04/25/2010

Subject: Gaming
Title: Megaman X Command Mission

Ever since getting my Gamecube (about five months ago), I've gotten only two games for it. Metroid Prime 1 and 2. These two are excellent games, and they alone easily justify the purchase and ownership of a Gamecube console.

Though it feels kind of wasteful to have just two games for an entire game system, and many people tell me that the Gamecube (despite being the worst seller of the Big Three during the sixth console generation) does have a handful of good games. One of my friends says that Megaman X Command Mission is one of them.

It's Megaman X! In an RPG! LOLOLOL!

Despite being a resilient fan of the Megaman X series, this game had fallen off my radar for a long time. This is for a number of reasons. 1) It's on the PS2 and Gamecube, which are consoles I've only owned within the last year. 2) It's an RPG, which is entirely incongruous for the series. 3) Every review I've heard about it is lukewarm at best. But when you already own a Gamecube and can buy a copy of MMXCM for $8 on Amazon, you don't have much excuse but to try it for yourself.

As of this blog entry, I've played MMXCM for about 2 hours. My reaction is one heavy sighing "meh" noise.

I wonder if it's entertaining to watch me play all these games that everyone else played six years ago. I can see now why MMXCM got all those lukewarm reviews. It's the lukewarmiest game I've ever played, like sitting in a bath for six straight hours when the water is kept warm only through your body temperature.

MMXCM is... a Capcom game. And that has a lot of implications. Ridiculous story, somewhat decent graphics, horrible voice acting and some good gameplay ideas. Two other typical standouts in Capcom titles are good music and interesting, varied environments. We see these last two in full force in pretty much every game in the Megaman classic and Megaman X series. Most of those games produced memorable soundtracks, and the action typically took place in a wide range of levels with different color scales and visual impressions.

MMXCM sadly does not have good music or level design. Every single song is bland techno-punk-rock-whatever with no melody or harmony. Each of the three dungeons that I've yet been in (being about halfway through the game's third chapter) is nothing but running through gunmetal grey corridors.

This game's aesthetics are boring and flat in the harshest possible way. Like, if a pimply-faced computer nerd with coke-bottle glasses and twelve pocket protectors came up to you and started shouting details of the Intel Pentium 4's deeply pipelined CPU architecture, without it being at all interesting or engaging, that would be the colors and music of MMXXCM.

The one thing that kept me playing the game for even this long was the battle system. There are a few clever ideas that make fights interesting, but those ideas are too few. In the end, an RPG's battle system needs to satisfy one or both of two major criteria to keep me interested. 1) Give me a lot of customization over how my party grows or, 2) make every battle something of a puzzle, with enemies that require thought to fight effectively.

MMXCM does neither of these, at least not within the first 2 to 3 hours of gameplay. Character growth is just earning experience points and equipping a few parts for buffs, and none of those parts has a decisive effect on combat. The combat itself is too often just trading blows with enemies until one of you falls over, battle of attrition rather than of strategty. It's boring.

The natural rebuttal is "But UD, it get's better if you play further in!" My response to this is... okay? Why should I care? If the game fails to catch my interest within the first two hours of play, then I'm going to dump it. I don't feel deprived of the game's better content from later on, nor do I feel any obligation to play far enough to see that better content. There's a crap ton of other games, even other RPGs that do keep my interest right from the beginning.

So, yeah. I don't fully know at this point if I'll pick up MMXCM ever again. I might, or I might not. When is Capcom going to make a 2D Megaman X 9, in the same spirit as Megaman 9 and 10? If Capcom made an SNES-styled MMX title for direct download, I would buy it so hard.