait through a 10 second long cutscene that can’t be skipped where absolutely NOTHING happens.
Whereas Cyberspace in X4 was peak, Cyber Field is hell. The first section is typical X7 design where you run around all your problems but in the second, you’re in a maze like area where at certain points, you have to travel to the underside by jumping on orange colored tiles. This would be fine, but the level is designed in a confusing and nauseating way with the colors and layout and almost translucent walls. It’s hard to tell where you have to flip to continue, and when you do that, your controls are reversed. In a 3D environment. I think it’s intentional, but playing it is torture, especially if you’re trying to go for the collectibles.
And the fun doesn’t stop once you reach the bosses. X7 has the worst Mavericks of all time. Concept and design wise, they’re mid at best (an onion? Really?), and their names are really stupid. X6’s untranslated names were pretty bad, but X7 has even more gems like Vanishing Gungaroo or Tornado Tonion or Snipe Anteator. No, I did not misspell anything. Then the stages obviously suck, and the fights aren’t much better. Most of them have the same issues: long i-frames, easy to avoid attacks that last forever, and giant health bars. I think this was done to balance that the player essentially has two health bars, but it does not work, especially since if you die as one character, you lose a life even if your other one still had health. To make matters worse, in Mega Man X7, you deal less damage than in Rockman X7. I can’t understand why they would do that, did they want the game to be even slower? Anyway, they’re trash, and they also make you want to mute your tv because they never shut the hell up. They’re spamming voice clips that get very obnoxious very fast, like “triangle ki-“ or “YOUPUNKYOUPUNKYOU” or “later!” The most infamous one is Flame Hyenard. **** this guy, he’s worse than Infinity Mijinion. There’s not a single moment of silence for the entire fight. It’s so bad that their lines overlap each other as they run around you in circles and you likely die to the jank physics of the platform you’re on.
On the topic of bosses, the special weapons leave much to be desired. The lock on kills any reason to use them when I could just press attack over and over and get better results while not having to worry about ammo. Especially with X and his charge shot that decimates everything. They also just don’t work well in 3D. For example, Moving Wheel is this small disc that travels across surfaces. Good luck hitting anything with that. Weapons aren’t even good for bosses because of the i-frames and how most weapons have low ammo compared to the boss health bars. Since Zero doesn’t have ammo, Splash Warfly’s and Flame Hyenard’s weakness worked like a charm as him, but I didn’t bother with the others. If this was supposed to solve the issue bosses have with weaknesses, it doesn’t. X7 still has Spark Mandrill Syndrome, but now the weapons don’t have enough ammo to kill the boss, are hard to even land a hit with, the invincibility period is even longer and drags the fight out more, and the fights still suck without weaknesses. That’s not a solution. As Axl though, he does get new guns for each weapon, which are usually better than the actual weapon.
At least the boss theme is fire. That’s really the only redeeming quality of X7, the music. They did a nice job, it’s just kind of generic (like when you compare the stage clear theme in X7 to any from X1-X6). I’d rather listen to the osts of X1, SNES X3, X4, X5, or X6, but I still enjoy most of the game’s tracks. It’s sad how there’s almost no remixes out there because the game’s ass. Also, they got rid of the iconic SHING sound effect that played in X1-X6 when X and Zero struck their victory poses. They barely even have victory poses, because…
…this game’s production values were so low. I’ve frequently brought up how bad X5 and X6 look because X4 showed how good a PS1 game can look and those games are visual downgrades in every way. But X7? Where do I even begin? Well, at least the game’s art style in particular is pretty.
There’s three types of cutscenes in X7. The first is the rarest and only good one, which is full CGI. Outside of stages, there are these cutscenes with stills and character portraits placed over them. It looks really cheap, like something you’d see in a DS game. And while they’re skippable, they tend to feel bloated. The one after the intro stage is longer than the level, and it could have easily been condensed into half that time. The third kind is used in stages, usually before a boss, and can’t be skipped. They’re in engine, and this wouldn’t be so bad if not for the fact that the models don’t animate, change facial expressions, or even open their mouths. It’s hilariously low budget. Scenes that are supposed to be cool, like Axl holding a gun to Flame Hyenard’s head and saying “don’t worry. I have just the cure,” or Zero threatening to put Vanishing Gungaroo on time out, or serious like the one with Anteator and X, are unintentionally funny because of this.
The graphics aren’t great. Backgrounds are blurry or flat colors, textures look bad (shout out to Lava Factory, where you can see the seams in the lava), and overall it just is not visually appealing. Even outside of the cutscenes, you can tell they didn’t have enough money for good animations with how stiff characters look while doing anything. The stage start screen is also still a Canva presentation, and the effects are cheap. In other Mega Man platformers, when you die, you explode and expel spheres of energy in a circular motion. In X7, you kind of just become one with the universe. A yellow light shines in you and radiates energy as you fade to nothing. This combined with the scream your character lets out never failed to make me laugh. If you run out of time in Central Circuit, instead of showing a clip of the road exploding, explosions just appear on your vehicle and the screen turns to red.
The game’s poorly optimized too. A constant annoyance was the pop-in. X7 is incapable of having every asset in the stage (stages which are already split into parts) loaded at once. But the pop-in is so egregious that it can genuinely be an issue. You’ll be walking and see enemies just spawn in, which can catch you off guard if you weren’t expecting it since they literally weren’t on screen a second ago. I’m sure they could load things better than that. And speaking of loading, this game has a lot of that. Most X4 and a few X5-X6 stages were split into two parts that were separated with a loading screen. In X7, despite being on better hardware, they’re split into even more parts and the game has more loading screens in general. On PS2, these last over 10 seconds each. While the Legacy Collection makes them much faster, that doesn’t change the fact that X7 has no excuse for having lengthy loading times in the first place. It’s just, again, poor optimization.
Remember how I said this game has pacing issues? It goes way beyond the controls and gameplay and loading times. Like Alia. In X5, she would pause you at random intervals to tell you some obvious observation she’s made of the stage, forcing you to mash through the text. She’s still in X6, but now you can choose to ignore her call. X7 does that too, but if you ignore her, she’ll keep repeating “cAn YoU hEaR mE? Axl/X/Zero?” as long as you’re in the radius to trigger her call. If you give in and answer her call like she clearly wants you to, you’ll find out that it’s even worse than X5 because her text scrolls by super slowly and doesn’t let you continue until the last word has been spelled out. Every text box in the game is like this, making unskippable cutscenes a nightmare. The menus are also agonizing. For example, like X5-X6, getting a game over sends you to your last checkpoint. In those games, when you run out of lives, it would just ask you if you want to do that or go to the stage select, in which case Alia would quickly give you your rank and let you continue. In X7, first you’ll sit through a loading screen, then Alia will tell you your rank, then she’ll make sure to individually list every single Reploid you’ve saved, and if you got one that had a chip, she’ll tell you how some Reploids can hold those each time you use one. Then she’ll ask if the chip distribution was okay, you have to say yes, and then she’ll ask if you want to retry, save, go to the stage select, or quit the game. If you pick any option, she’ll ask you to confirm first. And then you can go back to where you died. And if it was a boss, you’re rewatching that cutscene! See what I mean? Did she have to say one. Reploid. At. A. Time? Did she have to tell me that Reploids give me chips every time I save one that has one? Pretty much every interface in this game is like that. When you start the game, Alia tells you each Maverick and where they’re located, which is already kind of slow in X4-X6, but since it’s X7, you can’t just mash your way through. It’s torture. Even saving is a pain in the ass because of what I just mentioned. Poor Alia. I’ve always liked her even though she’s annoying, but some fans hate her because of this game and X5.
