(OLD) Mega Man X3 Review

[Music] [Applause] [Music] hello ladies and gentlemen welcome back to the all-inclusive mega man x retrospective we've already looked at mega man x for the super nintendo and its remake as well as last time we're doing mega man x2 for the super nintendo megaman x2 is a fine game that had some decent level design decent music decent power-ups and pretty much a decent everything other than the areas where i thought the game really flopped in like the x-hunters for a long time now both of these games were some of my favorites to replay but still my opinions on that don't really diverge from the popular majority so after x1 x2 and mega man 7 were released the fifth generation of game consoles were coming with gaming making its transition from 2d to the third dimension with the sega saturn the sony playstation and the nintendo 64. so capcom decided to have one last hurrah for the fourth generation and so the final 16 bit mega man x game was produced titled of course mega man x3 the game was released in japan in december of 1995 a very optimal release date i'd say however mega man x3 in north america was released in january of 1996 which might have been the worst date they could have possibly come up with seeing as december is one thing but january doesn't help that this game upon release was pricier than other super nintendo games since it again has the cx4 chip and the cartridge display enhanced graphics in other words unsurprisingly mega man x3 sold very poorly even in japan i'm guessing the reason for this ultimately was the fact that all eyes on the next generation of game hardware and people probably weren't willing to go back to weaker hardware just to experience the last mega man x game on the system capcom is probably aware of this fact and so fairly shortly after mega man x3 was released in a remastered form for the playstation 1 the sega saturn with some changes to the gameplay and an updated soundtrack with real instruments and fmv cutscenes i can't tell you if this game sold better than the original since i couldn't find anything on that but i do think it's a safe assumption it did given its release on more commercially relevant consoles another problem comes in since the 32-bit version of x3 was only released in europe and japan while the pc version of x3 was released here and did contain a few new features from the 32-bit version but i don't think many people played that either americans didn't get a simple way to play mega man x3 until 2006 with the mega man x collection of the ps2 and the gamecube which included the ps1 version of the game that serves as a smooth segue into the fact that fans of mega man x have concluded that mega man x3 is one of the weaker games in the series being better than x6 or x7 but not as good as the rest reasons being flawed difficulty balancing backtracking weaker level design among other things i first played x3 right after x2 but at first i really didn't care for this game either not for level design or anything like that just because i was spending a lot of time dying on bosses since i was guessing what the weakness order might be and i just gave up on the last maverick stage i did then moving on to x4 and x5 after finishing them there was always something pulling me back to x3 this game was a ton of variables and things to do so at the same time i was replaying the other four games to get better at them i was doing so for x3 but this game kept giving me more trouble than the rest and the process of getting better and better kept me playing it over and over until i had the game mastered and from there i tried to learn as much as i could from watching speedruns and that's when the game became one of my favorite games in the series and this video is here to analyze it and see where it succeeds and fails so let's start with the story i figured it would be important to start with the fact that chronologically mega man x3 takes place after the events of mega man xtreme a game that i'll review later said game takes place after x2 and before x3 not much really changed by those events but i still figured i'd let you know that anyway zero is back on the force but maverick crimes the same as ever until a replied scientist by the name of dr doppler comes onto the scene with a cure for the maverick virus and so the crimes stop the world is so thankful of doppler that he gets a whole city named after him a few months later though mavericks are back at it again and x and zero go out to stop them but the problem is they find that dr doppler is responsible but right then and there they get a call that mapper counter hq is under attack meaning that they were sent out on missions to distract them from protecting the hq x and zero rush back to defend headquarters and find out that dr doppler has eight mavericks running a muck in the city and now x and zero have to defeat them quick spoiler warning now dr doppler seeing how much progress the duo are making against him sends out the nightmare police those being fit bite and vile mark too since dr doppler resurrected him before these events took place in the end the nightmare police are defeated and then it's revealed that dr doppler built a new body for sigma and he's back again for ex-defeat depending on your actions either 0 and x will escape with sigma defeated or x will escape with dr doppler sacrificing himself for the greater good and he tries to destroy sigma end of the game with x yet again wondering why this fight must go on and what will have to be sacrificed for peace to be achieved x3 story is pretty good unfortunately the game begins with a three minute long cutscene that can drag on for a very long time repeat playthroughs however it can be skipped as well as boss intros at the beginning of every stage so enough of that let's dive into the game design the intro stage is fairly typical seeing as you're given some basic platforming and wall jumping as well as basic enemies to fight your way through things change when halfway through x gets captured and zero has to save him but this time we're playing a zero fully for the first time in any mega man game we have plenty of time to get into that later so i'll save it for then intro stages after x-men are