By the time you read this, I’ll be enjoying myself in North Carolina and Florida. See, your angry pal here needed a break from the stresses of everyday life before he snapped. Wandering about among the palm trees with friends should alleviate some of that stress.
In the meantime, I’m going to go off about the latest news from Capcom…the announcement that Mega Man X8 will be released this fall. Let me make this very clear: Mega Man X7 sucked. Horribly. The graphics were clean and whatnot, but the gameplay was an abomination. Yes, you can say it…Capcom pulled a Square. To add insult to injury, Mega Man X himself wasn’t even a playable character from the get-go! You had to “unlock” him later on. Ridiculous.
Probably the single worst thing about the game was the camera. During the 2D-esque sequences, it wasn’t a problem. But once the action switched the full 3D, you had seriously problems. My biggest complaint is that there’s no way to automatically lock the camera forward. When fighting a boss, this gets incredibly annoying; you have to use your L/R triggers to manually rotate the camera around. This naturally takes time, and it’s time that enemies will use to destroy you while you’re distracted.
Then there’s the whole matter of shitty voice acting, which is nothing new to gaming fans. Luckily, you have the option of choosing English or Japanese dialogue with subtitles. That’s fine for boss fights and other areas where there’s lots of talking…but in the actual levels themselves, the characters tend to run their mouths. Axl we can’t say much about; he’s a new character, and very much a rookie, so he sounds like a kid. Makes sense, I suppose. Zero, however, sounds too damn old, and X sounds rooty-tooty-fresh-and-fruity. When X would yell “Stop it!” I thought for sure his next line would be something like “I’ll scratch your eyes out!” or “I’ll give you such a pinch.” Scary.
Finally, we’ve got piss-poor translation. It wasn’t as bad as MMX6, where they didn’t even bother to translate boss names, but MMX7 isn’t much better; everything seems half-translated, and spelling errors are in abundance.
So that was the feces that was MMX7. We can only pray that Capcom has learned from their mistakes, and that MMX8 will be a significant improvement. I’m not holding my breath, however; to the best of my knowledge, MM creator Keiji Inafune was not involved in this project, nor was he involved in MMX6 or MMX7. His absence is jarringly obvious. Even MMX5, which was ridiculously easy compared to other games in the series, was still a fantastic game, rife with excellent design, cool bosses, and cooler music. Not to mention all the plot revelations and cliffhangers the game offered. It’s a shame that once Inafune moved on to his next project, Mega Man Zero, Capcom decided to shit all over the X franchise. It’s looking rather grim.
Now then…if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go relax by the pool with some busty bikini-clad women, and tell them how big my joystick is.