I don’t know this game’s development history that well, but X8 clearly had a lot of pressure put on it. If you read my other posts, you’d see how. X5 was a game that tried to do a lot of new things that could have easily created the new best game in the franchise. But it didn’t get the time or money to become that, resulting in a game that was a significant step down from the last four games. That was supposed to be the last X game, but Capcom got greedy and rushed out a sequel. X6 was ambitious too, but it’s hard to make a good PS1 game in ten months, especially when most of the original team had left. The game ended up being a broken and unfinished mess with atrociously designed gameplay and difficulty. It was awful. X7 tried to fix the issues of X6 but the game was a total disasterpiece. My point is that X8 is coming after the two worst games in the entire franchise, while the other series attached to the Mega Man IP were doing way better. They had a few mediocre to bad releases, but were mostly games that were far more worth anyone’s time than X5-X7. X8 had to prove that Mega Man X games were still good. Did it succeed? Well there’s no X9 and the only Mega Man X games since have been spin offs, so it wasn’t enough for Capcom. But for fans, this is the most liked game post-X4, and definitely post-X5. Although it’s somewhat divisive, a lot of people love X8. But is that only because X7 was so bad that anything looked good by comparison? Or is it genuinely a good game?
Unsurprisingly, it’s miles better than X7. It’s kind of crazy how they fixed everything about that abomination. For example, X is tolerable again. X7 turned his hatred of violence into him being a selfish ******* who whines about war nonstop, is mean to Axl and has almost no influence on the story. They address this quickly. In an early cutscene, X laments how the war is still going on. Alia stays silent when he says that, but Axl says “just the thought of wiping the floor with Mavericks makes my trigger finger itch!” Alia yells at him, but X says Axl’s right; Mavericks are wreaking havoc as they speak and there’s no time to grieve right now.
So humans have been migrating to the moon with a giant orbital elevator to escape Maverick violence. This is known as the Jakob Project. One night while on patrol, X finds an army of Sigmas near the elevator. The director of the project comes and reveals himself to be a New Generation Reploid named Lumine who’s totally not a femboy, and he tells X this is an army of New Generation Reploids (I’ll call them NG Reploids for short), which Axl is a prototype of, if you forgot. They are immune to the Sigma and Maverick Viruses, and can shapeshift with their copy chips. Everything is running smoothly until Vile (last seen on X3) returns to kidnap Lumine. This causes Maverick crime to rise and X, Axl, and Zero must rescue him and put a stop to it. Yes, Sigma’s involved. I’ll go over the rest once we get to the final stages, but this is the least interesting plot in the series imo. One thing I do like is how Zero is still mad at Sigma for trying to use him in X5. That’s a nice detail, especially since he didn’t act differently towards Sigma in X6 or X7.
X8 is fully voiced, which might sound like a bad thing considering X7’s dub was…
something. In that game, X4, 8, and ZX Advent, Capcom basically hired random English speakers off the street for the voice work, which is why the dubs ended up the way they did. But this game, Maverick Hunter X, Powered Up, Command Mission, and the Battle Network anime were dubbed by actual VAs. It’s not outstanding or anything, but it’s good. X’s voice perfectly fits his personality and Zero sounds laid back but not like he’s 40. Axl sounds young, but not annoying. It’s like he went through puberty, and he reminds me a lot of Silver (introduced in a ****ty game, hated by fanbase for a while, similar to blue main character, overshadows them in the game…). Sigma sounds like a threatening villain and not whatever
this is. Alia and Signas sound good, but the other two characters introduced in X5 are completely gone now. But there’s two new operators, Palette and Layer, who both sound good.
On the topic of new characters, they did a revamp to the art style of the series in X8. By the Zero series, Reploids (besides Zero and X, in universe those two look the same as always) have evolved so much that they’re nearly indistinguishable from humans. X8 was meant to show the start of that, but the art shift wasn’t well received, so these designs were scrapped in later appearances with the exception of one character. Even though love the Zero series art style, I used to hate the X8 designs. But while I still don’t prefer them to the X1-X7 styles, I think they’re good in their own right. But there’s a few that I want to talk about. I’m not a fan of Zero’s cursed thin ponytail. Next, Alia is the one exception I was referring to earlier. If you look at her
old design and then her
redesign, you can guess why this one stuck.
Yeah, I don’t understand why they felt the need to do that. Her old design was already good. I do like how she has her hair down as a reference to when she was working with Gate, and I still like this design overall. But I prefer the old one.
Finally, not a redesign since she’s new, but Layer.
