Shades of Resonance: Second Chances - Memory Log #42

Mega Man X2 & Mega Man X3

I think, by this point, that I've blabbered on long enough about how much I love the original Mega Man X. I mean, I can certainly find the inspiration and the energy to further express my fondness for the game and share more of the special memories that are attached to my experiences with it, but that that would be unnecessary. I've already made all of the most important points.

Though, for the purpose of framing this particular piece, I'd like to say one more thing about Mega Man X: It's long been the only X series game I've ever cared to play.

When I say that, I'm not implying that its sequels aren't quality games, no. What I'm saying is that I'm indifferent to them because not a single one of them succeeds in (a) achieving the same level of excellence as Mega Man X or (b) exhibiting the type ambition that conveys to me that its creators were endeavoring to evolve Mega Man X's established formula in any meaningful way.

I've felt that way about them ever since the mid-90s. Back then, my assessment was that they quickly became safe and ordinary and did so as if they were determined to convey those qualities.

The original Mega Man series was three games deep before its creators ran out of ambition and resigned themselves to a future in which profitability mattered more than progression, but the X series didn't even make it that far before it ran out of steam. Rather, it began its decline immediately!

And that's not how it should have been. Mega Man X, a game whose every aspect was soaked with ambition, deserved at least one or two bar-raising sequels.

But it got nothing of the sort. Instead, Capcom followed up its SNES masterwork with two straight disappointments: Mega Man X2 and Mega Man X3, whose strict adherence to convention was so instantly obvious to me that I couldn't even wait until I'd finished more than two stages of either to start expressing my feelings of apathy.

As I was playing through each of them, I'd wait for something amazing to happen. I'd put myself in a state in which I was prepared to be wowed by the sudden introduction of a mind-blowingly innovative game mechanic or an awesome new level-design twist. But sadly, the game apparently wasn't interested in giving what I was looking for. So my only option, then, was to abandon all hope and accept the fact that the game was so steeped in formula that even a hint of transcendent game design was unlikely to be found.

There were some promising signs, sure, like when I was able to play as Zero or test out some new Ride Armor model, but such instances would be fleeting. They'd last a few minutes and terminate before they could blossom into anything grand or meaningful.

At the time, I described Mega Man X2 and Mega Man X3 as "more of the same," but even then, they somehow felt like less than that. They fell so flat with me that I rarely felt compelled to play them. In fact, had I not created my video-game-themed "Superbooks"--in which I mapped out the Mega Man games' stages, wrote about and fleshed out their stories, and drew their enemies and weapons and provided descriptions of them--I might have completely abandoned the sequels not long after X3's 1996 release. Because I probably wouldn't have had any other reason to spend more time with them.

But eventually I did abandon them. Once I lost interest in playing video games for the purpose of covering them in my books, I had no reason to play them. So I shelved them. And I didn't go anywhere near them for the next five years.

Because both Mega Man X2 and Mega Man X3 lack any elements that really stand out to me, they tend to blend together in my memory (in fact, there was a long period in which I'd often forget which Mavericks belonged to which game). That's why I feel that it's appropriate to combine them into a single Memory Bank entry.

So let me start by telling you about Mega Man X2, for which I had such high hopes.

It all began with Mega Man X's surprise post-credits scene, in which Sigma's visage appeared on the background's teal-colored monitor (which originally appeared to be nothing more than a stylish background element) and promised that he would return in a new form. This was a very effective cliffhanger for me. It made me eager to see where the story was headed and how Sigma's impending resurrection was going to change the series' universe.

I was also eager to see how the reinvigorated Capcom was planning to top Mega Man X, which was, arguably, the company greatest-ever creation.

I couldn't wait to see what it was going to do!

Ten months later, Nintendo Power Volume 67 arrived with the first preview of Mega Man X's sequel. And I couldn't have been more excited to read it!

Concerningly, though, the preview raised a few red flags.

