Place your random thoughts (video games in general edition)
- Thread starter Yanrima~
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Snap Crackle Pop
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I don't know why I am having such a hard time feeling motivated to play video games. I honestly think maybe I burned myself out because once I become obsessed with a game I have to play through it and it's all or nothing. I played Persona 3 Reload nonstop and at least had 100 hours in the game and that was in like... a month span or so which I think is the issue. Unfortunately this has bled into my willingness to play Wuthering Waves, and Genshin which I have not really touched in the last month or so. I'm hoping with the small break I am taking that when Switch 2 comes out I'll be able to reset my feeling of burnt outness.
This is andy, hes burnt out. He sat in front of the heater for too long and now hes on the floor
Attachments
Elodieiscool
I’m autistic, of course I have to sort my flowers.
I’ve had animal crossing for 4 years but this has been the only time I’m actually trying in the game lol
QueenCobra
yassified for anonymity
I don’t get the Just Dance music video for Espresso. Like, why are we all sitting down in a hair salon? Lol.
I beat Mega Man X5 and… it’s good. It’s definitely a drop in quality from the first four, I can see why at least half the fanbase hates it, but I think it was better than okay, at least. Here’s my really long explanation why.
And that’s how I feel. I know I’ve been pretty mean to it, but I like X5. I don’t think it’s a bad game. But it definitely is a disappointing game because it had every reason to be as good as, if not, better than X4. But it wasn’t. X4 being my favorite Mega Man game has nothing to do with it because most people see this game as a downgrade regardless of their opinions on X4 (I actually replayed that game as Zero to see if it was actually as good as I remembered… and yeah, X4 is still as fun as it always was for me. And so were the games before it). I know that this game - as well as X3, X6, X7, and to an extent, X8 - has a fan made improvement project, but I don’t think that would be enough to make it S-tier because it still has inherent issues like the slower stages. I’ll still try it out because it seems like they fixed a lot of the really stupid design choices, like making the Tidal Whale’s ****ty stage more bearable and significantly reducing the number of required backtracks. But with the way the official PlayStation release turned out, I’d be disappointed if it was the note the X series ended on like it was intended to.
Let’s start with the positives. Once you boot up the game, you hear one of the best intro themes in the series. The openings of 8 and X4 gave the Mega Man releases a different song than the one used in the Rockman release, which I always thought were great, but not as much as the Japanese songs. Here, they used the menu theme of the game, which you wouldn’t think would work, but it actually fits infinitely better than Monkey, the Japanese song, and is better overall. It feels perfect for what was intended to be the last game in the series, and it’s so much better that I can’t even listen to the Rockman X5 version even though I like the song they used. I’ll get to the actual intro itself later, but to continue being positive, the music in general is great. 8’s was okay, and X4’s was definitely a favorite, but I think this game’s is the best one from X1-X5. There’s more variety in synths than X4, as well as a lot more guitars, something that was noticeably absent from most of that game’s ost. Standouts in this game include Volt Kraken, Spiral Pegasus, Shining Firefly, Zero’s opening stage, Sigma’s first phase, Zero Stage 1-3, and Dynamo’s theme. The Japanese credits music, Mizu no Naka, deserves recognition as well, it’s much more fitting than Monkey. It’s really sad if you know what it’s saying and realize that since X’s voice actor, Showtaro Morikubo, is the singer, this is X singing about losing Zero. The ost is just banger after banger. Even the beta build tracks are good. Most of them are just early versions of songs using placeholder midi instruments, but a few were finished and went unused. Like Armageddon, a rock ballad that was meant to be used in the bad ending, or Tidal Whale’s theme, an original song they were going to use before opting for a remix of Bubble Crab. It’s good music on its own and fits an underwater stage, but would probably have made the level even more insanely bor- wait, I’m supposed to be listing positives right now. Okay…
…there’s a cool story as well. Sucks that X is still shafted in favor of Zero, even if that’s to be expected, but besides that I like it. I appreciate that they don’t bother hiding the fact that Sigma is the main villain from the audience. I’ll save why I hate that trope for my X6 review because I already know that game’s story and it’s definitely hurt the most by it. Anyway, Sigma hires Dynamo to crash the Space Colony Eurasia to spread the Sigma Virus all over the planet, and the reason he did it was because he wanted to awaken Zero’s true self, which is who Dr. Wily originally created him to be. It’s also heavily implied that Wily is actually still alive in some way (it’s been previously implied that he was alive in the form of Serges in Rockman X2, but the English version removed all references), and created Sigma’s new body and the Shadow Devil. All the Mavericks you fight are sad since you can see them succumbing to the virus, and most of them were people X and Zero knew. I like Spiral Pegasus and Burn Dinorex being former members of Repliforce. Ignoring the usual Mega Man X story issues like not conveying enough in game or a translation that’s not great, it’s a really good story. The fight between X and Zero is really epic, so long as Zero’s been awakened, and the music during the fight is probably my favorite Mega Man song (if not that, then it would be the very basic choices of Cannonball, Departure, or Falling Down, but specifically any of the remastered versions since I don’t think the GBA versions are quite as good).
