The Q Review - Mega Man X7 (Patreon Milestone!)

this is the city west allis wisconsin it's a relatively small city just west of milwaukee there are two main thoroughfares around here the first is greenfield avenue where you can find the site of the wisconsin state fair they make amazing cream puffs there the other is wisconsin highway 100 along this road you can find pretty much everything needed for everyday life food clothes cars hardware and for people like me video games i carry a controller it was tuesday march 6th it was cold in west allis i was working the day watch for my apartment my art is made by yuki goomba my name is kyuji i just received a patreon donation which gave me my first milestone and since i'm a man of my word that meant that it was time to review a particular video game when i was a young gamer in green bay one of the first nes games i played was mega man 2. ever since i've been a fan of the franchise i've seen it through its highs and its lows in fact ever since i started making gaming related videos in 2011 it's been the series i've talked most about now despite my love for mega man or possibly because of it one game in this series has haunted me for years mega man x7 a game so hated that it's said to have effectively killed the x-series but when you take away its reputation and its legacy just how bad is it really well thanks to my friends and my supporters on patreon i found the motivation to play through this game again and now it was finally time to give mega man x7 a proper review but let's not get ourselves this game sucks and it's time i told you why [Music] so [Music] probably the best place to start with this is talking about just what we're getting into mega man x7 was the first original mega man game for the playstation 2 released in 2003 and was the first and only game in the x series to feature 3d gameplay the game was developed by capcom production studio 3 which had developed the previous 2x games also in a similar fashion to x6 long-time series producer kg inafune contributed very little to x7 only giving advice to the illustrators as to the design of the new character being added to the game already we're behind the times considering that not only had original series been released that had been built from the ground up in 3d but other popular series including mario and sonic had also long since made the jump to 3d in fact this wasn't even the first 3d mega man game that would be mega man legends for the ps1 which was designed with 3d gameplay in mind however as we're about to find out simply being behind the curve on transitioning in 3d is the least of the crimes on this game's rap sheet [Music] now considering that this is the seventh game in the x series i won't go in depth about the lore of the series and talk about how we got to this point instead i'll just give you the cliff notes about the kind of world we're dealing with in the 22nd century the world is populated by humans and advanced robots called reploids the reploids were based on the design of dr light's last creation mega man x or x for short who was discovered by an archaeologist named dr kane now these reploids aren't perfect and carry the possibility of malfunction or turning maverick the maverick hunters were formed to deal with these cases and were originally led by a super advanced reploid named sigma however during an investigation of a maverick who'd attacked another unit sigma encountered and fought against dr wily's last creation that being zero sigma ultimately defeated zero by a stroke of luck but not without consequences while zero somehow became less aggressive sigma became exposed to a mysterious virus turned maverick and began leading reploids in a revolt against humans believing roughly potential to be superior to humans sigma would eventually be defeated by x but would be reborn repeatedly only to be stopped by x and zero each time basically sigma is the equivalent of castlevania's dracula if he were a robot it was not by my hand that i'm once again given flesh x7 picks up after x is ending in x6 with maverick incidents on the rise in the midst of this crime wave x becomes sick of the endless violence and tests up and quits with the hunters effectively kneecapped in x's absence a group of bounty hunters known as red alert rises to fill the boy however one of their members a young replied named axel decides screw it and runs away in hopes of joining the hunters himself as he runs away from red alert's pursuit he runs into zero who's investigating the latest incident and together they take down a giant scorpion later axel asks to become a hunter but x refuses because well rampant pacifism just then the hunters are contacted by red the leader of red alert who's none too happy about his baby bird fling the nest and instead of simply asking or even demanding axel's return he challenges the hunters to a face off against red alerts bounty hunters with axel as the prize excise it yet another pointless battle but zero and axel charged into the fray x eventually does join the battle but more on that later now here's my first big issue with the plot the x series has always been darker than the classic series and decidedly so i mean we've dealt with crap like a robot civil war a falling space colony and viral outbreaks of plenty however in this game what we have here is basically a gang war i don't know about you but to me that feels like a huge step backwards in terms of the story and if red wants axel back so badly why does he skip straight to fighting instead of oh i don't know demanding axel's return oh wait we do get an explanation for that speaking of ways from here on out it's