First, I’m going to explain how X6 came to be. So, X5 was obviously supposed to be the last X game. After this, they were going to start working on Mega Man Zero 1. But the PS2 had come out by the time X5 had released, signaling that the PlayStation’s lifetime was ending. Upon noticing this, Capcom’s thought process was “no one has a PS2 yet, so let’s release a new Rockman X game on PS1 in the holiday season before it leaves the market.” I can understand that logic, even if the series had concluded, but they just didn’t give themselves enough time to ensure they were releasing a high quality product. Rockman X6 was released a year after Rockman X5’s, and the development time was probably even less than that. There’s no way it could have turned out well. Despite how constantly I question their sanity, I do feel bad for the devs. I can see the effort that was put into the game.
The release of this game resulted in them changing the original plans for the Zero series. That’s definitely for the better, but not relevant right now. Unfortunately, X6 ended up being one of the most infamous games in the series. Fans despised it when it released since not only was it not supposed to exist, but it was also super unpolished and not fun. It’s not even like the game sold that well either, it did the worst out of all the PS1 MMX games. But like some other hated video games, while it’s still widely considered the second worst X game, it’s more divisive than anything now. Like X5, you’ll see a lot of people who hate it, but also people who say it’s only mediocre, better than X5, or even one of their favorites. If you don’t already know which category I fall into, it shouldn’t take long to.
Let’s start with the story. Honestly? I like it. The plot, on its own, is not bad. There’s a few plot holes to explain before getting in, though. First, the game is stated to take place three weeks after X5, when that game said the next event would take place three years later. This is just a retcon. Nothing in X5 states that this couldn’t have happened less than three years later. Then there’s Zero’s recovery. In the Japanese version, he compares his repair to X’s. X was repaired by a Dr. Light AI, but Light says that he doesn’t know who fixed Zero in the Capsule in Weapon Center. However, Dr. Wily was around during X5, and there’s a character in this game named Isoc, who is probably Wily in a Reploid body. So either Wily or Isoc revived him. Finally, if you beat the game as Zero, he seals himself away for 100 years so the Maverick Virus can be studied. But obviously there’s more X games after this, which Zero is in. This is easy, the ending happens at the end of the X series, which is the new tie in to the Zero series. It all works perfectly.
As for the actual story, there’s a scientist named Gate who used to work with other Reploid researchers, including his close friend Alia. He was obsessed with X and Zero because their DNA structures were unanalyzable, eventually creating seven or eight of his own powerful Reploids with similarly advanced data. However, his coworkers, besides Alia, were all either jealous or afraid of his creations, eventually teaming up to sabotage them. Alia was forced to kill two as well. Feeling betrayed, Gate left, while Alia later became a navigator for the Maverick Hunters. However, shortly after the debris of Eurasia hit, when the Earth was safe enough for Reploids work on fixing it, Gate comes across a sample of Zero’s DNA. Using it, he and the mysterious Isoc revive all of Gate’s Reploids, calling them “Nightmare Investigators,” create the Nightmare, and create a powerful Reploid known as High Max and a discolored copy of Zero called Zero Nightmare. Gate comes up with an elaborate plan to kill or force into submission all “low-grade” Reploids by exposing them to the Nightmare, tricking them into thinking the Nightmare Investigators would help and that Zero was somehow responsible, planning on creating a society of advanced and independent Reploids. And X must put a stop to it. I like it a lot. They gave Alia, who was little more than a gameplay feature in X5, some backstory, and the Nightmare Investigators all have interesting backstories to the point where, besides Heatnix and Mijinion, you feel really bad for them since they really did nothing wrong. And Gate is a tragic villain even if it doesn’t at all justify his actions. But I do have one big issue.
