Thanks to Capcom’s recent release of the new(er) Mega Man X Legacy Collection, I have been playing through the series once again. The Mega Man X series is hard to write about, a long and storied history full of outrageously different peaks and valleys in quality. I would boldly claim that Mega Man X is one of the greatest action platformers on the SNES and to this day is one of my favorite games on the system. However I’m not here today to endlessly praise one of my favorite games of all time, instead I’m here to faintly praise a game I am much more lukewarm on and compare it to it’s more well-liked predecessors.
A little bit of background – Mega Man X5 was supposedly meant to be the last game in the X series, after which Inafune would go on to ask Inti Creates to create the Mega Man Zero series as a follow up. X5 was released in Japan in 2000, a full 3 years after the release of X4. This gave the team at Capcom a decent amount of time to work on the game (a luxury they would not soon be able to afford after X5). As such, X5 has some of the largest additions to the overall formula in the series, as well as one of the bigger changes to the otherwise standard 8 boss progression. The game essentially overhauls the armor parts system that had been present and largely unchanged from X1, now there are 4 total armors in the game 3 of which you have to collect by finding Dr. Light’s capsules. Having two distinctly different armors to collect via parts which both serve ostensibly different purposes in game can make backtracking a lot more rewarding, especially when it becomes a chance to use your shiny new armor in action to collect the other parts. This stands in contrast to X4 which more or less towed the line in collectibles from the rest of the series, a single armor set that you equip gradually.
“X5 has some of the largest additions to the overall formula”
These armor parts for the Falcon and Gaea armors come in addition to the Ultimate Armor which is gained all in one piece during one of the final levels, and the Fourth Armor which X actually starts with since it’s a direct follow up from X4. In addition to the physical armor pieces you also have a brand new to the series parts system that can augment the gameplay as well. Some of these are rather significant too, Hyper-dash and quick charge can make certain sections immensely easier if you acquire them.
That brings us to the elephant in this specific room, and believe me there are many elephants in just as many rooms within X5. The parts system itself can seem random to new players, which is because functionally it might as well be. The game gives you a choice after each mission of Life or Energy, and each of those will also grant you a different part for each stage. The problem is there is no way to know what you’re getting until after you’ve received it. Mechanics transparency is a constant problem plaguing X5, and this extends to the Armors themselves as well. If you want the Fourth Armor as X you have to make sure to start as X during the intro mission, otherwise you lose it forever since whichever character you don’t pick gets damaged. This however, does bring up another one of X5’s good improvements over X4, the ability to freely swap between X and Zero between missions. Zero is a fully fleshed out character like he was in X4, with bosses instead giving him new abilities instead of specific weapons, but now he can collect parts that would otherwise be for X too. This all goes a long way to actually reducing the amount of backtracking which is a welcome change.
Other smaller changes include the ability to duck for both characters, which doesn’t seem like much but is a natural fit for the more platforming heavy focus of the game. X5 is all too happy to force you to take a second and contemplate your next few moves, as it takes some stage design ideas (sometimes literally) from classic Mega Man. This is a far cry from the design philosophy of X4 which was itself more a natural extension of X2’s focus on speeding through level.
The point of this overly long rambling has been to point out that X5 has a lot of good ideas that felt like a breath of fresh air at the time. I have to couch any of this praise to point out that what mars a lot of the ideas is the actual execution. This isn’t meant to be a full review of X5 and I’d be here all day if I were to list all the gripes. Suffice it to say that yes, the RNG laden story progression is bad, having to kill yourself in a stage multiple times to get 100% is bad, the poor translation obfuscating some already poorly executed mechanics is once again, bad. Yet I think X5 is in this unique place in the series, it follows up the now widely loved X4 and predates the widely loathed X6, and functions as sort of a bridge between the two. It’s far more ambitious in the novelty of its mechanics than the former but also less concise. Yet also had a clear intent behind it’s design and wasn’t just them throwing ideas on a wall to see what stuck, unlike the latter. I would never try to imply that X5 is on the whole better than X4 but I also respect X5 for the product it is and the genuinely good ideas it has. X4 is a very safe product, it does what worked in the past which means it has less chance to introduce something frustrating. If I were told to play either X4 or X5 just once, I’d pick X4 easily. But if I was forced to pick one to play for a month, I’d probably go with X5.
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