Shades of Resonance: Disappointment and Regret - Memory Log #52

Mega Man X4, X5 & X6

Let me put Mega Man X2 and Mega Man X3 aside for a moment. Because if I'm really going to talk about Mega Man X games that so inextricably blend together in my memory that I struggle to identify a single Maverick, stage setting, musical piece, or weapon as belonging to any one of them, then I have to talk about Mega Man Xs 4 through 6.

To me, theirs to be a whole new level of indistinguishability.

I'm quite serious: If you were to put me on the spot, I'd be unable to point out the ways on which X4s and X5's plots differ, I'd likely fail to place any of the games' supporting characters, and I'd have to guess as to which soundtrack belongs to X6.

The only thing that I remember for certain is that these three games are practically identical in terms of storyline, visual style, mode of progression, and amount of content. And I lament that fact because it shouldn't have worked out that way. Rather, I should be here talking about my cherished memory of how the PlayStation trilogy of X games built toward the series unforgettable finale.

Sadly, though, I can't do that. Because I have no such story to share.

"So where did it all go wrong?" you ask while bearing a huge frown.

Well, it all started a few days earlier, when Mega Man 8 was failing to set my world on fire. That was disappointing to me because I was hoping that it would be the game that finally evolved the classic Mega Man formula in a meaningful way. What it did, rather, was choose closely adhere to the established formula, whose age was now seriously showing.

At the time, I viewed Mega Man 8 as a disappointingly derivative series entry, and I felt that it wasted the opportunity to use the power of 32-bit hardware to create and showcase newly conceived, boldly innovative design techniques. And as I plummeted into a death pit for, oh, the 50th time during one of those awful "Jump! Jump! Slide! Slide!" segments, all I could think about was how badly I wanted to be finished with the game so that I could move on to Mega Man X4, (which I purchased in tandem with Mega Man 8), for which I had high hopes.

Even though I knew that Capcom was apt to release formulaic Mega Man sequels, I didn't feel as though it was delusional for me to think that Mega Man X4 would buck the trend and do what Mega Man 8 was unable to do: heroically dash its way onto the scene and conjure the evolutionary spirit of its series' amazingly ambitious progenitor!

"It has to happen eventually!" I thought. "So why not now, with this game?"

So the burden fell on Mega Man X4 to meet my expectation.

And, well, the early signs were discouraging.

The first red flag was what I saw when the action commenced. My heart dropped as I gauged what was being displayed on the TV screen and noticed that Mega Man X4 had resolved to replicate not its SNES predecessors' visual style but instead Mega Man 8's!

It had the exact same visual qualities as the latter: Its hero's sprite had a scaled-down, anemic look. Its health and weapon-energy pellets were mundane in appearance and consequently stripped of all character and distinguishability. And it had a generically-styled green health meter that was so much less distinctive than the traditional sliver-based meter, which I saw as an essential part of the Mega Man franchise's fabric.

I mean, the game looked fine, and it animated nicely, but something about its visual presentation felt off to me. I just didn't feel as though it was compatible with the SNES games'. It was too different.

Also, everything about Mega Man X4's level design seemed antithetical to what the original Mega Man X had strongly established: The stages were cramped and linear, and their traversable spaces were often limited to narrow corridors. The action was usually locked to a single screen, and resultantly there was a clear lack of wide-open spaces and an element of exploration. And the game replicated one of Mega Man 8's most egregious transgressions and broke up its stages into separate parts, which, as it the did in Mega Man 8, served to interrupt the action's flow and erode any sense of cohesion.

I'll reprint what I said about this design choice in my Mega Man 8 piece, since it also applies here:

"All sense of logical progression was lost, I felt, when Mega Man suddenly teleported off the screen and then, after a ten-second loading time, reappeared in a completely different area with his health and weapon energy fully restored! This type of level design only served to unnecessarily segment stages and rob them of any natural flow.