Sigma. He was permanently killed off in X5, but after you beat Gate, he reveals that he needs him to finish his plan and revives him. In the Classic games, Wily being the villain every time works since it doesn’t take itself seriously, but in the X games, having the same person be behind everything no matter what ruins all tension and makes Sigma more of a joke with each game. In X1 and X5, it’s fine, but every other time it falls flat. He feels more like he’s X and Zero’s biggest hater than a real threat, because why else is he harassing these guys every other week? This game is one of the worst offenders because he and the Sigma Virus aren’t seen or even mentioned up to this point outside of the intro, he’s supposed to be dead for real, and they had a good villain who had a relationship with a main character. He doesn’t even have an impact on the story. He (maybe?) kills Gate, but if they just had X and Zero do it, nothing would change. Seriously, it’s probably more effort to think of some way to shoehorn this mf in every game than to just have the actual villain be the final boss.
Besides that, the plot is sadly butchered by the “localization.” Mega Man X6 first released on December 4, 2001, which is 5 days after Rockman X6. The end result was quite subpar. When you load up the game and when you watch the credits, the Japanese songs will play. The songs they used, which are Moonlight, The Answer, and I.D.E.A., are bangers, but they’re obviously not supposed to be here. They couldn’t even at least make instrumentals, telling you how rushed the game was right off the bat if you played the games before this. In this collection, specifically ones that weren’t bought in Japan, for copyright reasons, they removed them and replaced them with different songs, but these ones are much less memorable and make me wish I was playing on Steam so I could mod the original music in. The cutscenes are also fully voiced in Japanese, which was kept in the English release. I can’t attest to the voice acting quality, but seriously? You can turn it off in this collection, and apparently people were upset when they removed it in the original X Collection, but come on. It clearly wasn’t an intentional design choice. And even if it was, the game keeps X5’s PowerPoint presentation cutscenes and voice acting with English subtitles doesn’t fit at all with it. It just makes X6 look cheap.
The far bigger issue is the translation. Most Mega Man games don’t have good translations most of the time, but X6’s looks like they did whatever the closest thing to copy and pasting the entire Japanese script into Google Translate was back in 2001 and called it a day. Nearly every exchange has rampant typos, very awkward dialogue, or characters saying things that make zero sense. For example, in the intro, it says “X and Zero defeated Sigma and narrowly escaped with their lives, however, only one would return from the battle.” Huh? So they both escaped but only one escaped? Before fighting High Max in the opening stage, he says “High Max… I am called.” Did no one read that and think it sounded really off? And that’s barely scratching the surface. The most infamous line in the entire game is definitely Zero saying “I hid myself while I tried to repair myself” when X asks how he’s alive, which makes it hard to take an otherwise fairly heartwarming scene seriously. Zero, my guy, you were a torso at the end of X5, what are you talking about? It’s barely comprehensible at points. There’s no excuse for any game released in 2001 to have a translation this bad.
After that, you get into the actual game and are exposed to what makes this game so infamous. The Nightmare Investigators here have really badly translated names, unsurprisingly. By that, I mean they literally just used their Japanese names, causing countless players to scratch their heads wondering what a Mijinion is (tbf X1 also did that with Boomer Kuwanger but here they didn’t bother with any of them). But their designs are really cool, and like I said, you feel bad for them. I appreciate them going out of their way to give every Maverick a backstory because they really didn’t have to, but their stages are some of the worst levels in the X series. I’ll go over all of them to explain what I mean by how poorly designed they are.
First, there’s the opening stage. This stage is definitely the best designed level in the game and does everything an opening stage should. You start off with a nerfed version of the Falcon Armor. Its flight has been exchanged for an invincible air dash and its charge shot really sucks now, but it can charge special weapons. X can also press the special weapon button while not having one equipped to use Zero’s saber, which he had in his good ending in X5. He just can’t use it as fast as Zero due to a lack of experience. Eventually you’ll see a block that can’t be destroyed with your buster, so you’ll realize you can destroy it with a saber swing. A non verbal tutorial, something X5 was allergic to. The level sets a very high bar. In the weakness order, first is Commander Yammark’s stage, Amazon Area. This level has some waiting and annoying mantis enemies, but is good overall. However, there’s one section with a leap of faith onto a moving enemy that serves as a platform on spikes. You can damage boost with the nearby enemies to delay frustration for the actually trash stages, but it’s still bad design.