It delivered its information in a pretty standard way: It provided a brief plot synopsis and some select gameplay details. There was nothing suspect about that aspect of it. The problem, rather, was its tone, which was enthusiastic in character but tempered by worrisome comments like "Mega Man X2 has the same great gameplay as last year's original 16-bit Mega Pak" and "Mega Man X2 isn't a revolution--it's just a lot of fun."

Comments like those planted seeds of doubt in my mind, but I didn't take the time to deeply ruminate over them because I got easily distracted by the rather intriguing-sounding information about Capcom's newly invented "C4 chip," which was said to possess the ability to boost the game's graphics beyond anything we've ever seen. It would, the piece explained, allow for "rotating boss characters" and "deep, 3D perspectives."

Future Nintendo Power issues made a big deal out of the chip's ability to render a "wire-framed" Sigma boss, which sounded mind-blowing!

Because if there was anyone out there gullible enough to get excited about a game merely for the fact that it was around advanced graphical effects, it was me!

So I was looking forward to seeing what Capcom was going to do with its new chip technology.

At the same time, though, I wasn't feeling as excited for the game's other aspects. The descriptions of them simply didn't capture my imagination. So I allowed for my interest in the game's C4-enhanced visuals to become the driving force behind my purchase of the game.

When Mega Man X2 hit stores in January in 2025, I went right out and bought it. Then I immediately brought it home and initiated my ritual: reading the game's manual in full before starting the game. "Maybe its contents will raise my spirits a bit and get me hyped," I thought.

But unfortunately, that didn't happen. Reading through the manual instead had the opposite effect.

The main problem was that the manual was very compact and plain-looking compared to Mega Man X's, and it lacked a similarly appealing storytelling device (its newspaper-styled "Future Times" article was eye-catching, yes, but it simply wasn't as creative or as immersing as X's pages-long "journal entries" device, which explained each of the backstory's developments from Dr. Cain's perspective).

By that point in time, video-game manuals' importance might have been dwindling, but to me they were still an essential part of the package. I counted on them to get me in the spirit and help me to become invested in the action. But Mega Man X2's manual didn't do that for me. Rather, it left me feeling cold.

Mega Man X2 started to fall flat with me moments after I switched on the SNES. The first disappointment was that its title-screen music wasn't nearly as rockin' or as energizing as its predecessor's. It was, in all honesty, bland and downright generic-sounding. I didn't get any kind of rush as I listened to it.

Then there was the intro stage, the Reploid Factory, which wasted its intense lead-in by presenting a stage setting that was neither as elaborately structured or as epic-feeling as X's besieged highway. It was short and rather mundane. And none of the game's designers seemed to realize that making a stage boss gigantic didn't automatically imbue it with the ability to evoke a sense of awe--especially when it was true that you could take it out with just four or five charge-shots. You had to make it do truly awesome things! Instead they programmed it to walk back and forth and occasionally swing its arms, which was hardly spectacular.

Then came the main part of the game: the Maverick stages.

My first selection was Wire Sponge's stage because English-writing method taught me that it was usually best to start at the top-left when choosing items from a multi-row menu.

It was a poor decision. I didn't like what Sponge's stormy Weather Control Center presented. It was terribly cramped, visually drab, and devoid of interesting enemies. Its challenges were mostly built around its inhibiting weather conditions and tricky jumps that had you traversing your way across series of narrow, vertically moving platforms. And I found both of those stage elements to be annoying and really boring.

Also, having to constantly fight against a constraining downpour reminded me of my first experience with Toad Man's stage, which was similarly unpleasant.

Observing all of it gave me with a sinking feeling.

And after I failed several times to safely work my way across the moving platforms and resultantly suffered multiple spiky deaths, I started to think that Mega Man X2 was going to much tougher than its predecessor.

I turned out to be correct: Each of the successive Maverick stages required me to continuously exhibit skills that were considered "advanced" in Mega Man X (long-distance jumps of all variety, including those that were used to perform tricky wraparound maneuvers). Also, enemies and projectiles seemed to be inflicting larger amounts of damage, and resultantly enemy hordes would efficiently wipe me out anytime I was slow to react to their presence.