Most egregiously, the constant replenishing of Mega Man's health and weapon energy worked to trivialize a lot of the game's challenge. 'Why bother being tactical when the game will reward me for simply tanking my way through stage sections?' I couldn't help but reason."

Mega Man X4 was graphically superior to its predecessors from a technical perspective (with its multiple scrolling background layers and large amount of onscreen activity), sure, yet still there were far too many instances in which its environments felt flat and lifeless. It was all too typical for backgrounds to be visually uninteresting and at times de-emphasized to the point where they desperately lacked for color and detail.

And I just couldn't help but think that this chosen art direction made X4 feel spiritually distant from its predecessors. The SNES games had a patented visual style that just flat-out worked, but for whatever reason, Capcom decided to ditch it and go with a new one that wasn't nearly as attractive.

I mean, I was completely in favor of developers trying new things and shaking up tired formulas, but I wasn't particularly fond of changes that betrayed an original vision.

X4, I felt, was guilty of doing so.

Now, I couldn't deny that X4 had some things going for it. To start, its anime cut-scenes were pretty great. Typically I wasn't a fan of these types of animated scenes, but I really liked X4's (whereas I felt that Mega Man 8's were silly and cringeworthy).

Well, honestly, I was mostly intrigued by their story content. I found it to be very gripping.

I was particularly captivated by the scenes that gave us glimpses into Zero's past via flashbacks and dream sequences. As I played through his campaign, I became riveted whenever I was watching those like the intro scene, in which the silhouette of Dr. Wily was seen commanding Zero to destroy "him" (X, presumably). Later on, I was deeply entranced by a compelling scene that revealed, in great detail, one of the major events that led into the Mega Man X series: an extremely violent confrontation between Zero and Sigma, who at that point were on opposite sides of the conflict. Sigma was the calm, collected champion Maverick Hunter who was tracking down the crazed killing machine Zero.

The implications of these events were obvious to me, and I was excited to find out where all of it was heading.

Admittedly some of the writing and the voice-acting was still far from appropriate, and it only worked to undercut certain scenes.

The worst example (and perhaps the series' most infamous) is the unintentionally comical scene in which Zero expresses grief over the loss of Iris, his female companion, by uncharacteristically breaking down and yelling, "WHAT AM I FIGHTING FOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOR!" His inflection is such that he sounds more like Pee-Wee Herman reacting to someone saying the secret word.

That, I'm guessing, is probably not what they were going for.

Also, X4 had a few interesting level-design gimmicks (some of which, honestly, I only remember after replaying the game in preparation for this piece): There were a stage section in which X found himself under assault by the stage's boss, Jet Stingray, who ran interference by blitzing across the terrain on a Ride Chaser (the hover bike that we hadn't seen since Overdrive Ostrich's stage in X2). There was Slash Beast's in-transit military train with its large laser turrets and legion of patrolling Metalls (I'm biased here in that I've always loved stages in which you travel along the tops of trains or trucks). There was the spiraling staircase that comprised the sprite-layer and background of Split Mushroom's stage, which was memorably unique as a result. And Cyber Peacock's time-based challenges were genuinely new and added some real variety to the gameplay.

These types of creative ideas were so good that they were almost able to disguise their associated stages' cramped, constrictive design and linearity.

And I had no complaints about the game's soundtrack. It didn't have any standout tunes, no, but still all of its compositions were very solid. They were high in energy and as rockin' as I'd expect Mega Man X music to be.

But because it wasn't high-level, I was once again left to wonder why none of the Mega Man X sequels could come close to approaching the original Mega Man X in terms of having incredibly spirited, just flat-out-awesome music.

"Is there a missing creative force?" I kept questioning. "Can Capcom simply not find a composer who's as talented as Mega Man X's?" (According to GameFAQs, though, X1 and X4 share the same composer, so there must have been some other missing ingredient.)

But as yet another underwhelming Sigma battle drew to a close, it was clear to me that Mega Man X4 was about to fall well short of my expectations. It had, disappointingly, chosen to adhere to formula but not even the one that its predecessors had established, no. Rather, it desired to have commonality with Mega Man 8 of all games! It was structured just like the latter, and consequently it suffered from all of the same issues.

