Skip to main content

Mega Man X: Command Mission

Mega Man X: Command Mission - Part 1

I’ve finished yet another RPG, so its time to take a break from the kid’s stuff and review a game from yet another franchise I am intimately familiar with.

I am just going to come out and say it: Mega Man is the reason I play video games.  Mega Man 3 is was the single game that made me beg my parents for an NES back in the 90s.  To this day, its still one of my favorite gaming franchises and one of the few I pay attention to in the modern generation.  For a brief period, Mega Man games were the only non-RPGs I actively played.

Image result for mega man x command mission

That phase didn’t last all that long, but RPGs did become the genre I primarily focused on.  I was back to playing a bigger variety by 2004, but when I heard they were making a Mega Man RPG, I was pumped.  It wasn’t often I got excited by new games at that point, but this certainly made me take notice. I had also learned to temper my expectations for games, so while I appreciated the effort I also kind of anticipated I would come away a little disappointed.

I think tempering my expectations beforehand really went a long way in me enjoying this game.  There are a lot of very, very glaring flaws in Command Mission.  Most of these flaws come in areas that are critical for RPGs, like story, character development, and presentation.  While Mega Man had never appeared in a game like this, Capcom had certainly published RPGs before so I fail to see why more care wasn’t taken to make sure these things were up to snuff.  There were also a lot of gameplay elements that are almost universally off-putting to RPG fans, including unnecessary stealth and obstructed vision sections.  

That being said, this game fits a certain rarely targeted demographic: beginning RPG gamers.  Remember in the Quest 64 review where I talked about a lack of entry level RPGs?  I went back and started thinking about what titles would fit the criteria, which in my mind are:

  1. The game is actually fun
  2. Combat/menus are simple, yet allow for high level of strategy
  3. More hand-holding and tutorials than standard RPGs
  4. Hand-Holding/Tutorials are of good quality
  5. Little or no level grinding
  6. Tight difficulty curve
  7. Familiar gaming elements are mixed in with RPG concepts

Want to know how many I came up with off the top of my head?  Two.  Super Mario RPG and Pokémon.  That’s it.  After this most recent play through, I can safely say I would add Command Missions to that category.  It hits on all of those categories, for better or for worse.  (For the record, Quest fails on numbers 3, 4 and 6.). Many of the aspects that I found insufferable would actually allow non-RPG players to feel more at home, as would the familiar settings and characters.  Combat is great, tutorials are detailed and the difficulty curve is appropriate.

Check back next week as I delve into the details of this flawed, yet very interesting RPG.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Terranigma

  As usual, it took way longer than it should have, but I did EVENTUALLY do exactly what I said I was going to. It's a year late, but I've finally made my way through the Quintet trilogy. Playing these three games became a stated goal of mine since I started podcasting last year. One of my earliest episodes covered Soul Blazer, the first title in the pseudo series. The second game, Illusion of Gaia, was also a landmark episode as it was the first one to include the intro song ("A Glass Half Full of Tears" by Aura Blaze, who's music you should check out here ). Both of them received pretty solid scores, though I didn't quite like the latter quite as much as a lot of people seem to. After all these years, I'm still surprised I never played these games when they came out. Both were definitely right up my alley and readily available to buy or even rent at my local video store, but I just never picked them up. It's a little more understandable that I had ne
Post a Comment
Read more

Lost Odyssey: Part 1

  Before we unpack and review this week's game, we need to talk a little bit about the console it's on and that console's history. But this isn't some lesser known 90's system like the Neo Geo or 3DO. It's a console family that in the last 20 years has become a household name for both gamers and non-gamers alike. Whether you are a fan of the console or not, there's no denying the original XBox caused a seismic shift when it was released in 2001. The big black and green box immediately stood out physically and it wasted little time in establishing itself as one of the most unapologetically western consoles of all time. Born of a marriage between a multi-billionaire's spur-of-the-moment infatuation and excessive 90's edgelord marketing and baptized in Mountain Dew, XBox took Sega's "cool kid" strategy and turned it up to 11. There were no silly plumbers or hedgehogs here. Nintendo and Sony? Those were for anime nerds and little kids. Sega
Post a Comment
Read more

Lost Odyssey: Part 2

Last week, we started our look at Lost Odyssey, a title that seemed to break unwritten rules of gaming left and right. We have a traditional RPG, which is the brainchild of the creator of Final Fantasy, released for XBox, a console not known for the genre, at a time when said genre was at what felt like the absolute bottom of its popularity. We started with the story, characters and world, all of which I thought were really good to great. That's a great start for an RPG, where those aspects are very important. But all of that can be undone if the gameplay isn't up to par. It's critical in any generation, but this is an essential aspect to call out in 7th gen RPGs. There was a lot of experimentation going on in the genre at the time, a lot of which didn't yield positive results. I guess I get it, the genre wasn't doing well at the time and developers were trying to do anything they could to bring it back to relevance. Sometimes, that meant terrible gimmicks. Other ti
Post a Comment
Read more