Palette’s design is adorable, but
Layer… okay, fanservicey characters aren’t bad when their design is actually good. I love
Marino and her design, for example, she looks badass despite being half naked in
Quicksilver form. But here the horniness is beyond shameless, and it doesn’t even make sense when you think about it (she’s actually wearing a dark brown bodysuit that doesn’t fully cover her breasts so she has to wear a cloth over the top? o
_O). I started to mind it less over time, but she’s still my least favorite of the Navigators overall. I’ve seen people joke about Reploids even having boobs, but I actually don’t think it’s that silly from a design standpoint since Reploids are supposed to look like humans. They also don’t need hair, but it makes them more humanlike. In this case, it’s pretty dumb. Wait, what was I talking about again…
Oh yeah, Mega Man X8. The controls are just like X1-X6, and mostly just 2.5D with some exceptions. X and Zero are fun again (and everyone can still air dash by default), so what about Axl? He can still hover, but it feels more natural. To attack, instead of spamming the shoot button, you hold it down and continuously shoot weaker bullets (which you actually could do in X7, but you had to turn Auto Repeat on). You can also shoot in all directions, so he’s just like Bass. His copy shot no longer needs to be charged, making it more bearable to use. When you get a DNA core, you can transform whenever you want and end it whenever you want, even if they’re still mostly useless. In other words, Axl is now more than just a bad X. It’s nice how everyone is playable from the beginning. X7 let you pick two characters to bring into a stage, which would in theory let you experiment with different combinations, yet you only have two characters for a good chunk of the game. It felt poorly thought out, so they fully realized it in X8.
The stage design is probably the most divisive part of the game. Not because they’re slow like X5 or poorly designed like X6 and X7, but instead it’s because they don’t really feel like Mega Man X levels. Every stage has a central gimmick that it revolves
entirely around (which other games did to a lesser extent, and not with every level), so more often than not your enjoyment of the level depends on how fun you find the gimmick. So let’s go over all of them.
Noah’s Park is the intro, and it’s a normal stage. It’s a good level and tutorial. Switching characters has been revamped and has a lot of changes worth mentioning. In X7, when you died as one character, you’d lose a life regardless of how much health the other had. In X8, if you die to something other than things like spikes or pits, you can continue as your partner. If you take damage, some of the lost health turns red before gradually disappearing. While it’s red, you can swap out to slowly restore that lost health, but if you swap back before it’s fully recovered, it stays lost. Some attacks can trap your character, and you can either mash buttons or swap out to immediately escape. Finally, you can chain attacks together to perform combos. Combos fill a gauge that allows you to use the Double Attack. When used, a cutscene starts where both characters start attacking, killing everything on screen and doing good damage to bosses. However, you must activate it close enough to any target to use it, and if you fail, you have to wait a couple seconds before trying again. You can also use Double Attack energy to revive a dead partner.
Next up is Optic Sunflower, and his(?) level is Troia Base. You have to clear rooms, and the faster you do it, the better rank you get. The higher your rank, the harder the next room is. It sounds kinda like the Cyberspace from X4, but the rooms just revolve around killing enemies in a contained space instead of fast paced platforming. It doesn’t take many visits to get boring, especially since the first room is a minute long and Zero’s D-Glaive has such long reach (Axl’s Ray Gun also helps, but you get that from Optic Sunflower himself so you’ll only be able to use it on revisits) that the rooms basically play themselves if you bring it. Next is Pitch Black, Dark Mantis’ level, and it’s actually one of the better ones on account of being more like a normal stage. Like the name implies, everywhere is dark and there are spotlights that you have to get around. If they catch you, enemies will show up to attack you. It’s fun.
Gravity Antonion’s level is Primrose, and the gimmick is flipping gravity. It’s fine until you get to the spike room that requires the most precise movements and timing to escape alive. It’s pretty unfair. But, you have to fight Vile on select stages, and if you do this level third, that takes the place of that room. Other than that, the level is too repetitive to find super fun. It reminds me of Volt Kraken and Shield Sheldon’s levels, but this stage isn’t as bad as those, especially not the latter. Next up, Earthrock Trilobyte’s level, Metal Valley. You start off being chased by a giant Mechaniloid, and they learned from the “chase” levels of X5 and X7 by making the robot fast, adding a sense of exhilaration rather than boredom... at first. But once you get to the end, you have to attack the robot with a crane and it starts going backwards, so now you have to go all the way back to the beginning of the stage, which is so boring. Eventually you get to this room where you have to dodge moving crystals, which would also be fun if it didn’t last so long. By the time you have to fight the Mechaniloid indoors, I just want the level to be over.