spoilers so if you don't want the rest of the details get to the time stamp here okay good good as you defeat the members of red alert the story is further fleshed out through text cut scenes turns out axel is a huge asset to run alert because of his ability to use dna data to copy the abilities in form of other reploids but even he doesn't know how he got it or where he even came from which is probably why red just couldn't build another one turns out that axel was being used by red alert for his ability and he ran away after his old friends became more aggressive and even murderous as it turns out a mysterious figure known to our learners the professor took advantage of red's disdain for the hunters and showed him how to use the dna data collected by axel to make his mercenaries stronger in exchange however he wants axel's return and x's dna data you'll never guess who this mysterious figure is yep after defeating the bounty hunters storming red alert's base and defeating red it's revealed that the professor is none other than a revived sigma so the hunters kick his ass twice sigma somehow survives red kills up and knocks out x in zero but it's actually axel who uses the ruse to blast sigma in the face not gonna lie that was clever later cygnus and alia think axel has what it takes to be a hunter but x refuses because well rampant pacifism come on axe even after all that meanwhile zero has a nightmare about x becoming murder crazy something that runs completely contrary to x's character and here we have the other crime committed by x7 story the treatment of its characters the writing for these characters is one dimensional especially compared to previous games this is most prominently seen in the hunters axel as a character in concept is far from that overall and in x8 and command mission his youthful and cocky personality was a good contrast to x and zero but to say his introduction was graceful is nothing short of delusional i get what they were going for he's a rookie he's young he's a runaway from a family that's changed beyond recognition and the likes of x and zero are legends to him but the way he was written in x7 makes him look like just a little kid with notice me senpai syndrome zero's always been a badass to be sure but his character has been developed throughout the series particularly in x4 and 5 with the emotional stress taking its toll on him more and more in x7 though he's nothing more than a shell-shocked veteran whom the writers oh i'm sorry planners tried way too hard to make look like a badass but ended up making him a stereotype in the process but x got the worst treatment by far x's struggle with violence has always been there but there was more depth to him than that because even though he didn't want to fight he knew that sometimes you can't protect peace without stopping those who spread war x7 on the other hand reduced him to a [ __ ] ass [ __ ] who won't stop whining about violence even when he rejoins the battle his dialogue with the bosses is just wine wine wine even side characters like elia who had her backstory fleshed out in x6 had all that thrown out the [ __ ] window writers need to respect their characters but it's clear that these guys just didn't maybe they should have hired actual writers to write this thing [Music] one of the things that made the x series stand out was its great presentation the sprite work was simply excellent and the levels just had a fine degree of visual polish unfortunately the look of x7 is rather dull in comparison to the previous six games the game tries to go for the cel-shaded look made popular by wind waker however one of the strengths of wind waker was how expressive the characters were by contrast the character models in x7 look like action figures with exactly the same amount of facial expression the models themselves don't look too bad per se but they can suffer from severe pixelization depending on camera distance let's compare this to sly cooper and the thieves raccoonis which also uses cell shading and was released the year before a lot more expression and a lot less pixelization and as for the environments in x7 they're just boring most of the stages lack the pop of previous games in the super nes and ps1 era the stages were hand drawn and looked wonderful they had style they had coolness they stood out only a few stages actually look like they stand out on x7 such as zero's intro stage and splash warfly stage the rest either look generic as [ __ ] or in the case of snipe and eater stage they look painful on sensitive eyes i mean we have generic forest level generic fire level generic cave base level etc where's the style where's the uniqueness where's the stuff that makes me want to give a [ __ ] this is the playstation 2 for god's sakes the music isn't much better either this is a far cry from the memorable tracks of the 16 and 32 bed eras come on i'm sure most of you who remember the x series remember the likes of storm eagles theme for example x7 soundtrack on the other hand just doesn't stick a lot of it just feels like generic rock and i struggle to remember most of the tracks in the game not all of them are bad to be fair but i only distinctly remember a few of them those belonging to a couple of the stage themes the main boss theme and the strangely creepy boss rush chamber theme seriously that theme dead ass gives me the shivers the sound effects i'll admit are pretty good for the most part except for the sound of footsteps i mean they sound like they're stepping in silly putty doesn't sound a thing like the sound of robot footsteps on metal or stone but that doesn't even hold a candle to the voice acting this is no