never an issue by the way but for consistency's sake i am going to discuss the intro stage but again keep in mind the fact that none of these are bad unless i point out a flaw that is bad from there we're again thrown into eight stages filled to the brim with combat and platforming the level design in this game is still pretty good for all the reasons stated in the x2 review but i noticed that x3's level design suffers from moments where you walk straight and not much is going on which is annoying no matter what game it is in addition to that there are moments where x or zero must blast their way through enemies with some pretty beefy health bars not saying that mashing the shoot button is going to prevent from becoming annoying but to be fair not everyone can mash the button on a controller as fast as someone else might be able to so putting enemies in your way like this can be troublesome these are problems that can plague almost every level in the game i might add another problem is the fact that some of these levels can go on for a pretty long time for example blast hornets stage can go on for six whole minutes which for a 2d platformer is a really long time at best many levels are four minutes and at worst six or seven this might have been a problem in x1 and x2 but i sure noticed to hear more what you really need to keep in mind for these reviews is that again i'm trying to focus on the aspects that are specific to each game i enjoy playing through x3's levels quite a bit since like i said they have all the same things going for them as x1 and x2 but i already said why i like playing these games i already said x can dash at default x2 there's no need to say that kind of stuff again moving away from that not sure if you can call this a level design issue but it seems there are many times in mega man x3 where the player is forced to make a leap of faith with no way of knowing what will be awaiting you and once you find out you're already dead i know what's coming already but someone who's never played before most likely will not moving away from criticism is something i'm very mixed on would be thankfully the level changes from x1 are back therefore increasing the world building of mega man x3 but i say mix because i like how beating volt catfish means that the power is activated blizzard buffalo's level which melts the ice or how it makes the elevator in the special stage work the other two are pretty weird though you see gravity beetle stage is an air hanger with a bunch of crates in it basically a plane leaves this level for blast hornet's level to which crates are dropped off and picked up but beating blast hornet means the blocks and gravity beetle stage are gone by beating gravity beetle the plane never shows up in the first place i'm not sure that makes any sense from a logical point of view but in the game design this is pretty annoying for reason to be explained later in the video however a pretty subtle one would be how beating blast horn if the enemies with cannons on their heads don't have cannons anymore as usual x needs to collect eight heart tanks and four sub tanks the same functionalities as last time but i recommend getting these things seeing as in this game an issue is how easy it is to die at the very start of the game many enemies hit like a freaking 18 wheel are typically killing you in about three hits especially bosses other than that the amount of collectibles has been expanded from the last two games x can collect four ride armors in a few of the stages oh wait i never talked about those i didn't think they're worth mentioning in the other two reviews because they didn't add much basically an x1 x-pilot a robot that could jump and punch that's about it in x2 x could pilot a robot that has spike for a hand and could hover for a few seconds in this game x can find four separate right arm as you can summon from select stations in each stage the chimera armor is the same as x1 the kangaroo armor is the same from x2 only without the glide however the frog armor is my least favorite it is unique since it's the only one that can operate underwater but other than that doesn't have any advantage in any other environment it also has a really awkward jump that makes the parts where you should use it in doppler stage 2 are necessarily more difficult than need be the hawk armor is my favorite since it can hover it for a brief moment and it shoots missiles that damage enemies effectively these right armors are pretty good and add to the experience however we have a huge issue in the fact that you need the chimera armor in order to use any of them and with that level being the last in the weakness order many players will grab them and never use them ever which kind of kills the point of the system x has again ditched his armor from the previous games and luckily dr light has recorded nine new messages as well as parts for x the foot parts will allow x to dash horizontally like x2 but in addition to that allowing x to dash vertically which really does come in handy the arm parts allow x to charge up special weapons for a more powerful attack in addition to that it allows x charges buster and make it able to release two shots like x2 this being the ability i use most of the time the other one being how if x releases both shots at the same time they release a wave attack that wrecks the frame rate for a brief bit the game's enemy placement seems like it's lined up perfectly for this ability but i still don't use it very often the body armor reduces damage by 50 as usual but upon getting hit a shield is emitted that one being hit inside the shield damage is reduced by 75 lastly the head parts are the best they've ever been but still has a few flaws basically x can be shown a scan of the levels at the beginning that highlights all collectibles in the stage and telling you what you have and don't have on the stage select this does a much better job of revealing secrets in the head parts of the second armor but still the problem is that you only get the map once per stage at the beginning so you have to memorize it also it's hard to tell where you are in context of the red dots maybe there could have been like a blue dot to show your location since the