~ Estimated Reading Time: 5 min ~
Mega Man is on some monarchic worship of its eldest type shit. The series created a formula with its very first entry - before there was even a strong understanding of how one makes a good action game - yet all its core elements remain uncontested to such an extent I don't often see from a franchise. Which is weird, because every single fan I know ontologically hates at least one core trope of it. Generally, I tend to find the classic games palatable enough, but this is the first one that feels like it's grown too much for its skin. X4's level design never gets a moment to break out of the most basic baseline; I'll catch a glimpse of some cute level design, and I'm already at the door to the boss fight by the time it registers in my brain. Which is a shame, because a lot of this level design is just fun, it just doesn't go anywhere - like it's comprised entirely of Mario 1-1s. Where the series usually benefits from its nonlinear stage select dynamic is in tandem with eccentric levels, saying to you "can't beat it? go somewhere else to power up". X4 gives you checkpoints that perpetuate through game overs in the middle of levels, as if to say "keep bashing your head against the wall". I gladly will, considering some of these area 2s are so breezy, they might qualify as Dark Souls runbacks. I wanted this to just have linear difficulty progression so bad, I wanted it to shed its skin of structure, but I just kept running into more evolutionary problems. I still don't get Robot Master weaknesses, compared to something like throwing axes to swat a Bat out of the sky in Castlevania. It feels like cheating, and not in a fun way. The boss fights are an obvious highlight of this game - I just wish using sub-weapons had more to do with spacial and combative logic, rather than the overly mathematical "i shoot fire and it beats ice man". And this one still climaxes with a shitty Boss Rush, in an ultimate act of traditionalism.
Was shocked at how hysterical this game's plot is in ways so far beyond the newgrounds flash fangame-esque voice acting. Sigma's positioning in this plot is hilarious; the game opens up with a cutscene of him in a shadowy evil cloak, while convincing an army colonel (literally named Colonel) to Get More Evil. He is a saturday morning cartoon villain in a world vaguely trying to be more complex than that. X's plot is so empty, it's like nobody on this project cared about anything other than Zero. They knew they had an idea for a plot-line where Zero would be tragically betrayed by the character who's on the stage select screen, but when they got to X, they were like "i'm stumped, can we just do that twice?". So X has to fight a rly evil betrayer guy who's signature attack is called "evil blast". There are genuinely no particular stakes to him fighting Sigma this time; this is just another weekend for them. That might make it sound like Zero's plot here is filled with things, but all of its run-time is used on relaying his backstory from the past, and setting up motivations for the future. In that sense, X4 is my least favourite type of plot: one that's not trying to make itself any more special, but is just establishing Things for the Franchise. But, also, by being so utterly disinterested in itself, while so hazily put together, it seems that for most people, this has become the most special plot? In all of its shoddy production, it is at least not without a beating heart.
Mega Man games just feel to me like the project plans are put together in twenty minutes. Which, while not exactly a blessing in disguise - or anything that nice - did leave me lamenting the lost art of how games used to be produced at a hasty pace. That we could just churn out games in nine months, and already have a finished project ready to bounce off the flaws of next release - it's undoubtedly how the medium progressed so fast in the 80s. But Capcom's strongpoint isn't in introspection. For a game often touted as the plateau of the series, it's a bit of a weak grand thesis, no? This is the fourth entry in its sub-series - the main branch of which has already had eight - released only nine years after the first Mega Man, with zero improvements in general structure. Their so-fast-they-couldn't-think release cycle seems to have only held them back, especially when the X team evidently shuffled around a lot. From what I can tell, X2, X3, and X4 were all made by completely different people, which only obfuscates the process of iteration. Meanwhile, Mega Man 11 was developed like sixteen years since Capcom's last blue-guy-run-n-gun outing. The team was requested to play every game in the series back to back, and try and figure out its je ne sais quoi. And, honestly, (even if it's a little aesthetically sauceless)...it's like the best designed one of these I've played by far. X4 feels like everyone working on it genuinely needed to take a step back, and think about what they're making. Every year they don't rush one of these out, I'm on the beach drinking from a coconut experiencing tru delight