The increased cast was something I liked. In the first four games, it felt like X and Zero were mostly on their own. X5 onward makes it feel like the Maverick Hunters are a team with lots of people working behind the scenes. Sure, X, Zero, and other hunters are doing the actual fighting, but when entering a dangerous area, they’d still need someone to tell them what’s ahead. I appreciate that change.
You get to use an imperfect reconstruction of the Fourth Armor if you play the opening stage as X, which is nice (if you beat it as Zero, you get to use Z-Buster instead, which makes X3’s arm upgrade look useful. In other words, you should just start as X). And lives are pretty much non existent now. In X4 and 8, halfway through every level, there would be a save and if you game over, you restart from there. And also, whenever you died, all weapon energy would be restored. Now, if you get a game over, you just restart from the last checkpoint, so lives pretty much have no purpose (which makes the EX Item completely pointless). Maybe some people would think this makes it too easy, but I don’t like lives anyway. It only felt like a time waster getting to a boss in the NES, SNES, or GB Mega Man games with one life and low health, dying, and having to redo the entire stage, especially if it was a long one, so I like the change.
And those are the main positives. Seriously, that’s it. See why people don’t like this game yet? Before continuing, I’m actually curious as to whether a single person reads these really long posts I write. So if you’ve read this far, react to this post.
Now for the major negatives… well, first there’s the presentation. X4 and 8 spent a lot of money on making the games look so good, but neither sold very well. A few years later, X5 came out and the production values were evidently lower. Remember what I said about the intro earlier? Yeah, the title screen music really makes it feel more epic than it actually is, because all that’s happening is character renders and the gifs flashing on screen. X4 and 8 had anime cutscenes and those looked great. On its own, it’s not awful, but compared to those games, this is such a visual downgrade. In game, the cutscenes are just still frames with text. It’s not visually appealing, and they’re unskippable so on replays you have to mash. It’s barely a step up from the sprites and text boxes the SNES games used. Actually, come to think about it, the way they do it in the Zero games from 2 onward, where it’s sprites and text boxes, but images are used whenever those aren’t enough to convey what’s happening, looks better than this. And those are GBA games.
The sprite animations are worse too. X and Zero look good since their sprite set is just taken from X4, and while I didn’t notice any particularly bad enemy animations, the same cannot be said about the bosses. Their sprites themselves are fine, but their animations are stiff as hell because they have noticeably less frames than anything from X4. They’ll jump from one pose to another with little to no fluidity, just like X3, which was on the SNES and they didn’t have an excuse there. So there’s definitely no excuse on the PS1. Again, the Zero games on the GameBoy Advance had better sprite animations than this. And Sigma in the opening stage and in his second phase of the final boss is just a static png of Sigma’s head, which is impossible to take seriously. Earth Sigma in X4 was a png and looked less cheap than this. The backgrounds can also be quite jarring, like the Laser Institute’s spiraling staircase section, which looks 10x less convincing than it did in the Bio Laboratory. And there’s not as many impressive effects, which is noticeable when you compare this opening stage to 8’s or X4’s. That includes the stage start screen, which isn’t anywhere near as cool as X4’s despite the actual music being as hype as always. Here, it just looks like a glorified Canva presentation. In pretty much every way that X4 looked amazing, this game completely misses the mark.
