Mega Man X8

"Bought it on a limb, and not disappointed."

Let me get one thing straight before I start, 7 is a good rating. I gave Resident Evil 4 an 8, and that's one of the funnest games I've played in a long time. Anyway, 7 is a darn good score for me to be giving, for there are very few games that I would give a 10 to. (Chrono Trigger being one of them)

Story 6/10

Oh me, Oh my! Yay and hails! Yeah... well. It's a Mega Man game. A familiar foe is up to no good... I'll give you a hint who : His name starts with S and rhymes with Igma... Give up? Sigma. Yep. Mega Man is still your regular ol' "I don't want to fight, but since I have to I might as well blow everything up really damn well." guy... Zero is a brooding hero and Axl is an annoying kid. Now that the formalities are out of the way, they got a bit fancy this time around. You know Axl? See his copy ability? Yeah... well, he was the prototype for the new race of reploids, they can copy DNA, which is very cool. And... anything beyond that is spoilers, but it's all got to do with new generation reploids, yada yada, ho hum. It all comes down to the same deal as every other X game.

Gamepplay 9/10

They fixed it! Yeah, the crappy 3d crapitty crap crap from X7 is gone, and it's back to good ol' fashioned X gameplay. Not much to say... Zero can Double-jump, X can do stuff depending on what he's wearing and Axl can hover at low altitude... cool. There are 8 capsules in the game, each with an armour piece (helm, buster, foot, armour) for the 2 different (regular) armours... Hermes and Icarus, both of which are a bit similar lookswise but very different play-wise (I'll say more about the looks in a few...)

8 levels, 8 bosses, 8 capsules, a pre-boss level, a level where you fight all 8 bosses again, and a final level (which is damn hard)... it's standard.

The reason I gave it 9 instead of 10 happens to be said last level. Spikes. Too many. No fun. 'Nuff said.

Graphics 7/10

2D gameplay in a 3D environment, sounds cool, could be but isn't so much. Capcom needs to get better at this, seriously... Nice work on the backgrounds, but the sprites are junk. The enemies are all either too big and weird or too small and cluttered. Give or take... The bosses are far less intimidating in 3D than they would be as 2D sprites. What happened to the uber-cool Launch Octopus?! Boomer Kuwanger? Hm? What happened to them? Kuwanger was intimidating, and he was a freaking DUCK! A DUCK!

But there's not much to complain about, so I'll stop it there. It's nice, but the enemies could be better. Oh, and the animations are alright, nothing fancy.

Sounds 10/10

I'm being too generous, take 2 off of that score to get the real one. Mega Man MUSIC IS BACK! Hurray. Thank you Capcom, you finally fixed that which has been a plague to the games for quite some times. Mega Man X ( the first, if you didn't catch on to which is my favourite by now ) had some of the best video game music ever. Holy crap. Remember Storm Eagle? Sigma's boss battle? Those are some friggin' classic tunes! And they've brought it back. They brought back the metal, and it sounds good! Because now they have some decent space on the discs and can use... get this... proper guitars! Yeah! Alright... so subtract 2 because the songs that they actually composed... well.... they're not that great. They're rockin', they're fast, but they're lacking. Not so bad, though, and they're background-noise because of the volume level.

Buy or Rent?!

Well, like I said, I bought this game on a limb... I just saw it, picked it up and walked out the store with it. It's got lots of replayability because of the 3 difficulties and lots of secrets... and yeah... so rent it, like it, buy it. Or don't... but you'll be missing out.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 04/19/05