The next three stages are the worst in the game. First off is the absolute worst, Dynasty, Gigabolt Man-O-War’s stage. Interesting, X5-X8 all have a level to add to my list of least favorites in the series, and after X5 it’s always multiple. At least that’s consistent in the second half of the series. This is one of two Ride Chaser levels, which are both in 3D but otherwise you’re still automatically moving and have to react to obstacles. I called X7’s the worst Ride Chaser level in the series, but nahhh, this one takes the cake. You’re flying over a city chasing down Gigabolt and you have to shoot him enough times before he escapes, which means instant death. After this, you fight him normally. To get close enough to shoot him, you have to boost, and you have to pick up energy capsules to do that. But the course’s design makes it hard to see them. There’s signs and Gigabolt’s attacks to watch out for too, which are also obscured, and to top it all off, he’d get along with Flame Hyenard and Ride Boarski because he never shuts up. You only have to play it once since it has no items, but that one playthrough is enough to ensure you’ll never want to touch it again. It plays so terribly. Central White, Avalanche Yeti’s level, is another Ride Chaser stage. It controls normally, so what makes it especially bad? Just take a wild guess. It’s too long. It’s a six minute slog, with two minibosses that have the potential to drag it out even longer. And this
is a Ride Chaser stage, so you
are going to die at least a few times.
Inferno is next, which is
Blaziken Burn Rooster’s stage. These fire Mavericks after X5 have
not been good. Blaze Heatnix had a cool design and theme but the worst level in the game. Flame Hyenard sucked at everything besides music, and now Burn Rooster is another one with a nice design but a crappy stage. The level starts off with a descending autoscroller that, as per usual, would be pretty fun if it were half the length. It’s scrolling quickly, so it actually is difficult, but the fact that it’s over a minute long means it’s bound to get boring, as well as frustrating since dying means doing it all over. The next section is decent. It has lots of spikes, which can be annoying, but getting through it is kind of fun. After that is another lengthy autoscrolling set piece, obviously. And on your first visit, once you beat Burn Rooster, you have to escape by ascending the last shaft while lava is chasing you. It’s a reeeeaaaally slow stage. And finally, we have Bamboo Pandemonium, who resides in Booster Forest. Like Pitch Black, it’s automatically one of the better stages since the gimmick isn’t intrusive, so it feels enough like a normal level. Said gimmick is the Ride Armor, and every game features that in at least one level. It would have been hard to mess it up. Best stage in the game besides the intro.
Yikes. What a mixed bag. It’s better than X6 and X7 but I’d rather play most of X5’s levels than a lot of this. At least when they’re fast they still feel like a Mega Man X game. In X8, they’re not
always slow but they still aren’t that fun.
At least the bosses are good. The Maverick selection is a lot cooler than X7, which might shock you given how stupid some of these names are. Their designs are good, and so are the fights. They have big health bars, but they don’t take ten years to kill. Without weaknesses, you just have to dodge and notice the best opportunities for attack. The only one I didn’t like was Gigabolt Man-O-War since he was boring. All of them also have a desperation attack that they use, which isn’t new but is more streamlined now. They hit like a truck and tend to render the boss invincible, so you have to watch their actions and react accordingly. This combined with the long invincibility can make the fights long, especially on repeat playthroughs, but it’s never as excruciating as X7. At least you actually have to
play the game since there’s no lock on.
Before every stage, you’re allowed to pick a navigator along with your two characters of choice, and each one does something different. Alia still gives you general information on levels, Layer is knowledgeable on bosses, and Palette gives you hints on secrets in levels. She’s definitely the most helpful one for… reasons I’ll get to soon. While they work well enough, I still wish their dialogue was more interesting like I brought up in the X6 post. They could really make the relationship between the navigators and Hunters deeper. For example, Layer has a really obvious crush on Zero that he’s Lan Hikari and Ash Ketchum levels of oblivious to. And if you don’t answer a navigator’s call, Layer and Alia ask if you can hear them, but Palette will get pissed and yell at you to listen to her. Both of those traits are funny, but they’re not brought up that often. It would add a lot if, for example, when I picked Zero and chose Layer and picked up calls as him, her dialogue would be way more awkward than with X or Axl. I’m sure it’s an unnecessary amount of effort for something most people won’t notice, but I’m sure there’s people besides me who would also appreciate it.
