Mega Man X3

"A tedious, uninspired retread whose few innovations are mostly gimmicks."

Capcom has a long and embarrassing history of creating brilliant, well-polished, extremely fun games and then essentially re-releasing them with minor additions and graphical updates as many times as possible, but things rarely turn sour as fast as they did with the Mega Man X series (The thousands of minor tweaks to Street Fighter II being the most obvious exception). The first game was an expertly crafted sidescroller not too far removed from their star series on the NES, but unique and updated enough to be worthy of a franchise all its own. The second game, while clearly wrought from the same template as the first, was still endlessly playable.

Mega Man X3, on the other hand, is so diluted and uninspiring it's like it was developed by an entirely different team, or rushed out the door to cash in on the SNES's popularity one last time before the next wave of consoles took over. A November 1995 release date makes that second possibility seem a lot more likely.

Most of the design flaws that permeate the following X sequels found their birth here:

- Forgettable bosses with repetitive strategies. Tunnel Rhino charges back and forth and occasionally shoots drills. Blizzard Buffalo charges back and forth and occasionally blasts or throws ice. Neon Tiger shoots lens flares and moves diagonally. Each fight is an extended exercise in tedium.

- Useless special weapons. The Frost Shield is probably the slowest weapon in any Mega Man game. You have no sense of the area of attack for Triad Thunder. You have barely any control over the Ray Splasher. The Acid Burst is a slow green ball, except when charged up, where it's a slow green ball that bounces.

- Ugly, distracting energy effects. Yeah, those bosses look great with that crappy color morph effect. And there's nothing I love more than playing as a messy blob of flashing light after grabbing the armor upgrade.

- Frequent action breaks for mid-boss fights. X and X2 did these, but they were dynamic and took place within the actual level. X3 forces you to pass through the same stupid cage doors, makes you wait for the boss's entrance, and treats you to the 15-second long slow explosion effect you haven't seen enough of by this point when you kill them. Oh, and the rooms reserved for Bit and Byte fights were a nice touch. Especially since they're in every level, you have to pass through them to progress, and you only fight each boss once.

- Boring level design and artwork. Five of the eight main stages are interchangable warehouse/factory/airport/plant fusions cluttered with pipes, gears, conveyer belts, blinking lights, and meaningless metallic boxes. The color palette is muted and uninspiring. The levels are flat and joyless, filled with forced breaks for uncreative boss fights and without the character of any of the levels from the previous two games. X4 improved on this, but X5 and 6 tried to fix their levels with gimmicks like viruses and nightmares and lots of spike pits.

- Horrible music. It fits the level design perfectly: Grinding, repetitive, airless, and depressing. Actually, this is one of the things the following X games did a lot better.

- Angsty, inept storytelling and misunderstood villains who realize only too late the error of their ways. X4 would ratchet up the angst and melodrama exponentially, but at least it wasn't as dull as this one.

X3 does have a few things going for it: The controls for the game are still relatively tight and enemy invulnerability times are still reasonable. Sprites are still relatively stable and you have a sense of the game's collision detection. And It's challenging in a way that toes the line between hard and cheap but doesn't cross it more than once or twice. Later X games would cheerfully kill you for not perfectly executing that complicated mid-air maneuver -- this one just requires the height of your concentration and reflexes. But to this point, these have been staples of the X series, things we've come to expect. The development team would have to actively try to make the gameplay sloppier.

But if you're willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, the fact remains that X3's new innovations had functions that were dubious, inconsistent, or just never quite clear. The overlay shot is sluggish, difficult to use in the air, and usually impeded by narrow enemy damage zones. The upward air-dash is slow to activate, often leaving you vulnerable to enemy attack, and difficult to control. The pink capsules were an interesting twist on the armor upgrades, forcing you to choose only one of four extremely cool additional powerups, but the game ends up trying to have it both ways by including a Super Secret Ultimate Armor that a) just gives you all four anyway and b) is incredibly easy to find (incidentally, this is another gimmick later X games were all too happy to reuse). And the ability to use Zero....who are we kidding, that was an even bigger gimmick than the pink capsules. His limited availability, lack of special weapons or sub-tanks, and one-death maximum made him a completely throwaway feature Capcom could use to sell the game. He would have to wait until X4 to actually be a viable gameplay alternative (and a more interesting one, being limited to close-range combat).

And so the downward slope of what started a promising series begins with a huge dropoff from the second installment to the third. A cluttered, tedious, frustrating experience.

4/10

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 01/22/08

Game Release: Mega Man X3 (US, 11/30/95)