snes x button doesn't do anything in these games so they should have had the map come up upon pressing the button upon getting all of these parts you've assembled the third armor is personally my favorite so far i prefer the second arm as arm parts but the other three abilities make up for that we aren't done yet though since the four levels that don't have regular capsules all have pink ones that contain the enhancement ships these increase x's third armor abilities such as the hyper crash which allows you to shoot charge shots without charging the double dash which allows you to dash twice the head parts that allow you to regenerate your health by standing still and finally the body parts reduce damage by 75 when the shield is activated it reduces damage by 90 a drawback with these is that you can only get one at a time and the one you get you're stuck with since you can't get another one leaving you no room to experiment with it the playstation 1 version fixes this by allowing you to switch between them meaning that in that version i like this mechanic since you have room to experiment with which part you like the most last but not least in the first doppler stage if you make it all the way to this point with full health you can get the golden armor which gives you all four enhancement chips but you can't get the golden armor if you got any of the enhancement chips prior to this so i'd recommend holding off on the chips until now so you can get all four as usual x3 has eight new mavericks to face those being in weakness order blizzard buffalo unless you're playing the ps1 version in there it's belzer buffalo toxic seahorse tunnel rhino volt catfish crush crawfish neon tiger gravity beetle and blast hornet on my let's play channel i'm doing four versions of this game in the playstation playthrough i did the weakness order and it sucks for pretty much one reason there are many power ups you can't get on the first run meaning that at the end you'll have to do a lengthy backtracking sequence and with that that makes several other problems like not having enough health to make it through some of these bosses in general these bosses hit pretty hard most of them having really predictable patterns but that's obscured by the damage output i managed to feed most of them except voltcat fish and toxic seahorse and i had some trouble with neon tiger and crushed crawfish but keep in mind that i've played this game a lot and i'll just leave it at that my personal order is tunnel rhino blizzard buffalo blast hornet neon tiger toxic seahorse gravity beetle volt catfish go back to tonal rhino for the hard tank and head parts and lastly crush crawfish this order removes backtracking from almost half the game and is easily the fastest 100 way through this relates to a much larger issue that most of the items are found the same way by breaking through a wall with tunnel rhino's weapon or using a special weapon with the arm parts but you need the foot parts internal rhinos weapon to get that so the customization is nowhere near as strong as x1 and x2 i also hate how some of these are placed though i think it's better than x2 i'm thinking how some of them require specific things to have happen like how the crates and gravity beetle stage are blocking the heart tank and beating blast hornet stage caused them to go away as i established earlier but nothing in the game would lead you to believe that so you just have to keep guessing as to what's going to get that heart tank but nothing in the game actually does no weapon no armor no nothing moving away from that into the actual weapons each boss gives extra new weapon like usual these are some of the best weapons in the series frost shield allows x to kill enemies with ice that causes them to drop health acid bursts probably the weakest one of the bunch and while it does hurt enemies it doesn't really give you much of a tactical advantage over the x-buster tornado fang breaks through the walls but is not really a great weapon triad thunder is one of the best stones in the series since it gives you a shield and hurts enemies the considerable amount of damage spinning blade kills almost everything in next to no time race flasher works as a good spread shot to kill multiple enemies at once unfortunately gravity well is one of the weakest weapons in the series since it does next to nothing in damage to almost every enemy and i only really ever use it twice in the whole game lastly the parasitic bomb can freeze enemies allowing you to get past them and also make smaller enemies fly into each other before we move on to the final levels we have discussed three more things like i said zero is playable on x3 but at the same time he's not you can select zero in any stage but he can't do anything in this game zero is pretty much a clone of axi he can charge two big shots and slash with a z saber which does a ton of damage the problem is zero cannot fight mini bosses fight bosses collect sub tanks collect heart tanks and collect dr lake capsules and collect right armors in other words zero can do next to nothing and can only be played as for maybe a minute and a half of continuous progress zero has only one life and so if he dies he's out of the picture for good so i don't know what the point of even putting him in the game was if he literally does nothing and also sang you put him in the game in the back of the box next up the nightmare police will interrupt your progress to challenge you bit will always appear in stages 3 4 and 5 with bite appearing in stages 6 7 and 8. these bosses will probably trouble you for a few lives but still the patterns are simple enough to have much trouble come from them for vile mark ii you can find them by locating secret portals in certain levels to go through the special stage beating these through with their weaknesses means that they die but with any other weapon they just retreat it could be troublesome that you have to fight two of the nightmare police in stages i don't really mind it but some people might mind the effect they have to fight them i think the best of both worlds between the nightmare police and the x hunters would be vile mark ii as the pros of both parties and none of the cons since you have