Mega Man X: Command Mission - Part 2

Last week, I took a high level look at Mega Man X: Command Mission, an RPG featuring side scrolling stalwart Mega Man.  Now its time to take a closer look.

I guess we can get started with the first thing anyone would notice: the graphics.  They are pretty good, everything is bright and bold and all the characters look great.  The attacks look cool, the enemies are well done and the backgrounds are serviceable.  I found a lot of the areas to kind of look dull and sterile.  There isn’t much to look at, but it kind of fits the setting of the MMX universe.  My eye was usually drawn to the enemies, many of whom appear in 3D for the first time.  That might not matter to non fans, but as a Mega Man aficionado I thought it was cool.

The music and sound effects are also great, but the cutscenes....whooooo boy.  It brings us to one of the biggest flaws in the game.  Anyone that has played any of the PS1/Saturn MMX games (X4, X5 and X6) will be intimately familiar with the cheesy, terribly written, horribly voice acted narrative segments those games possessed.  They were cringeworthy and in some cases, embarrassing. In a 3-5 hour action game, that’s okay, or at least tolerable.  The focus of the game is on the side scrolling action while the rest of it is just background noise. Now, imagine those, but in a 30+ hour RPG.  Yeah, its not good.

The voice acting is atrocious.  Mega Man is okay, but everyone else is unacceptably bad.  Since when did Zero become a stoned surfer dude?  Axl’s voice actor was better than the one they used in Mega Man X7, but that’s not saying much.  All of the original characters are similarly bad.  No one reads their lines with any sort of conviction and it all sort of sounds forced.  It’s like they did one take and were like “eh, sounds good.”  Again, this is totally acceptable in an action game where that stuff isn’t that important, but it completely takes you out of the atmosphere and limits the impact of the narrative.

I touched on it earlier, but there are a lot of obnoxious gameplay segments that are completely out of place in this kind of game.  Unnecessary stealth, one of those areas where you have to stop moving when the screen blinks red, a section where you can’t see whats in front of you and a few other things like that.  I HATE that stuff in RPGs.  It adds frustration without actually increasing the challenge.  As I mentioned before, that might play into Command Mission’s advantage in appealing to RPG neophytes, but I can’t stand it. The frustration is also compounded because if you fail at any of these tasks, you are usually forced to fight a battle and battles in this game take a long time.  

That being said, the battle system is excellent overall.  It’s essentially the same as Final Fantasy X, a strictly turn based system where you fight with three members of a six person party.  You can switch members at any time unless one of the active members is knocked out.  You get to see the order of when each character and enemy will act, so you can plan your strategy accordingly.  Everyone can equip two sub weapons to go with their regular attack.  The sub weapons cost WP to use, so you need to choose between getting two extra hits in or saving up for your character’s action trigger.  Each character has their own unique trigger as well as their own hyper mode transformation to further power their attacks.

I do have a few gripes with the battles though.  First and foremost, they do take a long time.  The animations all look great, but they are also drawn out and deliberate.  Each character switch takes a full 10 seconds and enemy attacks also take a long time to go off.  I don’t think the encounter rate is excessive, but the lengthy battles make it feel worse than it is. The action triggers all require what are essentially mini games to determine damage or healing.  Some of them are simple (like X’s simply holding a button to charge his button, some are fun (who doesn’t love a random hand of 5 card draw ever once in a while?) but most are just annoying.  My request to the RPG gods is simple: STOP with the F%^$&%$ slot machine attacks!  Even Final Fantasy is guilty of this crap. Just stop it.

As much as I complain about it, that’s the kind of stuff that helps this game fit into the whole “beginner RPG” category.  Timing and button pressing mini games add some familiarity.  For example, Zero’s action trigger is all fighting game button combos.  Not a huge fan, but I get it.  I should also mention you are able to continue from the start of a battle if you die.  Again, it feeds into the whole beginner thing and it takes away a huge amount of frustration that RPGs from the old days presented.  However, it also takes away from some of the challenge.

My final complaints, which I did touch on briefly before, are with the story and character development.  Look, I wasn’t expecting too much when it came to the core Mega Man X characters, they have already been around for 20 plus years without any meaningful development.  But this would have been a great time to introduce some new characters into the universe and it feels like a wasted opportunity that more wasn’t done in that regard.  I don’t think any of these characters have appeared in a Mega Man X game since and frankly, Command Mission did such a bad job building them up and fleshing them out that I wouldn’t have cared if they were.  The story is okay and I didn’t think the twist was incredibly obvious, but the poor cutscenes and voice acting really drag it down.

I can’t say I didn’t have fun with Command Mission, but it was a very deeply flawed experience I’m not sure I would play through again.  There isn’t enough substance, or even style to warrant spending any more time on.  The interesting battle system isn’t enough to carry the weak story and characters.  If you are looking to get into the RPG genre, this might be a good place to start.  Pokémon carries a certain stigma and Super Mario RPG is difficult to find, so Command Mission may be your best option by default.  It’s a solid baseline, if you don’t like this game you should probably steer clear of RPGs in general, but if you enjoy it you should move on to bigger and better games in the genre.  It might be worth a playthrough for RPG veterans (IMO its kind of a ‘strictly worse' version of Final Fantasy X), but not much more.

6.5/10

Play this Game if:

You are looking for a gateway into the RPG genre

You are a diehard Mega Man Fan

You loved the battle system in Final Fantasy XX

Avoid if:

You like RPGs with ATB combat or action RPGs

You are a “story first” RPG Gamer