I remember wanting to post here, but I didn’t have any game that I hated enough to say it was the worst one I’ve ever played. Sonic Forces sucks, but is it
that bad? Sonic 2 8-bit on the Game Gear was near unplayable, so it was that for a while, but that’s a port. The original is probably still bad, but not unplayably bad. Maybe The Lost Levels, but I really couldn’t decide on what my least favorite game ever was. I have
the answer now:
Poor Mega Man.EXE, having to be associated with this game is a fate worse than death
This game. I knew it was gonna suck, but I wasn’t sure how bad it would be. Jesus Christ. I still love MMX and it will always be my favorite of the seven different series, but how they went from banger after banger to a mid game to a really crappy one to the absolute worst game I’ve ever played is so astonishing.
I’ve shat on X6 in multiple posts, including the last paragraph, but there honestly is
some fun to be had in it. There’s three (maybe four, I can’t decide whether North Pole Area is good or just fine) stages that I do think are good, one cool boss, and the armors are also great and fun to use. Not as good as the X4 Fourth Armor, but still better than the Gaea Armor and both X5 and X6’s versions of the Falcon Armor. Overall, on the rare occasion that it feels balanced and isn’t super annoying/unfair, super easy, or ruined by stupid features like the Nightmare Effects, X6 can be fun since X1-X5 are inherently fun to play and it plays just like those games. Plus, there’s also non gameplay related things I like such as the music and story when ignoring the “translation,” and it even has some improvements over X5. I’m not going to pretend that I think X6 is
entirely unenjoyable. It’s also one of those games where it’s really fun to watch people abuse glitches to completely break it in half because the disc is being held together with duct tape and five minutes of play testing, but I’m not counting that as a point in the game’s favor. Don’t confuse this as me saying that I suddenly like X6 because I definitely don’t. It’s just that I can appreciate what good things do exist in it.
X7 is different. Unlike X1-X6 or even the Xtreme games on GBC, it doesn’t feel good to control, no matter who you play as, but that’s just the start. Everything else about it is garbage too. At no point is it better than mediocre, and usually it doesn’t even reach that. There’s no high points. When I write an unnecessarily long post that I don’t expect anyone to read about my thoughts on it like I did for X4-X6, I’ll go into more detail, but I’m serious when I say literally everything that could go wrong did. The stages suck, the bosses suck, their designs and names are stupid even compared to X6’s untranslated names (not designs though, X6 character designs are peak), the voice acting is inexcusably awful for a 2003 PS2 release but it’s not even at least bad in a funny way like X4 or MM8, the game somehow looks cheaper than X5 and X6, X’s character was absolutely massacred and you also can’t play as X for at least half of the game called
Mega Man X7, and the list goes on. It doesn’t stop anytime soon. This game just sucks at everything besides the music and maybe one or two other tiny things. It’s pretty funny and baffling how bad it is, but actually playing it is insanely boring. Boring and slow because everyone plays slowly and clunkily while moving through areas that don’t do anything even remotely gratifying. And if it’s not boring, it’s agonizing just like X6 can be, but somehow worse. Worst Mega Man game of all time and the worst game I’ve ever played by a long shot. X6 is definitely the second worst game in the franchise but it isn’t even in the same league as this trash. And I haven’t even mentioned the sociopathic achievements made for this game in the collection.
As far as real games go, it’s easily the worst one I’ve played. By “real,” I mean excluding random mobile or licensed games or borderline shovelware because let’s be real, no one actually looks at a game like Big Rigs or Ninjabread Man and expects it to be good. There’s two DOS Mega Man games made by only one guy that are probably worse games than X7, but no one would unironically play those since they’re pretty much bootlegs. If you heard about a game like X7 or DMC2 (which coincidentally came out the same year as this game) without knowing about their infamy, you’d expect something decent since it was an official game released by a big company like Capcom and it’s an important, mainline entry in one of their franchises. It’s a game that will have to be remembered by fans and people seriously paid for thinking they’d get something worth their money and time. But it ends up being inexcusably terrible from start to finish and incredibly disappointing. If Mega Man was actually popular, I’m sure this game would be considered as bad as games like Sonic 06.
And kind of problematic in some instances, like iirc Gurdurr was a builder who suffered a permanent, debilitating back injury that left him unable to do work like he used to. He became heartbroken and turned to scamming people to get by, until he had a change of heart thanks to the main characters. So like, he found another, similar career that still made him happy, right? Maybe like an architecture designer, or he focuses on running shop while his Timburr assistants do the hard physical labor that he's no longer able to do? NOPE, he just needed to try harder and think positively
one change of mindset and he's running around building houses again like nothing ever happened.
