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.
