1. Mega Man X7 [N's Edition hack v1.3]

2003 | Capcom | PlayStation 2

Stream dates: February 4, 2025

This was the first stream of 2025, following an overhaul of my Chrono Trigger-inspired stream overlay I had been using since 2022. I wanted to launch with some fun jank, so with some brief research, I learned about the N's Edition hack, a sweeping overhaul that purports to fix many perceived flaws with mechanics, game balance, text speed, and camera angles, as well as making X available sooner. However, it also has some contentious changes, such as altered boss order. This didn't matter to me since this was my first playthrough. I made sure to use version 1.3, the last one that retained the original English voices. And it's a good thing I did because some of the English voices were really funny, like Zero sounding like a villain, Red sounding like a manager, and Sigma sounding like he hadn't had his coffee yet.

Yet even with the major improvements to the gameplay, I'm able to see why Mega Man X7 is regarded so poorly. It's jank, but the improvements don't make it suddenly fun. Camera angles do help with preventing unfair trips down bottomless holes but don't repair the mediocre stage design and enemy variety. A few stages resembled classic X stages without 3D camera gimmicks, and those were my favorites. Most importantly, I still had control issues. I really don't like the double-tap to dash mechanic that's been part of the series from the first game and with the added dimension, I found myself getting dashes in 3D that I didn't command. I don't know what analog movements I was making that was being interpreted as two taps in one direction from neutral but more than once it got me into trouble.

I didn't think much of the endgame either, which, if the lack of any patch notes mentioning it is any indication, is just as anticlimactic in the unmodded game. The last battles with Red and Sigma asked very little of me, and both Red and Sigma's first form shared the same weakness. I didn't even need to move around much in the latter fight. This isn't a major complaint since I would much rather have easy end bosses than hard ones so I can actually finish the game under time constraints, but I was expecting a lot more based on what I heard about this game's overall difficulty.

I read one review say that they tried to develop the first 3D Mega Man X game like a 2D game without any considerations for how 3D platforming works, and considering that they had made three Mega Man Legends games before this, it's baffling that what they tried to accomplish ended up this way. Even the menus come off as amateurish, with excessive confirmations for every action after a stage. All of this is to say nothing about X's characterization in this game. Whatever they were going for was absolutely not worth it. He's supposed to be a shell-shocked veteran tired of fighting but the actual purpose of this was to make Axl look good, which doesn't work when we don't get to see him do the cool stuff that's discussed in the epilogue. I'm interested in playing Mega Man X8 as a counterpoint, to see how much of the positive opinions on it come from its own merits and not just because it followed X7. The 16-bit demake may soon follow.

Score: -1 with the improvement patch, -2 without

2. Gradius III [Asia version]

1989 | Konami | Arcade

Stream dates: February 6, 2025

Last year, I made the New Years' Resolution to learn a very difficult retro game clear and decided on the arcade Gradius III. I ended up making little progress and didn't stream it at all after April. I'm starting again with the Asia version, which applies the power-up loss mitigation on death from the original's Beginner Mode to the entire game, in the hopes that my experience with this easier version will prepare me for the "real" game.

3. Mega Man X8 [Mega Man X Legacy Collection 2 version]

2004 | Capcom | PlayStation 2
[Mega Man X Legacy Collection 2: 2018 | Capcom | PC]

Stream dates: February 7, 2025

It seems one of the big talking points about Mega Man X7 is that Mega Man X8 is actually good. I wanted to see for myself if they mean that it's good in comparison or just on its own merits. Having played X7 three days prior, I would definitely say it's better, but not as much as people say it is. Unlike with X7, there's no big ROM hack that fixes anything, so I used the Mega Man X Legacy Collection 2 version for the fast load times.