And while the presentation might not matter as much as the gameplay, that’s a downgrade too. I’m not sure if it’s just me, but the movement is so much less satisfying and fluid than it was in X4. But ignoring that, the stages just rely too much on waiting. The thing is, even though this is an action platformer series, it’s not impossible to make a fun stage involving waiting. Volcano in X4 is a good example. On your first playthrough, you’ll probably spend a lot of time wall jumping and waiting on platforms for the burning rocks to pass, but once you get good, you can beat the stage with minimal waiting. It’s skill related. This game kind of does that with things like the gimmick in the first half of Magma Stage, but other times, perfectly good stages like Reploid Air Force or Planetarium are made just okay because at some point they force you on an unskippable elevator or have a gimmick that slows down time. Or you might have a stage that’s already not that good like Super Electromagnetic Lab, which starts with a very cheap ride chaser section (even worse if you’re trying to get those goddamn spheres) that makes Jet Stingray’s level look fun, and gets worse when it starts to revolve around unfun puzzles. These things come together to form Tidal Whale’s level, Deep Sea Submarine, a contender for the worst Mega Man X stage of all time. Between X1-X5, it definitely is, no contest. In it, the submarine mid boss U-555 follow you the entire time, stopping three times for you to fight it. That wouldn’t be too big of an issue on its own, but the screen scrolls so damn slowly. You can kill the U-555 to stop it from attacking you for the section, but you can’t speed up the autoscrolling in any way. Maybe it would be a little better if you only played it once, but you have to replay it for 100%. If you want to get the heart tank as Zero, then you just need to play it after beating Volt Kraken, then replay it as X with Tidal Whale’s weapon… aka the weapon you have to play this stage for. But if you want it as X, you’d need an armor, which requires playing this stage, so you’d have to play through this absolute slog three. ****ing. Times. Screw this level.
Then there’s Alia, a navigator who gives X and Zero information from back at the base. Even though she’s cute, she’s really annoying in this game. Every 3 seconds she stops you to make some pointless observation. She’ll shut up if you beat the stage (and even then, if you go in as the character you didn’t play it as, she’ll still talk to you), but you can’t turn this off through settings or anything for whatever reason. It completely ruins the flow of stages that are already slower paced, but I also think it’s counter productive to the stage design. For example, usually a Mega Man game will give you a safe place to test a gimmick where you can use your brain and learn how it works before making it more dangerous later. That kind of tutorial is good because if you know what you’re doing you shouldn’t have to stop, but if you don’t, you can easily learn what you’re supposed to do. This game actually does do that, but they didn’t think you were smart enough to figure out how things work yourself. If you’re new, sure, it tells you what you need to know, but if you’re not, it’s a pace breaker. I get why crouching needs a tutorial since no Mega Man game has had that before (oh, and it turns out I’m a dumbass. I made a post when I started the game saying I didn’t understand how you were supposed to avoid one of Sigma’s attacks in the opening stage when all you have to do is crouch. I knew it was a thing, I just never bothered trying it), but otherwise, there’s literally a training level for new players, so this isn’t necessary.
With all that said, you can surmise that this game is not well paced. But it would all be slightly more tolerable if not for one thing: the backtracking. God. X3 is criticized for this same thing, but there’s actually a path that lets you get every item while only having to revisit one stage. It’s just that it requires deep knowledge of the game’s mechanics and fighting Blast Hornet and Neon Tiger without their weaknesses, two of the harder bosses. No such route exists in X5. A big reason why is the way the armor system works. There’s two armors, so there’s a capsule in every stage since each armor has four parts. The issue is that to use any of them, all parts of that armor must be collected, whereas before you’d be able to use a part the second you find it. It would make sense if you had to leave and equip a part on the stage select screen since you can find capsules as Zero or as X while already wearing an armor, but not being able to use any of them until you get every piece is dumb. Especially because the Gaea Armor part in Reploid Air Force requires Falcon Armor’s flight to get, so before using the Gaea Armor, you have to have played every stage at least once since you can’t equip only the Falcon Armor’s foot upgrade and fly with that. Which means that all the heart tanks put on spikes that Gaea Armor is supposed to get can’t be obtained until every stage in the game has been beaten. You could get those with Falcon Armor, and I know there’s some insane trick to get that Gaea part without flying, but it doesn’t feel like the routing is worth it when I’ll most likely have to replay the stage anyway. Stupid things like that add so many revisits that I don’t think anyone’s even bothered to make a least backtracking route, and all of this results in a game that’s so much harder to pick up than the first four. Because it fails so hard at replay value compared to those games, I think it’s fair to say that this is the worst X game so far.