After him is Ground Scaravich, Central Museum. The stage has four totem poles that transport you to one out of eight randomly selected and predetermined areas that must be cleared, then you fight the totem poles to continue. This would be a cool idea, but since it’s X6, they don’t do anything fun with the gimmick. The devs just used it as an excuse to spam Nightmare Viruses everywhere, the most annoying enemy in the game. Two rooms deserve a special mention. In one room, there’s a gap too big to cross without an air dash. Of course, the Falcon Armor can cross it, and so can the Blade Armor and Zero. But if you’re wearing the Shadow Armor (or unarmored X)… screw you, I guess. The other area has a jump that’s supposed to be made with the Blade Armor’s mach dash, which you’re not likely to have because one of the parts is later in this stage. Was this game playtested, like, at all? Also all of the secrets are hidden in the randomly picked areas, so if you’re unlucky, have fun replaying this level over and over. Awful stage.
Next is one of, if not, the most infamous level in the game: Blaze Heatnix’s stage, the Magma Area. That’s because of the Nightmare Snakes, which everyone just calls donuts. They’re big, have giant health bars, and four really annoying to hit weak spots that they attack out of. It takes forever, it’s not fun since you’re just running back and forth, and when you die, it’s incredibly frustrating, which will be common on your first playthrough. If you only had to fight it once, it would be kind of bearable, but this thing is used five. times. in the level with no changes other than environment. There’s not even any level in between the fights after the second one because that would require time and effort. The fourth donut is one of the worst sections of gameplay in the entire game, because it’s an autoscroller where there’s lava rising up a vertical shaft, which covers the bottom weak spots and makes them near impossible to hit, and obviously the lava one shots you. Some attacks can obliterate the donuts in seconds, which I’ve seen people use to say that the stage somehow isn’t that bad. I was aware of that, but refrained from doing it because I felt like that would rob me of the Mega Man X6 experience. How would I know how bad the game is if I didn’t play the worst stage the same way everyone else did when they first played it? And yeah, this was the point where I realized… this game really sucks. I felt nothing but pain playing it. No good game would have a level like this in it. And screen nuke spam doesn’t fix anything. It’s less frustrating, but it also shows how absolutely nothing is happening outside of these trash boss fights.
Blizzard Wolfang’s level, the North Pole Area, is decent. It has some frustrating parts, especially as X, but is fine overall. Inami Temple, Rainy Turtloid’s level, is one of the best in the game. Its gimmick is acid rain that slowly takes away your health, and you have to find these small enemies and kill them to take out the shields surrounding these generators causing the rain. Then you can destroy those generators. I’d expect them to make the rain take away a lot of health, or hide those enemies in really annoying spots, but they didn’t. It felt… fair. And fun. The only thing I don’t like is the damage sponges that guard themselves, they were placed really obnoxiously. All fun goes out the window in Metal Shark Player’s Recycle Lab. This level has been said to make a man break a controller in rage, and it does deserve that disdain. The entire gimmick of this stage is a compactor that goes down and back up. If you get caught under it, you die instantly. It would be painfully slow on its own, but it’s somehow even worse than just that. Obviously tons of enemies are placed in just the right spots to knock you into the crusher, but also, if you need to duck to not get crushed, but let go of the crouch button… the game just kills you. Instead of keeping you down. That will probably cause one cheap death, but then there’s the fact that if you get hit by an enemy, you automatically stop ducking, and the most common enemy in the stage is Nightmare Viruses, which can move and attack through terrain. It’s just a frustrating slog because the risk of death is always there, and dying means redoing that part of the level. Tied with Magma Area as worst level in the game.
Shield Sheldon’s stage, Laser Institute, is bad, but more because it revolves around puzzles that quickly overstay their welcome and less because it’s frustrating. If you’re going for the route to the boss, it takes a good 45 seconds to beat, so I can barely call it a level. If you go for the other path, then you do more laser redirecting in a section with secrets like “walk through this wall for a Capsule” because anyone would guess that. Finally, Infinity Mijinion’s level, the Weapon Center, is also barely a stage, it’s just a straight line with incoherent enemy spam and a robot shooting you from the background. It’s just a minute long endurance test. This is overall a really bad stage selection. It’s very clear how rushed some of these levels were.