The single biggest fault is how lives are handled. On normal difficulty, the game starts with two Retry Chips, with three available for purchase. Three more can be purchased before starting a stage. This system was inspired by Mega Man Zero, which came out in 2002, and was decried as being way too difficult but otherwise a good game. Here, extra lives cost metals, and you'll want to save all of them for permanent upgrades rather than waste them on spike-related trial and error. Some would argue that gathering up lives the old way cheapens difficulty, but this doesn't address how long it takes to respawn after losing a life because doing so is technically Game Over. It just feels wrong that since you enter with a team of two, the reserve players takes over when the leader runs out of health after taking damage from enemies, but the game is over if you fall into a pit or touch a spike. I didn't have any tolerance for the unreasonble difficulty in Mega Man Zero, so I played on easy difficulty and accepted that I have to trade the possibility of playing as the navigator ladies that people like or the Ultimate Armor in exchange for infinite lives and little need to do grinding.

With the retry system solved by easy difficulty, the next big problem is the stage design. They tried too hard to make every stage unique, and as a result, I would say only two or three stages resemble traditional Mega Man X stages. The rest are designed to burn lives. Several stages conspire with the camera to take away as many of those Retry Chips as possible in a first playthrough, including autoscrolling stages, spike traps obscured by darkness or the camera, multiple vehicle stages, and unforgiving puzzle gimmicks. With death punished far too hard, I feel no compulsion to play my clear data on normal difficulty to face the true final boss, especially since that will mean grinding for materials to buy upgrades that had previously been taken for granted—you first need to locate them and then buy them with metals to unlock them. In other words, you unlock upgrades and they still ain't unlocked. The infamous metal underflow glitch from the PS2 version was fixed in the collection, so that wasn't an option for me either. In practice, finding upgrades would have worked much like previous games, only that they wouldn't be available until after the stage is over. If I could write the grinding out of the game like that, I might have bothered to try normal difficulty, and then quit after touching one spike too many in the final stage.

As far as the boss battles go, I was mostly fine with them. I think on the whole they were alright challenges—certainly more sensible than the bosses in X7—but I played the game on easy difficulty, where the bosses don't use their attacks that will kill instantly at your starting health level. They start using them at 50% health and make it clear that they now mean business. Even though they're well telegraphed, it's still not fun to learn the consequences the hard way the first time. Also, on normal difficulty, it feels like the bosses can all destroy you in four or so hits per character. On easy difficulty, you start at maximum health capacity, so several of the bosses felt more like classic Mega Man bosses where both you and your opponent are evenly matched in health and firepower.

At this point, I feel compelled to bring up that the original Mega Man X is one of my favorite video games of all time. It was the first Mega Man game I played and still my favorite of the entire franchise. I believe it's as perfect as a game like it can be. It is just the right length, with a good amount of gimmicks and stages that change if certain other bosses are defeated first. Starting with Mega Man X2, the series moved in a direction that put too much emphasis on gimmickry and hidden upgrades. The mechanic of interchangable armors still feels foreign to me because I just don't feel as enthusiastic for any of the games after the first. Every sequel that followed up to the planned ending in Mega Man X5 went further and further in their excess, and I would say X5 is the limit of good taste in terms of difficulty. Everyone knows the story with Mega Man X6 overstepping the original vision and outstripping X5 in unfairness, and the series never recovered despite Capcom's best efforts to keep it relevant after Mega Man Zero continued the storyline. Not even the attempt to remake X1 with Mega Man: Maverick Hunter X was enough to keep it alive, because I played that and didn't think much of it either. Having played the last two X games within a few days of each other out of curiosity, I can only hope that if Capcom ever gets around to making an X9, they go all the way back to X1, or at least X4 for the throwback.