I should probably explain how rescuable Reploids work in X7. Just like X6, each of the main levels has 16 Reploids that can be saved and returned to the base. But instead of giving you parts, two of them in each stage give you chips, while some give you heart tanks. Every character has twelve permanent upgrades that are unlocked with those chips. This might make Zero usable, but I didn’t give him any so I have no idea. I think this is a neat idea, since they’re basically permanent parts, but it can feel really unbalanced. For example, you can triple your invincibility frames and halve damage, which makes it even easier to just run through everything. But it means I can engage with the crappy combat even less, so it’s not like I’m complaining. I can complain about how easy it is for the Reploids to die. In X6, if a Nightmare Virus touched them, whatever part they were holding was lost forever. In X7, this happens if any enemy hurts them at all (it could be argued that nothing changed considering how often X6 flooded the screen with Nightmare Viruses). And again, most of them don’t hold anything and you have no idea if they do until you get to the results screen. And after that, you have to use it immediately, you can’t save it for later. This is infuriating, and a perfect segue into the achievements in the Legacy Collection.
I never brought these up because they weren’t really that bad in other games. In X1, X4, and X6, they weren’t hard, which is shocking considering the high potential for sadistic achievements X6 has. They easily could have asked me to do Blaze Heatnix’s stage without armor or beat the Nightmare Mother damageless. X2 had one hard one, and X3 and X5 were forced me to do multiple full playthroughs, but I didn’t absolutely despise my time with most of them from X1-X6. Besides maybe the Zero Stage 1 no Dark Hold one. X7 is mostly the same but has two in particular that are really annoying. The first makes you save all 128 Reploids. A few Reploids are placed in really dickish spots, and letting any die means restarting the stage. Which means more time of my life spent on Mega Man X7. The other achievement wants you to listen to every Alia call. It’s not hard, but it’s so tedious, in one of the slowest action platformers ever made. They must have known the game sucks. There’s another achievement that wants you to max out every character, which had me scared that I was going to have to replay the game until I realized that beating the game gives you a new game plus where your upgrades are kept. So I only had to do two stages, thankfully. I think it’s hysterical how every single X7 achievement is a rare achievement because no one wants to play this game.
Where was I… oh yeah, the game’s agonizingly slow. Obviously the actual gameplay is still slow, but they find ways to make it even more painful. I said that Air Forces has this long cutscene you have to rewatch upon death, but a lot of stages have needless padding. For example, Radio Tower has a mini boss with this one attack where it spins blades around that are super easy to dodge, but it’s invincible while using it. The attack lasts 15 seconds, and if it’s feeling evil, it’ll use it over and over again and give you no chance to attack for as long as it wants. When the game does things like this, I’m just shocked that this went through multiple people and no one thought there was an issue.
Finally, there are the final stages, which are, without a doubt, the worst the series has ever seen. I previously gave that title to X6, but the overuse of spikes, enemy spam, and blatant lack of playtesting found in Secret Lab manages to be less torturous than X7’s gauntlet. Since you’d want to make sure you have X’s armor by now, let’s check that out first.
X only has one armor this time around (he doesn’t even start off with an imperfect Shadow or Blade Armor and can’t get Ultimate Armor in any way), which is the Glide Armor. Whenever he gets armor parts, he can immediately use them. That’s an improvement over X5 and X6, but they also made it that X needs to be the one to find the capsule when before, Zero was able to collect it on his behalf. Considering that, again, X is an unlockable character, this is an unwelcome change. But I think the ability to utilize the armor’s individual features without finding everything might mean that X7 actually has a least backtracking route. The issue is it’s Mega Man X7, so it’s not like I’m planning on revisiting it. The abysmal pacing carries over into actually getting an armor part, though. You have to wait for the capsule to open, then Dr. Light tells you what the part does with no theme this time around (and thankfully, no voice), then X steps into the capsule, takes ten years to receive the part, then steps out. And it’s all for a mid armor. Design wise, it’s a mess. I have no idea what they were cooking with this, it just looks overdesigned and not appealing. And its functionality isn’t much better.
Like the Gaea Armor, the head parts are painful to get as they’re found in Cyber Field, but all they do is attract health pickups to you. Better than doing literally nothing, but still useless. It’s better to just ignore these so you don’t have to explore that ****ty stage. The body parts halve damage, prevent that knockback that happens when you take a lot of damage, and turn damage into energy for Giga Crush, a screen nuke. The arm parts let you charge weapons and add homing missiles to your charge shot, and the leg parts let you glide. Shout out to how the glide “animation” is just X T-posing. Great stuff, X7. All jokes aside, this armor sucks. Gliding is cool, but Giga Crush is strong yet uncreative Giga Attack and the missiles are hard to notice. Also, didn’t we just have an armor that let you fly? Why would Dr. Light decide the next step should be one that lets you glide instead? The body parts getting rid of that stupid three second long knockback is amazing, but it’s an issue that X7 introduced and shouldn’t be there in the first place. For what it’s worth, Glide Armor X is the best playable option in X7 since X was the best and this is just him but improved.
To get to the final stages, you have to beat every Maverick. You can’t get them early. I actually want to apologize to X5, because I said it was unbalanced how it lets you access the final stages as soon as you beat the intro level. But I disagree now (the rng system is still badly designed though). Zero Space probably wasn’t designed with X and Zero without upgrades in mind, but they weren’t designed in a way where beating them like that is impossible. I see it as a good challenge for someone who’s mastered the game, besides the first level. In X6, you can enter the final stages while only having beaten one Maverick, but the stages don’t allow every playable option to clear them with just the tools given to them upon beating the intro stage (and you can be softlocked even if you have beaten every level). That’s obviously bad design. On top of that, it has awful bosses like the Nightmare Mother and **** stage design across the board, so yeah. That’s completely different.
But enough yapping. Crimson Palace time. Red tells the Hunters where he’s located, and they must travel the Palace Road to reach it. When I heard the second stage select theme, I thought it was really good and kind of sad. For some reason, it made me think that maybe I was a little too harsh on this game. Then I actually played the levels… and wow, what was I thinking? This game has always been terrible. Palace Road is a flat path where you’re being chased by a giant Mechaniloid the entire time, and the screen is autoscrolling. Just like Tidal Whale’s stage from X5, they made it as slow as possible to create a 4 minute slog. It sucks, especially with the camera making some jumps harder than necessary. At the end of the chase, you fight the Mechaniloid, which can be trivialized if you have Glide Armor and know what charged weapons to use. But that level is merciful compared to the real beast, Crimson Palace.
It starts with a short stretch before you get teleported to Red. There’s multiple platforms over a void. Red teleports to a platform and then uses an attack, so you have to get to a nearby one and attack him from there. It sounds simple, but the fact that this is X7 makes the battle more annoying than it should be. First, pacing. Red has a giant health bar like every other boss, and his tornado attack renders him invincible. Then there’s the camera and size of the arena. It’s really big, so Red has a lot of room to teleport to. But when you jump to a platform, the camera faces towards you, which is usually away from Red, and that’s if you didn’t die jumping to the platform because of the hitbox detection. So what would happen to me was this: I jump to a platform, Red makes tornadoes, he teleports. I jump to another platform, turn the camera, and 80% of the time it turns out he’s out of lock on range, but in the time it takes to adjust the camera and get to a close enough platform to actually hit Red, he teleports away and uses the tornado attack again. And since he’s an X7 boss, every time he teleports, he says “over here!” Also, it didn’t happen to me, but if you kill him while jumping, you’ll fall to your death even though you’ve beaten the fight. Even Gate didn’t have that issue since X6 just froze you in place when you beat him. One of the absolute worst fights in the series, but I couldn’t help but laugh at the crappiness even though I hated it. Music’s great, at least.