There’s other major gameplay issues besides the bad levels. Such as the bosses. Most of them aren’t that well designed, but more often than not that results in them being piss easy despite them supposedly being powerful Reploids. Commander Yammark, for example, flies in place and shoots very weak shots that are easy to dodge or destroy. I did every Maverick fight without weaknesses, which really showed me how low the difficulty is. At least Metal Shark Player’s fight was cool. And when the game’s bosses aren’t easy, they’re usually incredibly cheap and frustrating. Just like the levels. Most of those bosses are found in Gate’s Lab, but there is one Nightmare Investigator like that: Infinity Mijinion.
Yeah, having one of the laziest and worst stages in the game wasn’t enough for him, his fight had to suck too. He would be pretty easy if not for his gimmick: whenever he takes enough damage or is hit by certain attacks, he’s knocked backwards and a clone of him appears in his place. This very durable clone does nothing but spam durable green bubbles. Having to deal with the clone’s goo and Mijnion’s attacks, one of which is also to spam goo, is near impossible and once he’s lost a good amount of health, the entire screen is just filled with crap, leading to constant cheap deaths. And his weakness doesn’t help. The Guard Shell only deflects certain attacks back at him, and it does almost no damage and makes him immediately clone himself. One of the worst fights in the series.
Despite the fact that you’ll die a lot in X6, for a couple reasons, I can’t say this is truly a hard game since most of the difficulty comes from poor design and a lack of polishing/playtesting. For example, the life system. Like X5, if you get a game over, you’re just sent back to your last checkpoint. I used to think that was a good thing, but looking back… okay, the concept is good, but these games execute it poorly because checkpoints are everywhere, so dying usually has no consequence. X6 especially abuses that fact. It also means there’s no punishment for dying to bosses, so they’re able to get away with things like Infinity Mijinion.
A few of X6’s mechanics make the game more dreadful. Like the Nightmare Effects. When you play a stage, two other stages will turn red. This means one of their nightmare effects has just been activated. Every stage has two nightmare effects that can be active in it and one that it turns on in two other stages when played/beaten. And once a Nightmare Effect has been activated in a stage, it can’t be played normally anymore. If a level has a really bad effect active, the best you can do is visit the stage home to its less annoying effect, leave, and come back. The problem with this system comes down to two things. One, the effects solely exist to annoy you. For example, Amazon Area spawns tiny bugs in Magma Area that get in the way of your shots. The worst one is definitely Infinity Mijinion’s, which causes Amazon Area and Inami Temple to be near completely shrouded in darkness. 2/3 of this game’s good levels ruined. X1 and, to a small extent, X3 had similar systems, but those were usually helpful. In X6, I’m pretty sure the only even remotely beneficial Nightmare Effect is Blaze Heatnix’s fire, which is necessary to melt a wall in North Pole Area that hides some upgrades. And even then, it makes the rest of the level a spam fest. The other issue is how the game doesn’t explain this system well at all. In the beginning of the game, Alia says she’ll mark any stage that has a Nightmare Effect active red, but that’s it. There’s nowhere in the game where it says what nightmare effects are activated by which stages and which stages have which effects or what they even are. It’s one thing for a Mega Man X game to make a system unnecessarily complicated and not explain it like X5, but it’s another thing to do that and make it actively worsen the experience. I’ve seen people say “oh, just avoid the bad nightmare effects,” but then why do they exist in the first place? If it’s so bad that you just have to tell me to avoid it, there’s something wrong with the system.