I played Mega Man X8 to compare it to Mega Man X7, so this game's score will be relative to it. When I think about how to score it, I'm first reminded of the stage gimmicks that annoyed me most. The second thing I think of is Retry Chips. Even though I was mistaken in thinking they were more severe than they are, the long delay on deaths combined with hideous spike trap arrangements in many of the stages (Pitch Black, Primrose, Sigma Palace...) makes the whole game stop cold when you see your stock of Retry Chips and realize you'll have to redo those sections if you don't want to spend them since you're probably saving the metals for upgrades. Since I played on easy difficulty and missed out on endgame content, I don't feel like I got the intended experience. Thus, the score is an extrapolation on what I think a normal difficulty playthrough would have been like. Having to buy lives would mean many, many retries on single stages that I don't really feel like grinding. If the game's upgrade system worked like before, I would give it -1. If the stage designs were closer to the pre-X6 games and weren't tethered to a shallow hard cap on lives, I'd might have even given it +1. As is, my impatience for money grinding and spike-centric level design leaves me to conclude that Mega Man X8 is technically better than Mega Man X7, but not enough to matter. Maybe if I were better at video games, I would feel bad about rating this so harshly since it comes off as me calling the game bad because my skill is not enough. I definitely feel like I'm being harsh on it because I didn't have access to a version that undoes the mechanics I don't like, like I did with N's Edition. But it still has double-tap dashing that can't be disabled, which got me killed multiple times yet again. Therefore:

Score: -2

4-8. Xenosaga Episode III: Also sprach Zarathustra

2006 | Monolith Soft / Bandai Namco | PlayStation 2

Stream dates: February 10-18, 2025

The consensus I heard about the Xenosaga trilogy before playing the first game in 2024 is that the first game is the best, the second game is the worst, and the third is in the middle. Some cursory research into why Episode II is regarded so poorly was enough to convince me that I need not play it myself, especially since Episode III includes summaries of the plots of the first two games. I figured that would be enough to catch me up before starting the game.

When I completed Xenosaga Episode I on April 14, 2024, I felt like I had been had. By the end, I did not enjoy the experience, even knowing that the very premise of Episode I was a promise of further things to come. My objective with this playthrough was to compare it to my playthrough with Episode I and see how things improved. With that in mind, I think it will be helpful to compare the two games point by point.

• One of the biggest problems I had with Episode I was the combat. You're expected to use A.W.G.S. for larger enemies but they don't grow at the same rate their pilots do, so their only practical purpose is to do more damage than normal. However, they have fewer abilities available to them compared to the pilots, so using them is a matter of routine with less strategic depth. None of this becomes truly problematic until the endgame, when enemy durability suddenly and sharply outpaces your own. The final two bosses in particular were insurmountable to me at my levels, so thankfully the Erde Kaiser was there to allow me to brute-force my way past them. Had that option not been available, I would likely not have had the patience to complete the game. The battle system in Episode III by comparison is greatly streamlined and simplified, with only one action per chararacter instead of the AP system, and a Boost meter available to both sides used for special attacks and taking extra turns. Robot battles are now a separate system entirely, but still comparatively rote. Animations are much faster than in Episode I, which alone creates a much nicer feel, and the Boost resources are a welcome substitute for AP. I do not miss the front/back row mechanic from Episode I in the slightest.
• The final area of Episode III had no less than seven bosses all fought within a few hours (not counting cutscenes), and I was able to overcome them all while only having to restart a handful of times and not needing to resort to an optional nuclear weapon in the Erde Kaiser, unlike the final two bosses in Episode I. The resistance they put up was appropriate for the amount of time I put into grinding, which was perhaps less than expected since I chose to bypass as many enemy encounters as possible in the last areas due to them still taking too long to destroy than I would have liked.
• The map design in Episode I consisted of overly large areas and backtracking in the latter half. Even though Episode III was also guilty of this, it showed more restraint about it, and I didn't feel overly annoyed with it in hindsight. It felt like most of the final dungeons in Episode I were spent at very wide camera angles, which resulted in walking very long distances with either empty space or too many enemy encounters. Episode III (and presumably Episode II) mitigates this by having extremely wide areas traversed in the E.S. mechas. The movement speed is still the same but the breadth of the areas is properly scaled. E.S. battles are also very easy to complete with a simple exploit, consisting of using traps to quickly build meter and using a level 2 special attack to immediately destroy all enemies. E.S. boss battles were either damage races or gimmick challenges, and it felt like they did everything they could to put resistance to the player's machines given the limited scope of the E.S. combat, demanding full knowledge of that particular system to withstand the later bosses' tactics.