Once you beat Red, he reveals that he set the place to explode and X, Axl, and Zero should escape. Axl doesn’t want to leave him, but Red tells him to anyway. It’s honestly pretty sad, if only the fight wasn’t so ****. Like Secret Lab 2, you’d expect the stage to end here, but nope. Other Mega Man X games have anywhere from 3-5 final stages, but X7 only has 2, so all of that content is crammed into this one. For that reason, this one stage takes over FORTY MINUTES to beat on a good day. And what’s that time spent on? What do you think? There’s actually two paths you can pick to continue, but regardless, all you’ll find are multiple rooms separated by loading screens with the most basic platforming ever that’s at the same time the most X7 ever asks of you, endless screens with nothing or enemies on them that you can just run around or through, and after that very intriguing gameplay is the boss rush. I think the atmosphere is cool, with it being a cemetery with creepy music playing, and when you beat a Maverick, you destroy their grave. But gameplay wise, this is hands down the worst boss rush in the series, and this is only two games after X5’s. Just the fact that you’re refighting these revolting bosses makes this the worst one, but then you have to factor in the loading times. There’s a loading screen before you go to a boss, after a boss, and if you die, that’s two more loading screens. I feel bad for those poor souls who played this on PS2.
And I could barely use boss weaknesses because of the issues I’ve already explained, but also one really dumb feature. In X5 and X6, if you turn on auto charge, you’ll charge a shot without holding down the button if you have no weapon equipped, and if you do have one equipped, nothing happens. In X7, if you switch to a weapon, you automatically charge it, making it really hard to use normal weapons with that turned on. And unlike the other games, you can’t turn it off through the pause menu. You HAVE to go to the options menu on the stage select. Why???? Since charged weapons use more ammo, it felt best to just fight the bosses buster only, which made me hate this even more. Anyway, just like X4-X6, the final boss is in the same stage as the boss rush. This level houses every important boss in X7, and they all suck. The actual stage? It’s a sequence of nothing rooms. Think about it. Every major gameplay related issue I’ve described up to this point - the pacing, the controls, the camera, the optimization, the stage and boss design - is perfectly exemplified in this single level. Crimson Palace is the worst Mega Man X stage of all time. It’s an astounding display of exactly what’s wrong with X7 in one final gauntlet.
After the boss rush, the Hunters find out that Sigma was behind all of this, and I have so much to say about this cutscene because it’s the funniest one in the game, I have this memorized line for line (send help). Sigma’s theme song slaps, but his voice is cheesy and stupid as hell in this game. He introduces himself by saying “thanks for coming by, fellas.” “Fellas,” Sigma? It makes sense since he’s supposed to be a total clown by this point, but still. Then he calls Crimson Palace his home and like, isn’t this Red Alert’s base? X and Zero are no longer surprised that it’s Sigma, but then the mf says “that’s right, folks! I’ll do it again and again! I WILL make X and Zero MINE!” BRO. Could you not have worded that any better? Then there’s the actual fight… wait, why is Sigma even here in the first place? In X1-X5, he had spare bodies to return to whenever X and Zero destroyed one or just had someone make one, and Gate made his in X6. What’s the explanation for X7? Whatever, I’m almost done with this piece of crap.
Phase 1 is easy. He has 50% more health than most bosses in both phases, but this one is pure 2D and it’s not too hard to deal with. It’s easily the best fight in the game, but that’s not exactly saying much. On the other hand, Our Blood Boils is one of the best Mega Man X final boss themes. In every other game’s first Sigma phase, even X6, I was forced to come up with some kind of strategy for the fight. It’s always satisfying to pull off, especially in X2, X4 (technically the second phase in that game, the one after the grim reaper), and X5. But in X7, I beat it on my first try with one sub tank and there was also no risk of losing progress since dying on the second phase thankfully doesn’t send you back to this one.
I say “thankfully” because the second phase was where they went all out in making some dog****. It’s impossible to take seriously with his voice, how much time he spends T-posing, and how one of his attacks has a laser coming out of his pelvis, but the fight really blows. Like Red, the arena is made up of floating platforms, but this time at different elevations. He uses a variety of attacks from the center of the arena, you just have to hit him when he’s close. However, the terrible physics, Sigma’s very fast punch attack instantly knocking you into the void, and the amount of health he has makes this incredibly frustrating. But here’s the crazy part: if you know what you’re doing, you can make this the easiest fight in the game. I learned that a charged Splash Laser absolutely decimates his health, and when combined with one of Zero’s techniques, Gokumonken, you can beat Sigma by doing almost nothing. If you go to the second highest platform and use Gokumonken (which shields you), most of Sigma’s attacks literally can’t touch you. As for the other attacks, for one of them he’ll shoot energy balls, and depending on the color, you either keep deflecting or attack them back at him for damage. Whenever he uses the super laser piss, you just jump over it, switch to X and charge Splash Laser. And when he does the punch, the attack doesn’t hurt you if you’re guarding and you can attack him after he uses it. I cannot believe this fight is so bad that Sigma actively attacks himself. You don’t even need X. This is why I brought Zero into this stage despite him being grossly underleveled. Just to see what I was missing out on, I tried the fight a few times normally and yeah, it’s ass. The theme’s amazing though, it’s a shame these final boss themes were wasted on X7.
The ending depends on who got the last hit, but first you watch another CGI one. Axl, X, and Zero are trying to leave, but Sigma is still alive and punches Axl through a wall and okay where are we? We were in Crimson Palace, then an elevator going down, then space, and now the palace again? What? X and Zero are about to attack Sigma but get interrupted by Red, somehow still alive, who jumps to Sigma. Sigma tries to fuse with him with his… tentacle things or whatever, but out of nowhere, Red whips out a pistol and shoots Sigma, knocking him out a window. Red reveals himself to actually be Axl and they escape. This is another scene that should be cool, but the voice acting kind of ruins it, especially Sigma’s scream when he falls to his death.
X and Axl have virtually the same ending where Axl wants to be a permanent Hunter. However, X is still against this because omg violence. Alia and Signas just let Axl do what he wants, but what was the arc here? X doesn’t want Axl to be a Hunter, and after he cleverly saves their lives, he’s still a hater. People say X4’s writing sucks (not saying it wasn’t kind of weak) as if X7 doesn’t exist. In Zero’s ending, he sees X standing on the corpses of Reploids. X charges and aims his buster at him before Alia wakes him up. He’s a little shaken up but reports for duty. This is supposed to be foreshadowing Copy X from the Zero games, but regardless, this ends Mega Man X7.
Wow. It’s fine to like a bad game, objective quality doesn’t necessarily correlate with enjoyment. But with X7, I’m genuinely curious as to what the few unironic fans out there like about it. Because the more I think about it, the more I realize how the game unsalvageable is in my mind. I think X6 is a piece of crap, but I can see what would make someone feel differently. With X7, I seriously don’t know what anyone sees in this dumpster fire. Even the music, while good, just sounds like average PS2 music. It’s not outstanding like most of the prior games. I truly think this is one of the worst games ever made. It’s more functional than **** like Big Rigs, but this is such an incompetent mess that completely screws up everything imaginable. I don’t think a game has to be sub-functional to be terrible, because no one’s paying money for Bubsy 3D expecting a good game. People did purchase X7 thinking it would be a quality product, and it’s just… not. Superman 64 being bad has no effect because no one would care about it if it wasn’t total garbage, and while Mega Man isn’t that popular, having a game this bad is still a blemish on its reputation and ultimately killed the X series. I think anyone can acknowledge how that makes it worse to some extent. I feel really bad for the devs, though. I’m sure they wanted to make something great, but they weren’t given the budget or time.
