Caltrops - Mega Man 10

Forum Overview :: Mega Man 10

by Lurker 15954 09/07/2014, 4:59am PDT

*SIGH*

+You can play as Zero. He's got his own distinct style and definitely feels like a heavy samurai in contrast to Mega Man's pew pew ninja. According to the wiki, the designers wanted him to be the main character from the get-go, but didn't want to alienate their fans.

+Sigma's 3 forms are probably the best here. He's pretty difficult, but doable as long as you're patient.

-Oh my god where to begin.

-Level design has been completely fucked. They're somehow more linear than they were before, except that the TINY bit of exploration from before, the one that discouraged you from rushing through the level as quickly as possible, has been completely removed. Life-Ups, Energy Tanks, and X-Upgrades are all either RIGHT in your path and require you to move a bit faster to reach, in totally obvious spots that require little to no thought, or behind painfully obvious boss-weapon locks. There's not a single secret that requires you to take a leap of faith down a potentially fatal pit.

-Whereas other Mega Man games will have just a few enemies on screen at once, but placed strategically (little helmet shooters placed on a ledge could hold their own with no problem), enemies are just thrown at you haphazardly here. Absolutely nothing is a threat to you, especially once you unlock Zero's spinning air attack to one hit everything or Mega Man's* infinite special attack helmet, so once again there's a focus on rushing through and killing things as quickly as possible instead of the much more thoughtful action in X.

-Checkpoints are ridiculously generous. Whereas old games would send your ass back to start after continuing, here every level is broken up into 2 sections. Getting a game over at the boss will just send you back to the beginning of the second section, meaning there's absolutely no reason for you to learn the layout or even bother keeping your health up. Even dying at the end of the first section will set you back to the midpoint of that. It's Super Meat Boy's design but without appropriately difficult levels to make that feature make sense. There are a LOT of surprise instant death spots, most of which are due to the camera being so zoomed in compared to previous games.

-Compounding the level design problems are the new character designs. As this was the first official new-generation Mega Man X game, they decided to redo all the sprites to take advantage of the system. Both Mega Man and Zero are slightly larger than before, which gives you far less space to move around and dodge shit. Movement is MUCH more sluggish than in previous games, which makes bosses harder than they should be. Everything also just FEELS uglier, with more drab colors (to make it feels more EXTREME and GRITTY) instead of the charming X-X3. It's not Man of Steel, but it's still an unfortunate change and a HUGE strain on the eyes since there's so much superfluous shit flying around in the background at all times.

-As with X3, the music feels incredibly weak. Again, it's unfortunate how many essential Mega Man elements they sacrificed in order to ineptly modernize things.

-Zero. Oh man Zero. This was their first big go at making him a fully playable character, and it shows. To start, he has a full 4 attacks that root him to the ground for a full 1-2 seconds. These are all completely useless and only serve to punish you for ever pressing the Triangle button. Half of the abilities he unlocks from bosses are simply movement (air dash, double jump, a useless "Giga Attack" mapped to R2, and a purple sword that destroys tiny pellets from tiny enemies. The double jump DOES also add the air-spin attack, but this doesn't trigger any boss's weakness for some reason), which means there's a full 4 bosses you'll have to face with no weakness. These also happen to be the HARDEST as well, which leads to Zero's 8-boss finale in the last level being disproportionately hard.

-Nearly every single boss and enemy you fight using Zero will devolve into a game of you jumping around using the somersault attack over and over and over. This does not hold up very well compared to the rhythm of building up a charge with Mega Man and releasing it at just the right moment.

-The voices. The cutscenes are hilariously bad, so that's alright, but EVERY single jump, dash, and attack will cause your character to shout HOO HA HO HEY YEAH, over and over and over. It gets old after about 1 level.

+I do remember skipping every little anime cutscene as a teenager (and that was in my weeaboo period!), so I missed out on the cool little fight that showed how Zero was actually PATIENT ZERO for the robot virus. Ohhhhhhhhh! I'm still not sure what X means, other than this game is X-TREME since it was the 90's.

-The dialogue. For some reason, they decided to up the story here by starting off every boss fight with a little bit of terrible banter. The dialogue boxes can only hold 7-10 words each, so you'll have to scroll through line after line repeatedly.

*I know he's called X here, but I'd like to save that to refer back to old games for simplicity's sake.