Wowza! I Played Through Mega Man X1 through X3!!

Hi! I beat Mega Man X1 through X3 recently within the last few months, and I have a lot of thoughts I want to unpack about them.

I’m going to cut to the chase to start with, and just say it.

I love Mega Man X.

With that addressed, there’s a lot of things put into these games that make me enjoy them so much, and I really want to talk about. I have thoughts to unpack, so sit down and saddle up for a ramble of sorts.

For starters, I feel like I should start with that I’ve been playing Mega Man games for a decent amount of time now. I started with the very first game in 2013, having gotten it on the 3DS eShop with spare funds trapped to its electronic, unfeeling hands. I’m not sure exactly how I became aware of the games, (or more specifically, the idea I would be interested at all) no one in my immediate family had ever bought the games before. I hadn’t seen any of the games physically in stores, as you can probably tell by me getting one from the eShop and not like Anniversary Collection for the Gamecube or something. I didn’t own any games featuring the characters either! Smash 4 wasn’t out and I’ve literally never owned a Marvel vs Capcom game personally.

Yet I have a distinct memory of browsing Wikipedia and looking at a horrifically empty Mega Man 8 page (but it listed that the Saturn version looked nice!!).

I have no idea what the specifics are, but ultimately I ended up playing through Mega Man 1 through 7 with my older brother (having later bought 1 on the Wii U and then buying Legacy Collection to get the games past 3).

Mega Man games are an interesting sort, that I can’t truly describe myself. I’m very picky about games, typically independent of genre. Mega Man games fall into the “2D Platformer” section, which a lot of games I enjoy fall under, but I’m still quite choosy. I think most 2D Mario games are bland, if you gave me a typical though fondly remembered platformer like Shinobi III I would just look at you weird, I even have a large dislike for the 2D platformer’s cousin, the Run n’ Gun.

But there’s a specific type of platformer, dedicated to novel concepts that push the limits just a bit. These are the ones I enjoy the most. Games like Sonic 3, that incorporate the physics of rolling to perform actions like get to high up, normally impossible areas. Games like Shovel Knight, that are built on making incredibly dense segments that use simple mechanics like Shovel Knight’s Shovel Drop or Specter Knight’s Dash Slash to their fullest.

Then… There’s Mega Man. I can’t say Mega Man ever is “at its fullest” or “particularly boundary pushing” past the first game. But every game is different and always enjoyable. You could say that the boundary it pushes, it how you can vary such a simple concept of selecting any stage to start with and getting a weapon from each stage’s boss.

So when it comes to Mega Man X, I find myself asking: What’s different? Why am I enjoying this more? Even if it's marginal.

My knee jerk reaction is to say: “Wow, X is fast!” I really like the Dash and Wall Jump mechanics.

But when it comes down to it, that’s not the whole deal! I enjoy the simplicity of the classic games just as much, and even most of those have the Slide, which in many implementations is quite like the Dash.

In fact, I often found myself wrestling with the game’s new concepts quite often!

As mentioned earlier, I’m a large fan of the movement options contained in the X games. While very similar to the classic games, I have to say: it’s very snappy! It creates the form of exhilarating gameplay that I crave.

Dashing is one of my favorite additions, and you can tell it was the developers’ too; X1 forces the player to obtain the upgrade for it, and X2 and X3 remove the upgrade requirement entirely… to make room for upgrades to the dash itself! I cannot stress enough how much I love this thing.

Like the Slide before it, it’s very layered in its use, beyond the obvious usages. Dashing also lowers X’s hurtbox size, so it’s very useful for getting through tight spaces- But unlike classic’s Slide, it’s treated as a secondary aspect, so I felt that, ironically, finding places to use that part was the most fun of it. There is a very special feeling for evading an enemy’s bullet by dashing right under it as it passes.

There is also the Wall Jump. It’s very simple and operates as expected. It has what feels to me like a surprisingly seamless addition to Mega Man’s core utility belt, it never feels out of place for the franchise’s signature gameplay, unlike the dash, which at times feels as if it is pushing it on what Mega Man is.

But don’t mistake that for a dislike of the dash! The dash is so cool. The dash is amazing. The dash could pay my mortgage.

With each game in the series you can feel a slightly increased understanding of the strengths of these mechanics, and it feels very good. It’s an experience I recommend, though I could not say if everyone will feel the same attachment.

