I think that it’s my new favorite Mega Man game. My opinions on the first three were that the first was the best one, the second was slightly worse but still great, and the third has a lot of issues which seem to have caused it to be disliked by a lot of people but I like it in spite of those. But they’re all S-tier. I think it’s close, but X4 is slightly better than X1. I’ve seen the quality of the stages get contested online, with a lot of people saying they’re just empty, but in my opinion they were great. Maybe Jet Stingray’s was kinda annoying but it’s still a great selection, even if it’s easier than the first three’s (although I didn’t find X1 super hard, X2 and X3 were more difficult). I also really like the sprites and art style of the PS1 X games. Probably my favorite Mega Man sprite set ever, and the effects look great in this game. Playing as Zero was also a great idea since X3 had the concept but executed it poorly since there were so many drawbacks that he wasn’t worth using outside of one specific secret. Now he’s really fun to use. You can charge through stages while slashing everything in your path, and he even gets to use techniques with his Saber as a counterpart to X’s special weapons. I actually liked them better than X’s weapons, to be honest. Even without them, there’s a trick you can perform by attacking to start your three slash combo, dashing after the first hit to stop it, and then immediately attack again without dashing too far, and rinse and repeat. It’s hard (much easier if you map dash to a shoulder button, which I make sure to do in every game), but since boss invincibility frames don’t end until the combo ends, you can shred through their health bars by doing this, because you’ll keep starting a new combo without legally ending the last one, meaning their invincibility frames never start.
The upgrades in every stage felt a lot better hidden than X3 (I hated the sub-tank in Jet Stingray’s stage, that one was evil). You have to do things like wall jump off a spider web with Web Spider’s weapon or use Rising Fire to burn a tree trunk. It’s much more intuitive than charging up an electric weapon to punch the ground and cause a rock to fall when you’d expect any weapon to be able to get rid of a boulder, but still more secretive than having two sub tanks just be out in the open. And it’s worth it, since the Fourth Armor is the best one so far. The head parts give you infinite weapon ammo if you don’t charge them, the body parts half damage like always and convert damage into energy to perform a Nova Strike where you dash forward and deal damage to anything in your path, the leg parts let you hover, and there’s two arm parts this time. One lets you shoot Plasma Shots, so when you shoot charge shots, they’ll continuously deal damage to where it hits for a few seconds. The other one isn’t as good, which lets you store four charge shots at a time to use whenever you want. They both let you charge special weapons. There’s parts of previous armors that beat these, like X3’s leg parts, but it’s the first time when none of the parts are bad or not useful. And there’s also the Ultimate Armor, an upgraded version unlocked through a cheat code that lets you use infinite Nova Strikes. It’s so good that they brought it back in later games, and the Fourth Armor is also in X5 but downgraded. Like always, the Maverick bosses are cooked by their weaknesses, but at least the route that finds every upgrade with the least backtracking, which I use for X1-4 since it’s a lot more fun, does force you to fight at least a couple bosses without their weakness in every game. Such as Magma Dragoon, who is definitely the most fun boss to do like this. He kicked my ass and I almost got a game over but it was hard in a fun way, especially knowing that getting a game over would just send me back to the halfway point and not the beginning of the stage. I really wish the bosses in these games weren’t so easy with their weaknesses. I actually feel bad for Split Mushroom because his voice clips are so adorable but you can pretty much stand in one place and murder him. I like the Maverick designs here a lot.
The music is also great. Recently I’ve heard a lot of people say they don’t like it or it doesn’t stand out very much but I can’t agree at all. I think that it’s worse than X5 and X6, but only because those games have really good soundtracks, and not because this game’s is bad. If I was ranking the soundtracks of these first four games, X1 would be the best, X4 would be second because it’s great, X3 would be third but very close, even if it’s a hot take to say I like it (a lot of people really hate the instrumentation of this game but I don’t; I only really find it grating in the case of the version of the Light Capsule theme used in-game or Doppler Stage 2. The PlayStation version has a good ost, but this version of the Doppler Stage 1 theme is awful), and X2’s is just okay so it’s last. But back to X4, I actually used to not like it because I felt like it overused the same boring synths and the instruments of X5 and X6 were more interesting. But I started to warm up to it a while before I actually played the game. Slash Beast, Jet Stingray, Magma Dragoon, it’s got a lot of really good songs. X’s version of Sky Lagoon is probably one of my favorite songs in the series. The instruments are great in this game even if I still prefer the next two’s. The songs don’t sound as catchy as the ones in the SNES games, but I don’t think they were meant to. They sound more atmospheric, and they are still memorable and perfectly fitting. For example, when you hear Web Spider’s theme, you can definitely imagine a jungle with rushing water and wildlife (well, mechanical wildlife), or with Split Mushroom, it feels like you’re escaping a dangerous laboratory. The opening stages perfectly represent this; X’s sounds sad but hopeful, while Zero’s sounds determined, perfectly fitting their personalities and how they feel about this city being destroyed and killing millions. X is sad but will continue regardless to stop the people behind it, while Zero is intent on kicking ass the whole way through. Apparently it had the same composer as Mega Man & Bass, which is definitely one of, if not my favorite classic one, so it checks out.
I really love the stage selected themes, especially in these PS1 games, and especially in this one where they state what war crime the Maverick you’re about to fight has committed along with the extremely hype music. I think this might be the most exciting one because of that, plus how it has a silhouette of the Maverick before the music starts and they appear right as it does, and then their name is announced. It’s so cool. You have to
watch it to understand what I mean. It definitely looks better than the ones in the next two games, if nothing else.