Oh, and despite having two armors, neither is better than the NERFED Fourth Armor. Gaea Armor is a contender for the worst armor in the series outside of its design. You can stick to walls, are immune to spikes, and can shoot charge shots without charging, but it moves super slowly and you can’t equip any parts. It can’t use special weapons at all, its Giga Attack is useless, and the instant charge shots have very short range, so it’s you’re still mostly better off charging them (which produces a more powerful shot). On top of all of that, getting its helmet is pure frustration (very precisely guide a Flash Laser through a narrow maze), but it does… wait for it… absolutely nothing. Dr. Light doesn’t say what it does, and the Wiki says it doesn’t do anything. It’s the only armor part in the entire series that has no function, and they can get away with it because of the way the system works. I know it’s hard to think of good uses for helmets, evident by the fact that it took until X4 for one to really be useful, but seriously? It honestly makes using unarmored X appealing, and with a Shock Buffer to half damage and an Ultimate Buster to shoot automatic charge shots, he probably is better. If the Fourth Armor had a Giga Attack in this game, and it was a screen nuke rather than Nova Strike, I’d never use the Gaea Armor besides when it’s required. Falcon Armor is much better, but I think it’s overrated. Design-wise, it’s top tier, its ability to fly is helpful and fun to use, and its charge shot can go through walls unlike any other buster shot in this game, but overall it doesn’t feel as fun as the Fourth Armor to me. I would have completely lost my sanity without it in the Shadow Devil fight, but still. X also can’t charge special weapons in it. I just think the Fourth Armor is better.
And then there’s the path to the ending. You have 16 hours until the Space Colony Eurasia collides, and entering a stage counts as an hour (just playing, even if you leave it still counts), as well as fighting Dynamo. Once you beat Crescent Grizzly, Tidal Whale, Volt Kraken, and Shining Firefly, you fire the Enigma cannon and only destroy part of it, which just delays its course and gives you a couple more hours. Once you kill the rest, you launch the Space Shuttle, piloted by Zero, and he survives and it’s successfully destroyed. It seems simple enough; beat every stage and you get the good ending, take longer than 16 hours and you get the bad ending… except that’s not 100% true. While the chances of either happening are low, the Enigma can work, and the Space Shuttle can miss. You can even launch either without parts, getting every part just increases your chances of success. But that’s all it does: increase your chances. Having the good ending be luck based would be annoying enough for people like me that want to see all three endings/need to for an achievement, but it actually has an effect on the gameplay even if you don’t care about those things. If Eurasia crashes, Zero turns Maverick, and that means you can’t use him for the rest of the game. Let’s say that you really like Zero. I mean, why wouldn’t you? So you get every heart tank you can as him, but all of a sudden, you reach the end game and now he’s completely unusable. They do kind of remedy this by having a few heart tanks only be obtainable with X’s armors, but I still feel like they could have done a better job since nothing tells you that you can permanently lose a playable character. You can also make heart tanks at the end of stages, but the game doesn’t do nearly enough explain how the system actually works (something I could probably give its own paragraph but this is already really long). Even with all that, none of this truly matters because right before you launch the Space Shuttle or fire the Enigma, you’re allowed to save, and the outcome is determined after the save. The fact that you can break the system in two by simply reloading your save is just horrible game design, regardless of whether it benefits the player, because it means that this you can unlock the final stages the second you beat the opening stage if you really want to.
When it comes to the final stages themselves, I guess they’re better than X4’s since they’re actually challenging, as much as I hate the Shadow Devil and Rangda Bangda W. The atmosphere of Zero Space is awesome, and it’s one of the few times the game looks as good as X4. But the last level is home to one of the worst boss rushes in franchise history. Like I said in my last post in this thread, it’s literally just the exact same bosses except with health bars that reach the top of the screen. All it does is make the already slow boss rush even longer. Only Spiral Pegasus requires effort because of how his weakness works. And honestly? Even without weaknesses, Crescent Grizzly, Shining Firefly, Tidal Whale, Burn Dinorex, and Dark Necrobat are piss easy (but it’s not like I’d be doing any battle in the boss rush without weaknesses and drag it out even longer). It’s not challenging, there’s no sense of player growth, it’s just. boring. After that, the final boss has the same issue as X4 where you can’t easily refill your sub tanks when you die. There’s a giant health pick up before fighting Sigma, but it only restores a fourth of a sub tank (tbf, it’s an improvement since in X4 it was only an eighth), so assuming you have 2, you’d need to kill yourself 7 times if you’ve used them up during an attempt and died. I don’t understand why this is an issue since the solution is so obvious. The heath pickup completely restores your health, so make it completely fill a sub tank as well. In the first phase, as X, despite dying a lot of times, I could mostly get away with wall jump spamming and taking whatever potshots I could at Sigma with Tri Thunder and actually *gasp* dodging his attacks when that didn’t work, and in the second phase, I just spammed Nova Strike. But I’m assuming that it’s not nearly as easy as Zero or without the Ultimate Armor, and I need to do at least the first one, so I can guess how frustrating it’s going to be.