However, the X series’s experimentation with ideas is both good and bad. Unlike the Classic games, which feel very content with themselves, to the point some games don’t add very much, like 2 & 5 and just opt to refine what they already have, X feels like it is never satisfied with its ideas. At odds even. I tend to agree, not feeling quite right with some of the most altered ideas.

X1 opens with the statement that it “[‘X’] Possesses great risks as well as great possibilities. I can only hope for the best.”, and really I think that conveys most of the games’ strengths and weaknesses.

Let’s look at the item system. It’s really fun, and gives a new incentive to replay and search levels for items. This was experimented with in games like Mega Man 4 and 6, but treated as an extraneous thing to encounter. X brings it to the front, constantly hiding secrets (of various levels of hidden-ness), and the developers expecting you to find them. X1 has multiple points that put the Armor upgrades straight in the player’s face, such as the earlier mentioned Dash upgrade. Other upgrade items in the series up to X3 include Sub-Tanks (the rechargeable battery variant of E-Tanks), Life Up (which increases X’s pitiful starting HP), and lastly Ride Armor and Chips, which were added in X3.

This mechanic is very flawed however! Unlike the dash becoming what feels like an “aggressive” alternative to an earlier idea, the upgrades generally feel as if they are against the series’s entire core.

Backtracking is nothing new, the original Mega Man literally requires the player to find an item in a stage to finish the game- completion is impossible until you get it. But X has to incorporate the numerous incredible opportunities that the upgrades provide to its freeflowing level select design. This is most commonly witnessed directly in the body armor upgrade.

In every one of the first 3 games I played, I noticed a very specific thing… The final bosses do a large amount of damage! This often included the other bosses after the main 8 Mavericks the player has to fight. Why? It’s because the game now expects the player to have the Body upgrade. Inversely, each of the 8 Mavericks typically feels underpowered with the body upgrade, if the player gets it early enough to have it then.

They can’t win with this set up! Yet they placed it in each game, forcing players who didn’t find it to backtrack last minute, and players who found it early on to play most of the bosses taking unusually low damage. It’s a perplexing dilemma! (And this doesn't even mention the raw numerical difference in the amount of damage players can take depending on the amount of Life Ups and Sub Tanks they find.)

Players who are particularly good can play how they want, simply dropping the Body Armor but;


- Players who are more or less decent but have never played each of the individual X series games before will want to pick up anything as they see it without hesitation. This is particularly bad because it makes early bosses much easier than they feel they should be. It would be awkward for flow and feel to pass up an obvious prize for exploring as the developers intended.
- Players who are not the best at the game, will need the armor to help with the earlier bosses. This is great! However, by making this something incorporated into the design of later bosses, its help is negated and does not help them at all when they would need it most. Furthermore, their skills would be less developed by the time they really need it!
- Average level players who do not find the body armor by the time of the final gauntlet are punished! If you find yourself there you will need to go back and find the armor! You have the choice to brute force the bosses, but the damage you take is simply absurd.

(These are general thoughts I had from my experience with X3, X1, and X2, respectively!)

Is there a right way to add the body armor’s damage reduction? I honestly have no idea, but it causes problems for game balance. Of course, in practice anyone with the right dedication can power through the final bosses of the X games. But is that really the right mindset for this? In addition, for players other than me, they may find that the damage is just right! It's a bit of a tricky question when it comes to accomodation vs sheer challenge when it comes to games like Mega Man that are built on players retrying over and over constantly, but I would be lying to say it's not skewed towards players who already know item locations.

There’s many things like this in the games, to varying degrees of severity, impact, and similarity, but a consistent feeling of emptiness or awkwardness upon encounter or realization.

For example, X1 has the Head armor upgrade; All it does is allow the player to headbutt blocks above them. It’s great for opening up more possibilities for exploring, but it ends up feeling like a wild goose chase item, as very few places to use it exist.

X2 (and X3, to what I believe is a much worse degree but I’m trying to list one for each game so let me have this!!!) has the X Hunters, who appear across the stages and provide a prize (prize being a secret sequence near the end) and challenge you to beat them for Story Reasons. This is fine and dandy but they show in places that are sometimes inaccessible, some times incredibly out of your way, and also can disappear before beating all 8 mavericks???

X3 has Ride Armor, a clever idea to add on to the ride armor of previous games by allowing players to use it in every level and unlock new ones. But. The player has to find the default “Chimera” Ride Armor to even activate it?? I spent the majority of my playthrough not knowing what the mysterious lettered objects I was collecting even were. Many items are locked behind having at least ONE Ride Armor you can access, so this severely hurts the game’s flow.