But everything I’ve said brings up the question: can X7 be fixed? Like X5 and X6, this game has an improvement project, but those former two games are built on good foundations. If you cut out the pointless crap, you have a much better experience. For example, X5 has some unnecessarily slow sections/stages. Just speed them up. The parts system requires killing yourself just to get them, so make that not happen. The random path to the ending is really annoying, so set clear parameters for what you have to do: if you get every part in time, you get the good ending. If not, you get the bad ending. Simple. X6 is mostly the same. You’d have to redesign the stages for them to be genuinely good, but you can make what exists less intolerable. Cut the health on the donuts, remove 70% of the Nightmare Viruses in the game (especially in Central Museum and Gate Stage 2), slightly alter all the potential softlocks so that no parts or armor are required to clear any stage. Give all the easy bosses like Blizzard Wolfang or Ground Scaravich more health and stronger attacks so you can’t beat them standing still, but weaken cheap and tedious bosses like Infinity Mijinion or High Max. Remove the Nightmare Effects and Reploids that don’t hold anything. My point is that most of X5 and X6’s issues can be remedied without fundamentally changing the game. In X7, yes, you can allow skipping through text boxes. You can speed up the menus. You can make Zero faster. You can give bosses way less health. But things like the bad stages, the lock on, the voice acting and cutscenes, all of those are baked into the disc. You’re limited by what exists within X7.
I think X7 needs something akin to P06 where someone takes the story, bosses, stage ideas, and everything like that but completely changes the game and puts it in a new engine. The 2D sections play the exact same as every other game, but the 3D sections are third person shooters like Ratchet and Clank. Some of the bosses are 2D, some are 3D, but they’re all remade. The script is rewritten and redubbed, the cutscenes are reanimated, the presentation is much better, etc. If someone made that, it would immediately be one of my favorite games in the series. The only issue is that this has to be done out of love, not obligation. It should be made by someone who likes or respects the original game and wants to fully realize it, like P06. Not many people feel that way about X7, so this will probably never see the light of day.
Like X6, X7 quickly became a contender for the worst game in the franchise. Capcom was taking L’s like crazy in 2003. I mean, they cooked with Mega Man Zero 2, but they also released Devil May Cry 2, Dino Crisis 3, Mega Man Battle Network 4, and Mega Man X7. While X6 has seen more love over time, almost no one tries to defend X7 or say it’s good. Instead, the topic of debate is whether X7 is worse than X6. People who think X7 is worse will probably say everything I’m going to, but people who think X6 is worse will usually say it’s a broken mess and that X7 at least tried something new while X6 failed at things the games before it got right. I would agree if I thought these games were of similar quality, but as bad as X6 is, it’s nowhere near X7’s level. It’s hard to appreciate how innovative the game was when it’s this bad, especially when I think it’s worse than X6. And yeah, I’m not even trying to hide my thoughts on X7. Trust me, it sucks.
In X7’s plot, Maverick crime is on the rise, but the Hunters haven’t recovered from X5’s events, only made worse by X retiring to find more peaceful solutions. A new vigilante group called Red Alert forms to deal with Mavericks led by a Reploid named Red. While they do a good job at first, they suddenly start getting crueler in their methods. One member, a New Generation Reploid child named Axl, and decides to flee because of the change. Zero finds him and takes him to the base, but Red challenges them to a duel. He releases their generals and says that they can keep Axl if they win. Axl takes the opportunity to become a temporary Maverick Hunter and fight with Zero, against X’s wishes. Axl also eventually reveals to Zero that the reason he’s so important is his ability to shapeshift into other robots his size because he’s a New Generation Reploid, and it’s also also eventually revealed that, as a shock to absolutely no one, Sigma’s behind all of this.
Cool on paper, bad in execution. I like them giving Axl a connection with the main villains, but it just feels like another way to shaft X. That’s not at all new, but X was still a main character in X4-X6. In Mega Man X7, the title character is barely in the cutscenes, so it’s no shock why Axl was hated for a while even if I like him. I think he’s a good character that was introduced in a bad game. But ironically enough, my biggest gripe with the story, besides Sigma, is X himself.
X is meant to be a pacifist who fights anyway because he hates injustice more than violence. He despises the innocent lives that are lost because of Mavericks, which is why he’s always the first to charge in to battle. That’s what makes X such a good character. He’s a complete badass that you want to hug. But. A story where X gets tired of fighting is a logical next step for him. It’s just that X7’s writing makes him unsympathetic. His retirement alone caused severe damage to the Hunters and forced his best friend to work alone. And sure, Zero is fine with fighting, but he has to deal with so many Mavericks on his own and I just feel bad for him instead. Then X never even brings up injustice. All he ever does is complain about how much he hates war, which makes him come off really whiny and selfish, like he’s not at all considering the damage he’s caused by quitting. Finally, he just sits on his ass the entire game rather than actually try to achieve this ideal world he wants. And he’s a total dick to Axl too. X in this game is not a shell shocked war veteran. X in this game is an insufferable, selfish crybaby.
A well written version of this would have a last straw that makes X retire. As is, it comes out of nowhere and if anything, he was getting more confident in X6. For example, someone he cares about gets hurt or killed. It can’t be some redshirt newcomer, it has to be someone who’s important. If this was really planned out, it could even be someone introduced in a previous game just for this purpose. This, combined with some other recent act of violence, would cause him to retire. But we actually see him doing things to achieve peace that instead reassure him that he does need to fight, and he clearly doesn’t know if retiring was the right decision.
Another thing that affects the story is the presentation. I’ll go over this more later since it’s a game wide issue, but something I want to talk about now is the voice acting. Unlike X6, X7 had time to make a dub. I criticized this in X6 because it’s incredibly lazy to leave the Japanese voices in the English version, but that’s still better than what this game did. X7 is up there with X4 and 8 as one of the worst dubs in the series (and in gaming). And it might be a hot take, but I think X7 is the absolute worst in this regard. 8 and X4 released when voice acting in video games was still new, and according to interviews, the recordings were done years before that. And while the dubs are pretty bad, both are at least very entertainingly so. Neither of those apply to this game. This was 2003, standards were significantly higher. But X7 has terrible delivery and direction everywhere, and it’s not funny bad. Red is actually good but everyone else? Axl is bratty, but is tolerable compared to X, who sounds sooo whiny. Especially with how he yells “stop it” every time you shoot a charge shot. Zero’s voice is way too deep, Alia’s annoying, Signas is just phoning it in, Sigma’s a chain smoker, and the less said about the bosses the better.
They butchered the gameplay, too. On paper, the controls are the same. But in execution, it’s awful. One of the most fun things about X1-X6 was how you could blast through stages with enough practice because of the smooth controls, but X7 doesn’t have that. Everything’s heavy and doesn’t chain together in a satisfying way like it used to. When you get hit by strong attacks, you get knocked far back and over for a few seconds, which only further slows down the pace and gets you killed in cheap ways. Something as simple as wall jumping will often just glitch out and leave you floating in place. For some reason, the camera is moved with the front shoulder buttons. They instead delegated switching weapons to the right analog stick. Considering that switching weapons in X1-X6 was already done with the shoulder buttons, I have no idea why they did this. You can’t even change it. And it’s not like the camera is good even when it can be controlled. When it can’t, it tends to be really zoomed in or at an awkward angle that artificially increases challenge.
