Even before I picked up Mega Man X8, I thought I had an idea what this game was gonna be like. After a string of progressively worse games, you'd get the exact game fans wanted. It would have been an acceptable, if not average platformer, Simga would be there and the series would spend its final moments riding out the clock until Crapcom could invest in magic beans and part ownership in the Golden Gate bridge. It gives me no joy to type that this game is one of the most fresh and forward thinking sequels in the series that established the groundwork for a string of successful games that would never come.
There's a scene in the first stage where Axl runs into Zero. Zero says "Axl, pick up the pace! This is no time to slack off!". Axl responds with "You show up late and have the nerve to complain". There's a little bit of banter and you gain access to both characters.
I bring this scene up because in the course of a year, X8 learns all the right lessons from X7. Axl's back! I didn't have anything positive to say about Axl in the first game. I thought he lacked a distinct gameplay style outside of a gimmick that wasn't necessary and didn't really work. In X7, his voice was whiny and he lacked any chemistry with the rest of the maverick hunters. In X8, he's eager to do his job (too eager at times) and he's cocky, but he's not as reserved as Zero. Axl will give the rest of the team shit from time to time, but when the other two tell Axl to do something, he'll listen and contribute to the team. He brings a "youthful" energy that gives X's pacifism and Zero's world weariness more room to breathe. His design is stripped back compared to what it looked like in X7, but that just means its easier to read him as a distinct character. His movement and gameplay feels a bit like X's, but the 8 way shot/hover allows him to deal with targets that X/Zero would normally struggle with, at the cost of generally lower "DPS". His copy shot's even here too! I didn't use it, but it's sure there.
X8 could have gotten away with "X told Axl to fuck off at the end of 7 and so he goes to play dominoes with Dynamo on a beach somewhere". It would have been real easy and nobody would have complained, but they doubled down and the game's much better off for it. They don't talk about Red or really the events of X7 in general. They don't even explain why Axl's here in the first place, but it's a fucking Mega Man game. You don't gotta get that deep into it. The world's in trouble, X got the stick out of his ass and Zero got off the Zolpidem. Welcome to the team buddy! I can genuinely say we're glad to have you.
A lot of X8's best aspects stem from experiments that failed miserably in X7 that were retooled to work in X8. You control two characters at once that you swap on the fly, like in X7. Unlike in the previous game, when a character takes damage, part of the health bar changes red. If you make them the reserve character, like a tag fighter, they'll slowly regain health. However, much like a tag fighter, if you switch them back in before their red health has fully healed, it goes away. It feels really natural and with how different everyone's movesets are in this game, the choice of "who do I bring to this stage" is a real one. It pushes the series forward in a way none of the other entries managed to do successfully and allowed the level designers to create challenged focused on a specific hunter.
Alia/the navigation system is also reworked into the best the series has seen so far. You have three navigators, each with their own personality and interactions with the main cast that give unique tips on a given level. If you don't want to use a navigator at all, you can turn them off before a level starts without any consequence. Pallette and Axl's banter isn't world shattering, but it's fun and both of them being so fresh to the team helps Axl feel like he fits in a bit more, plus she handles upgrades as well. Layer has the funniest character design in the entire series. The underboob is the shot, but having her be a dark skinned character from the shoulders down only? That's the chaser. Roboussy just hanging out. She has a crush on Zero in this game. Kindred spirit, I also fall in love with homosexuals and bark up the wrong tree. She does get Zero's saber in NG+ though. All of the navigators are unlockable playable characters. It just means that they're skins for the main trio, but that's neat as hell! I'm glad girls are playable in this series for once.
The upgrade system is
properly implemented compared to X7. There's a few upgrades that feel like they didn't have to exist, but for the most part I enjoyed the cash system they implemented into the game. It's another tool that the designers could use to get the player to dig through levels in specific ways. There are some chips that you can miss in the level, but health upgrades and most of the important ones just cost money. Upgrades aren't shared across the cast, but unlike in X7, you really gotta try to ignore a character for them to fall behind that far.
Everything I've explained about the game so far sounds like this should be one of the best games in the series. Outside of an "average" presentation (still a vast improvement from X7), there's very little to complain about. The monster closet in the first stage is dull, feels a bit like a beat em up, but the way the characters feel and play are a return to form. Why wouldn't you want to explore all the new bells and whistles that this game has to offer Then you get to the stage select screen. No matter what you pick, you'll probably be disappointed, but you'll write it off as a one off issue. There's lots of bad stages in the series. But you play another, and another, and the dread sets in.
Booster Forest is the most "traditional" Mega Man level in the game. Most of it is spent on a ride armor (or trying to preserve it for as long as possible), trying to prevent it from careening into the abyss. Outside of a few collectables, there aren't good reasons to struggle through the stage on foot. It goes on a bit too long.
Optic Sunflower's stage is a collection of quick (like, 15 second) VR missions and trivial platforming sections in between. Depending on how well you do, the combat trials will give you a different reward, but you need to play through the stage at least three different times to collect everything. There could be a few less combat trials, if we're being honest.
Pitch Black's stage is a stealth stage. It handles much better than Sting Chameleon's stage in X1. You're not really going to be running and gunning in the same way you would in most other stages, but Axl can use his copy shot to blend in with the rest of the guards. There are a few sections with tanky enemies I think could have been trimmed down, but it's a neat little gimmick!