When you consider my frame of mind at the time (I was essentially looking for reasons to be annoyed), you can understand why I listed this increase in challenge as a big negative. I saw it as the intentional reduction of Mega Man X's accessibility and fun factor.

As annoyed as I was, though, I couldn't deny that certain elements of Mega Man X2 were very appealing to me. I was fond, for instance, of how it looked. It was a visually pleasing game, and I enjoyed observing its imagery and the attractive environments that it was rendering.

I was most impressed with its background visuals, which worked to produce entrancing scenes like the ocean sunset of Bubble Crab's submarine base (which was and still is my personal favorite); the scrolling war-torn city that could be seen from Wheel Gator's aircraft; the multi-layer parallax dunes of Overdrive Ostrich's desert habitat; and the scrap heaps and city ruins that formed the surroundings of Morph Moth's junkyard. Quite often, I'd spend time just looking at them at marveling at how vivid and beautifully animated they were.

Stages like Wheel Gator's personalized tank and Overdrive Ostrich sandstorm-plagued missile base had unique and interesting level-design features, and I was happy to see that. I especially liked that the latter allowed for you ride on the motorbikes that were seen in the game's intro scene! I welcomed new ideas like these.

(Though, honestly, I had an awful time trying to control the motorbikes--particularly when I was attempting to boost off of the the opening section's final ramp and land safely on the other side with the bike intact, which I was required to do to obtain the stage's heart tank. Because I didn't fully understand how the bike's control inputs worked, I screwed up the jump dozens of times, and when I finally made it over the gap, I felt as though I only did so because I got lucky.)

And I felt that the game's tunes, despite their not being as rocking or invigorating as Mega Man X's, were high-quality. I even considered a few of them (like Bubble Crabs and Wheel Gators' stage theme) to be series standouts!

The soundtrack's best piece, I thought, was the one that played in the X-Hunter stages, which, in my estimation, certainly needed its strong presence because they had little else going for them. Their level design, visual themes, and platforming challenges were largely forgettable.

But I didn't really care for all of the game's other aspects. None of them were as good as Mega Man X's. None of them were able to capture my imagination or immerse me in the same way. And I was bummed out by that reality. I was sad that the game wasn't taking bigger risks or exhibiting the same type of ambitious spirit that its predecessor was famous for showing.

"This just isn't the next-level game I was hoping for," I kept thinking as I played through it.

What really dragged the game down for me, though, was the application of the new X-Hunter system. I felt that the addition of roving sub-bosses Agile, Serges and Violen worked to wreck the game's flow and put pressure on me to clear the stages out of order, lest I'd miss the chance to encounter the sub-bosses and retrieve Zero's stolen parts. It didn't help that all three of the X-Hunters were ridiculously overpowered, which was a major problem because you had to encounter them early on, when you had an inadequate amount of health and little to no armor enhancement.

If none of the hunters were occupying the stage that I was currently playing through, I'd purposely Game Over and hope that one of them would travel over to said stage, but I didn't like having to take this measure because I felt as though doing so only served to cheapen the experience. "Having to kill myself constantly doesn't seem like a legitimate way of playing a game," I felt.

All it was, really, was the abuse of a system. And it wasn't any fun.

The penalty for avoiding the hunters was having to fight Zero, as reconstructed by Sigma, in the game's final stage. And if this event occurred, I learned painfully, you were doomed to get the bad ending.

I was the type who always strove to earn a game's best possible ending, but whenever I played Mega Man X2, I wondered if it was worth the trouble to make such an effort. Because I really didn't want to deal with the X-Hunter system, which to me felt less like a bold new gameplay addition and more like the product of the Mega Man team's tired old tactic of simply increasing the amount of content rather than endeavoring to create evolutionary systems that could truly differentiate a series game from its direct predecessor.

And I was especially displeased by their decision to bring back the X-Hunters later on and make them the final-stage bosses! "Are you kidding me?!" I thought. "You can't even be bothered to create unique castle bosses?!"