exaggeration some of the worst voice acting i've ever heard in a video game you can hear how bad it is simply from the dialogue and a lot of it comes down to the voice direction now recently in anime milwaukee i went to a panel of voice actors who were involved with final fantasy and one thing that came up was the importance of voice direction you can bring together the best voices in the industry but if the voice direction is bad then the game will most likely sound like crap why do i bring this up because the voice direction in mega man x7 is absolutely abysmal many of the actors were either inexperienced miscast or just badly directed funny enough one of the few good voices was read voiced by barry guillerde know who else he voiced barry gill sandwich burton this is a veteran giving it his best shot and if this is as good as it gets then they definitely hired the wrong voice director now it's one thing for me to say how bad it is but i think it's more fitting if i give you some examples now if you care about your ears too much feel free to mute the video i'll give you an all clear when it's okay why must reploids fight one another i've had enough violence my friends in red alert are all really skilled reploids okay now as bad as the dialogue is the in-game voice clips are even worse you'll hear these guys talk every time you make a powerful attack every time alia has something to say every time you switch players take damage or are close to the brink of death and that's not even taking into account the boss battles these guys spout the most annoying one-liners in any game in the series non-stop until you find yourself having to pause the game and reach for the mute button by far the most infamous example is flame hyonard who not only spouts at one-liners in the most grating voice imaginable but has two clones who do the exact same thing and every time a new clip begins it interrupts the previous one resulting in a tossed salad of ear rupturing screeching don't believe me just watch again i'll give you an all clear when it's safe [Music] i sincerely apologize to everyone who didn't mute the video please don't sue me this isn't even cheesy bad like a mega man 8 or x4 where we could just laugh at how bad it is in x7 it's not even funny it's just painful but at least it's safe to say that the actors themselves have gotten better they would have had to if they're still getting work today can i file charges against this game for noise pollution [Music] as i've talked about before mega man x7 was an attempt to bring yet another franchise into 3d properly considering that it's a mega man game it follows the formula of previous x games after the intro stage you have a choice of 8 missions which you can play through in any order this time the maverick lineup consists of splash warfly soldier stone kong snipe antidoor rydborsky vanishing gungaroo wind crow ring ear cancer and he's just an onion he's just an onion he's just an onion stages are divided up into multiple sections with conveniently enough you can start at the beginning of if you run out of lives followed by a battle against the boss beat him and you gain his powers get a rating and return once all eight missions are completed the final stages open up as always there are plenty of hidden items such as sub tanks to store reserve energy heart tanks to increase your life meter and an ex tank which boosts your initial lives to five instead of three returning from x five and six are the rescue of injured reploids simply touch one to rescue them doesn't make a lot of sense but hey it's better than an escort mission there are a couple new things here stages consist of a mix of side scrolling 2d and open 3d sections for example also new to this game you travel in teams of two prior to starting a stage you select a team of two hunters to enter the mission of course that choice is moot for a good half of the game since well rampant pacifism sierra can double jump air dash and reflect most projectiles of the well-timed saber slash axle has a rapid fire shot can hover for a brief period and has a special shot which needs to be charged but if it lands the final blow on an enemy you can get certain enemies dna cores which allows axel to transform into a copy of that enemy for a limited time he also has a role move but when was that ever useful once you unlock x he has to be unlocked by the way he comes with his chargeable x buster an air dash and armor parts that you can find both x and axel can lock onto enemies and you can use the r2 button to switch nearby targets you can switch between your team members whenever you have active control by pressing l2 which is important because if your current teammate dies you lose a life regardless of how much help the other has think of tekken tag tournament instead of the marvel vs capcom style of health management from x8 in theory this style of gameplay could work but the gameplay is guilty of a laundry list of problems let's start with how slow and clunky the game feels previous x games felt fluid and fast allowing you to proceed through levels at a good pace x7 by contrast feels like a slog through a pool full of mud regardless of who you're playing as or whether you're playing in 2d or 3d even dashing feels slower than usual how is that even possible i'd really like to know another issue that hurts the game's pacing is a little thing called hard knock down normally in x games you only suffer slight pushback from getting hit however in x7 some things can knock you flat on your back not only is this a pace killer but if you're in the wrong place it can literally kill you also the lockdown system undermines the series