the option to face him and you actually affect the game this time around before we head into the climax of the game i figured now would be a good time to mention the graphics and sound as well as the various versions of x3 that exist graphically making an x3 for the snes is by far the best presentation in the series so far with a wide variety of backgrounds and animations for x and zero as well as the enemies and bosses most importantly the framerate rarely ever drops nor does the game slow down aside from the arm parts whether it be wireframe effects or multiple things on screen x3 puts the struggling engine from x1 and x2 to its limit and really creates a good looking game sound was kino yamashita composed the soundtrack for the super nintendo version and while many songs sound very similar yes the same can be said for x x2 mega man 7 and mega man and bass and three of those games have great soundtracks and x3 is no different in my eyes [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] the 32-bit version had a new sound effects and like i said i had fmv cut scenes to tell the story nothing complicated but it still shows they put some effort into the re-release the ps1 version as a whole is pretty much the same game only with the new things i've already mentioned and the pc version that i actually do own has an easy mode making the entire game of the difficulty balancing of x1 and x2 i managed to beat toxic sea horse without breaking a sweat for god's sake the saturn version of x3 unfortunately isn't that good reason why is because this version has a ton of slowdown that's about it actually but this completely changes the quality of the game drastically as evidenced by the fact that the saturn version of x3 got some pretty low scores one reviewer calling it the worst game on the system all three of these versions have an updated soundtrack with real instruments and while there are many diverse opinions on this i think it's really been growing on me these last few months [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] i love this soundtrack so much you probably should make a top 10 about it however in 2012 one person named xjustin3009x link in the description began working on a remastered version of x3 and the final product being mega man x3 the zero project this has been confused as the version of the game that just swaps x with zero if it was just that i wouldn't care about it at all let alone review and let's play it alongside officially released games this game yes it does have zero as a fully integrated playable character but the thing is it does so much more than that like how in the process of making zero playable he balanced the z saver to be less powerful and allowed zero to get every collectible including the capsules and zero can use them all in his own way the third armor's armed parts have been changed to a much better charge shot for x he didn't have to do that but he did and the game feels like it was really made for this charge shot so i'm glad he did the dialogue that references x has been rewritten to reflect there being two playable characters in addition to that in the original game whenever x talked the text box said mega man but it's been changed to x when x gets a hard tank zero gets it as well and vice versa you'd think that would be obvious but every other official mega man x game with multiple playable characters doesn't do this so thank god for the zero project the zero project itself has three different versions released for with each version adding new features and tweaking the visuals slightly so with that said you can find the game on romhacking.net and i heavily recommend it i also recommend subscribing to ex justin399x's channel if you're interested since he's working on a zero project version 2 of mega man x2 which will fix many of the issues i talked about in the last review so please show your support it's an entirely free hack so if you like mega man x and aren't playing this you definitely should be finally reached the end of the game and go through the doppler stages the first one is pretty fun since it doesn't last very long and the level design is constantly changing it up to make the whole thing more interesting this is where you get the golden armor and the zero project you can get zero the black armor and doing so will give x the golden armor and vice versa at the end we fight one of two bosses if bit and bite are both killed by their weaknesses then we fight this trashbot which is incredibly easy and simple if bit and bite are both alive they combine together to form a more dangerous enemy which hits like a tank but still is an incredibly easy pattern i figured there would be a different boss of one that the other was left alive but that isn't the case unfortunately you fight the same boss as if both were alive but overall this is why i enjoy bit and bite more than the x hunters the fact that something about your actions changes the game but still i wish there were new bosses if you hadn't killed one not the other the second stage is also good because if you killed vile mark ii then the levels will be clean have the strongest enemies in the game at the end you'd face an extremely easy fish boss that can barely hurt you if you don't beat vile then this love will be erect with the same crappy enemies from every other stage in the game at the end you'll fight vile again to feed him for good if vile was defeated in the maverick stages and zero is left alive he can face a mini boss in this level and upon defeating him zero gets damaged and he gives x the z saber and it is our super power move this time around and of all of them it's by far my favorite since it kills bosses in two hits via projectile or with less damage but still two hits with a direct slash i prefer it since you can use it no matter how much health you have making it more accessible than the other two super power moves noteworthy thing being how in the zero project if you did all the requirements and made it here as zero x wants you to be careful giving a reminder not to go through the door if you want to see zero's ending which is by the way a lot more interesting than x's ending but if you want the z saver you can totally get it lastly