X7’s controls are just clunky and slow, and the characters aren’t good either. I like how you pick a combination of characters before starting a stage and switch between them at any time, but no one is fun to use. X is the same as before, just now being able to air dash by default. And Axl is pretty much just X with a hover. But instead of having a charge shot, Axl has a copy shot. He can charge a shot and if it kills a humanoid enemy, it drops DNA data that he can touch to transform into it temporarily. The copy shot is very weak, yet must be charged, so it either takes an eternity to actually kill an enemy with it or you try to weaken them first, then accidentally kill them. The transformations aren’t even good, most of them are even slower than you already are and only have one attack, which usually stops all your momentum and takes seconds to use. And you can’t even switch back to normal or your other character with it, you have to wait for the timer to run out. Because of all this, you might think that there’s no reason to use Axl since he’s just a worse X, but remember that X has retired. In order to get him back on the battlefield, you have to either save 64 Injured Reploids (more on those later) or beat every stage. Since there are 16 Reploids in every stage, you’d have to beat a minimum of four levels before you can use the main character of the game. And that’s if you’re actually going after Reploids, which most people won’t. It really feels like a way to force players to use Axl and warm up to him when instead players would hate him even more for it.
I need to mention the lock on, because that’s what ruins X and Axl. I get the idea behind this. In 3D environments, the depth perception would make the usual “lining up your shots with enemies” gameplay impossible. But since the game automatically targets enemies and does all the work for you, all you have to do is mash attack. Over and over. That’s bound to get dull before the intro stage is over, and it’s like this for the entire game, even in 2D. This results in multiple sections where you don’t even try to dodge, you just spam attack. But what about Zero? He doesn’t have the Z-Buster anymore, so how does he fix the issue?
He doesn’t. He’s actually even worse. Zero was so fun to use on PS1 but now? He’s so close ranged that you’re more likely to hurt yourself than your target, which is most noticeable with his air attack. And the combos are super slow as well when they used to last a second. 3D swordfighting in games has been understood since Ocarina of Time, but X7 doesn’t and Zero’s simply impossible to use in combat without taking tons of damage. Plus, with any boss that shoots at you from afar, all Zero can do is deflect their attacks at them when X and Axl can just spam them to death. Once I got X, I never touched Zero again until Crimson Palace for reasons I’ll explain when I get to that abomination.
The combat is broken in this game. X7 doesn’t consider the fact that in 3D, you can just walk around enemies if you feel like it. That should NOT be a thing. Other 3D action games remedy this by either offering incentives for fighting enemies or forcing you to, but X7 only rarely does that latter. Most of the time, you’ll just actively avoid combat because it’s a waste of time, gives you nothing, and isn’t fun either. There’s an upgrade system tied to the Injured Reploids, so what about this instead: make enemies occasionally drop parts that Alia (or Douglas, bro is just gone now) can use to build upgrades. This isn’t new for the franchise or X series, it’s existed since the Game Boy.
The stages are terrible. At least X6 had some good levels. Every stage in X7 blows. They switch between 2D and 3D, but in both dimensions, they’re straight lines with almost no platforming and full of enemies that again, you just press attack over and over to kill. Combine that with your pitiful speed and the other pacing issues, and it’s pretty hard to stay awake playing X7 because it’s just so boring. I’m not going to go over every level since most of them can be summed up as this, but I’ll say a few highlights. Mostly ones where they try something different but fail spectacularly.
The opening stage instantly sets a low bar. You play in both dimensions, starting as Axl. Then you play as Zero where you fight the bumblebee jets from X1, except now you’re able to just stand under them and slash away penalty free as they have no way of hitting you down there. Then you kill Mega Scorpio and it ends. The stage goes on for 6 minutes, longer than any other intro stage, yet it feels like you’re doing nothing the entire time. And if you game over, you’re going back to the start. Every other game has a good intro, so of course X7 had to be the exception. It’s not even well tutorialized. It immediately leaves a bad taste in players’ mouths before they continue and realize it only gets worse because this is the best stage in X7.
Central Circuit is the worst Ride Chaser level in the series. In X4 and X5, the gimmick of these levels is that you’re on a hover bike, a Ride Chaser, and the screen is quickly autoscrolling while you react to one hit kill obstacles. These are annoying because of how trial and error they feel. Shockingly, X6 doesn’t have one of these, but X7 does. This one doesn’t autoscroll, but the controls are horrendous. At base speed you’re barely even moving, but if you try to accelerate, you go uncontrollably fast. There’s zero middle ground. What’s worse is that you’re not trying to get to the end, there’s an objective to complete. Disarm all 20 bombs on the course by… running them over? Okay… you have 3 minutes, which is enough time, but the control issue makes it so bad to play, especially since you can’t turn around. The best you can do is drive until the course loops.
Air Forces is a marvelous display of how janky this game is. It’s entirely 3D, but the worst part is the beginning, where you start off jumping from jet to jet. Since it’s X7, you’ll often die to the horrible camera or the nonexistent collision detection. And whenever you die in this section, you have to wait through a 10 second long cutscene that can’t be skipped where absolutely NOTHING happens.
Whereas Cyberspace in X4 was peak, Cyber Field is hell. The first section is typical X7 design where you run around all your problems but in the second, you’re in a maze like area where at certain points, you have to travel to the underside by jumping on orange colored tiles. This would be fine, but the level is designed in a confusing and nauseating way with the colors and layout and almost translucent walls. It’s hard to tell where you have to flip to continue, and when you do that, your controls are reversed. In a 3D environment. I think it’s intentional, but playing it is torture, especially if you’re trying to go for the collectibles.
And the fun doesn’t stop once you reach the bosses. X7 has the worst Mavericks of all time. Concept and design wise, they’re mid at best (an onion? Really?), and their names are really stupid. X6’s untranslated names were pretty bad, but X7 has even more gems like Vanishing Gungaroo or Tornado Tonion or Snipe Anteator. No, I did not misspell anything. Then the stages obviously suck, and the fights aren’t much better. Most of them have the same issues: long i-frames, easy to avoid attacks that last forever, and giant health bars. I think this was done to balance that the player essentially has two health bars, but it does not work, especially since if you die as one character, you lose a life even if your other one still had health. To make matters worse, in Mega Man X7, you deal less damage than in Rockman X7. I can’t understand why they would do that, did they want the game to be even slower? Anyway, they’re trash, and they also make you want to mute your tv because they never shut the hell up. They’re spamming voice clips that get very obnoxious very fast, like “triangle ki-“ or “YOUPUNKYOUPUNKYOU” or “later!” The most infamous one is Flame Hyenard. **** this guy, he’s worse than Infinity Mijinion. There’s not a single moment of silence for the entire fight. It’s so bad that their lines overlap each other as they run around you in circles and you likely die to the jank physics of the platform you’re on.
On the topic of bosses, the special weapons leave much to be desired. The lock on kills any reason to use them when I could just press attack over and over and get better results while not having to worry about ammo. Especially with X and his charge shot that decimates everything. They also just don’t work well in 3D. For example, Moving Wheel is this small disc that travels across surfaces. Good luck hitting anything with that. Weapons aren’t even good for bosses because of the i-frames and how most weapons have low ammo compared to the boss health bars. Since Zero doesn’t have ammo, Splash Warfly’s and Flame Hyenard’s weakness worked like a charm as him, but I didn’t bother with the others. If this was supposed to solve the issue bosses have with weaknesses, it doesn’t. X7 still has Spark Mandrill Syndrome, but now the weapons don’t have enough ammo to kill the boss, are hard to even land a hit with, the invincibility period is even longer and drags the fight out more, and the fights still suck without weaknesses. That’s not a solution. As Axl though, he does get new guns for each weapon, which are usually better than the actual weapon.