What bugged me the most was that the Violen fight was virtually the same as the first one! They didn't even make the effort to alter his appearance or give him new attacks! "How cheap is that?" I thought.

And I felt that the whole subplot of X fighting to retrieve Zero's parts was an insult. To me, Zero returning only served to make a mockery of the characters' emotional parting in Mega Man X. "Why should I be sad, then, when a Reploid dies?" I questioned. "It doesn't matter because it can simply be rebuilt!"

That storyline element reminded me why I largely avoided comics, to which I referred as "consequence-free entertainment." Because I knew that any character who died would inevitably be brought back and that any tragic event would be promptly undone by some contrived twist.

The "mature" Mega Man X series was, I thought, supposed to be above such silliness.

One thing I liked, though, was how Magna Centipede's stage contained the area in which the X-Hunters met during the cut-scenes to plot their next move against X. Because I had a weird obsession: I loved it when games allowed to visit places that were depicted on title screens, in intros, in cut-scenes or in places that were assumed to be part of separately-existing graphical assets and thus completely off-limits (like Rolling Thunder's control room with the giant telescreen or the transformation room from Banjo-Kazooie's Game Over cut-scene).

The reason I loved it was, I think, because entering into such an environment felt somehow verboten. Whenever I'd do so, I'd feel as though I'd entered into a restricted zone and therein a place I probably wasn't meant to be. It was as if I was somehow breaking the rules, which was always fun to do in games!

But what I didn't like was how they recycled this stage and reused it as the game's final battleground. It felt like a lazy design choice. And fighting Sigma in a place that I'd already visited several times only served to prevent the showdown from feeling as epic as it could have been. Our battle should have occurred at the cloudy heights of a tall tower, within a mysterious cavern, or in some other fantastical setting--not in the familiar, mundanely designed purple stage that had all of those awful falling blocks!

Also, the appearance of the wire-framed Neo Sigma wasn't as impactful as it should have been because I'd already seen the C4 (or "Cx4," as it's properly termed) technology at work earlier on in this very same stage, when I tangled with the rotating, wire-framed sword enemy! "They should have reserved its use for the Sigma battle," I felt. "That would have greatly increased its wow factor."

Furthermore, the fight wasn't anything special. All Neo Sigma did was float from one side of the room to the other and intermittingly fire down a laser and spew orbs that turned into minor enemies. And thus the only thing that I could conclude was that the designers were hoping that the technology, itself, would be impressive and captivating enough to disguise the fact that the fight had little substance to it.

So I was let down by all aspects of the encounter.

And as far as I was concerned, Mega Man X's Sigma battles, which were designed using apparently-meager "sprite technology," were far more climatic-feeling and memorable.

I was being hard on Mega Man X2 for a reason: I had high expectations for it, and disappointingly it failed to meet any of them. In most cases, it fell woefully short.

I didn't think that it was a bad game, no. Rather, I considered it to be a well-made action game, and I felt that it had its moments. But the simple fact was that it was inferior to Mega Man X in every way. It scored lower in every possible category.

At its core, it was an exact duplicate of Mega Man X: It tasked you with beating eight Mavericks, obtaining eight heart tanks and four sub tanks, locating four Dr. Light capsules, and infiltrating the enemy's four-stage castle. And that was the problem: Its only goal was to be equal to its predecessor in terms of content. It didn't strive to be something greater. It ran from the responsibility of having to raise the bar higher and meaningfully evolve the series' formula. (Even the game's big secret, the Street Fighter II-inspired Shoryuken-uppercut attack, felt safe and predictable!)

Considering how much Capcom blew me away with the inspired, super-ambitious Mega Man X, I was certain that the company had regained its mojo and was prepared to take its new series to the next level. But sadly, that didn't happen. Rather, the company quickly regressed and went right back to creating purely formulaic sequels. And that was unacceptable to me. I was expecting much more from the people who just one year earlier had delivered a game that profoundly impacted my life.