this level has a really stupid section at the end where you wait on a snail robot through a section of spikes and it takes forever it just be pixel perfect with your movements or else you're dead you do it again or you just follow him to do it again equally annoying the last doppler stage is the boss rush and it sucks i said last time how annoying it was to have to fight the same bosses you fought before only again only now effortlessly since you have all their weaknesses in this game in general bosses are easily destroyed by their weaknesses and so 10 whole minutes of you just plowing through these guys is just tedious and since i played this game several times for this video i was beyond sick of this crap after defeating doppler x makes his way to the resurrected sigma of whom the first phase is really stupid since the pattern despite being incredibly telegraphed is really fast you have next to no time to react appropriately doesn't help that he hits pretty hard you can cling onto the wall next to him and spam his weakness which works perfectly but the problem here is that there isn't a happy middle ground between being bombarded with shots not taking a single hit but once that ends the final fight begins [Music] that and the final boss is so easy this has been considered one of the hardest bosses in the entire history of the franchise and i really don't mind him that much i know exo's writing in the comments but it's not because i've played this game several times or anything like that it's because ever since my first playthrough sigma never gave me that much hell sure i used a few sub tanks but i didn't have too much trouble yes the hitbox is weird since you're supposed to shoot through the exhaust port but the headlights up and so you're supposed to think the head is the weak point but the thing is guys once you figure it out which shouldn't take very long given how little options there are you can't mess it up now because you already found out he moves incredibly slowly and really the attacks he does shouldn't get in your way too much since they seem awfully telegraphed to me especially this blue laser attack with all that said and done you have to escape with this rising fire section and that in my opinion is the hardest part of the whole climax since if we die here it's all the way back to the beginning but with that the game comes to a close as this video comes to an end i had a strange feeling a quarter of the way through writing the script that being that this game will put under a critical microscope kind of falls flat in its face don't get me wrong i love this game to death i would easily put out my top 20 games of all time for all the fun it brought me while trying to get better and better at it eventually mastering it beyond all recognition the third armor was the best one so far the stages are fun to play the soundtrack and technical stuff are through the roof but ultimately though the ride armor system the enhancement chips and the boss design were all complete failure for multiple stupid reasons that never should have made it past play testing i know there were many people who were probably expecting a glowing review of this game for me and while i did praise the game for reasons i felt deserved to be praised like i said i'm not trying to say the same things i said in previous reviews over and over again so when it comes to the things that megaman x3 added to the mega man x formula i found them to be messy but the foundation it was built on was very strong so by no means was making an x3 a poorly designed game far from it the game just has problems that can't be ignored and i believe i'm a competent enough reviewer to segregate how much fun i have while playing a game from the actual quality of the design like i said a million times in the lp i love this game so keep that in mind if you ever review a game lastly to address the reception x3 has gotten for many fans i think it's quite unfortunate to be honest specifically in north america x3's limited release made it so that not many people got the chance to play it when they were younger and went onto x4 and x5 playing the crap out of those as well as x1 and x2 and therefore becoming more adapted to those games flaws and as a result x3 was never given that chance and people played it later and upon getting annoyed the game was just written off i believe that if x3 got a release on ps1 in north america this game's legacy would be entirely different today but that's just speculation since no one truly knows you can find megaman x3 on the wii u and 3ds for 7.99 and on the mega man x collection for the ps2 and the gamecube the original cartridge will cost you quite a bit rockman x3 is about 30 bucks but the original game would go up for one thousand dollars complete inbox so i really strongly recommend you don't buy that i still feel the zero project was definitely a well-designed game from start to finish since it takes the good foundation that was the original x3 and builds upon it to make a game that i think anyone can get down with if you want to hear my further thoughts i did a collab review of this game on the sidequest gamers channel you shall go check out so in the end not much else to say here so thank you all for watching and i'll see you guys in the next video lastly would be how megaman x3 randomly got released on the genesis by random people out of nowhere based on the saturn version and is somehow worse ah screw it i'm not talking about that excruciatingly painful tripe i played this for the collaborative with alec alge of the cyclists gamer a few months ago and i did it for the lp when the video will come out soon i would want to talk about how buggy this game is but i never want to play this game again it literally gave me nausea i'd rather play mega man x6 over any day doesn't help that i paid 50 bucks for this

Channel: J's Reviews

Views: 229,830

Keywords: Review, Critique, J’s Reviews, J’s Let’s Plays, Genesis, Sega, SNES, Nintendo, Mega Man, Mega Man Series, Mega Man X Series, Mega Man X3, NINTENDO, CAPCOM, WII U, Playstation, Sony, Sega Saturn, PC, Mega Man X3 Zero Project

Id: PxuGYllBP1I

Length: 24min 35sec (1475 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 01 2016