Although it’s not as heavily criticized as in X5, backtracking exists in this game. The reason it’s not as talked about is obviously because the game has way bigger issues, but every level has an alternate “Another Route” which can be accessed through a portal found somewhere in the stage. They also end in an “Another Boss.” For all intents and purposes, these are separate stages from the ones they’re found in, so you can’t leave them even if you’ve beaten the stage the portal is located in. You also can’t return once you’ve entered, and since every route has upgrades, you’ll have to replay each stage at least once for 100%. It also still has that issue from X5 where you don’t get to use any armor part until the set is completed, although the secrets in this game usually allow you to get them in multiple ways. The routes aren’t even good either, they’re usually a minute long and as well designed as the rest of the game. As for the bosses, Zero Nightmare is pretty easy and the first one that will appear. If you beat him, you unlock Zero. After that, High Max will appear (more on him later) and if he’s beaten, you get the final stages early. Which, like X5, is really poor balance because of how those levels are designed. And after you unlock those, regardless of how, Dynamo will appear every time you visit one but has no bearing on the plot whatsoever. It’s just a way to add eight required backtracks.
There’s also the parts system. In X5, they were helpful upgrades you could equip, but the system was so stupid that it wasn’t worth it. Basically, every boss has two parts, but you can only pick one and the game doesn’t tell you which parts are which. However, you must fight the boss while they’re at level 8 to get the option. It’s just that the game doesn’t explain anything, and if you want to get a part from each boss, you’d have to game over multiple times because of the way boss levels work. What intuitive game design. In this game, boss levels and player ranks have been heavily simplified, but they’re not how you get parts. Instead, each of the 8 stages has 16 Injured Reploids. To get parts, you have to touch them and send them back to the base. This is an interesting idea, and since one in each stage has a heart tank, it means there’s 16 of those instead of 8, which kind of solves that issue from X5 where it’s hard to equally distribute them. But this is also hurt by two things. One, not every Reploid has parts. In fact, most of them don’t. You don’t know if you’ve gotten parts or which until you get to the results screen. So if you’re looking for one specific part, either pull up a guide or search every stage for it. Hopefully you haven’t missed it permanently, because two, when a Nightmare Virus, an enemy with a very annoying amount of health that’s also the devs’ favorite enemy to spam, sees a Reploid, it heads towards them. If it touches them, they’re infected by the Nightmare. At that point, they can’t be saved and any part they may have been carrying is lost forever. If it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t have an issue for this system, but it’s just annoying this way. Especially since some stages put Viruses an inch away from Reploids.
There’s some insane grinding to do before you can even use parts. When you kill a Nightmare Virus, Investigator, or hit Dynamo with his weakness and attack him again, you get Nightmare Souls. These increase your rank, and if you have a higher rank, you can equip more parts. However, sane people like me will just settle on a GA rank, because anything higher requires ridiculous grinding for souls. GA only lets you equip two parts and one limited part, the latter of which is just a temporary boost for a stage. It’s so stupid. Your souls aren’t shared between characters either. If you really want more parts, your best bet is to find a particularly quick Another Route and replay it constantly to fight Dynamo to grind.
Oh, and the presentation is bad. Of course it would be if it had a low budget and even less production time than X5. I actually like the backgrounds more than X5’s. But besides the (skippable, finally) cutscenes and terrible translation, the game still looks really cheap, like the pre-rendered pngs that are occasionally used, or how when you talk to a Dr. Light Capsule, X or Zero’s mugshot appears, but Dr. Light doesn’t have one, so X/Zero’s mugshot is there even when he’s talking. In X5, I just thought the sprite animations were ****ty, but in this game, some of the sprites themselves suck in addition to that. Most don’t, but then you have ones like Ground Scaravich. Blaze Heatnix’s is definitely the worst. His artwork looks so cool, but in game he’s just an orange bird. I saw a fanmade 16-bit sprite of him on Twitter and it looks better than his official 32-bit sprite (I also saw someone say that each Investigator’s sprite looks like they’re from a different game, and now I can’t unsee it). The stage start screen still looks like something made in Canva, but the stage select screen itself is particularly egregious. Aside from how it “transitions” when you switch screens with the shoulder buttons, there’s a globe that shows you where every stage is located just like in X5. But it’s not accurate. The snowy stage called North Pole Area is located somewhere around North Korea, and Amazon Area is apparently somewhere in the Pacific. Really?