In complete contrast, I was so unmoved by my Mega Man X2 experience that I didn't even feel compelled to immediately replay the game. I was ready to move on to other games.

Though, I did have to give Mega Man X2 one thing: Its ending was incredibly thought-provoking. I was highly intrigued by Sigma's statement that Zero was "the last of the doctor's creations." That single inference fascinated me to no end and inspired me to dedicate multiple pages of my Superbooks to theories about possible connections between Zero and original Mega Man series' two doctors.

I theorized, for instance, that Zero was a refurbished Proto Man (because his log number was "000," which could have easily been altered to just "Zero") and that he had been given the new job of protecting Dr. Light's latest peace-keeping robot. And I considered, also, that he might have been a mutinous creation of Dr. Wily.

I was obsessed with the idea of the two series being linked in some way. I was constantly thinking and writing about the potential connections and what they meant for the greater Mega Man universe.

That ending was Mega Man X2's best hook. It intrigued me so greatly that I vowed to purchase a future X-series title just to see where Zero's personal story arc was headed. "And maybe I'll be amazed by what's revealed!" I thought.

Because surely there was the possibility that Capcom realized that X2 was a disappointment and was now prepared to redeem itself by delivering a truly next-level Mega Man X sequel!

Right?

Well, no. That, I sadly discovered, was a total pipe dream. And honestly, I wasn't surprised by how things went down.

I can sum up it all by saying that my experience with Mega Man X3 was a total repeat of the one that I had with Mega Man X2. I had all of the same complaints.

My first issue with the game was the inclusion of the Nightmare Police, Bit and Byte. They functioned just like the X-Hunters, which is to say that their tactics were intrusive and only served to mess with the game's flow. Also, again, if you failed to engage them in the game's early portion, you'd instead have to fight them in a castle stage, and consequently you wouldn't be able to earn the best ending.

The only good thing about Bit and Byte was that they weren't as overpowered as the X-Hunters.

"Thank goodness for small favors," I thought.

Then there was the return of Vile, whose presence was slightly less intrusive but still had a significant impact on how the endgame unfolded. To engage with him, you had to locate and access his hidden base before defeating the last of the Mavericks, and if you failed to do so, you'd miss out on fighting two of the true Doppler-castle bosses and consequently lose the chance to earn the game's best ending.

Sometimes I'd forget all about the early Vile fight because it was nearly identical to the later encounter and thus blended together with it in my mind. I kept thinking that Vile was only as a castle boss. And then I'd wind up getting pissed when he, rather than the giant squid robot, would show up as the boss of the second Doppler stage and I'd suddenly remember that he was only there because I failed to locate and destroy him earlier on! Because I knew right then that I was going to get the bad ending.

That was a problem with both of these games: They recycled so much content that parts of them blended together and caused confusion.

It was so common for me to miss opportunities to take down Bit, Byte and Vile, in fact, that I didn't have any memories of "true castle bosses" when I returned to the game at future points. They were the only bosses that I remembered fighting.

That was the case even when I was putting together my Mega Man site (which is now defunct) in late-2000. I had no memory of the true castle bosses. Thus I failed to include them on my Mega Man X3 boss page.

I only remembered them because someone informed me via email that the page was missing the elephant and squid bosses. But I was so unenthused about the idea of playing X3 for the purpose of ripping their sprites that I never did so. I simply left them off the page.

I felt that Mega Man X3 had solid visuals and music, but overall I considered it to be the weakest of the three games in both of those areas.

It had some standout settings and backgrounds, sure: I liked, in particular, Neon Tiger's sprawling jungle, whose trees and foliage were illuminated by a beautiful sunset; the snow-covered city ruins that could be seen from Blizzard Buffalo's frozen arctic base; the richly colored scrolling skyline that would occasionally come into view in Gravity Beetle's airport complex; and the glorious waterfalls that flowed into Toxic Seahorse's reservoir.

But I didn't care much for any of its other visual themes, the majority of which were either generic in character or overly mechanical-looking and resultantly bland. Very few of them were able to capture my attention or stir my imagination.