Something I haven’t brought up much in these reviews besides the X5 one are the items in every stage. When replaying X1-X4, I use the routes that let you get every item while revisiting the least stages as it removes unnecessary padding, but for one reason or another, the other games all get it wrong. In X5, there’s a lot of forced backtracking because the items are often hidden obnoxiously. The best example of this is Tidal Whale’s stage. It’s already one of the worst levels in the series because it’s agonizingly slow, but for some reason the wall blocking the stage’s Falcon Armor parts can only be destroyed by shooting Tidal Whale’s weapon through a slit to hit a bomb on the other side. If you didn’t notice how boring the level was at first, you definitely will on the revisit. Adding on to that, it contains a heart tank that, as Zero, can be obtained on your first visit if you’ve already beaten Volt Kraken. But if you want it for X, his variant of that weapon isn’t strong enough and he absolutely must revisit a third time once either the Gaea or Falcon Armor has been assembled to take a different path. In X6, you’re forced to revisit every stage for the alternate routes, but also the secrets just aren’t well hidden. A lot of them are out in the open and aren’t really satisfying to find, the most embarrassing one being how in Infinity Mijinion’s secret route, if you just walk to the left after you enter it, the camera pans to reveal an Armor Part and heart tank right next to each other (although considering how the actual stage already looks like they didn’t even try, I can’t be that surprised). Or they’re just stupid, like with Shield Sheldon and Ground Scaravich. Injured Reploids carry items, so you have to save them, but most of them don’t even have anything and you don’t know if they do until you beat the stage. In both games, when you get an Armor Part you’re not allowed access to its benefits until you get every part. This means that any items requiring, say, the Blade Armor’s Mach Dash are unavailable until you assemble that armor. Aka once at least four levels have been visited. X7 is similar to X6, like Battleship having multiple items hidden the exact same way. It only has one armor and you don’t need to get every part to access the individual features, but you need to come as X in order to receive them. There’s also still Injured Reploids with the exact same issues as X6, and in all of these games the heart tanks aren’t shared between characters, making routing more convoluted than necessary. Especially in X7 where you have three characters. All of these games force you to revisit multiple stages no matter how you route it. X8 has the same issue as X5 but much, much worse.
Metals are a new currency that can be found in stages and dropped by enemies, and they can be used to buy things in the store. It’s exactly what I suggested X7 should do. One thing you can buy is retry chips. I’m kind of mixed on these. In the X6 review, I said that while I like the idea of game overs having no penalty in X5 onwards, the games don’t feel like they were really designed around this. I mean, there was an item in X4 that increased your default life count and it’s still in X5-X7 despite now being virtually useless. X8 slightly changes the life system, probably to address this. You start off with two retry chips and can buy more for a maximum of five. When you die, you’re allowed to leave the stage or continue with a retry chip. As I was writing this, I was wondering what my actual issue with this system is since the retry chips don’t cost that many medals. I think it’s just that it’s annoying being capped at five lives. The stages can be pretty hard in this game, but part of it does feel like it’s because of these putting a limit on how much I can die. Idk, maybe it’s because it reminds me of the way it worked in Zero 1, which was this but much worse, but I think these are annoying.
Anyway, the other things that can be bought in the store are temporary or permanent upgrades and items. The heart tanks and sub tanks that used to be found in stages can now be found here, meaning the only collectibles in levels are armors and Rare Metals (and also fixing the issue of equally distributing heart tanks since everyone has their own to purchase). The latter are used to give you more items to craft. The issue is just how the secrets are designed. There’s a lot of examples, so I’ll share some highlights. In Troia Base, you get a Rare Metal if you beat the stage with the highest rank in every room (and a secret fight against Cut Man). But you also get a Rare Metal if you get the highest rank on
most of them. Couldn’t they have just given you both at once? At the end of Central White, you need to use one of Zero’s techniques to melt ice to get an armor part as X. You can still only collect an armor part as X, but there’s also a Rare Metal in the same room that you need Axl’s glide to reach. Fortunately, rapidly swapping characters can be abused to cross the gap without him, but have fun replaying this stage if you didn’t know that. Final shout out is Inferno. There’s a flying enemy at the end of the second section, so you have to copy it as Axl and go all the way back, then fly through a pipe to get a Rare Metal for a new weapon for Zero, T-Breaker. There’s another Rare Metal in the level that needs you to perform a certain technique with this weapon, so you have to buy it and come back with both T-Breaker and the right technique. And make sure you come with X on one of the visits to get the armor parts. See what I mean? In X8, the amount of upgrades that require specific armor parts, characters, and weapons is so excessive that you have to revisit almost every level, which I already don’t think are that fun to begin with. And even though you can now leave a stage whenever you want (amazing change btw), it takes forever to get back since you have to wait through the results screen, go back to the stage select, pick your characters, and get back to where you were.
