It always really annoys me when fans of Mega Man X6 say that if you don’t like it, you’re just bad. If you pay any attention to the way X6 is designed, it’s obvious that it’s not a hardcore sequel aimed at superfans who’ve mastered X1-X5. It was supposed to be a normal MMX game, but it being so rushed meant the developers weren’t able to fully playtest and finish everything. This results in the difficulty feeling poorly designed and unintentional, and that’s the main reason why the game is disliked. For example, repeat playthroughs are way easier because most of the difficulty relies on beginner traps and cheap tricks. If you just know that a charged Metal Anchor or Ray Arrow/Rekkoha decimates the minibosses that make up Blaze Heatnix’s entire stage, you turn one of the most frustrating and worst stages in series history into one of the most mind numbing (but still one of the worst) as all you have to do is hold and let go of the special weapon button. Rinse and repeat 5+ times. In a well designed but really hard game, this level suck way less first of all, but it would also still require skill to beat with powerful weapons. It would take a multiple playthroughs to make the game super easy, and being able to do that is satisfying and fun. It would take multiple playthroughs for X6 to become mindlessly easy, but it wouldn’t be satisfying since again, the game is poorly designed. It’s not really skill culmination, it’s more like adapting to the bs.
Anyway, I think the reason people act like that, being so defensive over X6, is because they’re tired of this game they really like and are nostalgic for constantly being shat on. That’s fair, but I think you need to admit when something you like has flaws. If you adapt to them over time, they don’t bother you, the good outweighs them, or you don’t even see them as flaws, then that’s fine. You don’t have to say “I love this even though it sucks” every time you bring it up, but you also can’t act like its issues don’t exist and its hate is entirely undeserved. Actually, most people who like this game do understand this, it’s just a vocal minority that can’t fathom that people don’t like X6 for reasons other than “skill issue” or “a YouTuber told you to hate it.”
I have a lot of games like that, including some MM games, but the biggest one is New Super Mario Bros 2. That game is usually seen as one of the weakest main series installments, but that was one of my favorite games when I was younger and I replayed it so much. Now that I’m older, I can see why it’s so disliked since it’s definitely one of the safest games in the series, and it’s objectively not that good. But I still think it’s fun and have a lot of nostalgia for it because I played it so much. That’s actually what made me write this.
This video had the game on it and even though I’ve known about this game’s reception for years, it was only today that I realized “wait, NSMB2 is for me what X6 is for some people.” Otherwise I would have continued to not post on this site. Anyway, like I said in a post a few months ago, the complete opposite of this is Sonic Forces. I loved this game because of how cool it was to play as my own character and
Fist Bump and how Infinite seemed cool and it was the only 3D Sonic game I had, so I couldn’t tell how bad it was compared to the other boost or 3D games. Then I saw people online say it sucked, and I just agreed with them even though I didn’t see what was bad about it. Now I can safely say the game sucks, I don’t like it, and have that be my own opinion. It’s definitely not as bad as X7, but I’ve actually noticed a shocking amount of similarities between the games.