I liked its soundtrack, and I felt that some of its tunes were on par with Mega Man X's (particularly Toxic Seahorses and Gravity Beetle's stage themes, both of which stood among the series' best tunes), but I just couldn't rank it as great. It wasn't consistent enough to earn that distinction. It was never able to sustain a level of excellence. It had too many themes like Zeros and Blizzard Buffalo's, which were contrastingly drab- and uninspired-sounding (Dr. Light's capsule theme, in particular, was surprisingly unemotive, which was sad because previous capsule themes were so strikingly emotional and touching); I could only see them as proof that the series' composers were running out of inspiration.

Also, I felt that Mega Man X3 had some bad boss-fight design. I couldn't help but notice, for instance, that a couple of Mavericks had an extreme lack of an offensive repertoire. They did nothing more than predictably dash back and forth across the room in a straight line, and it was easy to evade these attacks with simple wall-jumps and air-dashes.

Hell--Blizzard Buffalo and Tunnel Rhino, both of whom specialized in this practice, were practically the same boss! They behaved so similarly that I came to believe that one of them was a sprite-swap of the other and that Capcom hoped that the cosmetic change, alone, would be enough to cover up that fact.

Their fights were basically nothing. They were trivially easy.

Mavericks like Crush Crawfish, thankfully, weren't as instantly neutered by their weapon weaknesses and would continue to mount some semblance of a response. They'd give the impression that there was actual design to their fights.

That didn't make their fights any fun, no, but it at least gave you the sense that the designers were actually trying.

With Mega Man X3, it was always the case that you were getting either too much or not enough.

Take Zero's inclusion, for instance: Getting to play as him and stylishly attack and dispose of enemies with his wicked green sabre was super-cool, but unfortunately, his appearance was anchored by a painfully restrictive set of rules (he's unable to fight Mavericks, and you permanently lose the ability to switch to him if you suffer a death while using him).

And that sucked because I wanted to switch to Zero at every available opportunity. I wanted to play as him and have fun slashing enemies to pieces and experimenting with his unique abilities. But I was hesitant to do so because I didn't trust myself to keep him alive. And for that reason, I felt stress whenever I took control of him. I was so afraid to die that I'd cautiously inch my way forward and try to avoid combat. And that, as you would guess, wasn't any fun.

Being able to play as Zero for the entirety of Mega Man X3 would, I thought, have made the game legendary, but sadly, Capcom was intent on depriving me of that opportunity. For whatever reason, the company simply refused to give series fans what they were demanding: the ability to play as Zero in a solo campaign.

I had the same issue with the new Ride Armor models: I liked playing around and experimenting with them, but the segments that were designed for their use were disappointingly short and not particularly fun or interesting.

It would have been cool, I thought, to be able to take a Ride Armor into a boss battle, but I didn't entertain the idea for very long because I knew that doing so was pointless. The Capcom that produced Mega Man X3 wasn't going to allow something that interesting to happen in its game.

Then there was the other end of the scale: all of the unnecessarily complex systems. (Mega Man X3 was the game that I blamed for starting the awful trend of piling in as many complicated systems as possible.)

When I played a Mega Man X game, all I wanted to do was (a) collect Light's four armor upgrades, the eight heart tanks, and the four sub tanks and then (b) advance to the endgame. I had no desire to spend an extra hour locating and obtaining "special" armor upgrades (or the Gold Armor that trivialized their existence), Zero parts, Ride Armor modules, and a dozen other trinkets.

Those additions were excessive, and I had no doubt that their inclusion was intended to disguise the fact that the game was formulaic. Because I'd seen this all before. I knew how Capcom operated. I knew how the company behaved when it was too lazy to create truly evolutionary game mechanics. It would simply throw in a bunch of new items and upgrades and hope that the existence of such would be enough to distract you from the reality that you were playing a game that was virtually identical to the previous one.