Once you’ve finally beaten all eight Nightmare Investigators, High Max, or obtained 3,000 souls, Gate personally invites you to his laboratory. But before I talk about the worst final stages in Mega Man history, let’s go over the good things X6 has that aren’t ruined in execution. First, the biggest one, the music. Almost everyone can admit that this game’s soundtrack goes hard. It’s definitely one of my favorite Mega Man osts, which is no easy feat at all. You have the peaceful yet somber Crash Site Ruins, one of the best stage select screens in the series (also the only X game to not have two), Blaze Heatnix’s fast paced and rocking theme, Infinity Mijinion’s oddly heroic theme, the best Light Capsule theme, Blizzard Wolfang’s somewhat sad theme, the high octane boss theme, and the list goes on. Seriously, every single song in the game is good.
Alia has seen major improvements. In X5, she would constantly interrupt stages to tell you things like how to jump over bottomless pits, killing the already slow pace. In X6, you see her call you can choose to pick it up. Combine that with the fact that she has an actual personality and Alia is a genuinely good character now. However, there’s still an issue in how she never says anything interesting (or readable). What if she said things that are important to the lore? For example, there’s a cutscene explaining her history with Gate that you’ll only see if you’ve collected 3,000 souls before defeating every Investigator. No one would grind that much, so why not have her explain it at different points in stages?
X’s armors are great. As Zero, they made a couple changes. To the point where his entire sprite set has been redesigned. His saber combo has been changed and I’m fine with it, it makes saber dash cancelling super easy. Aside from that, he has the Z-Buster, which is actually useful unlike in X5 because it’s strong, doesn’t take forever to charge, and is available by default. However, his techniques were pretty bad. Ensuizan is hilariously broken, but other times I would accidentally use Hyoroga when I was just trying to jump because it’s activated by pressing up+jump, or Sentsuizan to my doom because some genius mapped an attack that sends you plummeting downwards to up+attack, or I would try to use Yammar Option but it just wouldn’t work half the time. And half the techniques feel too situational to actually use. But the game seems to either have been designed around or not playtested as him since he trivializes a lot of the game. I would say him lacking the damage reduction that X has with armor makes up for it, but you can use a Shock Buffer to halve damage as Zero. Also, this is Mega Man X6, I doubt they thought that far ahead.
X’s special weapons were also kind of bad. Yammar Option is one of the best shield weapons in the series, surrounding you with dragonflies that shoot and deal contact damage. I used it a lot since the game really loves enemy spam, but the rest were just decent, situational, or bad. I like the idea of giving X a melee attack and Zero a ranged attack by default. In X4, X was only ranged and Zero was only melee, but now they can both do the other character’s specialty, they’re just not as good at it.
The nerfed Falcon Armor is actually pretty bad. Flight was its selling point in X5, so it not being able to do that and having a bad charge shot incentivized using other armors. Unlike X5, where the Fourth Armor was so good that I used it even after I unlocked the other armors since they weren’t that good anyway. First, the Blade Armor. Its head parts halve weapon energy usage, its body parts halve damage and convert it into a Giga Attack where X does a giant screen wide slash with the Z-Saber, its arm parts let X do a charge shot similar to the Fourth Armor’s Plasma Shot, charge special weapons, and do a charged saber swing if you hold up when letting go of the attack button. Finally, the foot parts let you do a chargeable air dash that can go in four directions and has double the distance of a normal air dash. The Shadow Armor, on the other hand, is just a good Gaea Armor, since it’s way more useful and isn’t super slow. The helmet actually does something, allowing you to swing the Z-Saber faster than normal. The body parts halve damage to let you use a Giga Attack where crescents encircle you that deal massive damage. The arm parts let you shoot shurikens instead of normal shots and when fully charged, you do a saber swing. But it can’t use special weapons at all. The foot parts let you stick to walls, make you immune to spikes, and let you jump to the ceiling by pressing up+jump and shoot shurikens down. They’re great, and they have such cool designs as well. They were so fun to use that sometimes I almost forgot I was playing X6. Almost. Way better armors than X5’s (besides the Fourth Armor).