…there’s a cool story as well. Sucks that X is still shafted in favor of Zero, even if that’s to be expected, but besides that I like it. I appreciate that they don’t bother hiding the fact that Sigma is the main villain from the audience. I’ll save why I hate that trope for my X6 review because I already know that game’s story and it’s definitely hurt the most by it. Anyway, Sigma hires Dynamo to crash the Space Colony Eurasia to spread the Sigma Virus all over the planet, and the reason he did it was because he wanted to awaken Zero’s true self, which is who Dr. Wily originally created him to be. It’s also heavily implied that Wily is actually still alive in some way (it’s been previously implied that he was alive in the form of Serges in Rockman X2, but the English version removed all references), and created Sigma’s new body and the Shadow Devil. All the Mavericks you fight are sad since you can see them succumbing to the virus, and most of them were people X and Zero knew. I like Spiral Pegasus and Burn Dinorex being former members of Repliforce. Ignoring the usual Mega Man X story issues like not conveying enough in game or a translation that’s not great, it’s a really good story. The fight between X and Zero is really epic, so long as Zero’s been awakened, and the music during the fight is probably my favorite Mega Man song (if not that, then it would be the very basic choices of Cannonball, Departure, or Falling Down, but specifically any of the remastered versions since I don’t think the GBA versions are quite as good).
The increased cast was something I liked. In the first four games, it felt like X and Zero were mostly on their own. X5 onward makes it feel like the Maverick Hunters are a team with lots of people working behind the scenes. Sure, X, Zero, and other hunters are doing the actual fighting, but when entering a dangerous area, they’d still need someone to tell them what’s ahead. I appreciate that change.
You get to use an imperfect reconstruction of the Fourth Armor if you play the opening stage as X, which is nice (if you beat it as Zero, you get to use Z-Buster instead, which makes X3’s arm upgrade look useful. In other words, you should just start as X). And lives are pretty much non existent now. In X4 and 8, halfway through every level, there would be a save and if you game over, you restart from there. And also, whenever you died, all weapon energy would be restored. Now, if you get a game over, you just restart from the last checkpoint, so lives pretty much have no purpose (which makes the EX Item completely pointless). Maybe some people would think this makes it too easy, but I don’t like lives anyway. It only felt like a time waster getting to a boss in the NES, SNES, or GB Mega Man games with one life and low health, dying, and having to redo the entire stage, especially if it was a long one, so I like the change.
And those are the main positives. Seriously, that’s it. See why people don’t like this game yet? Before continuing, I’m actually curious as to whether a single person reads these really long posts I write. So if you’ve read this far, react to this post.
Now for the major negatives… well, first there’s the presentation. X4 and 8 spent a lot of money on making the games look so good, but neither sold very well. A few years later, X5 came out and the production values were evidently lower. Remember what I said about the intro earlier? Yeah, the title screen music really makes it feel more epic than it actually is, because all that’s happening is character renders and the gifs flashing on screen. X4 and 8 had anime cutscenes and those looked great. On its own, it’s not awful, but compared to those games, this is such a visual downgrade. In game, the cutscenes are just still frames with text. It’s not visually appealing, and they’re unskippable so on replays you have to mash. It’s barely a step up from the sprites and text boxes the SNES games used. Actually, come to think about it, the way they do it in the Zero games from 2 onward, where it’s sprites and text boxes, but images are used whenever those aren’t enough to convey what’s happening, looks better than this. And those are GBA games.
The sprite animations are worse too. X and Zero look good since their sprite set is just taken from X4, and while I didn’t notice any particularly bad enemy animations, the same cannot be said about the bosses. Their sprites themselves are fine, but their animations are stiff as hell because they have noticeably less frames than anything from X4. They’ll jump from one pose to another with little to no fluidity, just like X3, which was on the SNES and they didn’t have an excuse there. So there’s definitely no excuse on the PS1. Again, the Zero games on the GameBoy Advance had better sprite animations than this. And Sigma in the opening stage and in his second phase of the final boss is just a static png of Sigma’s head, which is impossible to take seriously. Earth Sigma in X4 was a png and looked less cheap than this. The backgrounds can also be quite jarring, like the Laser Institute’s spiraling staircase section, which looks 10x less convincing than it did in the Bio Laboratory. And there’s not as many impressive effects, which is noticeable when you compare this opening stage to 8’s or X4’s. That includes the stage start screen, which isn’t anywhere near as cool as X4’s despite the actual music being as hype as always. Here, it just looks like a glorified Canva presentation. In pretty much every way that X4 looked amazing, this game completely misses the mark.