At least the boss theme is fire. That’s really the only redeeming quality of X7, the music. They did a nice job, it’s just kind of generic (like when you compare the stage clear theme in X7 to any from X1-X6). I’d rather listen to the osts of X1, SNES X3, X4, X5, or X6, but I still enjoy most of the game’s tracks. It’s sad how there’s almost no remixes out there because the game’s ass. Also, they got rid of the iconic SHING sound effect that played in X1-X6 when X and Zero struck their victory poses. They barely even have victory poses, because…
…this game’s production values were so low. I’ve frequently brought up how bad X5 and X6 look because X4 showed how good a PS1 game can look and those games are visual downgrades in every way. But X7? Where do I even begin? Well, at least the game’s art style in particular is pretty.
There’s three types of cutscenes in X7. The first is the rarest and only good one, which is full CGI. Outside of stages, there are these cutscenes with stills and character portraits placed over them. It looks really cheap, like something you’d see in a DS game. And while they’re skippable, they tend to feel bloated. The one after the intro stage is longer than the level, and it could have easily been condensed into half that time. The third kind is used in stages, usually before a boss, and can’t be skipped. They’re in engine, and this wouldn’t be so bad if not for the fact that the models don’t animate, change facial expressions, or even open their mouths. It’s hilariously low budget. Scenes that are supposed to be cool, like Axl holding a gun to Flame Hyenard’s head and saying “don’t worry. I have just the cure,” or Zero threatening to put Vanishing Gungaroo on time out, or serious like the one with Anteator and X, are unintentionally funny because of this.
The graphics aren’t great. Backgrounds are blurry or flat colors, textures look bad (shout out to Lava Factory, where you can see the seams in the lava), and overall it just is not visually appealing. Even outside of the cutscenes, you can tell they didn’t have enough money for good animations with how stiff characters look while doing anything. The stage start screen is also still a Canva presentation, and the effects are cheap. In other Mega Man platformers, when you die, you explode and expel spheres of energy in a circular motion. In X7, you kind of just become one with the universe. A yellow light shines in you and radiates energy as you fade to nothing. This combined with the scream your character lets out never failed to make me laugh. If you run out of time in Central Circuit, instead of showing a clip of the road exploding, explosions just appear on your vehicle and the screen turns to red.
The game’s poorly optimized too. A constant annoyance was the pop-in. X7 is incapable of having every asset in the stage (stages which are already split into parts) loaded at once. But the pop-in is so egregious that it can genuinely be an issue. You’ll be walking and see enemies just spawn in, which can catch you off guard if you weren’t expecting it since they literally weren’t on screen a second ago. I’m sure they could load things better than that. And speaking of loading, this game has a lot of that. Most X4 and a few X5-X6 stages were split into two parts that were separated with a loading screen. In X7, despite being on better hardware, they’re split into even more parts and the game has more loading screens in general. On PS2, these last over 10 seconds each. While the Legacy Collection makes them much faster, that doesn’t change the fact that X7 has no excuse for having lengthy loading times in the first place. It’s just, again, poor optimization.
Remember how I said this game has pacing issues? It goes way beyond the controls and gameplay and loading times. Like Alia. In X5, she would pause you at random intervals to tell you some obvious observation she’s made of the stage, forcing you to mash through the text. She’s still in X6, but now you can choose to ignore her call. X7 does that too, but if you ignore her, she’ll keep repeating “cAn YoU hEaR mE? Axl/X/Zero?” as long as you’re in the radius to trigger her call. If you give in and answer her call like she clearly wants you to, you’ll find out that it’s even worse than X5 because her text scrolls by super slowly and doesn’t let you continue until the last word has been spelled out. Every text box in the game is like this, making unskippable cutscenes a nightmare. The menus are also agonizing. For example, like X5-X6, getting a game over sends you to your last checkpoint. In those games, when you run out of lives, it would just ask you if you want to do that or go to the stage select, in which case Alia would quickly give you your rank and let you continue. In X7, first you’ll sit through a loading screen, then Alia will tell you your rank, then she’ll make sure to individually list every single Reploid you’ve saved, and if you got one that had a chip, she’ll tell you how some Reploids can hold those each time you use one. Then she’ll ask if the chip distribution was okay, you have to say yes, and then she’ll ask if you want to retry, save, go to the stage select, or quit the game. If you pick any option, she’ll ask you to confirm first. And then you can go back to where you died. And if it was a boss, you’re rewatching that cutscene! See what I mean? Did she have to say one. Reploid. At. A. Time? Did she have to tell me that Reploids give me chips every time I save one that has one? Pretty much every interface in this game is like that. When you start the game, Alia tells you each Maverick and where they’re located, which is already kind of slow in X4-X6, but since it’s X7, you can’t just mash your way through. It’s torture. Even saving is a pain in the ass because of what I just mentioned. Poor Alia. I’ve always liked her even though she’s annoying, but some fans hate her because of this game and X5.
I should probably explain how rescuable Reploids work in X7. Just like X6, each of the main levels has 16 Reploids that can be saved and returned to the base. But instead of giving you parts, two of them in each stage give you chips, while some give you heart tanks. Every character has twelve permanent upgrades that are unlocked with those chips. This might make Zero usable, but I didn’t give him any so I have no idea. I think this is a neat idea, since they’re basically permanent parts, but it can feel really unbalanced. For example, you can triple your invincibility frames and halve damage, which makes it even easier to just run through everything. But it means I can engage with the crappy combat even less, so it’s not like I’m complaining. I can complain about how easy it is for the Reploids to die. In X6, if a Nightmare Virus touched them, whatever part they were holding was lost forever. In X7, this happens if any enemy hurts them at all (it could be argued that nothing changed considering how often X6 flooded the screen with Nightmare Viruses). And again, most of them don’t hold anything and you have no idea if they do until you get to the results screen. And after that, you have to use it immediately, you can’t save it for later. This is infuriating, and a perfect segue into the achievements in the Legacy Collection.
I never brought these up because they weren’t really that bad in other games. In X1, X4, and X6, they weren’t hard, which is shocking considering the high potential for sadistic achievements X6 has. They easily could have asked me to do Blaze Heatnix’s stage without armor or beat the Nightmare Mother damageless. X2 had one hard one, and X3 and X5 were forced me to do multiple full playthroughs, but I didn’t absolutely despise my time with most of them from X1-X6. Besides maybe the Zero Stage 1 no Dark Hold one. X7 is mostly the same but has two in particular that are really annoying. The first makes you save all 128 Reploids. A few Reploids are placed in really dickish spots, and letting any die means restarting the stage. Which means more time of my life spent on Mega Man X7. The other achievement wants you to listen to every Alia call. It’s not hard, but it’s so tedious, in one of the slowest action platformers ever made. They must have known the game sucks. There’s another achievement that wants you to max out every character, which had me scared that I was going to have to replay the game until I realized that beating the game gives you a new game plus where your upgrades are kept. So I only had to do two stages, thankfully. I think it’s hysterical how every single X7 achievement is a rare achievement because no one wants to play this game.
Where was I… oh yeah, the game’s agonizingly slow. Obviously the actual gameplay is still slow, but they find ways to make it even more painful. I said that Air Forces has this long cutscene you have to rewatch upon death, but a lot of stages have needless padding. For example, Radio Tower has a mini boss with this one attack where it spins blades around that are super easy to dodge, but it’s invincible while using it. The attack lasts 15 seconds, and if it’s feeling evil, it’ll use it over and over again and give you no chance to attack for as long as it wants. When the game does things like this, I’m just shocked that this went through multiple people and no one thought there was an issue.
Finally, there are the final stages, which are, without a doubt, the worst the series has ever seen. I previously gave that title to X6, but the overuse of spikes, enemy spam, and blatant lack of playtesting found in Secret Lab manages to be less torturous than X7’s gauntlet. Since you’d want to make sure you have X’s armor by now, let’s check that out first.