After giving it some thought, I started to wonder if maybe this was intentional. Most Mega Man platformers can be beaten in 2-3 hours on a first run and even less on later ones. Super short games like that work when you’re making games in the 90s, when X1-X4 released, but people are less likely to buy them when you’re releasing them late into the PlayStation’s life cycle and definitely not on the PlayStation 2. So, is it possible that the items are so needlessly convoluted in X5-X8 just to make the games longer? Maybe, but it’s just fake longevity at that point. Zero 3 does have collectibles for a database in every stage, but it also has 11 main levels instead of 8. Command Mission, Battle Network, (the main games, at least), and Star Force are RPGs, which take a long time to beat by default, and Legends is also in a genre that allows the game to be longer. The ways X5, X6, X7, and X8 extend playtime are artificial. If they want to make the games longer… just add more content. Or make a game that’s not a platformer if they can’t make those long. With the way they did it, the result is that the first four games are shorter but the reduced padding makes them more fun to blast through. Meanwhile, the latter four take longer to beat, but they
are wasting my time, so they’re less fun. Especially when you compound that with the other issues the games have that I’ve talked about in different posts. What I said about X5 applies to the entire latter half of the series. They’re awful at replay value. Considering how many metals it takes to buy everything in the shop (and all the Easter eggs), it’s likely that you weren’t supposed to get everything on one playthrough; you were supposed to use New Game+ and let metals accumulate gradually until you’ve bought everything… but that still means I’m going to have to backtrack, just between multiple different save files. On later playthroughs, I’ll just get every Rare Metal on one playthrough and just not buy everything. Whatever, X8’s item game sucks, you get the point.
As I alluded to earlier, X8 has two armors again… with a twist. As soon as you get you first part, you get the Neutral Armor. It doesn’t do anything on its own, but you’re allowed to use it to mix and match parts from both the Hermes Armor and the Icarus Armor. Obviously, this means you can use a part as soon as you collect it. This is a unique spin on the X5 and X6 idea and I really liked it. Between the two armors, I think the Icarus Armor is better, so I’ll go over that one first. Like the Shadow Armor, it takes what the Gaea Armor did and makes it not useless. Its head parts allow you to damage enemies by jumping into them. The body parts halve damage and cause all damage taken to turn red rather than some of it. The arm parts make your default shots come out semi charged, semi charged shots come out fully charged, and the new fully charged shot is a giant laser. Finally, the foot parts increase your jump height. The Hermes Armor is more mobility focused. The head parts double your charge speed. The body parts
don’t halve damage, but grant complete immunity to weak attacks. The arm parts fire a spread of three semi charged shots in place of your normal fully charged shot, and the foot parts doubles running and dashing speed while also make you invincible to most attacks while dashing. Additionally, if you decide to use all four parts of one armor, you’ll get the Giga Crash (screen nuke Giga Attack) for the Icarus Armor and the X Drive for the Hermes Armor (temporarily boosts every part, e.g. quadrupling charge speed instead). I like X8’s armor system, and I like using individual Hermes Armor parts such as the foot parts or head parts. The only issue I have is the design. All of the armors have the same premise, just with a different color scheme. It’s not bad, it’s definitely less stupid looking than the Glide Armor, but I don’t vibe with the realistic aesthetic that much. I like the Gundam inspired look of the other armors way more than this.
I think X8 beats X2 as my least favorite X ost. Since my X7 review, my opinion on its soundtrack has gotten slightly more positive since I like to reread the reviews and usually do so while listening to music from the game. It deserves a little more credit than I initially gave it. As for X8… well, the tracks aren’t
bad exactly, but I don’t listen to them outside of the game often. The music is really rock oriented, which is fitting since a lot of Mega Man X music is synth rock. But, minus X2, the other games have much better compositions and instrumentation. The guitars X8 uses in most of its tracks sound kind of bland, and so are its melodies. It’s cool how some stages have multiple themes, but it’s just generic rock, and that’s coming from someone who likes Sonic CD’s US ost. But like X2, it does have some great tracks such as Jakob’s Elevator, Bamboo Pandamonium when in the Ride Armor, and the final boss themes.
Before discussing the final stages, how about that presentation? The game has pretty good CGI cutscenes like X7, except there’s more this time. In that regard, it looks better. But I can’t say the same for the rest of the game. The pre-boss cutscenes in X7 were hysterical because in addition to awful voice acting, the character models barely animated and didn’t even open their mouths. But at the same time, the game is changing camera angles and zooming up to make it seem like stuff’s happening when it just makes you realize how embarrassingly low budget the game is. In X8, they get around that by one, having good voice acting and characters open their mouths, but more importantly, most cutscenes utilize character portraits and dialogue. This covers up the fact that the models still don’t actually animate, and it does make it possible to take the cutscenes seriously, but I can’t just ignore the fact that this game was released on the PlayStation 2 in 2005. Jak and Daxter, Metal Gear, Sonic Heroes, hell, even other Capcom games like Devil May Cry 1-3. They all have cutscenes that look like they belong in a console game. Why do X8’s still look like something you’d see on a handheld?