• The second biggest issue I had in Episode I was the music, or the lack thereof. One of the selling points of that game was the soundtrack by Yasunori Mitsuda of Chrono Trigger fame, but there is barely any music at all. Most of it is in cutscenes, with the vast majority of gameplay itself taking place against ambient noise. There are only two battle tracks: one for the final boss, and one for every other fight in the whole game. I can only assume Yasunori Mitsuda was busy with another project because what he turned in there was bare minimum. I demand hot jams from an RPG from a major game company, and while Episode III's music was at best serviceable, it at least existed, and it went a long way toward reducing the monotony of the second half of the game. Many more areas have some kind of music and there are many times more battle tracks than Episode I. I didn't think much of those tracks because I felt they weren't uptempo enough, but they did their job of distinguishing types of battles. There were still a number of maps that had the same Episode I silence but they were further between.
• Both games had an excessive amount of cutscenes relative to gameplay, but I don't mind long cutscenes if they have something to say. Episode III was better about them because as the definitive ending to the story, they did everything they could to wrap up character arcs as neatly as possible. Knowing how the development of the entire trilogy went, some forgiveness can be found for the loose ends they didn't manage to address, but I thought they put up a respectable effort since by all accounts, the staff just wanted to be done with the project and move on as quickly as possible.
• I like Shion's character design in Episode I, because I really enjoy characters who fight while looking like they have no business fighting. Her company uniform in the original game is a great example of this (as is a new hidden costume for her at the very end), and I don't care for her default outfit in Episode III despite the storyline reasons that justify it. I borrowed clear data from Episode II to gain access to a facsimile of her Episode I uniform, because this game also brings back equipment that changes appearance. However, unlike other RPGs with costumes, they're coupled to specific equipment, so you aren't able to keep using costumes indefinitely because defense becomes relevant by the end.
• Finally, Episode I had a few silly Namco cameos sprinkled throughout, and I didn't see a single one in Episode III. Maybe there were some in optional areas I didn't go to, but I don't imagine there's anything like the in-game spam e-mails advertising upcoming Namco games.

Speaking of silly things, my favorite thing in the combat was the Break attacks consisting of CQC. The two I used the most were exclusive to humanoid targets. Ziggy's neckbreak in particular got frequent use. It always looked stupid no matter who took it, especially the people who were shorter than he is.

Xenosaga Episode III is yet another game that I was misled into thinking it was better or worse than it was compared to another in the same series. Of the two Xenosaga games I played, it's easily the better one. It really did feel similar to Episode I but with all of the major complaints I had with it sufficiently addressed, just like I was hoping for. Episode I felt underdeveloped, with a lot of mechanics not given enough thought and poor balance in the latter half. I didn't play Episode II myself, but from my research, in response to criticisms to the first game, they made many major changes to the gameplay that were themselves not well received, such as the removal of currency, shops, and even equipment, all while trying to take a different approach to the storytelling (which people reportedly did enjoy). Those things being absent is not necessarily a bad thing—an RPG not having currency isn't unheard of, such as Parasite Eve—but I also read that other changes amount to sluggish pacing, and that's enough to dissuade me from playing a lengthy game (even though it's the shortest one in the trilogy). Xenosaga Episode I would get a -1 score here, so this game can only get the inverse. I'm left to wonder what it was about Episode I that people enjoyed so much at the time that they claim it's the best in the trilogy, because I didn't see it when I played it last year. All told, though, Episode III was just okay when not compared against its predecessors, so that part of what I heard going in was correct.

On a final note, I know I will never touch any of the Xeno games that follow this one because in order to avert the problem of overly long cutscenes, Xenoblade Chronicles took the opposite approach and made the gameplay overly long instead. I don't have it in me to stream 70 straight hours of anything.

Score: +1