X only has one armor this time around (he doesn’t even start off with an imperfect Shadow or Blade Armor and can’t get Ultimate Armor in any way), which is the Glide Armor. Whenever he gets armor parts, he can immediately use them. That’s an improvement over X5 and X6, but they also made it that X needs to be the one to find the capsule when before, Zero was able to collect it on his behalf. Considering that, again, X is an unlockable character, this is an unwelcome change. But I think the ability to utilize the armor’s individual features without finding everything might mean that X7 actually has a least backtracking route. The issue is it’s Mega Man X7, so it’s not like I’m planning on revisiting it. The abysmal pacing carries over into actually getting an armor part, though. You have to wait for the capsule to open, then Dr. Light tells you what the part does with no theme this time around (and thankfully, no voice), then X steps into the capsule, takes ten years to receive the part, then steps out. And it’s all for a mid armor. Design wise, it’s a mess. I have no idea what they were cooking with this, it just looks overdesigned and not appealing. And its functionality isn’t much better.
Like the Gaea Armor, the head parts are painful to get as they’re found in Cyber Field, but all they do is attract health pickups to you. Better than doing literally nothing, but still useless. It’s better to just ignore these so you don’t have to explore that ****ty stage. The body parts halve damage, prevent that knockback that happens when you take a lot of damage, and turn damage into energy for Giga Crush, a screen nuke. The arm parts let you charge weapons and add homing missiles to your charge shot, and the leg parts let you glide. Shout out to how the glide “animation” is just X T-posing. Great stuff, X7. All jokes aside, this armor sucks. Gliding is cool, but Giga Crush is strong yet uncreative Giga Attack and the missiles are hard to notice. Also, didn’t we just have an armor that let you fly? Why would Dr. Light decide the next step should be one that lets you glide instead? The body parts getting rid of that stupid three second long knockback is amazing, but it’s an issue that X7 introduced and shouldn’t be there in the first place. For what it’s worth, Glide Armor X is the best playable option in X7 since X was the best and this is just him but improved.
To get to the final stages, you have to beat every Maverick. You can’t get them early. I actually want to apologize to X5, because I said it was unbalanced how it lets you access the final stages as soon as you beat the intro level. But I disagree now (the rng system is still badly designed though). Zero Space probably wasn’t designed with X and Zero without upgrades in mind, but they weren’t designed in a way where beating them like that is impossible. I see it as a good challenge for someone who’s mastered the game, besides the first level. In X6, you can enter the final stages while only having beaten one Maverick, but the stages don’t allow every playable option to clear them with just the tools given to them upon beating the intro stage (and you can be softlocked even if you have beaten every level). That’s obviously bad design. On top of that, it has awful bosses like the Nightmare Mother and **** stage design across the board, so yeah. That’s completely different.
But enough yapping. Crimson Palace time. Red tells the Hunters where he’s located, and they must travel the Palace Road to reach it. When I heard the second stage select theme, I thought it was really good and kind of sad. For some reason, it made me think that maybe I was a little too harsh on this game. Then I actually played the levels… and wow, what was I thinking? This game has always been terrible. Palace Road is a flat path where you’re being chased by a giant Mechaniloid the entire time, and the screen is autoscrolling. Just like Tidal Whale’s stage from X5, they made it as slow as possible to create a 4 minute slog. It sucks, especially with the camera making some jumps harder than necessary. At the end of the chase, you fight the Mechaniloid, which can be trivialized if you have Glide Armor and know what charged weapons to use. But that level is merciful compared to the real beast, Crimson Palace.
It starts with a short stretch before you get teleported to Red. There’s multiple platforms over a void. Red teleports to a platform and then uses an attack, so you have to get to a nearby one and attack him from there. It sounds simple, but the fact that this is X7 makes the battle more annoying than it should be. First, pacing. Red has a giant health bar like every other boss, and his tornado attack renders him invincible. Then there’s the camera and size of the arena. It’s really big, so Red has a lot of room to teleport to. But when you jump to a platform, the camera faces towards you, which is usually away from Red, and that’s if you didn’t die jumping to the platform because of the hitbox detection. So what would happen to me was this: I jump to a platform, Red makes tornadoes, he teleports. I jump to another platform, turn the camera, and 80% of the time it turns out he’s out of lock on range, but in the time it takes to adjust the camera and get to a close enough platform to actually hit Red, he teleports away and uses the tornado attack again. And since he’s an X7 boss, every time he teleports, he says “over here!” Also, it didn’t happen to me, but if you kill him while jumping, you’ll fall to your death even though you’ve beaten the fight. Even Gate didn’t have that issue since X6 just froze you in place when you beat him. One of the absolute worst fights in the series, but I couldn’t help but laugh at the crappiness even though I hated it. Music’s great, at least.
Once you beat Red, he reveals that he set the place to explode and X, Axl, and Zero should escape. Axl doesn’t want to leave him, but Red tells him to anyway. It’s honestly pretty sad, if only the fight wasn’t so ****. Like Secret Lab 2, you’d expect the stage to end here, but nope. Other Mega Man X games have anywhere from 3-5 final stages, but X7 only has 2, so all of that content is crammed into this one. For that reason, this one stage takes over FORTY MINUTES to beat on a good day. And what’s that time spent on? What do you think? There’s actually two paths you can pick to continue, but regardless, all you’ll find are multiple rooms separated by loading screens with the most basic platforming ever that’s at the same time the most X7 ever asks of you, endless screens with nothing or enemies on them that you can just run around or through, and after that very intriguing gameplay is the boss rush. I think the atmosphere is cool, with it being a cemetery with creepy music playing, and when you beat a Maverick, you destroy their grave. But gameplay wise, this is hands down the worst boss rush in the series, and this is only two games after X5’s. Just the fact that you’re refighting these revolting bosses makes this the worst one, but then you have to factor in the loading times. There’s a loading screen before you go to a boss, after a boss, and if you die, that’s two more loading screens. I feel bad for those poor souls who played this on PS2.
And I could barely use boss weaknesses because of the issues I’ve already explained, but also one really dumb feature. In X5 and X6, if you turn on auto charge, you’ll charge a shot without holding down the button if you have no weapon equipped, and if you do have one equipped, nothing happens. In X7, if you switch to a weapon, you automatically charge it, making it really hard to use normal weapons with that turned on. And unlike the other games, you can’t turn it off through the pause menu. You HAVE to go to the options menu on the stage select. Why???? Since charged weapons use more ammo, it felt best to just fight the bosses buster only, which made me hate this even more. Anyway, just like X4-X6, the final boss is in the same stage as the boss rush. This level houses every important boss in X7, and they all suck. The actual stage? It’s a sequence of nothing rooms. Think about it. Every major gameplay related issue I’ve described up to this point - the pacing, the controls, the camera, the optimization, the stage and boss design - is perfectly exemplified in this single level. Crimson Palace is the worst Mega Man X stage of all time. It’s an astounding display of exactly what’s wrong with X7 in one final gauntlet.
After the boss rush, the Hunters find out that Sigma was behind all of this, and I have so much to say about this cutscene because it’s the funniest one in the game, I have this memorized line for line (send help). Sigma’s theme song slaps, but his voice is cheesy and stupid as hell in this game. He introduces himself by saying “thanks for coming by, fellas.” “Fellas,” Sigma? It makes sense since he’s supposed to be a total clown by this point, but still. Then he calls Crimson Palace his home and like, isn’t this Red Alert’s base? X and Zero are no longer surprised that it’s Sigma, but then the mf says “that’s right, folks! I’ll do it again and again! I WILL make X and Zero MINE!” BRO. Could you not have worded that any better? Then there’s the actual fight… wait, why is Sigma even here in the first place? In X1-X5, he had spare bodies to return to whenever X and Zero destroyed one or just had someone make one, and Gate made his in X6. What’s the explanation for X7? Whatever, I’m almost done with this piece of crap.