The plot of this game also gets a lot of hate online/on the Mega Man subreddit, although Mega Man’s writing is generally not viewed in a positive light within the fanbase. I think it kind of sucks that X is much less of an important character, so much so that he only physically appears in one FMV cutscene, which is in Zero’s story. It’s clear that this is when the series started to focus on Zero more, since he gets all the important moments, like the revelation that he was the final creation of Dr. Wily, so he should be a powerful Maverick and trying to kill X. X does at least get his own crisis at the end of the game, where he realizes that he could turn Maverick after considering how so many people he knew had. I really like the new characters, especially Iris and Double, even if they all die at the end and don’t have developed personalities. I was going to explain the entire plot, but this is already way too long. If you’re actually interested (which you probably are to some extent if you read this far or at all), you can just search up the game on the Mega Man fandom and read the plot. But aside from the fact that Sigma is the villain again like always (although at least they acknowledge that it’s getting old when you fight Split Mushroom as X. Doesn’t fix the problem, but it’s funny), the issues with the plot are the English dub and them not explaining enough in game. The first one speaks for itself. It has the same voice actors as Mega Man 8, this time in a game that takes itself seriously. It’s still really funny, but it ruins almost any serious scene because the line delivery is so bad most of the time and no one’s voice fits, with Zero being the worst offender this time, and Iris’ death is the most infamous scene in the dub. If you search up “what am I fighting for,” you’ll see why. I respect the voice actors since this probably wasn’t easy and voice acting in games wasn’t common at the time, but seriously. These collections do allow you to play the Rockman versions of every game, which does include the original Japanese voice acting of this game, and it’s very refreshing to hear. But anyway, even if you ignore that, the plot doesn’t make sense without context that is only given in supplementary material and the manual. Colonel caused the entirety of Repliforce to be labeled Maverick because he refused to put down his weapon. That sounds like a stupid thing to do, but he genuinely can’t control it. He and Iris were supposed to be one Reploid that had a fierce fighting spirit and a pacifist side just like X, but their CPUs weren’t compatible, so they were split into two. Colonel has the fighting side, so he follows his moral code very strictly and couldn’t tell his soldiers to put down their weapons or do so himself because it would go against it. And Repliforce has had a reputation of doing more harm than good, which is why they were so quick to be labeled Maverick. Of course, nowhere in the game is this revealed, so Colonel just looks like an idiot, and X, Zero, and the unseen humans look unnecessarily hostile for immediately labeling them Maverick. Another good example of this is Magma Dragoon causing Sky Lagoon to fall and kill millions just because he wanted to fight X and Zero, and Sigma told him that doing this would let that happen. Repliforce is blamed for this and that kickstarts the events of the game. That also sounds like a dumb decision, but to my knowledge, Magma Dragoon is supposed to be a character similar to Akuma from Street Fighter, so his only desire is to get stronger and fight stronger foes by any means necessary. When he was finally given the chance to, he took it, even if it cost the lives of millions of innocent people. But even with that, for some reason no one tries to explain that Magma Dragoon was responsible once learning that he did it. The plot also doesn’t try that hard to make Iris and Zero’s relationship believable. She doesn’t want him to fight Colonel because she hates violence and doesn’t want to lose either of them, but other than that, you wouldn’t really know they were dating unless the game told you. And even though Iris has appeared in other games, those usually don’t try to help this either. On paper, this is a great plot. In execution, it needs some rewriting to explain everything better. It’s ironic that the game with FMV cutscenes has a harder time explaining its story than the games that had to do the same only using text boxes.
This is my least favorite final boss so far. The first two phases are not hard and can be beaten without taking damage easily, but then there’s the last phase, which has two forms with different health bars. Earth Sigma, the form where he’s on the ground, has really annoying attacks that take off a lot of your health and I feel like it wouldn’t be as much of an issue if every time I attempted, I could fully refill my health twice. But I can’t do that because there’s nowhere to farm for health pickups to refill sub-tanks. The final boss of X3 was somewhat similar, but at least that one did have a place to farm, as well as an upgrade to let you heal and refill sub-tanks by standing still. It just makes the final boss more annoying than necessary since it’s essentially a four phase fight. It was satisfying to learn the best ways to dodge attacks, but the fact that Earth Sigma can’t be hit most of the time, and the few times he can be hit, he likes to use attacks that only leave him vulnerable for a brief amount of time or make it way too dangerous to attempt to attack made it feel more like a test of patience and war of attrition than anything else. Really annoying. Especially as Zero. I also felt like the final stages didn’t offer much challenge, even by the game’s standards. It was kind of underwhelming.
My current ranking would be X4, X1, X2, and X3. Technically, X1 is the better game since I feel like it’s more perfect. X1 has no stages I don’t like, whereas this game has Jet Stingray’s stage, but in terms of which I like more, this one edges out. Though I’m not sure if I would swap X2 and X3 or not. It doesn’t matter since they’re all S-tier, like I said. I do know that this is the last game that isn’t divisive, since X5, X8, and especially X6 are, while X7 isn’t, because everyone just unanimously agrees that it’s terrible. I feel like 5 and 8 might be good, but I have very low expectations for 6 and pretty much none for 7. For some reason, I think it’s fun to talk about games in series that I like, even if it’s in one that is not at all popular and I don’t expect anyone to actually read them.
, but he keeps brushing me off. Everyone else is pretty nice, though.
(maybe will grow our friendship?)