The definitive core of Mega Man X, I personally believe is exceptional. But the additional ideas that come with it are never uniform feeling, so it’s extremely hard for me to say it’s what I like more.

Either way, I have many praises for it in other aspects.

Mega Man X is both very silly and very serious, in the best of ways, and in a way that is very rare to see.

Often games that I would classify as “very silly and very serious” are games like Earthbound, that are filled with jokes and goofy enemies and places, but then use it to provide a harsh contrast in its villain and themes.

Mega Man X is a specific type of silly. It’s shonen silly.

When I look at Mega Man, the classic ones, I see a robot that has to fight an 80s/90s Saturday morning cartoon villain, and maybe, if we’re lucky, he learns something about his long lost brother or a little bit of the meaning of what it is to fight for everlasting peace.

X on the other hand… reminds me of a child playing with action figures, making up insane stories with them, tearing off limbs and making new ones out of grape stems that got left out too long, or putting black sharpie ink all over one of their figures. The kind of action figure adventure where this time, two of the villains are supposed to fuse together, so they replace both figures with some toy horse with a similar color to both that the kid has. The kind where the main villain is so big and strong, that he becomes an abstract entity, only conveyable by a crumpled piece of bright green construction paper. That spits out random Pokemon cards.

And then, this kid’s older teen brother comes home from school, and joins in too. He does mostly the same, but cleaner, neater. They’re “older and cooler”, so sometimes they bring in new toys, from the latest sets, sometimes they get ones that have entirely different qualities from the rest of the main toys, but they both think are cool so it doesn’t matter. Sometimes they play rad songs from their CD player while they’re playing. But ultimately, despite all this, the teen is not any less goofy in what they do with the toys.

They eventually finish up their sessions or ongoing stories for the time, but the teen makes something to remember the conclusion of that part with.

After all the dumb adventures and “I shot his leg, Now he can’t use his leg.” you’d expect it to be equally as empty, but it really brings it home. The action figure journeys weren’t just fun, they were an experience, that both participants, honestly and truly, really cared about.

That is how I would describe Mega Man X, briefly, if you will.

And make no mistake reading the larger two paragraphs of that analogy-thing! I think the X series games are suitable for nearly any age to enjoy, assuming you’re not the kind of person that vomits at the sight of pixel art. (And of course, classic Mega Man is too!)

It’s the type of thing that pulls you in, on the premise of being very simple in design, but is just so fun to be there.

The games are relics of their time in ways, but it creates an unparalleled experience. The games each have deeply hidden secrets, some I’ve found, some I’ve only heard of. Some I’ve been told through the grapevine from friends, and had to explore myself. This is riding right on top of the item system I mentioned earlier, but takes a weakness and turns it into a uniqueness. There is an unshakable feeling while playing the X series games that there are things unlisted and untold hidden in the game, in the cart, beyond what you know. And games that prove the player’s instincts right are my favorite kind.

The visuals are very 90s, and is in that way, straight to the point in a way I couldn’t possibly describe without showing. It is VERY convinced, that it is the pinnacle of video game graphics (And at the time? It probably was!)

The 3D models in X2 and X3 are often rotated and resized excessively. It’s funny in a way, yet at the same time you can’t help but be impressed, even when you’ve seen things from the modern day that definitely have more polygons in a random cup.

X2 and X3 have in their manuals, a little thing boasting about the sheer power contained in their carts, bolstering their visual effects. You know blast processing and all that. No kid, teen, or even adult that doesn’t actually tinker with or research machines often would know what the heck a “C4 Graphics Chip” is, or to believe it. But it’s real! It’s a whole thing put in X2 and X3’s carts to actually do all this! Emulators actually have to do something about not having the chip to run!!

It’s this form of feeling like an exaggeration that turns out to truly be reality, that sells the feeling. At first it feels like a bluff, but then it becomes a true fact. In my case, small bits like this that contribute to a whole.

It doesn’t just look like it’s trying to say it’s the peak of video games… It is it!


Ultimately, Mega Man X is extremely similar to its older brother, “Classic” Mega Man, but feels like a proper evolution of the ideas and strengths of the original. It’s not as steady or as reliable, but I would be lying to say I think it falls short of the legacy, fun, or creativity. My enjoyment of the X games is indeed higher so far, but I think it all falls back on a personal preference more than anything that I feel is strictly superior.

God, I hope the series isn’t supposed to end with the next one or something. Or worse, I find out they just stopped making new X games altogether in like, 2004. That would be horrible.