Mega Man X7
We’ve been sitting on this one a long time. See inside to find out why.
Tags: Mega Man X7 Categories: PS2 Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Jeff Shedden on Mar 3rd, 2004
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Mega Man X7 (title page) | |||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Action | No | ||
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This has been the hardest review that I’ve ever had to write. You see, I love Mega Man with all my heart. There is no Mega Man game that I haven’t played and beaten, including Mega Man Soccer. I have never gotten sick of the Mega Man series, although Battle Network is really pushing it. The X series is easily my favorite, and when they finally announced that the X series was coming out on PS2, I was thrilled. As the game got closer to release, however, the word wasn’t so good. Our own Jake got to play it briefly at E3 last year, and he had no good words for it. I ignored him, because it was Mega Man, and Mega Man is good. I’ve been able to look past some of the negatives of past games and still get plenty of enjoyment. I could overlook the time limit in X5. I could overlook the stupid hostage rescue stuff in X6. So could I overlook any potential shortcomings in X7?
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The answer is sadly, no. Don’t get me wrong, I still treasure X7 as a Mega Man X game. But it’s easily my least favorite of the series. It’s really hard to sift through everything that is wrong with X7 to point out the good, but I’m going to try.
To start out with, You don’t get to play as X right off the bat. You have to play as the duo of Zero and the newcomer, Axel. Axel is a former member of a new anti-reploid squad, called Red Alert. Axel has the ability to copy his enemies abilities, and even morph into certain enemies and use their powers. Axel decides to leave Red Alert, and Red Alert wants him back. Red Alert challenges our Maverick Hunters to fight all of its members or they’ll attack.
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Okay, let’s get this over with. For starters, the game has moved from 2D to 3D. This has worked for some games, and ruined others. The graphics themselves look rather nice. The characters look just like you’d expect them to be if they were 3D. The environments are completely 3D, but sometimes you use old school 2D controls, and sometimes the game switches to a 3D control scheme. The 2D controls still feel fine, even though the characters don’t move quite right. They run a little slow, it seems to me.
The 3D controls flat out suck. Rather than being stuck to side-to-side movement, you have full freedom to move around in the environment. While this sounds good on paper, the aforementioned lack of speed really hurts the 3D movement. The camera also sucks hardcore, but how many Capcom games truly have a good camera? Well, sometimes you can rotate the camera (using the L1 and R1 buttons), but other times, the locked camera serves to hide powerups. And when you’re in a huge area with a locked camera, you’re constantly finding yourself shot at by enemies that you can’t even see. There’s a stage that takes place on a battleship, and one of the minibosses is a plane that’s zipping around on a little platform, and unless you’re using Axel, it’s hard to get a hit on it, because you can’t tell where it is.
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Boss fights are fought in a 3D arena, and this actually works really well. As these are areas where you can rotate the camera, you can take advantage of the R2 button’s ability to lock on. The bosses themselves are standard, Mega Man X fare, and are all based on animals. Once again, each is weak to a particular weapon, and have their own patterns to learn in order to beat them. When you defeat a boss, you gain their abilities. Axel can morph his weapon into theirs. Zero learns a new sword technique for each boss, and X absorbs their abilities just as he always has.
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Yes, I did did say X. While you don’t get to start as X, once you rescue 65 hostages, X joins the fight, and you can select him as a playable character. Oh yes, the hostages are back. Boy, do I hate the hostage rescue thing. I hated it in X6, and I REALLY hate it in X7. You really have to hunt through the 3D parts to find the hostages, and they are often positioned in an area where an enemy will instantly kill them. And you really don’t want a hostage to die, as hostages are also the way to improve the characters’ skills. Certain hostages carry upgrade chips that let you upgrade your characters’ power, speed, and recovery abilities.
The sound is about what you’d expect in a Mega Man game. The music sounds right, and the voice acting is awful. It’s not Mega Man 8 awful, but it’s bad enough in its own right. You can change the voice acting to Japanese, but the Japanese dialogue drags on a bit.
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I really hoped I would love Mega Man X7 like I loved the rest of the series, but I just can’t. It’s still a Mega Man X game, but it doesn’t have the heart that the other games do. It’s been a pretty bad time for the Mega Man series, lately. Battle Network was nice as a gimmick for a while, but four games later, and it’s gotten annoying. Mega Man NT was a sheer travesty, and now Mega Man X7 is both a step forward and a huge step backward for the X series. I’m still looking forward to another Mega Man X game, but I’m worried that Capcom won’t have learned from its mistakes.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
|
+ The graphics made the transition + Axel has potential as a future character |
6.0 |
| What Doesn't | |
|
- The controls blow - You have to unlock X - The camera is horrible - The characters all run in slow motion |
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| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| This is my third attempt at this review. I keep hating the results of my review, but this is what has to be said. Avoid X7, unless you really love the series. | |
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Tags: Mega Man X7
Posted by Jeff Shedden on Mar 3rd, 2004 and is filed under PS2 Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