The stages are also kind of eh. They have gritty looking textures and don’t look super appealing. I don’t believe this game has the same poor optimization as X7, so the last thing to talk about is the stage selected screen, just because I always vaguely bring this up. In X1-X4, and especially X4 and PS1 X3, you would get this really flashy animation when you pick a Maverick on the stage select screen with hype music. X5 onwards kept the hype music part, but not the flashy animation part. I keep comparing it to a Canva product and I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. X5 at least kind of looked like they were trying, but in X6 it just consists of pngs moving into place. And in X7, it’s just this animated background with a render of the boss on it. I genuinely think you could replicate these in Canva in 5 minutes, and in the case of X6 you could probably do it in PowerPoint. X8’s is reminiscent of the SNES ones, but it kind of looks like the Maverick is having a seizure. Other than that, it’s definitely the best one from the second half of the series. If you want to see these for yourself, watch
this video. There is a very noticeable decline between X4 and X5.
After beating all eight Mavericks, Sigma contacts the Hunters and tells them about evolution before the transmission is cut off. The readings Alia picks up also suggest that the Mavericks aren’t being controlled by Sigma, but rather they…
are him. The Hunters chase after him using the Jakob Orbital Elevator to get to space, and unfortunately this level also kind of sucks. You’re on the Elevator going to space while enemies are bombarding you, and it stops every so often for more enemies to board that you have to kill. Can you guess what the issue is? No? It’s sooooo looooooooong. Like I said, this level has one of the best songs in the game, but four minutes of this crap? At the end, you fight Vile, who explains to the Hunters that Sigma orchestrated this entire thing. After defeating him, you go back to the base. The next stage is Gateway, which houses the usual incredibly boring boss rush. It doesn’t even come close to the level of torture in X5 or especially X7’s boss rushes, but it’s still a section of gameplay that I find to be mind numbing by design. And this was where I really realized how annoying those giant health bars can get when you’re trying to speed through the fights and get on with the game. But like X7’s, I at least find the atmosphere to be neat. The capsules are located on this tree that I think might be symbolic for something, and it has a really peaceful theme. Defeated Mavericks turn into a NG Reploid (specifically a Guardroid) before dying, showing that it was only a copy that you fought. After this, the place starts to collapse and the Hunters must escape. But on their way out, Sigma appears to challenge them. This fight is pretty hard, and he might give you Nightmare Mother flashbacks when he sets the floor ablaze with his desperation attack. But with sub tanks, you can beat him without worry of redoing the entire level. Upon death, Sigma also turns into a Reploid using a Copy Chip. Before that can be explained, the stage thankfully ends here and you’re not forced to fight the final boss in the same stage as the boss rush, showing that they learned after making that mistake four times. That would have been grueling in this game, considering that you can only die five times at most.
The final level is Sigma Palace, which takes place on the moon. This is when I actually got interested in the story. You have to play through some level before reaching Vile, who you fight in a Ride Armor. This is where a main mechanic I haven’t mentioned comes in. If you hit a shielded enemy with a charge shot, the third hit of Zero’s saber combo, or every eighth Axl bullet, you break their defense. It’s super cathartic to do that to Mets, and you have to do that to Vile to knock him out of his Ride Armor and damage him, which is much more interesting than in X3. I also have to say, Vile’s theme is another one of X8’s bangers, it really sounds fitting for a guy who just won’t stay dead. Until now, presumably. After that, you do the rest of the level, which has a bizarre obsession with spikes. It’s not as obnoxious as Secret Lab, but it still feels kinda cheap. I did get through it without dying, so I can’t complain too much. Then you reach the real Sigma, who has a really badass design this time around. I mean just look at
this fit. It looks nothing like his older designs, but I think it fits giving how much he’s died (which X6 also showed). It’s much better than either of his X7 designs, especially that T-posing one. He explains how these New Generation Reploids are his “children” as they all have copy chips with his data in them. Axl, of course, is not included due to being a prototype. His plan is to eradicate the old, imperfect world and repopulate it with his children but first, he needs to kill the Hunters. This is another challenging fight. Sigma’s general pattern is to shoot rings that you can either dash through or stay on the opposite wall to dodge. Sometimes, he’ll disappear before reappearing above your current position and slicing down with his sword, kind of like his first phase in X2. He has a tendency to do that multiple times in a row, but he’s pretty vulnerable when it ends. The main challenge comes from his very large health bar and the fact that besides his weakness, the only way to damage him is through guard breaking. He also has a giant blast attack that can only be stopped by doing that. At low health, he’ll light the wall across from him on fire. But despite being hard, he does have a pretty simple pattern, so he’s not
impossible.