And that's how it continued to be for the PlayStation Mega Man games. Homogeneity became a theme for them, and thus they were all haunted by a pervasive feeling of sameness.

That's why I'm only able to remember them as one big inextricable mass.

X4 did, however, have one notable success: It hooked me with its story. By the end, I was very eager to find out how Zero's story arc would play out and what was going to be revealed about his past.

That accomplishment, alone, convinced me that it was worth giving the X series another chance. It earned a sale for the series' next game.

That's correct, yes: I was willing to buy a sequel just to see where the story would endeavor to take us. "And with any luck," I thought, "Inafune and his team will use the time in between games to find the inspiration that they need to craft a gameplay experience that's just as compelling as the story!"

In the days that followed, my feeling of eagerness persisted, and I continued to be genuinely excited about the idea of getting my hands on Mega Man X5, which had hit stores very recently. And because I had no intention of once again being late to the party, I headed over to Amazon.com and placed an order for the game!

My copy of X5 arrived on April 25th of 2001--approximately two months after the game released--and that was significant to me because it was still within the window in which I could take part in the all-important collective experience! "A lot of people are just starting to play this game," I thought, "and it'll be fun to get together with them and share our first impressions and talk about the progress that we're making!"

It felt really good to finally be up to date with the scene!

What pumped me up even more was what I heard when I booted up Mega Man X5 for the first time: the game's incredibly rockin' opening tune!

Right as I began to recognize that the tune's softly toned, melancholic intro was a recreation of Zero's Mega Man X theme, it absolutely exploded into an electrifying piece whose super-charged metal note strings filled me with energy and brought my excitement to a fever pitch!

I barely knew this tune, yet I already considered it to be a serious challenger to Mega Man X's intro, which I'd always felt was the best of its kind in terms of evoking powerful feelings of invigoration and setting the perfect tone for the action.

I'd seen videos of X5's gameplay, so I knew that it was going to be very similar to X4's. Yet I couldn't find it within myself to be disappointed by that fact. Because I expected X5 to closely adhere to X4's formula. So that wasn't where my focus was as I advanced past the title screen.

All I cared about, really, was Zero's story. I needed to know where the game's writers were taking it. That's why I couldn't wait to finish X's campaign: I was eager to start playing as Zero and engrossing myself in his story! (I preferred to play through these games with X and Zero individually rather than swap between them during the adventure, and I always played through them with X, first, because that was the traditional thing to do.)

I didn't care one bit about the rest of the cast (the Colonel, Double, Signas, Douglas, Moe, Larry, Steve, and whoever else) or their uninteresting character motivations, and I couldn't have been less concerned with plot developments that entailed crashing Space Colonies and other emotionally unimpactful large-scale disasters.

I was here for Zero. I was interested only in learning more about his history and finding out how it was going to affect the series' overarching story.

However, as soon as I started X's campaign, my excitement suddenly turned into puzzlement. That happened because the game was chatty as hell. It wouldn't leave me alone for a second.

I quickly became agitated by Alia's frequent transmissions, which were seemingly delivered with the intent of holding the player's hand every step of the way. There were periods in which she'd interrupt the action every ten seconds to notify me of something that was already patently obvious.

"Why is there a hint system in a Mega Man game?!" I questioned in an annoyed manner. "Who do they think they're making these games for?!"

Seriously: The game never stopped interrupting me!

Also, this is where the series started to go overboard with armor upgrades and the number of systems attached to them. None of it ever made any sense to me. I was never sure what, exactly, the designers were going for with these upgrades and systems, and I didn't care to do any research on the matter because I found all of it to be entirely uninteresting.

And in Mega Man X5, there was, additionally, an inexplicable system that allowed you to somehow travel to the game's final area at any time but only under certain conditions.