Now that I’ve gotten everything positive out of the way, it’s time to enter Gate’s Lab. Ughhhh. Right off the bat, the music is an absolute banger. It’s a metal remix of X-Hunter Stage 2 from X2. One of my favorite final stage tracks in the series. But that’s about where my compliments end. Once you enter the lab, you meet a giant spike wall. The easiest way to pass this is obviously the Shadow Armor, but if you don’t have that, you can always use parts. If you don’t have those parts, or do but don’t have them equipped, you’ll have to intentionally game over because as far as I’m aware, you need the Jumper part and Ice Burst even though you can unlock these stages without either, the former being more likely to miss. Amazing game design, just softlock players for not having an optional item. I’ll be able to talk about that again in stage 2, but the rest of this one is actually pretty easy. They just spammed enemies and the lasers from Laser Institute everywhere but you can damage boost through everything, although it’s still horrendous design. There’s a pretty dickish moment where you go through a door, and then fire rises. Normally, this means your controls would be locked until a miniboss or boss shows up. But neither happens, so you’d expect the fire to stop. Except it doesn’t, your controls are just unlocked this time. I knew this ahead of time, but otherwise this only exists to rob you of a life since the room has nothing in it. After this is an autoscroller before you face off against the Nightmare Mother.
This is definitely the worst Mega Man X boss of all time. I didn’t die on it as much as the next two, but this is worse solely because of how poorly designed it was. I mean to the extent where it doesn’t feel like it was play tested at all. No one who likes this game will try to defend it. The Nightmare Mother is composed of two cube shaped masses of Nightmare with a singular eye in the middle of each. Kind of like a Devil. Similar to those, they’re invulnerable until the eyes are exposed. When that’s not the case, they’ll move rapidly around the arena, and due to their size, you have to rush to the wall and wall jump over them continuously and pixel perfectly if you don’t have the Jumper parts or Shadow Armor. They don’t telegraph which direction they’ll move in, so you have to react insanely quickly. But that move is, comparatively, the least of the fight’s issues. Once they stop, the eyes emerge and they’ll both do one of a couple attacks before heading back and moving again. But the attacks feel almost impossible to avoid, and since they do a lot of damage and are random, it’s just bull****. There’s no better word to describe it. Once it gets to half health, which can take a while since it has a giant health bar, it starts moving incredibly fast and will change direction in the blink of an eye. This fight is atrocious. The only saving grace is the relatively short i-frames, so a charged Metal Anchor can really ruin its day if used right. But screw this ****ty boss. The only reason I didn’t break a controller over it is because of the Jumper parts.
The second stage is much worse. It starts off with more enemy spam. And if you think I’m overusing that term, go search up a video of both of these stages. Half of it is just bad Mario Maker level design. After that you have to fight more of Central Museum’s totem poles. You’re pitted against 4 back to back, and it wouldn’t be so annoying if it weren’t for the fact that after this is two more, and then some cramped spike spam where it’s easy to die and have to restart the entire thing. It sucks hard. Thankfully, if you know what you’re doing, both the Blade and Shadow Armors can skip half the fights, but it’s still terrible. After this is High Max. Yay…
Like I said, you can fight him in an Another Route before this, but his attack pattern is different here. He’s a pain in the ass regardless. To hurt him, you have to hit him with a charge shot and then a special weapon (vice versa as Zero). If you do that, he takes damage equivalent to a paper cut and is invincible for a while. Ignoring the fact that it’s possible to find him in an Another Route and not have any special weapons, at which point you’d have to game over, it’s so drawn out. This version of the fight is worse since he utilizes giant barriers and spends 80% of the fight flying on and off screen. It’s not hard to avoid, but he does it so much. You can destroy the barriers, but he’ll quickly regenerate them and if you destroy them too many times, he’ll go to the middle of the arena and start spamming death balls at you that each turn into four homing orbs if hit, all while shouting “desu bōru” over and over again like an X7 boss. You’re supposed to either deal with that chaos and ear torture or wait for him to use an attack with the barriers and then hit him. If you do it the former way, good luck not rupturing a blood vessel, and if take the latter option, the fight would take all day. Thankfully, certain attacks, like a charged Blade Armor saber swing, can hit him through the barriers, which can easily lock him into a pattern despite his long i-frames because of how long it takes for him to respawn his barriers and attack after being hit. It still takes forever, but not as long as it could. Sucks anyway.