After beating him, and for real this time, Lumine emerges and immediately aura farms by stepping on Sigma’s head. He says that the plan has gone smoothly thanks to them. It turns out Sigma wasn’t using Lumine, it was actually
Lumine using
Sigma. Holy crap, the main antagonist isn’t Sigma??? Maybe. It might be that Sigma was behind this and Lumine used this to his advantage or that Lumine just orchestrated the entire thing. It’s hard to tell. For his first phase, he’ll fly around the room with colored gemstones circling him, and after some time he’ll go Super. Just kidding. He’ll stop every so often to use one of the Mavericks’ desperation attack, and at that point, his weakness becomes the weakness of whatever Maverick he is. This is another battle that’s hard, but he’s not unbearable once you learn the strategies and hopefully have armor. Like how at the beginning, he’ll always use Trilobyte, who’s easy to hit with his weakness while using the attack and he stays in this form for quite a while too.
After this, he says the New Generation Reploids have been awakened before attacking the Hunters. They ask if he’s gone Maverick, and he seems to mock their assumption. He says how the NG Reploids are destined to turn evil since they contain Sigma’s DNA. However, he explains this rather poorly by saying “we can go Maverick at will!” This makes no sense as the series has previously demonstrated that being Maverick can be a choice, so NG Reploids aren’t special. But anyway, he the Hunters by calling them outdated tools and tells them to line up to be exterminated. This discourages X, but Axl motivates him and shoots Lumine in the shoulder. His second phase is seraph inspired, reminiscent of Copy X’s final form in Zero 1. And this is where things start getting unfair. Some of his attacks are super hard to avoid, and I wouldn’t have as much of an issue if it weren’t for the fact that if I die more than five times at any point in this stage, I have to redo the whole level and rematch Vile, Sigma, and Lumine’s first phase. I only died exactly five times, but I can’t say I wasn’t incredibly tense on that last life. Especially because of his desperation attack, Paradise Lost. He starts teleporting around, cloaking himself with his wings. You have to guard break him multiple times, but if you don’t kill him quickly enough, he one shots you. Fortunately, this wasn’t a huge issue as I just saved a double attack for this point since I knew he had this attack, and it was enough to finish him off. To be fair though, this is the only time in the X series besides maybe X2 where I don’t think any of the bosses in the final stages are completely cancer inducing, even if this boss is kind of annoying.
Like X7, the ending is a little different depending on who gets the last hit. But the gist is that Lumine tells the Hunters they’re too late to stop his plan before dying, and when Axl approaches his body, tentacles come out shattering the crystal on Axl’s helmet and knocking him away. Zero destroys the tentacles while X catches Axl and charges his buster at Lumine’s corpse, vaporizing it. Both are relieved to find that Axl is okay, just unconscious, and they report to Alia to tell her they’re heading back and Axl’s hurt. On the elevator back, X considers Lumine’s words and wonders if they really are outdated. However, Zero comforts him, telling him not to let it get to him because becoming Sigma is barely evolution. And besides, even if they are destined to be thrown away, they still have to fight, both against Mavericks and against that destiny. The scene normally ends here, but in Axl’s ending, he grunts and a shard inside his broken helmet crystal shines, showing that Lumine is possibly alive. Sadly, that’s a cliffhanger that’s yet to be resolved. In the end credits however, the narrator tells us the production of NG Reploids with copy chips was cancelled once people learned Lumine had gone Maverick, but the Reploids themselves were still manufactured. And years later, the copy chips would continue to be as well. Finally, there’s text of Dr. Light’s final wish, which we’ve pretty much always known about: for humans and robots to live in harmony. This ends Mega Man X8.