Gravity Antonion's stage is just gravity puzzles. They're not teleporter puzzles, I guess, but most of the stage is dedicated to not crushing yourself/stepping on spikes, combat's not really the focus and for the entire stage I found Axl's hover to be more useful than anything the other two could offer. While the puzzles aren't hard, there are a lot of them you'll have to slog through.
Earthrock Trilobyte's stage is a long, extended "boss fight" with a mech that is immune to damage not caused by flipping a switch. You run away from the boss, then the boss runs away from you, then you smack up the boss a bit. It's an autoscroller with very little downtime between dealing with this big dumb metal jackass. He's durable too, he takes so many hits from conveniently placed cranes, you'd think they run out of them after awhile.
Gigabolt Man-O-War is the worst stage in the game and feels like a leftover from X7. It might actually be worse than most stages in that game, X7 being X7 aside. You're on a hoverbike and you have to fire at the boss enough to get to the actual boss fight. You need to constantly use a speed boost to keep up with the boss, and if it does two full laps then you instantly lose. If you know what you're doing, this section isn't fun but takes about thirty seconds. If you don't know to step on the gas, it's a fucking ordeal.
Avalanche Yeti's is another on rails section. Thankfully, unlike Gigabolt's stage, playing through it is self explanatory. Don't run into walls, don't drive the bike off a cliff, shoot gun when something walks in front of the bike. It feels like it goes on for fifteen minutes until you get to the end of the stage, and there's no on foot sections outside of the boss fight.
Burn Rooster's stage is the Brinstar section from Melee's Adventure mode, except the screen locks so you can't breeze through the level even if you memorize what platforms to fall on. You up and down and up and down and even after the boss, you have to sit through another one of these vertical platforming sections. It's still one of the best stages in the game, if only because you're not in a vehicle the entire time.
All of these stages have very similar issues. Despite extensive improvements to the way characters in MMX8 play, the game doesn't show these improvements off. It's like they took parts of a level that would have been notable setpieces in previous games, and stretched them out to the size of a full level to dipterous results. They're all just a little bit too long, and don't really feel like "Mega Man" levels. It's like if they put dash cancels and wall jumps into Open Season. Even when you do have on foot run and gun sections, the flow of levels are constantly broken up by monster closets that don't feel bad to play, but feel like padding you'd see in a beat em up and not a fast paced platformer. This game's level design has cock shame, there was no faith in the core gameplay loop of Mega Man. The final levels of the game, normally my least favorite parts of a MMX game, were my favorite because they were the closest thing to a normal level with X8's characters in it.
I've complained about Sigma for seven games now. I don't think my complaints were hyperbolic. In a series that's supposed to have a darker tone with stronger story elements, having an antagonist with X-Pac heat is a serious flaw. I'm not even saying Sigma had to be a well developed character with a nuanced reason for his rebellion. He really could have been a Kefka Palazzo or Luca Blight, just a ruthless, irremediable prick whenever he's on screen and I would have accepted that. That's kinda what Vile is! Just an unpleasant character that's uncomfortable to be around and that you want to see get beat up by X and crew. Vile's reasoning for reappearing and stirring trouble isn't even explained clearly, and it doesn't disengage me from the vibe of the game at all. Especially as the X series progressed, it felt like Simga was less an antagonist with agency, and more the concept of being maverick given form.
X8 solves this by changing nothing about Sigma. If any other video game antagonist got the treatment Sigma got in this game, it would be a character assassination. There's a billion Sigmas now, and none of them are threatening. He still has no personality and Vile has more of an impact on the overall plot than Sigma does. After a boss fight where a copy of Sigma gets punked out in a few hits, he shows up as a reskin of enemies you've already seen in game. There's an enemy formation where a Sigma is holding up a shield, while another Sigma takes pot shots with a pea shooter at X and crew. The second to last boss fight is with "Sigma", but instead of looking like Buzz Lightyear, he looks like a Tamotsu Shinohara character. Complete redesign, no reverence for this bald bitch. I cannot express how much this treatment of Sigma helps. You never have to take this character seriously again. Capcom clearly doesn't care. He's just a really strong maverick that can be called upon whenever new mavericks wanna stir up some shit. He's a Final Fantasy summon now.
Lumine nails his first and only appearance in the X series. I would never say that he's a gripping antagonist, but he has personality, he has a clear goal, his fight's really fun (I keep talking about Final Fantasy, partially because his arena looks like it should have Dancing Mad playing in the background), and dies in a memorable way. There's an actual excuse for him being missing from most of this game's plot. A character like him isn't reinventing the wheel, but it's all that this series needed for over a decade. Baseline competency with a few memorable bursts of flair. If there was another X game, I don't get the feeling that Lumine would have shown up, and I mean that in the best way possible.
It sucks that this game is as good as it is. I don't think I can rate this game any higher than I did, because 3/4ths of it was such an unfocused experience, but there's so much promise in Mega Man X8. I couldn't think a more bitter way to end the series. Almost every element in this game, outside of the level design, was an improvement over the previous three games in the series. It didn't shy away from the steps forward those games took, when they easily could have without consequence. X8 laid a rock solid foundation for the series going forward, one that would never be properly built upon. At the end of my review for X7, I praised that game for killing the series instead of letting settle into perpetual mediocrity. That was grade-A cope on my part. We lost something with this series leaving at the time that it did. I don't think a new Mega Man X game would continue to push the series forward, if anything it would resemble MM9/10. Mega Man X8 shows that this series still had creative potential and breaks everyone's heart in the process.