And while the presentation might not matter as much as the gameplay, that’s a downgrade too. I’m not sure if it’s just me, but the movement is so much less satisfying and fluid than it was in X4. But ignoring that, the stages just rely too much on waiting. The thing is, even though this is an action platformer series, it’s not impossible to make a fun stage involving waiting. Volcano in X4 is a good example. On your first playthrough, you’ll probably spend a lot of time wall jumping and waiting on platforms for the burning rocks to pass, but once you get good, you can beat the stage with minimal waiting. It’s skill related. This game kind of does that with things like the gimmick in the first half of Magma Stage, but other times, perfectly good stages like Reploid Air Force or Planetarium are made just okay because at some point they force you on an unskippable elevator or have a gimmick that slows down time. Or you might have a stage that’s already not that good like Super Electromagnetic Lab, which starts with a very cheap ride chaser section (even worse if you’re trying to get those goddamn spheres) that makes Jet Stingray’s level look fun, and gets worse when it starts to revolve around unfun puzzles. These things come together to form Tidal Whale’s level, Deep Sea Submarine, a contender for the worst Mega Man X stage of all time. Between X1-X5, it definitely is, no contest. In it, the submarine mid boss U-555 follow you the entire time, stopping three times for you to fight it. That wouldn’t be too big of an issue on its own, but the screen scrolls so damn slowly. You can kill the U-555 to stop it from attacking you for the section, but you can’t speed up the autoscrolling in any way. Maybe it would be a little better if you only played it once, but you have to replay it for 100%. If you want to get the heart tank as Zero, then you just need to play it after beating Volt Kraken, then replay it as X with Tidal Whale’s weapon… aka the weapon you have to play this stage for. But if you want it as X, you’d need an armor, which requires playing this stage, so you’d have to play through this absolute slog three. ****ing. Times. Screw this level.
Then there’s Alia, a navigator who gives X and Zero information from back at the base. Even though she’s cute, she’s really annoying in this game. Every 3 seconds she stops you to make some pointless observation. She’ll shut up if you beat the stage (and even then, if you go in as the character you didn’t play it as, she’ll still talk to you), but you can’t turn this off through settings or anything for whatever reason. It completely ruins the flow of stages that are already slower paced, but I also think it’s counter productive to the stage design. For example, usually a Mega Man game will give you a safe place to test a gimmick where you can use your brain and learn how it works before making it more dangerous later. That kind of tutorial is good because if you know what you’re doing you shouldn’t have to stop, but if you don’t, you can easily learn what you’re supposed to do. This game actually does do that, but they didn’t think you were smart enough to figure out how things work yourself. If you’re new, sure, it tells you what you need to know, but if you’re not, it’s a pace breaker. I get why crouching needs a tutorial since no Mega Man game has had that before (oh, and it turns out I’m a dumbass. I made a post when I started the game saying I didn’t understand how you were supposed to avoid one of Sigma’s attacks in the opening stage when all you have to do is crouch. I knew it was a thing, I just never bothered trying it), but otherwise, there’s literally a training level for new players, so this isn’t necessary.
With all that said, you can surmise that this game is not well paced. But it would all be slightly more tolerable if not for one thing: the backtracking. God. X3 is criticized for this same thing, but there’s actually a path that lets you get every item while only having to revisit one stage. It’s just that it requires deep knowledge of the game’s mechanics and fighting Blast Hornet and Neon Tiger without their weaknesses, two of the harder bosses. No such route exists in X5. A big reason why is the way the armor system works. There’s two armors, so there’s a capsule in every stage since each armor has four parts. The issue is that to use any of them, all parts of that armor must be collected, whereas before you’d be able to use a part the second you find it. It would make sense if you had to leave and equip a part on the stage select screen since you can find capsules as Zero or as X while already wearing an armor, but not being able to use any of them until you get every piece is dumb. Especially because the Gaea Armor part in Reploid Air Force requires Falcon Armor’s flight to get, so before using the Gaea Armor, you have to have played every stage at least once since you can’t equip only the Falcon Armor’s foot upgrade and fly with that. Which means that all the heart tanks put on spikes that Gaea Armor is supposed to get can’t be obtained until every stage in the game has been beaten. You could get those with Falcon Armor, and I know there’s some insane trick to get that Gaea part without flying, but it doesn’t feel like the routing is worth it when I’ll most likely have to replay the stage anyway. Stupid things like that add so many revisits that I don’t think anyone’s even bothered to make a least backtracking route, and all of this results in a game that’s so much harder to pick up than the first four. Because it fails so hard at replay value compared to those games, I think it’s fair to say that this is the worst X game so far.