Now, all of this goes back to the question I asked at the beginning: is Mega Man X8 a good game? Well… I’ll say this. X8 is a more competent game than X5, X6, or X7. It’s well made, and I think that most of the issues I have with it were intentional design choices rather than the ideas being poorly implemented. But that doesn’t change the fact that I have those issues in the first place. Sorry X8 fans, but whatever it is you see in this game… I just don’t. I didn’t
not enjoy it, but it’s only an okay game to me. Which is sad, because I didn’t go into X8 wanting to hate it. With X5, I did enjoy it a lot at first, but the more playthroughs I did, the more prevalent the issues became. I was genuinely relieved to visit X6 after playing X5 four times, and it seriously was fun at first, but things like Blaze Heatnix’s level, Metal Shark Player’s level, fighting Infinity Mijinion, the Nightmare Effects, and having to revisit every stage and kick Dynamo’s ass over and over revealed to me that X6 just isn’t good. Good games shouldn’t despise the player and their time this much. And Secret Lab, especially that god forsaken second stage, just showed how bad it gets. I had zero expectations for X7 and it actually ended up being
worse than I anticipated, so props to that game. And in X8, I thought it was amazing coming off of X7, but playing more of it made me realize I don’t find the game that fun in its own right. To the people who like this game, or X5 or X6 or even X7, more power to you. I just personally don’t think they’re super fun games.
When I rank games, I think of them in tiers like this: an S-tier game is one of my favorite games in that series and favorite games of all time. It might have issues, but either they’re nitpicks and/or I can overlook them because the game is that good. An A-tier game has more problems, but still a great game that I really like playing. B-tier games are good, but not the best. I definitely enjoy and look forward to playing it, but I wouldn’t drop everything to play it. I explained this and E-tier in the X6 post, but C-tier is for alright games. Maybe it’s a game I’m completely neutral towards, or it has things I like but issues that hamper my enjoyment, or it’s just too bland for me to think about it that often. Either way, I don’t hate my time playing it, but I don’t really feel the urge to play it either. A D-tier game is either incredibly mediocre or just plain bad, but not offensively so. E-tier games are really bad overall, even if they have aspects I like. And an F-tier game is just complete trash with either little to nothing unironically good about it, or the gameplay is so abysmal that any genuine positives are rendered void. It needs to be burned to the ground. If you can’t already guess, X1, X2, X3, and X4 are all S-tier, X5 is C-tier, X6 is E-tier, X7 is F-tier, and X8 is in C-tier right below X5.
I want to end this post by talking about X8’s improvement project. I’ve briefly mentioned the each game’s improvement project in their respective posts and while I’ve still only played some of the X5 patch (and X3’s Zero project but that’s not relevant right now), my opinions on these are that X5 and X6 might not have turned out the best, but you can remove all the poorly thought out features and unnecessary fluff for a far better experience. With X7, the game is so fundamentally flawed that you can’t make it anything more than okay. Okay is still better than garbage, but the only way to make X7 a genuinely good game is to take its ideas and place them in a new engine, remaking it entirely from scratch. However, I doubt this will ever exist because, it would need to be made by someone who actually likes the original game but understands the flaws with it, and Mega Man X7 doesn’t exactly have a dedicated following. I compared this to Sonic Project 06, but this actually does exist within the Mega Man X fandom. Enter Mega Man X8 16-bit. This fan game was made by someone whose favorite was X8 and didn’t intend to “fix” the game, but rather make it more like the SNES ones (and X4 by extension). Funnily enough, he actually confirmed that he won’t be doing this for X7 because he thinks it’s a piece of ****, further proving my point. This is way more than just X8 with SNES graphics though. 16-bit is just an art style in this game, and it doesn’t intentionally limit itself. For example, widescreen support and more frames of animation than X1-X3.
At first, X was the only playable character as it was like that on the SNES. But recently, Axl has been added and I think Zero is being considered as well. The actual stages retain the ideas of their X8 counterparts. For example, Troia Base still revolves around you scoring high ranks, but now you’re doing the usual fast paced platforming you’d expect. Instead of just being based on how fast you clear it like the original or Cyberspace in X4, you have a rank meter in the top corner that continuously decreases and you can raise it by killing enemies, like in a DMC game. You have to speedrun while being able to kill every enemy you can, which sounds way more fun than what the original did. In addition to that, the item game has been completely redone, which was actually intentional as the creator of this fan game was inspired by the YouTuber who’s does the least backtracking routes for X1-X4. I’d love to play it. I mean, you can fight Red from X7 but actually good and everyone’s favorite enby Navi Serenade, it has to be good.
Finally, this isn’t going to be my last X post. I have one more for Maverick Hunter X, which was supposed to come out way sooner. Like, while I was still on X5 sooner. It’s just that I had other things to do like school or the other Mega Man X games and the Battle Network series. But that’s going to be my last unnecessarily long post about a Mega Man game. Uh, hopefully not this long though. If anyone’s reading this, see you then.
Bird Jesus and The Fonz!? 