fundamentals in 2d sections mega man's been a series about jumping and shooting dumping isn't just for the sake of getting over obstacles but also to getting to the right height to defeat enemies but with the lock-on system you can just mash the attack button and usually you can kill everything in short order it feels like that feature should have been restricted to the 3d sections unfortunately said 3d sections feel even worse first off the 3d sections largely feel like they were designed with 2d level design in mind now this works for franchises like crash bandicoot but crash doesn't have a lot of shooting in it now the following point has been made by other reviewers but it bears repeating this philosophy of level design often reduces the shooting of enemies from necessary to simply optional granted this could make for speedrun potential but let's face it why would you want to speedrun this it's like they tried so hard to make 3d work that they didn't have time to think about how to make mega man work in 3d and there are a couple of stages that reintroduce familiar mechanics but as a result they end up as crime scenes themselves the first is ride borsky stage which is a ride chaser level past ride's chaser levels were fast paced and demanded quick reflexes and split-second reactions this stage well you can accelerate but the controls are so bad that it shouldn't even pass for street legal and considering you're defusing bombs the only reasonable way you'll complete your mission in time is to drive so slow you'd get a ticket for holding up traffic thankfully this stage is mercifully short only to end up with a boss battle with a crap ton of slowdown then there's vanishing gungaroo which brings in ride armor remember the power rush that ride armor gave you in the past well you won't find it here because it's been robbed blind by bad mechanics the blue armor is slow and clunky as [ __ ] and the red armor is melee only and the main attraction for this thing is an arena battle where you take out a crap ton of enemy bots in a 3d chamber speaking of which the camera is another accomplice the way it's angled has your character way too close to the bottom of the screen and the camera is always pointed downwards the best 3d platformers have free camera control in x7 the camera when you can control it will still interfere with you whenever it gets the goddamn chance now in a 3d platformer how would you expect to be able to control the camera the prime suspect would be the right analog stick but x7 commits the felony of assigning camera control to the r1 and l1 buttons which you'd think would be used to switch weapons guess how you switch weapons the right analog stick not only is this bass backwards but this means the camera can only move in two directions and the weapon switching is unassignable not that the special weapons will do you much good anyway most of them are very ineffective and don't have enough weapon energy to make them worthwhile even in boss bikes they don't do enough damage to be worth using since they have so much health you're better off using your default weapons in most cases though i will give credit for one thing sometimes you get new base weapons for axel and zero an idea they expanded upon an x8 as for the boss fights themselves they tend to be either easy and tedious or needlessly frustrating with almost no middle ground flame hyun art and tornado tonion are cases of the former because you can exploit zero's techniques or the enemy's movement patterns three big examples of the latter are snipe and idor who fills his arena with so much projectiles that you'll be trying hard just to survive red who combines the 3d issues with small platforms instant counter attacks and other crap and the final sigma battle where the camera will wrestle with you at every turn meanwhile each of the characters has their own issues in zero's case it's his slow and sluggish combat in x4 through six zero saber slashes were quick crisp and clean and you knew where's attacks would hit because the saber arcs were well defined but look at zero's slashes in x7 they're markedly slower and it's not always clear if the attack will actually hit anything and besides his melee combat makes him handicapped especially against the likes of red of course axel has issues of his own if that role move was only issue that wouldn't amount to anything but then there's his copy shot it does pathetic damage even compared to his peashooter and several enemies in the game are bullet sponges and remember that copy shot has to be the final blow in order to get the dna core so you either have to remember just how many shots it takes to bring an enemy down to the right health level or guess and run the risk of killing the enemy and it's not like they're useful for general navigation or combat when you actually use a trance it'll likely only be to locate reploids or items that are in locations that are otherwise impossible or unfair worst part you can't even cancel the transformation early you have to wait until the timer runs out one more thing in 2d sections the enemy has to be in line with you or the core will drop out of reach to be perfectly honest atran sounds like it could have been used as a great stealth tool so to see it so underutilized makes it a misdemeanor in itself now there's one hunter left a profile x now remember x is absent when the game starts mainly so that the game can push axel as its newest protagonist i mean he's featured on the back of the box his face is on the disc he's featured on the instruction booklet so it's pretty clear that capcom wanted axel to be the star here there's this one problem with that this