Well. Well well well. Here we are. Dear God in heaven, here we are. I debated whether or not I was going to write this. As I played the game in question, I really wanted to rip it to shreds in a proper exorcism. Then I beat it, watched some speedrun stuff, realized some other stuff, and now I'm faced with a dilemma on just who is to blame for the experience I had. It was only digging up my old writings on Mega Man X5 and seeing the teaser for this game I inadvertently put at the end that made me pull the trigger on it. So, here it is. Mega Man X6. A screed I have yet to commit to the page, but which will be partly a rage-induced exorcism and partly a treatise on the nature of culpability in a difficult video game experience. Let me set the scene for you. It's 6:30 PM on Monday night (January 24th for those of you coming to this well after the fact) and my Internet connection just went out. Well, shit. Now what do I do? At least I have a myriad of video games to choose from. Against all odds, I decided to fire up the Switch and see what Mega Man X6 had to offer. The online connection didn't come back until 9:30 on the 25th, so that was a good 27 hours or so of being cut off. Nothing but me, and Mega Man X6. This is not a review in the traditional sense. This is a travel journal, of my survival in the depths of hard video game hell. Here then, is my experience with Mega Man X6, and what I've been mulling over for the past week.
I had dabbled with X6 before, once or twice. I didn't like it because of something I complained about in the X5 review. I made a big deal out of having to remap buttons because special weapon fire was relegated to Triangle. Turns out you can't do that so easily in X6, because now you always have Zero's saber and you activate that with Triangle (or X in this case on the Switch) so you can't just hot swap the special weapon fire and the X Buster. This was a dealbreaker for me in 2015. This week? I take it back. I got used to it, somehow. Time has me being kinder to this. While we're at it, Alia's constant interruptions have been relegated to optional status in this game. I only had her give me advice once or twice. Maybe if I had let her chatter, I would have made things easier on myself... but, as we saw with X5, the contradictory nature of stopping the game for the advice didn't help much there. There are other bits and pieces I liked about X6. On the whole, it is a fun action platforming game. It's the little things that got me annoyed, though... and some particularly interesting design choices. I guess we should begin by talking about High Max. High Max is an antagonist robot who you meet in the opening stage and have an unwinnable fight with. The idea is he's some sort of super robot that you can't beat, and the goal is to overcome him. Overcoming him is a hell of an issue, considering how you find him again. Each of the game's eight stages has an alternate route to take, and at the end of it you fight High Max again. This fight you have to win. Now, as it turns out, what you need to do to damage High Max is as follows: Hit him with a charged up buster shot, and he will flash white. While flashing, hit him with any special weapon to damage him. This is a trick I didn't figure out on my own for quite a while. My buster shots had no effect, so I assumed you needed a weapon to get him... but he was immune to everything I threw at him! Worse yet, there's no way to exit the stage or anything once you get in a fight with High Max. I had to game over to him repeatedly. Now, I did discover the trick on my own eventually, but dear God. If you managed to get onto an alternate path on your very first stage (which, off the top of my head, is only possible for two of the stages but that's still a bigger number than zero)? You're fucked. You have to game over.
Now, the other bit of design that drove me up the wall was in the final stage I chose. I saved the fire boss, Blaze Heatnix, for last. Things compounded very quickly here. Blaze Heatnix's "stage", such as it is, consists almost entirely of miniboss fights against Nightmare Snake, a big red donut fucker that's an Ouroboros snake. Cute. You have to blast tiny weak points on its corners as it moves back and forth, each fight giving you more unstable terrain and enemies to deal with. The things are tanky as hell and obnoxious to fight, and there are no enemies which drop health in the stage so you can't refill between fights. The semifinal battle takes place in a vertical autoscrolling section with unstable platforms and the bottom half of the screen filled with rising fire that's instant death. Nightmare Snake darts up out of this sporadically. You have enemies to deal with here as well, and it can be nigh impossible to hit the lower weakpoints once you get to the top of the screen and have no room left. This would have been obnoxious enough, but we forgot a mechanic. The Nightmare Effect. Beating certain bosses first puts obstacles in other stages... and since I had beaten the dragonfly boss, Commander Yammark, first? This put unkillable dragonfly enemies in my path as I tried to beat the Nightmare Snakes, hitting me when I had to dash away from the giant red donut. It turns out they're destructible with Yammark's weapon, but I had no Internet and no inkling to try that. I had to restart the game and save Yammark for last, just so those shitting dragonflies would leave me the fuck alone. Now that's a mark of great game design, huh?All of this frustrated explanation gets at a bigger point I've been mulling on, one I realized once I watched videos and realized certain things. Nearly every element in this game which pissed me off to no end has an out in one way or another. As another example, in Blizzard Wolfang's ice stage, you have to hide from avalanches in alcoves. As you do so, ghosts of Zero spawn and home in on your position, with no way to dodge them. Turns out one of the boss weapons kills them. What should have been an easy scathing takedown has become something altogether more difficult for me. I find myself wondering where the line of culpability is drawn. At what point do I have to stop blaming the designers of the game for making such obtuse bullshit, and start blaming myself for being a dumbass? Those Nightmare Snakes? Turns out there's a thing called the Giga Attack in this game, returning from the earlier X games. When you take damage it powers up, and you can use it when it's charged to unleash a super attack. This works with special weapons as well, and certain combinations will make short work of the Nightmare Snakes. I keep going back and forth on that question of culpability. At first I thought fighting these things with the Buster was bullshit. Then I learned about the exploitative nature of Giga Attacks and thought it was my fault for not trying them. Then, sitting here writing about it, I thought of a limit case where I picked that level first. Yes, there's a certain order to Mega Man stages that you can follow to make things easier... and yes, if you fail at one you can try another... but this game goes above and beyond. It seems to expect you to know how to exploit it, and pulls no punches assuming you will. It's a strange form of difficulty, and it leads to this confusing situation. Who do I blame? Them or me? is this a flawed bullshit hard game, or a game that expects me to try and fail and then blast through it with every tool available?
