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Megaman X5

SkylineRKR

Member
Mighty no 9 rekindled my fire. I am now playing Megaman games full stop. I bought Zero collection on sale and also the MMX collection 2 which I never bought before as the first one is pretty much the one to have. But I always wanted to take another shot at MMX5, which I dismissed rather quickly in 2000.

I beat the game, with all heart tanks, energy tanks and armors. And why its not nearly as good as the first 4, the game is very experimental and interesting. They tried some weird shit here. First of all the lack of budget shines through, gone is the anime from 4, and the stages and boss animations look considerably worse.

But once I played it got interesting, and once I looked some things up I was rather amazed. So, you have this cannon, an equip menu and a time limit. You can fire off this cannon at any time, and I read you can have success even when you don't collect anything for it whatsoever. The time limit I can kinda dig, it comes down to this; you have 16 hours to beat 8 Mavericks. Every time you enter a stage you use up one hour. So you can't freely enter all stages, take the reachable loot and peace out. You have to plan this. But, in reality its not much. First of all, this game is ridiculously easy. I think its the easiest MMX game I have played. You get lots of extra lives (from hostages mainly), but thing is these are fucking pointless. a game over and continue let you start at the same checkpoint. In theory you can just tank all, rush through, die somewhere and continue on and reach the boss without any skill. The levels are very easy, only somewhat challenging if you don't use Armor but why should you? They are short but they have a huge problem; they don't flow. There is a lot of roadblocks and stupid things going on, and the girl is constantly calling you. They are boring overall and almost every one of them has a gimmick.

Okay so once you beat the 8 robots the timer is gone. But here is another thing that kind of wowed me. You can fucking fail the cannon/shuttle even when doing all objectives. In my game both failed, but I reloaded my save after the second fail and got the good ending anyway. This is completely random, all I did was reloading my save and I was presented a different cutscene lol. In MM I always collect all, and this is where MMX5 falls flat again; it fucking sucks. You need fly armor to reach heart tank X, but to reach fly armor part you need weapon Y. And you need spike armor for that one over there, so exit and re enter with spike armor. The worst offender is the fucking Whale level, you need HIS OWN weapon to open the secret room in his stage lol. And I wanted to fucking die when I finally collected the 8 orbs on the motorbike elsewhere. Both armors are worse than the X4 armor anyway, but they are situational and all come in handy in the final stage gauntlet.

Then there is another interesting thing, you get chips you can install. 2 on Armor and 4 on naked X. I only found out when I was about halfway through. And to make things even weirded, bosses have a level, the later on the timer you off them, you get a chip. So I realized I had to dick around 7 or so hours and then kill them. I got about 4 or 5 chips in total now.

Final stages were fucking terrible but short. On the first one I could've used dark hold, but I never did so after 20 tries I beat the laser maze and got a trophy. The second is considerably easier with spike armor (its a joke in fact, including the boss). The third is best to do naked because ultimate armor, then probably lose the boss battle and peace out. And for the final bosses just spam giga attack. This Sigma looked like a sunday morning budget version, he was lame as fuck.

But on the whole I liked the experimental things and weirdness, even the RNG that probably trolled many players in 2000. I like MMX5, its just not nearly as good as the first 4 games imo. What do you guys think about this one?


Now, MMX6 awaits... I've heard horror stories about this one lol.
 

SlimeGooGoo

Party Gooper
Mighty no 9 rekindled my fire
Sad John Cena GIF
 

Variahunter

Member
I like X6 more than X5 or X4.

As for the stages, there's only the latter half of the Phoenix stage that is really bad. Even if the repetition of the demi bosses is bad, they're not hard with Zero's giga attack. And the music is soooooo good. X6 may have one of the best OST of the MMX games, after X1.
 

kunonabi

Member
I disliked X4 so I didn't really get around to the later games till years after they released. Don't remember much other than not liking them much at all and not finishing any of them. I adore X and X2, especially X2, but the rest of the series just never clicked.
 

radewagon

Member
It's funny. I didn't really grow up with Megaman since I was a Sega kid. So, the first one I played was Mega Man X4. I remember thinking, man Mega Man games are awesome! I eagerly played X5 at release and boy was I disappointed. Mega Man, apparently was not always awesome. Sometimes it was downright awful.
 

NeoIkaruGAF

Gold Member
X5 is worth it for the music and that’s it.
The stage design is awful (Whale’s stage is horrible and if you’re going for items you’ll have to do it twice no matter what). Alia constantly tutoring you and not having an option to just shut her off completely is a tier A dumb idea. Features like the boss levels and the chips add RPG elements that don’t belong in the series. And the cannon being complete RNG, with failure being an option even if you have beaten all the Mavericks, is just madness. The original US version using those Guns ‘n Roses names for the Mavericks was the cherry on top of this disaster (even though ”Duff McWhalen” was kinda worth it).

This game was clearly the prototype for Zero’s own series. Capcom just didn’t have the guts to make X take the backseat for fear of enraging the fans, but X5 is just better playing as Zero, except the rematch with Grizzly where you can’t deactivate the saber attack he’s immune to (another exquisitely dumb idea).

X5 is marginally better than X4 in artstyle, I can concede that.
X6 could have been a better game if not for some monumentally stupid design decisions.
The sad truth is, X1 is the best X game because even if it’s too easy, it never tries to be hard by being cheap. X1 is pretty much a perfect game for its time. Level design in the X series took a nosedive after that. I’m still to play X8, though.



But Megaman X4 have Iris... The most beautiful waifu of Megaman series.
Blue shirt/green ribbon Roll is better imo.


I like X6 more than X5 or X4.

As for the stages, there's only the latter half of the Phoenix stage that is really bad. Even if the repetition of the demi bosses is bad, they're not hard with Zero's giga attack. And the music is soooooo good. X6 may have one of the best OST of the MMX games, after X1.
X6 would have been fantastic if not for these things:
- the Nightmare effect in some stages like Metal Shark Player. Icy walls over insta-death spikes under a falling ceiling? You can tell nobody tested this shit.
- everything about Infinity Mijinion and its stage. You can tell nobody tested this shit.
- Blaze Heatnix’s stage, of course. You can… oh, the pattern is clear, isn’t it?
- the “castle” stages with random sections and that one point you can’t pass with one specific armor. No, they just didn’t think this through.
- the prisoner Reploids that you can lose forever and/or are positioned in places like just over a bottomless pit. Seriously, what in the everliving fuck?

The irony is, they had to rush the game. It would have saved so much time to not think about these things, or at least to not implement them in the game.
 
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