isn't mega man axel this is mega man x now in order to sum up the main issue with x i have to tie this into something else rescuing reploids this was introduced in x5 but all that was at stake was health refills and extra lives x6 took it a step further by having a fixed number of them having some of them give you power-ups when rescued and adding an element of risk by making them susceptible to the nightmare virus this was a pain to be sure but x7 made things worse by giving reploids the fortitude of dried flowers if any bullet so much as grazes their cheek boom dead permanently and unless you've played the game before or have a guide you have no way of knowing which ones have power-ups meaning if you don't approach one carefully and it's in a precarious position you may lose out on a power-up now permadeath works with games like roguelikes and more prominently games like fire emblem which are designed with this mechanic in mind but unless mega man x7 is trying to commit identity theft i don't think it's a roguelike or a fire emblem game so what then is the point of rescuing reploids well besides the aforementioned power-ups they're one of the keys to making x playable here's the thing there are 16 reploids to rescue in each of the 8 missions in order to unlock x you need to rescue 64 reploids or beat all 8 bosses that means at minimum you have to rescue all the reploids in four of the missions without a single one dying and this is where the biggest issue with x comes in by the time you unlock him you're likely to have powered up both zero and axel to the point where x is in serious need of anchor arms at this point you'll likely need to take x into every stage from that point on to get him caught up as for his armor the glide armor is very lackluster the head attracts nearby items the body gives you the giga attack the arms let you charge special weapons and allow the axis of a charged shot to hone in on enemies and the legs let you glide yeah the test is powerful and the legs are useful in certain areas but that's still only half the armor set that's actually good what happened to the awesome armors of games past the fight of the falcon armor the charge shot an unlimited weapon energy of the fourth armor the ninja power of the shadow armor oh and about those power ups i mentioned earlier it brings up another issue i have with this game alia remember x5 when alia would interrupt you every five steps you took well it's not quite as bad here except when i answered her calls i couldn't speed up the text scrolling it's especially annoying on the results screen where you have to hear her explain power-ups every time you equip one as well as every time you select an option on the results screen do you want to retry the stage yes i want to retry do you want to save yes i want to save and it's not just alia you can't skip the end game cutscenes either just the intermission ones and unless you have a bad copy like mine the attract mode cutscene yes i know it was my copy one of my friends was able to skip it on his would it be fair to call him lucky [Music] it's clear that mega man x7 fails to live up to the legacy established by its predecessors despite its best efforts and the fanbase tends to agree for good reason made even more clear by how the backlash against the game effectively committed manslaughter on the sales of both x8 and command mission but even on its own ignoring what came before it and how it affected what came after it x7 is still guilty of being a bad game the game commits assault on the sensibilities of both 2d and 3d platforming and murders the potential of 3d mega man with lackluster presentation gross negligence of the series characters a bland story and gameplay decisions that sabotage the quality of the game i struggle to find positive qualities about this game but in the end nearly everything i managed to find was ideas of course ideas and intentions are well and good but it won't count for much if the execution fails and that's what x7 ultimately is a well-intentioned but poorly executed mess of a game that's a crime against the franchise that spawned it i'm the quarter guy and thank you so much to all my patrons for supporting my channel and helping me get this far you've all been a big help and now that i've made my case as to why i can't recommend this game to anyone it's time i carried out the proper sentence on this piece of crap [Music] [Music] mega man x7 burn to the ground so yeah mega man x7 sucks [Music] hey remember when i talked about what characters i wanted a smash board dlc well it turns out i was right about one of them out of 10 and about a couple years late but hey it still counts right i mean i predicted mega man and shulk so i think i have some kind of precognitive abilities maybe i should join the stock market actually no considering this day things are in i think it's too risky next time top 10 characters i want in smash switch it's game time [Music] [Music] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: The Quarter Guy

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Keywords: The Quarter Guy, Quarter Guy, Quarter, Guy, Video Games, Video, Games, Gaming, Capcom, Mega, Man, X7, Megaman X, Rockman X, Zero, Axl, Maverick, Hunter, Patreon, Milestone, Red, Alert, Sigma, Reploid, Robot, Playstation, PS2, 30th, Anniversary, Dragnet, This, Is, The, City, Camera, Wind, Crowrang, Soldier, Stonekong, Splash, Warfly, Tornado, Tonion, Vanishing, Gungaroo, Ride, Boarski, Flame, Hyenard, Snipe, Anteator, Glide, Armor, Signas, Alia, 3D, Action, Platformer

Id: VjFnTYYW1Bk

Length: 27min 36sec (1656 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 26 2018