Caltrops - Mega Man 10

Forum Overview :: Mega Man 10

by Lurker 15954 09/07/2014, 8:38am PDT

+They completely fixed all the problems I had with X4's graphics and sound. The music is a little bit better, but still nowhere near the standard Mega Man is known for. Zero is no longer a bumbling hulk and you can actually see enough of the screen to react to enemies.

+Level design is still as linear as X4, but at least they made some attempt to hide a few items. There are even a few leap of faith pits to drop into. I know that EVERY Mega Man game is linear, but X and X2 had comparatively wide open areas with a lot of room to maneuver up and down.

+The options menu allows you to turn on autofire AND auto-charge. I used Zero for most of the game, but it was still a wonderful little thing to have.

+/-You can choose either Zero or Mega Man at the beginning of each level. Unfortunately, if you choose Zero for the intro stage, then you get his bonus blaster gun (which roots you to the ground, of course; can only be fired when you're standing completely still; can't be fired while ducking (you can duck now!); and does piss poor damage) and forgo Mega Man's super armor. Without the super armor, Mega Man is completely worthless for the rest of the game until you collect one of the other special armors.

+/-Voices are totally done with, but the truncated dialogue boxes are still there.

-Zero's moves are all still fucking useless. You're still going to spend 90% of your time with him just spamming the spinning air attack. He is actually given boss weapons that target weaknesses this time, but hitting a boss with his weakness will also give him about 5 seconds of invincibility versus the 1-2 he'd get from just a normal spin attack. Unless you're fighting a boss that has some super move that you absolutely need to cancel, it's almost always best to just spin attack them and ignore the weakness system.

-There's a terrible combination time limit and RNG story branching system. The game starts off with you having 16 hours to collect 4 pieces of a super laser to shoot down an incoming space station. If the laser fails (RNG determines success based on how many items you've collected from bosses, you can actually fire the laser right away with no items and manage to bring down the station), then you'll have to collect 4 more pieces from the remaining 4 bosses to power up the space shuttle Columbia to do a suicide run into the station. Here's the problem, though. If the shuttle fails as well, and it still can even with all 4 pieces, then Zero will be permanently removed from the game. If you've been using him for every single fight up until this point, then fuck you. You'll be forced to play as Mega Man and get the shit ending because the game decided to fuck you over. Luckily, you can just reload and the sequence will play out again with a different result, but it's such a fucking awful way to introduce replay value.

-The game is disappointingly easy. I started playing immediately after the X4 review and it took me 1 hour and 41 minutes to beat (including one poop break). I'd say 25% is due to me being on a Mega Man high right now, and 75% because they decided to add a scaling difficulty level. Every boss starts off at level 1. For every time you choose a new level, the aforementioned 16 hour timer ticks down by 1 hour and every boss gains 1 level. From levels 1-4, Zero can pretty much just stand right in a boss's face with no upgrades and slash him to death within seconds. This means the first 4 bosses you fight will be completely worthless. When you get to the 8-boss finale, they all get jacked up to level 99 and get gigantic, screen covering healthbars, but still do level 1 amounts of damage. I noticed that there is a difficulty setting in the options menu, but I assumed that "Normal" meant "Normal Mega Man difficulty".

-There's an incredibly cryptic weapon upgrade system, but understanding it really isn't necessary since you can blow through the whole game without a single one. Every time you kill a boss that's above level 8, you'll get to choose between a health bonus or an energy bonus. Whichever one you choose will also determine the weapon part you get, so choosing a life up after killing a boss might give you a jump height increase, while choosing the energy upgrade will give you a walking speed boost. There's no way to know what you get until after you've chosen. Plus, if you killed the first few bosses right away, like any regular player would, then you get jack shit since they'll only be level 1-7.

-Every 5 feet in every single stage, your operator will feed you the most useless information. As with X3, the dialogue boxes can only fit 7-10 words, so you'll be forced to smash the X button while this retard tells you to avoid dropping into the lava. Every single clever level bit is preceded by this useless tutorial where you're told exactly what to do, as if there was any confusion on whether or not you should avoid getting shot by the giant plasma balls. If you reenter the stage with the other character, every message repeats.

-There's a ranking system that was probably implemented along with the RNG story branching to encourage replays and speed runs. In the context of PS1 era games, where a title from an A-list company (AAA didn't really exist just yet) didn't have to be 12 hours long, this makes sense. Unfortunately, it did not age well at all. Finishing the game with the highest ranking (which involves blazing through every level without getting hit or killing anything) nets you absolutely nothing aside from a smug feeling of self-satisfaction.