What those conditions were, I had no clue. And again: I just didn't give a damn. All I wanted to do was jump, shoot enemies, and blissfully dash my way across stages! I wanted to engage in intense, exciting Mega Man action and do so without having to worry that I was going to get a bad ending because I didn't wear Falcon armor exactly six times while I was battling Mavericks whose names contained two Os.

It did make me wonder, though: When did Dr. Light find the time to scout out all of these locations and install all of these upgrade capsules? How did he know to build so many of them? And how is it that not a single being--particularly any of the stages' Maverick guardians--ever stumbled upon one of them?

I don't know, man. It's either that Light was incredibly stealthy or everyone else in this world was dangerously oblivious.

Still, though, I was happy with certain aspects of Mega Man X5. I thought, for instance, that the game was clever in how it was handling Zero's story progression and specifically how it dropped hints and made subtle references that worked to fill the gaps (Zero's initial interaction with the holographic Dr. Light made for a very intriguing scene, though I was a little concerned with what Light's feigned ignorance might have meant for Zero's search for truth). It was the perfect amount of teasing.

And I was so ready for the big reveal, whatever it was!

Also, I thought that the game's soundtrack was pretty damn good, too. It had, in contrast to X4, a few standout tunes, like the powerfully melancholic Zero Space, which provided the endgame stages a stirring emotional energy and a strong air of culmination; the ominous and thunderous 2nd Encounter, which played during the second Sigma fight and gave you the sense that you were engaging a mighty god in a monumental final battle; and the heart-wrenching Zero's Dead, to which you should listen if you ever want to fall into a deep depression.

These were truly some of the most intensely evocative tunes that the Mega Man franchise had ever produced.

I didn't even mind that the composer cheated and brought back Mega Man X's Dr. Light-capsule music and the Bubble Crab stage theme (which now served as musical accompaniment to the equally aquatic Duff McWhalen stage). I felt that both were terrific renditions and that their presence went a long way toward providing the game a nostalgic link to the SNES games, which otherwise, sadly, felt as though they were a world away.

Outside of aforementioned, though, there wasn't much unique about Mega Man X5. From an artistic and design standpoint, it was pretty much interchangeable with X4. It contained similarly cramped environments; the same type of drab, muted background work; and a number of recycled stage gimmicks like speeding across terrain in a Ride Chaser (in one of the most infuriating stage segments ever), traversing your way across moving train cars, and running up a large spiral staircase (whose higher and lower portions scrolled independently to create the sense that the screen was actually spiraling, which was a pretty impressive effect).

I'd seen most of this before.

But like I said: I was fine with that. I expected the game to be formulaic. I was here specifically because I was interested in the story, and I felt that the game had done a great job of building to a climax.

The bulk of the responsibility fell upon the cyber-themed Zero Space stages, which brilliantly created an air of finality and ultimate culmination. Their tunes' melancholic, wistful vibes penetrated my soul and perfectly captured the emotion and anticipation of the moment.

"The end is near," they told me, "so get ready for something amazingly epic!"

And I couldn't wait to see what it was!

Sigma Stage 1's first segment, I immediately noticed, was a clear recreation of Quick Man's stage. Its every platform and structure was remindfully crafted, and its timed insta-kill lasers were still as stress-inducing as ever (and in staying faithful to the design of yore, the game allowed you to use the time-stopping Dark Hold weapon to freeze them!).

And its final room pit me against the shape-shifting Black Devil, which was the most versatile in its line! It was easily the toughest of the Devils. And what made this battle so very memorable to me was its devotion to authenticity and specifically how it was flavored, appropriately, by a rendition of the castle-boss tune from the original Mega Man!

Suddenly I was home again.

"Talk about coming full circle!" I thought to myself.

Sigma Stage 2 continued the theme: It was home to the recognizable Mega Man X fortress boss Rangda Bangda, who functioned as expected. I saw his as another appropriately remindful appearance and a sign that I was now in a phase in which it was all starting to come together.