Oh, and despite having two armors, neither is better than the NERFED Fourth Armor. Gaea Armor is a contender for the worst armor in the series outside of its design. You can stick to walls, are immune to spikes, and can shoot charge shots without charging, but it moves super slowly and you can’t equip any parts. It can’t use special weapons at all, its Giga Attack is useless, and the instant charge shots have very short range, so it’s you’re still mostly better off charging them (which produces a more powerful shot). On top of all of that, getting its helmet is pure frustration (very precisely guide a Flash Laser through a narrow maze), but it does… wait for it… absolutely nothing. Dr. Light doesn’t say what it does, and the Wiki says it doesn’t do anything. It’s the only armor part in the entire series that has no function, and they can get away with it because of the way the system works. I know it’s hard to think of good uses for helmets, evident by the fact that it took until X4 for one to really be useful, but seriously? It honestly makes using unarmored X appealing, and with a Shock Buffer to half damage and an Ultimate Buster to shoot automatic charge shots, he probably is better. If the Fourth Armor had a Giga Attack in this game, and it was a screen nuke rather than Nova Strike, I’d never use the Gaea Armor besides when it’s required. Falcon Armor is much better, but I think it’s overrated. Design-wise, it’s top tier, its ability to fly is helpful and fun to use, and its charge shot can go through walls unlike any other buster shot in this game, but overall it doesn’t feel as fun as the Fourth Armor to me. I would have completely lost my sanity without it in the Shadow Devil fight, but still. X also can’t charge special weapons in it. I just think the Fourth Armor is better.
And then there’s the path to the ending. You have 16 hours until the Space Colony Eurasia collides, and entering a stage counts as an hour (just playing, even if you leave it still counts), as well as fighting Dynamo. Once you beat Crescent Grizzly, Tidal Whale, Volt Kraken, and Shining Firefly, you fire the Enigma cannon and only destroy part of it, which just delays its course and gives you a couple more hours. Once you kill the rest, you launch the Space Shuttle, piloted by Zero, and he survives and it’s successfully destroyed. It seems simple enough; beat every stage and you get the good ending, take longer than 16 hours and you get the bad ending… except that’s not 100% true. While the chances of either happening are low, the Enigma can work, and the Space Shuttle can miss. You can even launch either without parts, getting every part just increases your chances of success. But that’s all it does: increase your chances. Having the good ending be luck based would be annoying enough for people like me that want to see all three endings/need to for an achievement, but it actually has an effect on the gameplay even if you don’t care about those things. If Eurasia crashes, Zero turns Maverick, and that means you can’t use him for the rest of the game. Let’s say that you really like Zero. I mean, why wouldn’t you? So you get every heart tank you can as him, but all of a sudden, you reach the end game and now he’s completely unusable. They do kind of remedy this by having a few heart tanks only be obtainable with X’s armors, but I still feel like they could have done a better job since nothing tells you that you can permanently lose a playable character. You can also make heart tanks at the end of stages, but the game doesn’t do nearly enough explain how the system actually works (something I could probably give its own paragraph but this is already really long). Even with all that, none of this truly matters because right before you launch the Space Shuttle or fire the Enigma, you’re allowed to save, and the outcome is determined after the save. The fact that you can break the system in two by simply reloading your save is just horrible game design, regardless of whether it benefits the player, because it means that this you can unlock the final stages the second you beat the opening stage if you really want to.