Phase 1 is easy. He has 50% more health than most bosses in both phases, but this one is pure 2D and it’s not too hard to deal with. It’s easily the best fight in the game, but that’s not exactly saying much. On the other hand, Our Blood Boils is one of the best Mega Man X final boss themes. In every other game’s first Sigma phase, even X6, I was forced to come up with some kind of strategy for the fight. It’s always satisfying to pull off, especially in X2, X4 (technically the second phase in that game, the one after the grim reaper), and X5. But in X7, I beat it on my first try with one sub tank and there was also no risk of losing progress since dying on the second phase thankfully doesn’t send you back to this one.
I say “thankfully” because the second phase was where they went all out in making some dog****. It’s impossible to take seriously with his voice, how much time he spends T-posing, and how one of his attacks has a laser coming out of his pelvis, but the fight really blows. Like Red, the arena is made up of floating platforms, but this time at different elevations. He uses a variety of attacks from the center of the arena, you just have to hit him when he’s close. However, the terrible physics, Sigma’s very fast punch attack instantly knocking you into the void, and the amount of health he has makes this incredibly frustrating. But here’s the crazy part: if you know what you’re doing, you can make this the easiest fight in the game. I learned that a charged Splash Laser absolutely decimates his health, and when combined with one of Zero’s techniques, Gokumonken, you can beat Sigma by doing almost nothing. If you go to the second highest platform and use Gokumonken (which shields you), most of Sigma’s attacks literally can’t touch you. As for the other attacks, for one of them he’ll shoot energy balls, and depending on the color, you either keep deflecting or attack them back at him for damage. Whenever he uses the super laser piss, you just jump over it, switch to X and charge Splash Laser. And when he does the punch, the attack doesn’t hurt you if you’re guarding and you can attack him after he uses it. I cannot believe this fight is so bad that Sigma actively attacks himself. You don’t even need X. This is why I brought Zero into this stage despite him being grossly underleveled. Just to see what I was missing out on, I tried the fight a few times normally and yeah, it’s ass. The theme’s amazing though, it’s a shame these final boss themes were wasted on X7.
The ending depends on who got the last hit, but first you watch another CGI one. Axl, X, and Zero are trying to leave, but Sigma is still alive and punches Axl through a wall and okay where are we? We were in Crimson Palace, then an elevator going down, then space, and now the palace again? What? X and Zero are about to attack Sigma but get interrupted by Red, somehow still alive, who jumps to Sigma. Sigma tries to fuse with him with his… tentacle things or whatever, but out of nowhere, Red whips out a pistol and shoots Sigma, knocking him out a window. Red reveals himself to actually be Axl and they escape. This is another scene that should be cool, but the voice acting kind of ruins it, especially Sigma’s scream when he falls to his death.
X and Axl have virtually the same ending where Axl wants to be a permanent Hunter. However, X is still against this because omg violence. Alia and Signas just let Axl do what he wants, but what was the arc here? X doesn’t want Axl to be a Hunter, and after he cleverly saves their lives, he’s still a hater. People say X4’s writing sucks (not saying it wasn’t kind of weak) as if X7 doesn’t exist. In Zero’s ending, he sees X standing on the corpses of Reploids. X charges and aims his buster at him before Alia wakes him up. He’s a little shaken up but reports for duty. This is supposed to be foreshadowing Copy X from the Zero games, but regardless, this ends Mega Man X7.
Wow. It’s fine to like a bad game, objective quality doesn’t necessarily correlate with enjoyment. But with X7, I’m genuinely curious as to what the few unironic fans out there like about it. Because the more I think about it, the more I realize how the game unsalvageable is in my mind. I think X6 is a piece of crap, but I can see what would make someone feel differently. With X7, I seriously don’t know what anyone sees in this dumpster fire. Even the music, while good, just sounds like average PS2 music. It’s not outstanding like most of the prior games. I truly think this is one of the worst games ever made. It’s more functional than **** like Big Rigs, but this is such an incompetent mess that completely screws up everything imaginable. I don’t think a game has to be sub-functional to be terrible, because no one’s paying money for Bubsy 3D expecting a good game. People did purchase X7 thinking it would be a quality product, and it’s just… not. Superman 64 being bad has no effect because no one would care about it if it wasn’t total garbage, and while Mega Man isn’t that popular, having a game this bad is still a blemish on its reputation and ultimately killed the X series. I think anyone can acknowledge how that makes it worse to some extent. I feel really bad for the devs, though. I’m sure they wanted to make something great, but they weren’t given the budget or time.
But everything I’ve said brings up the question: can X7 be fixed? Like X5 and X6, this game has an improvement project, but those former two games are built on good foundations. If you cut out the pointless crap, you have a much better experience. For example, X5 has some unnecessarily slow sections/stages. Just speed them up. The parts system requires killing yourself just to get them, so make that not happen. The random path to the ending is really annoying, so set clear parameters for what you have to do: if you get every part in time, you get the good ending. If not, you get the bad ending. Simple. X6 is mostly the same. You’d have to redesign the stages for them to be genuinely good, but you can make what exists less intolerable. Cut the health on the donuts, remove 70% of the Nightmare Viruses in the game (especially in Central Museum and Gate Stage 2), slightly alter all the potential softlocks so that no parts or armor are required to clear any stage. Give all the easy bosses like Blizzard Wolfang or Ground Scaravich more health and stronger attacks so you can’t beat them standing still, but weaken cheap and tedious bosses like Infinity Mijinion or High Max. Remove the Nightmare Effects and Reploids that don’t hold anything. My point is that most of X5 and X6’s issues can be remedied without fundamentally changing the game. In X7, yes, you can allow skipping through text boxes. You can speed up the menus. You can make Zero faster. You can give bosses way less health. But things like the bad stages, the lock on, the voice acting and cutscenes, all of those are baked into the disc. You’re limited by what exists within X7.
I think X7 needs something akin to P06 where someone takes the story, bosses, stage ideas, and everything like that but completely changes the game and puts it in a new engine. The 2D sections play the exact same as every other game, but the 3D sections are third person shooters like Ratchet and Clank. Some of the bosses are 2D, some are 3D, but they’re all remade. The script is rewritten and redubbed, the cutscenes are reanimated, the presentation is much better, etc. If someone made that, it would immediately be one of my favorite games in the series. The only issue is that this has to be done out of love, not obligation. It should be made by someone who likes or respects the original game and wants to fully realize it, like P06. Not many people feel that way about X7, so this will probably never see the light of day.
I decided to use wordcounter.net to see how long this post is… wow, it would take 30 minutes to read this entire thing. But I feel like I have to do that to fully describe how soul devouring this game is. I do definitely take pride in having what might be the longest post on the site, if this is actually it. This video pretty much explains how the game is trash in 3 minutes.
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i’m starting to like fallout 4. i was initially frustrated with the game because i encountered a game-breaking glitch but i restarted and was able to get past it. the only thing i really dislike about this game is that there is no settings to adjust graphics, my steam deck is COOKING.
Now off to working on getting a Gold sticker on every single Joker..................
AccfSally
Writer ₊˚✩📖🌹
Plum, my shiny Whimsicott who I
Gave my newest cutie, Chocola the shiny Dedenne a bath. I got her from a trade from a trusted person. I'm so happy, I've been looking to get one since Pokemon Moon and now I have one. She's so cute!
Everyone was waiting for their turn lol.
This was fine.
tazmily menace
SOUNDWAVE: SUPERIOR.
since zapdos has blessed me with its presence...
...this twitch plays pokemon tag of mine is going along juuust fine
...this twitch plays pokemon tag of mine is going along juuust fine
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