And Sigma Stage 3 ultimately delivered me into a chamber whose background displayed an instantly recognizable symbol: a giant W, which was Dr. Wily's insignia! Its presence created an absolutely riveting and entrancing air of anticipation, and it provided a sense of enormity to the upcoming X-versus-Zero encounter that I'd been waiting for ever since it was predicted in Mega Man X3's ending scene.

And when I started examining the room's background, I noticed something else: "Those are the capsules from which X and Zero emerged following their respective hibernation periods!" I excitedly observed. "We're about to learn something else about them!"

In that moment, my anticipation-level reached its peak. Something big was going to be revealed after I defeated Sigma. I just knew it!

So here we were. Mega Man X had paid respect to the franchises' three most important games: Mega Man, Mega Man 2 and Mega Man X (those that we regard as the games that are most responsible for bringing us here), and in doing so, it had reminded me of who I was and where I came from.

We'd indeed come full circle.

And what had begun 14 years earlier in that humble little NES action game with the silly box art was about to come to its grand conclusion!

Aaaaaaaaand then Capcom completely and utterly blew it. After spending half a decade hitting me with hints, intimations and illusions, it gave me absolutely zilch.

There was no big twist, no Wily reveal, and no epic finale in which Zero battled and defeated a cybernetically enhanced Dr. Wily and consequently got the answers that he was seeking and finally freed himself from his dark past.

There was no payoff whatsoever. Instead Zero simply died again--for, like, the tenth time--and before doing so, he offered a somewhat-enlightened interpretation of his recurring dream: He realized that he was originally created to destroy Reploids, which we already knew from watching X4's flashback scene.

And that was the last thought that the game relayed to me before a loading screen appeared and abruptly ushered me to the closing credits.

Oh, I knew exactly where this was going, and I didn't like it one bit. "Buy the sequel to see if Zero returns and discovers more about his past!" Capcom was probably going to tell me in the following period.

Because Capcom had played me like this before. This wasn't the first time that the company's propensity for greed and endless repetition had rendered my search for finality a pointless pursuit, no. It had been like this since 1994.

And quite simply, I didn't want to be baited anymore. I didn't want to feel obligated to buy any more Mega Man sequels. I'd had enough of Capcom's practices.

I was done with it.

Mega Man X5 should have been the series' swan song. That final battle should have been the last one ever fought between the heroes and Sigma. That soul-touching, powerfully climactic Zero Space theme should have endured as a musical piece that evoked memories of a series that knew when its time had come.

Instead there was Mega Man X6.

And yeah--I talked myself into buying it. I used all sorts of mental gymnastics to convince myself that it was a good idea to give Capcom another chance. And I put up whatever front that I needed to put up to suppress the feeling of shame that started developing within me as I clicked my way over to Amazon.com and began placing an order for Mega Man X6.

Though, I was well aware that my chosen rationale was anything but sane-sounding. Basically I was still desperately clinging to the hope that Capcom would deliver something that resembled the "epic grand finale" that I'd spent years putting together in my head.

I couldn't accept how it had all gone down--how Zero had anticlimactically died and how all of those allusions to "the doctor" were simply left to our interpretation. I didn't care about Sigma's purple viruses or what they meant to the series' future, no. The only story-driving elements that I desired to see in X6 were (a) an animated flashback that showed us how Zero killed the original Mega Man (which was an event that we all believed to be canon) and (b) an ending sequence in which Zero and X teamed up to battle Sigma and his mystery friend: a cybernetic or holographic form of the still-sentient Dr. Wily.

All I wanted were solid answers and some finality.

That was it.

And I was willing to give Capcom one last chance to provide me what I was looking for.

And, well, that mistake was wholly on me.

Frankly, I was stunned by how aggressively unapproachable Mega Man X6 was. It was rough in so many ways.