"There's no need for any of this extra stuff," I'd always think to myself while I was collecting all of X3's items (because I wasn't able to ignore my completionist urges). "Why not just come up with interesting new level-design ideas instead?"

Well, because it was 1996 Capcom.

Throw in the intrusive sub-bosses with their convoluted requirements and you had a Mega Man X game that was far more complicated than it needed to be.

Playing it felt like a chore.

Also, Mega Man X3 was punishingly difficult. Its enemy rate was so high that I could barely deal with what it was throwing at me. I'd frequently get overwhelmed by the enemy hordes, and usually I'd be in a crippled state before I could even reach a stage's halfway point.

Otherwise, the game was rife with tricky platforming sequences that required highly precise jumps and air-dash movements, and a lot of its special items (heart tanks, sub tanks and Ride Armor modules) were extremely difficult to obtain even when you possessed all of your advanced abilities.

And I remember having a particularly miserable time trying to deal with Sigma's final form, whose weak point was so comically tiny that I almost lost my mind as I struggled to land even a single shot. Had I not discovered some quick-and-easy solutions for refilling sub tanks (like standing still when I was equipped with gold armor), I might have had no choice but to quit and abandon the game and do so for the sake of preserving my mental health.

Very few final bosses had ever infuriated me in that way.

That final battle was more maddening than epic, and the chase sequence that followed was too annoying to feel climactic (and my bad mood only worsened when I died while trying to clear this sequence and had to repeat the entire Sigma fight).

"Why did they make this game so much more difficult than the other two?" I kept wondering as I struggled with its challenges. "Why are they so intent on making each new game less fun and enjoyable than the previous one?"

And the ending scene provided me little consolation. The first problem was that I didn't understand what it was trying to tell me. I wasn't sure why X had to "destroy Zero" to save mankind or where that twist even came from. So I was left feeling empty.

Also, I was tremendously disappointed that the game provided absolutely no follow-up to X2's allusions to Dr. Wilys or Dr. Lights' potential involvement in Zero's creation. Neither the cut-scenes nor the ending had anything to say about the subject. It was as if the entire storyline thread had been dropped. But honestly, that didn't surprise me considering how many times Capcom had played me in the past. I should have seen it coming.

"And what the hell is up with this credits theme?" I wondered in my moment of disillusionment. "Why did they choose to go with a rock variation of Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer?!"

Can someone tell me, please?

And that was my relationship with Mega Man X2 and Mega Man X3. I saw both of them as disappointments. I felt that neither of them lived up to the standard that Mega Man X set or made an effort to meaningfully evolve the series' formula.

I had completely misplaced my faith in Capcom, which I presumed to be a company that was riding a wave of renewed passion and inspiration, and resultantly the only thing that I got was a cold hard slap in the face and the dispiriting message that nothing about the company had actually changed. Mega Man X, it turned out, was merely an anomaly.

To me, the SNES Mega Man X sequels were two of the generation's biggest busts. They were total downgrades. And their existence only served to box the series in and severely narrow its scope.

For most of my life, that was how I regarded them.

These days, though, things are different. My view of these games has changed. At a time when the industry has abandoned the old values and no longer cares to produce challenging side-scrollers, I'm more welcoming of games like them. I see them as having an important role to play. I look to them to provide the gaming world more of what's sadly missing and desperately needed: solid, satisfying 2D action games.

I mean, I still view them as inferior to the original Mega Man X, yeah, but at the same time, I'm now able to recognize that my criticisms of them were a tad excessive. Having played through them again recently, I can say that they're actually pretty good games when you judge them on their own merits. I really like them.

In fact, I now feel the same way about them as I do the original series' post-Mega Man 3 entries: I'm glad that they exist, and I wish that there were more like them. My life would be an emptier place without their presence. And so would the gaming space, for that matter.

I'm happy that they're now readily accessible and that millions of people are now able to easily discover and play them. Because God knows that games of their type are needed now more than ever.

"But what about those other Mega Man X sequels?" you ask with a curious expression on your face. "How do you feel about them?"

Well, my friend, that's a whole other story.