(Note: On replaying Blaze Heatnix's stage to get these screenshots, I used Giga Attacks to do lots of damage, but still had to fight the things normally in between taking enough hits to use another. Far from being a solution, it's more of a timesaver.)
In a way, it reminds me of Mega Man 11. Sure, they came out almost 20 years apart, but that game is designed all around you using the Double Gear System to both slow things down around you and blast the hell out of obstacles with powerful charged shot. When I tried the demo, I tried playing it like an older Mega Man game and being sparing with it at first. I had an insufferable time. Once I learned to abuse it, I had a great deal more enjoyment about it. The difference here, I feel, is that MM11 tells you upfront all about the Double Gear System, bothering to teach you about it before you play. X6 just throws you into the deep end of the pool and waits for you to paddle or drown. True to that form, we have to talk about the final levels. The first fortress is infamous for the way it starts, a vertical climb lined with spikes on all sides. I don't know if it's possible to beat without this method, but there are parts you gain from rescuing robots in the stages. Certain ones give you upgrades, and increasing your dash plus your jump height allows you to get past here. These upgrades are each hidden in the alternate paths of stages, and quite well to boot. There's throwing you into the deep end and expecting you to know the game in and out to win, and then there's just being cheeky. I think this delves into the latter, especially considering the High Max thing. See, if you actually beat High Max? You unlock the fortress stages early. You still need those parts, but you can get in there early. Doing so seems like suicide, considering how obnoxiously hard the fortress is... but the option is there for some goddamned reason.
I want to close out by talking about those Angry Video Game Nerd games from Freakzone Games. Now, I will say upfront that Mega Man X6 is less obnoxious than those. There's at least some sensible design here that isn't made to kill you at every turn. A lot of turns, yes, but not every one. I could go on about how it's less obnoxious, but just hear me out here. The people who adore those games and their take on difficulty will praise it for being "hard and rewarding", in the sense that you get thrown into the deep end of unfair difficulty and grind your way through it, managing to overcome the odds and win. Good on them and their taste, but for me "rewarding" isn't the word I would have used. The word was "relieving". As in "oh thank GOD I don't have to touch that shit any more". X6, to me, feels like it would appeal to those types and give them the feeling of rewarding they crave as they endure, survive, and surpass the bullshit hurled at them. For me, I felt that same "relieving" feeling once I finally learned about Giga Attacks on the final boss and shitblasted him with them over and over, after trying and failing with another weakness that basically did chip damage. The very same "thank GOD it's over, I never have to play this again" feeling. In that sense, I think X6 is a miss. Quite how much of a miss depends on where you think the blame lies; either with the game for being obtuse with what needed to be done to clear it without making things an aggravating slog, or with me for being a stubborn dumbass who didn't use every broken and busted tool available to them to break the game wide open and win. Before I go, a thought experiment for this dilemma. Imagine you take two people who have never experienced or seen Mega Man 2, which most consider a standout of its series. Completely blind, and yet skillful at retro games. It's a thought experiment, bear with me here. You take the first one and tell them to do Quick Man's stage first. Take the second and tell them to do an easier level, with all the powerups available to them thanks to a password (let's say Flash Man for this). Chances are, your Quick Man player will bash their face against the instant death laser maze and be frustrated, while your Flash Man player will have a better time. Playing Mega Man X6 with no Internet is like playing Quick Man blind. Yes, you can go to another level and try something else, but the game is designed so that, statistically, some players' first impressions of Mega Man 2 are bullshit instant death lasers. I don't think I hate this game now that I know its brand of bullshit, but I can't love it because of my bullshit first impressions... be the fault on me or the game itself.But hey, at least it can't get any worse, right? What's this? Mega Man X7? Hope that's good.
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