To start, the situation with the armor sets and upgrades was now even more complicated. You could play as an unarmored X if you desired to, sure, but you probably didn't want to do that when a number of more powerful armors were readily available. But the catch, you see, was that if you overused a certain armor, you wouldn't be able to obtain parts for another armor that was needed to access a special stage whose navigation was required if you desired to earn the best ending; unless, of course, you chose to wear the fourth armor, which would only be available if you used the third armor but never the second, and access the final stage early. Well, except if you used the fifth armor more than three times on days beginning with T, in which case you were screwed.

"What the hell is going on here?" I confusedly wondered as I desperately tried to comprehend all of this. "Why is any of this 'multiple armor' stuff necessary? Why can't I just play as plain ol' X and upgrade him naturally, like I did in past games?"

Attempting to make any sense out of the armor system only served to make me feel frustrated, so I decided to ignore it and simply play the game however I wanted to.

Also, it was immediately obvious that Capcom didn't even bother to fully localize the game. That became apparent to me when I observed that the game's vocal tunes and (overly long) cut-scenes still featured the original Japanese voices!

"This just can't happen," I thought. "You can't release a game that's obviously in an unfinished state."

Mega Man X6 was clearly rushed over to the North American market (it did release a mere ten months after X5, after all), and that made me believe that Capcom had apathetically dumped it out into the marketplace and that the company's executives no longer gave a damn about the Mega Man franchise or how it was perceived. "There's no reason for us to waste money localizing these games," they probably thought, "when idiots will buy them regardless of how little care we put into their marketing!"

And, well, they were able to rope in one sucker, at least.

But the absolute worst part of Mega Man X6--the principal game-killing element--was its rotten level design. I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that it had some of the most aggravating, torturous stages I'd ever had the displeasure of traversing. They were a horrible combination of overly gimmicked and cruelly designed, and the majority of them were so insanely challenging that I couldn't complete a single one of them even when I was using the best armor.

One of the biggest offenders was Rainy Turtloid's stage, which had a hideously awful dynamic masking effect that randomly darkened 90% of the screen and reduced my field of vision down to a tiny, constantly reshaping screen slice. And on top of that, it tasked me with finding and disarming bombs while enduring a deluge of acid rain that was slowly draining my health. "Why stop there?" I thought after seeing all of this. "Why not also design it to where a giant spring-loaded hammer knocks you back to the stage's starting point any time you touch the ground?"

It was absolutely ridiculous.

And it wasn't long before I reached a breaking point: After repeatedly failing to clear Rainy Turtloid's stage, I went to Commander Yammark's stage. It was, I found, comprised of narrow, enemy-stuffed corridors, and it had, to my horror, that same obnoxious masking effect! And it was so stupidly difficult that I couldn't even make it past the first section! Whether I attempted to cautiously inch my way forward or swiftly tank my way through the stage, I'd get the same result: utter failure.

And after I died about, oh, thirty times, I had enough. I angrily switched off the PlayStation, and then I quickly popped out the CD, snapped it back into its case, and tossed the game into my game cabinet. And I had no plans to return to it. "I can happily live without ever seeing this game again!" I told myself. (Though, admittedly, I did watch some of my favorite YouTube and Twitch personalities play through it.)

Mega Man X6 didn't simply kill the remaining enthusiasm that I had for the Mega Man franchise on the whole, no. It disgusted me so much that it drove me to shut down my Mega Man fan site, which I'd been building for two years. (This was no big loss, really. It honestly wasn't a very good site.)

Because the fact was that talking and writing about Mega Man just wasn't fun anymore.

I wanted nothing to do with the franchise beyond that point. I made the firm decision to avoid the relatively new Mega Man Battle Network and Mega Man Zero series because I knew exactly what would happen to them: They'd be driven into the ground in much the same way. Because that was how Capcom operated.

I became so detached from the franchise that neither Mega Man X7 nor X8 registered as even a blip on my radar. It wasn't until years later that I finally saw them in action. And it was obvious to me that both of them were incredibly mediocre.