After that X or Zero’s beautiful victory jingle plays, signifying the end of your torment… but the stage isn’t over yet. No, you have to play through a completely new stage now because this level is two in one. Where you go depends on who you’re using. As Zero you do a repeat of the crusher from Recycle Lab, which I didn’t do but I’m sure is as fun as it sounds. As X, you visit a version of Inami Temple with even more damage sponges there. This section is also home to one of the most infamous moments on the game. It’s a gap that’s too wide to cross without an air dash. But again, the Shadow Armor is incapable of air dashing. And there’s a good chance you picked Shadow Armor since these levels have a hard-on for spikes. This one is more well known than the previous ones in the game since you’re required to visit here if you played as X. I’ve seen people say there’s nothing wrong with this and I don’t get it. It’s possible to make the jump with the Jumper and Hyper Dash, both parts belonging to Reploids who can’t be infected, but honestly, I don’t care. Those are completely optional and you don’t have to have them equipped. The devs just forgot one of their armors couldn’t air dash. There’s no excuse for designing the stage like that since it means beating the stage as Shadow Armor isn’t an intended way of playing the game. And as no armor X, the only way to make it is by abusing a glitch. The existence of this jump punishes anyone who happened to pick the wrong armor by forcing them to redo the first part of this stage and High Max. I did know of this, but if I didn’t and I picked Shadow Armor, I honestly would have stopped playing the game.
After that is the battle against Gate himself, and just like the last two abominations, he’s one of the worst MMX bosses of all time. But first, can I just say that his combat form design is freaking cool? And his theme bangs too. Both of those also apply to High Max as well. The battle takes place on multiple incoherently placed floating platforms over a pit. Gate is completely invincible to your weapons and can either fly to your position or shoot an orb at you. If he does the latter, once the orb stops moving, you can attack it and once destroyed, it launches fragments towards and away from you, so you have to time your attack to hit him. If you don’t destroy the orb in time, it will have some effect depending on the color. The orbs don’t do much damage to him, it’s completely random whether or not he’ll shoot one, and the arena’s design is just incredibly claustrophobic and makes avoiding contact with Gate or his orbs artificially challenging. Once he reaches half health, he’ll start using a stronger attack that destroys platforms temporarily, but this just drags the fight even longer since if you’re unlucky, that’s all he’ll do. I hate this boss with a passion, and this entire stage was my breaking point. First I would die on the spikes in that totem pole section and getting annoyed because the totem poles took so long to kill that it took forever to get back to where I died, then I finally got to High Max and of course that guy sucked, then I got to Gate and he was just impossible to beat without any sub tanks. And at this point, I was just sick of the game and the frustration it and especially this stage caused. The next day, I did beat the stage after coming in with full sub tanks and a life recover (a third sub tank) and it was much easier, but still not fun. Definitely one of the worst stages in the game, **** this level.
After this, you fight Sigma and there’s nothing noteworthy other than his design in this game being pretty cool. He’s supposed to be an unfinished zombie who can’t think of anything other than wanting to kill X and Zero. There’s a boss rush, but thankfully they didn’t give the bosses a screen’s worth of health. If they did I probably would have broken a controller fighting Infinity Mijinion. Sigma himself is easy and anticlimactic, his first phase is pathetic and his second phase just spams a lot, but on my second attempt, I was able to beat him with full sub tanks and the life recover. It was nothing compared to Gate. There’s still the issue from X4 and X5’s final bosses and Sigma has really badly translated lines before his second phase but I don’t even care at this point. I felt no satisfaction beating this game. It didn’t feel like I overcame a hard challenge, it was just like “finally. I’m done. I hate this.”
Like, I get it, I do…but people with tiny houses get married all the time lol.
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What is this dialogue?! So unhinged lol.