When it comes to the final stages themselves, I guess they’re better than X4’s since they’re actually challenging, as much as I hate the Shadow Devil and Rangda Bangda W. The atmosphere of Zero Space is awesome, and it’s one of the few times the game looks as good as X4. But the last level is home to one of the worst boss rushes in franchise history. Like I said in my last post in this thread, it’s literally just the exact same bosses except with health bars that reach the top of the screen. All it does is make the already slow boss rush even longer. Only Spiral Pegasus requires effort because of how his weakness works. And honestly? Even without weaknesses, Crescent Grizzly, Shining Firefly, Tidal Whale, Burn Dinorex, and Dark Necrobat are piss easy (but it’s not like I’d be doing any battle in the boss rush without weaknesses and drag it out even longer). It’s not challenging, there’s no sense of player growth, it’s just. boring. After that, the final boss has the same issue as X4 where you can’t easily refill your sub tanks when you die. There’s a giant health pick up before fighting Sigma, but it only restores a fourth of a sub tank (tbf, it’s an improvement since in X4 it was only an eighth), so assuming you have 2, you’d need to kill yourself 7 times if you’ve used them up during an attempt and died. I don’t understand why this is an issue since the solution is so obvious. The heath pickup completely restores your health, so make it completely fill a sub tank as well. In the first phase, as X, despite dying a lot of times, I could mostly get away with wall jump spamming and taking whatever potshots I could at Sigma with Tri Thunder and actually *gasp* dodging his attacks when that didn’t work, and in the second phase, I just spammed Nova Strike. But I’m assuming that it’s not nearly as easy as Zero or without the Ultimate Armor, and I need to do at least the first one, so I can guess how frustrating it’s going to be.
And that’s how I feel. I know I’ve been pretty mean to it, but I like X5. I don’t think it’s a bad game. But it definitely is a disappointing game because it had every reason to be as good as, if not, better than X4. But it wasn’t. X4 being my favorite Mega Man game has nothing to do with it because most people see this game as a downgrade regardless of their opinions on X4 (I actually replayed that game as Zero to see if it was actually as good as I remembered… and yeah, X4 is still as fun as it always was for me. And so were the games before it). I know that this game - as well as X3, X6, X7, and to an extent, X8 - has a fan made improvement project, but I don’t think that would be enough to make it S-tier because it still has inherent issues like the slower stages. I’ll still try it out because it seems like they fixed a lot of the really stupid design choices, like making the Tidal Whale’s ****ty stage more bearable and significantly reducing the number of required backtracks. But with the way the official PlayStation release turned out, I’d be disappointed if it was the note the X series ended on like it was intended to.
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QueenCobra
yassified for anonymity
In Stardew Valley, I got a letter from Marnie saying that Andre (my cat) “loves” me. I knew that, but…Marnie, how do you know that? Are you spying on me? 
ZeldaCrossing64
Sugary Cynic
I decided to revisit an old YouTuber I used to watch back in elementary school, and I'm currently watching his Stardew Valley videos. It's so interesting to see how different the game was back in 2016 compared to now.
Also, I miss playing Harvest Moon. T_T I might buy a Story of Seasons game on my Switch, but I'm still thinking about it.
Also, I miss playing Harvest Moon. T_T I might buy a Story of Seasons game on my Switch, but I'm still thinking about it.
Has anyone been playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33? I did a quick search on TBT but didn't find much (I probably missed a lot).
My coworkers have been trying to sell me on this game big time, and I have to admit from my research the game looks amazing.
Do any of you have thoughts? I want to finish Xenoblade Chronicles DE, but I feel like Clair Obscur will be my next game!
My coworkers have been trying to sell me on this game big time, and I have to admit from my research the game looks amazing.
Do any of you have thoughts? I want to finish Xenoblade Chronicles DE, but I feel like Clair Obscur will be my next game!
tazmily menace
SOUNDWAVE: SUPERIOR.
so. deltarune, eh?
when the release countdown was happening i went to roblox to wait with people in a deltarune rp game. here are the pictures i got from the experience
god bless the undertale/deltarune community
when the release countdown was happening i went to roblox to wait with people in a deltarune rp game. here are the pictures i got from the experience
god bless the undertale/deltarune community
ZeldaCrossing64
Sugary Cynic
I love doing Skull Caverns runs in Stardew Valley, but the enemies kinda scare me... I just yelled "Holy ****!" when three iridium bats attacked me at once. It's 4 AM and I hope I didn't wake anyone up. 
I found a tip to improve the Switch 2's battery life. In display settings, turn off "120Hz output," and that will add some extra time. When I turned that setting off, my Switch 2 lasted a bit longer, and most games do not support that refresh rate anyway.
I miss playing Tomodachi Life. I used to play it so much even though there was only so much you could do in that game. I just love making my favorite characters as Miis and throwing them all in that wacky universe together. I’m really looking forward to the new game and I’m hoping Nintendo gives us a Mii creator similar to Miitopia!