Seriously: Damn the suits at Capcom for forcing its development teams to continue pumping out Mega Man X games and trying to wring every last cent out of a rotting corpse. I may not agree with how Inafune and his staff handled the X series beyond its inaugural entry, but I can at least commend them for how they planned to let it die with grace. Good on them, I say, for their objecting to the idea of continuing the series past X5 (Inafune chose not to be involved with X6, and later on, he even apologized for the game's existence). That was the right thing to do.

I was so frustrated with the situation that I didn't play another Mega Man game until seven years later, when I purchased Mega Man 9 for the Wii. That's how detached I grew.

So in the end, the PlayStation Mega Man X became something of a sort point for me. They disappointed me in so many ways. Theirs wasn't the start of a celebrated redemption effort like I'd hoped they'd be, no; rather, each new entry only served to accelerate the downward slide that the series had been on since Mega Man X2.

And I'll always wonder why it had to be that way--why the X series, which started out so amazingly, inexplicably failed to aim higher and instead worked to deny itself the opportunity to reach legendary status.

Resultantly it found itself mired in mediocrity and flirting with irrelevance. And I consider that to be one of the worst things that ever happened in gaming.

There's no saving the series now. It's far too late for that. So all we can do now is wonder about what might have been had Capcom known what it had and given it the royal treatment that it deserved.

Were it not for the existence of this blog and my requirement to replay the games that I write about, I'd probably would have never again revisited Mega Mans X4, X5 and X6. I thought that I'd at least extract some enjoyment from X5, which for years I told myself was a solid game, but after replaying it, I can't imagine why I believed this to be the case (maybe it's that my memories of the game are positively colored by what went on during its endgame portion and how I continued to be so very captivated by the story as it built to its crescendo).

In fact, I didn't enjoy playing a single one of them. Hell--I got fed up with X6 after only a few minutes! I couldn't get its CD out of my PC's disk tray fast enough.

And after I was done putting together the original version of this piece, I told myself that this time, I was truly was done with these games. "I'm never playing or thinking about them ever again!" I vowed.

It didn't work out that way, though. In November of 2020, I decided, after reflecting on the matter for a while, to purchase Mega Man X Legacy Collection 2, which was, at the time, on sale for $9.99. I did so for two reasons: (1) I got tired of hearing that little voice tell me that I wasn't a true Mega Man fan because I didn't play through all of the X-series' games, and (2) I couldn't live with the fact that Mega Man X6 had gotten the best of me.

So I had a strong desire to play through all of the games and take down the ones that I missed in the early-mid 2000s.

And I think it's fair to say that I didn't play through them as much as I suffered through them. I had a miserable time with Mega Man Xs 6 through 8, and I pushed myself to complete them only because I felt obligated to do so. I did it simply because I wanted to say that I'd beaten all of the series' main entries.

Honestly, my experience with X4 was pretty pleasant. It's a fine game, and I'll probably revisit it in the future. But the rest of them? Forget it. I have no desire to ever go near any of them again. I'm done taking their abuse.

Sometimes I wish that the seven X sequels didn't exist and that the original Mega Man X's name wasn't tarnished by its association with a collection of games that simply couldn't live up to it. Mega Man X is a brilliant masterwork, and it provided its sequels an amazing foundation to build upon, but unfortunately, each one of them chose to run from the challenge of meaningfully evolving the formula and contently embrace the safety that was available to it on the ground level.

Why it all went down this way, I can't say for sure. Maybe it's simply the case that Mega Man X set the bar too high. Or it could be that Inafune and his team simply didn't possess the drive or the ambition necessary to top the original work. Or perhaps it's that I'm just fooling myself and the truth is that the Mega Man X series was never meant to be anything more than it was.

Honestly, I don't know the answer. I don't know why history played out the way it did. And sadly, I probably never will.

But there's one thing of which I'm absolutely certain: Each time I play the amazing Mega Man X, I will, as I always have, continue to dream about a reality in which its success bred a series of sequels that relished the opportunity to build toward the stars and proudly carried forward their progenitor's legacy.

Oh what might've been.