Rhombus Rota

Mega Man X6 gets a lot of hate and is widely considered one of the worst Mega Man games but I really enjoy it, at least with the Tweaks rom hack that tidies the game up a bit. You could consider it unfair to judge the game based on a fanmade rom hack but I don’t really care. If there’s a way to get more enjoyment out of the game then I’m gonna go that route, especially since the Mega Man series has a bunch of enhancement hacks that the fanbase consider as replacements for the originals, like the X3 Zero Project and X5 Enhancement Project.  I’m just gonna run through the game and highlight everything that I love about Mega Man X6 (Tweaks).

Starting with the intro stage I think this does a really good job. You get to learn how to use the saber as X and that’s just one of my favorite things about this game. It’s so emotional to have X go on to use Zero’s saber after his death. They’re just so in love. X isn’t as proficient with the saber as Zero was but he can still dash cancel with it, making it really useful and fun to use. Another thing I like about the stage is that you can blast through it pretty quickly on subsequent playthrough by just damage boosting through the timed obstacles. This gives you less health for the boss fight but you really don’t need it.

Commander Yammark is a good stage to start with. The stage is simple, without any gimmicks so you get a little longer to figure out the new mechanics. It’s not too tough either. The giant mantis enemies are kind of annoying but you can make quick work with them if you’ve figured out how to saber dash cancel. There’s a sub-tank and very useful part upgrade here that you can’t reach yet so we’ll have to do some backtracking but I don’t really mind that when it allows us to get one of the more useful weapons this early on. It’s a shield that isn’t the most helpful or anything but you can still use your X-buster when it’s activated and it has a lot of ammo so you can have it activated for most of the stages. Yammark himself is tough but certainly doable as your first target. Even after playing through the game a bunch I still died to him once during this playthrough and I only had a slither of health left when I did defeat him. Most of the bosses are balanced well so you can beat them buster (and saber) only. It won’t be easy but it won’t be frustrating either.

After beating your first maverick the nightmare effects become active. These are one of the most hated aspects of the game but the Tweaks rom hack allows you to just turn them off completely in the options, which is what I’ve been doing until now but for this playthrough I left them on because I wanted to see if they were really as annoying as I had been led to believe. My plan was to go after Shield Sheldon next and his stage was one of the ones that were infected with the nightmare virus so it was a good opportunity to see it in action. The nightmare effect for this stage was these little bug enemies that you can only destroy with your special weapons. They didn’t really leave any impact though, I didn’t even realise you could destroy them until I was halfway through the stage but they barely harmed me. Sheldon’s stage is one of the weaker ones in the game. It involves a bunch of these laser puzzles that aren’t too bad or anything, they just get kind of dull on repeated playthroughs. I intended to take the alternate route but I kinda went on auto-pilot and went straight to the boss. Sheldon himself is an okay boss. I like dodging all his attacks when he bounces across the room but you don’t get many opportunities to counterattack so the fight is kind of long. After beating him I ran through the stage again to take the alternate route and fight Nightmare Zero. He’s easy but it’s still a fun boss fight. Getting an X vs Zero saber duel is just cool. After this encounter it’s revealed that the real Zero is still alive and you unlock him as a playable character. This feels a little cheap storywise but I think the trade off is worth it when you consider how much fun Zero is to play as.

I immediately took Zero into Rainy Turtloid’s stage. The nightmare effect was active there too, which had soul bodies of X flying around the stage to attack me. These definitely were more effective than the bugs since they were actively attacking and did a lot of damage, one of them even knocked me into a bottomless pit. I didn’t think that they were especially annoying though and even if I did there were plenty of other stages I could have entered instead. Even disregarding the changes made in the Tweaks rom hack I think the nightmare’s impact on the game has been grossly overstated. I really like the gimmick of Rainy Turtloid’s stage. There’s acid rain which does chip damage to you until you destroy the generators to stop it. After each of these sections you recover all of your health so it allows you to play a little recklessly. The boss himself is also one of the most fun in the game. You have to break the little crystals on his shell before he becomes vulnerable but then he’s open to being destroyed with saber dash cancelling.

Rainy Turtloid gives you Zero’s best technique, Ensuizan. It’s this big spinning attack that has great range and damage! I went to Ground Scaravich’s stage with Zero to play around with his new move. Unfortunately this is one of the worst stages in the game with some of the best upgrades. Playing through the stage is fine but it’s gimmick is that there are teleporters that take you to random areas and you don’t end up playing every area in a single run. This means if you want the upgrades that are in these areas you have to replay the stage (sometimes more than twice) and hope you get lucky. You can just kill yourself to reset the teleporters but I didn’t discover that until this playthrough and it’s still a waste of time. Luckily this playthrough I got all three upgrades I wanted in a single run but that has never happened to me before so I wouldn’t count on that happening again. The boss is good though. He rolls up this big ball of scrap because that’s what dung beetles do with… well dung. It’s fun to see how big this ball can get as it grows throughout the fight, becoming trickier to dodge each time..

One of the upgrades from Ground Scaravich’s stage was the speedster part which boosts your movement speed so you’re essentially dashing all the time. This is not only super fun but essential for collecting some other upgrades like the equally useful life recover part back in Commander Yammark’s stage so I returned there as Zero to collect it. Whilst I was there I took the opportunity to explore the alternate route and fight the second alternate boss, High Max. He’s super tough but I actually think that he’s a very fun boss fight. He showed up in the intro stage as an undefeatable boss so getting to rechallenge him essentially whenever you want to is a fun challenge you can set for yourself. He gets a lot of anger thrown his way since you can technically fight him before you have any special weapons or any way to beat him but the chances of doing this accidentally are really low. Most of the alternate routes are inaccessible without certain upgrades.

I went to Blizzard Wolffang’s stage next as Zero because I thought it had an armor piece for the blade armor that I wanted but it was actually a piece for the shadow armor. This brings me to an aspect of the game (especially with the Tweaks rom hack) that I really love. This is the first game in the series to really do multiple armors right. X5 had a full armor given to you at the start of the game and two more you could collect the pieces for like this game but there the fourth armor that you start with was just as good as the unlockable ones so I tended to just stick with that since the hassle of getting the other sets weren’t worth it. Here the blade and shadow armors are both improvements over the falcon armor so you actually want to unlock them. The Tweaks rom hack allows you to use whatever pieces you’ve picked up rather than needing the full sets so that allows a lot more freedom to choose which armor set you want and go after that one first, which is what I tried to do here but I wasn’t able to remember which stages had what from memory. This system does get a bit confusing like that but the freedom and complexity it provides more than makes up for it in my opinion. Back to Wolffang’s stage I quite like it. In some ways it feels like a harder version of the intro stage with all the timed obstacles that you can damage boost through if you’re willing to risk having less health. Some of the platforming here is really tough but it’s really fun, especially with the mobility of the speedster part and Zero’s double jump. Wolffang himself is similarly tough if you don’t have his weakness, which I didn’t. His boss fight is still fun though because of how agile both the player and the boss are.

Metal Shark Player’s stage is another contender for the worst in the game and I probably would call it the worst now that I know that you can reroll the randomisers in Ground Scaravich’s stage. This stage has a crushing ceiling so you have to make it to lower ground and duck before you get crushed. This doesn’t sound too bad but if you let go of the crouch button or get hit by a stray projectile you’ll spring up and die instantly. That along with the sparse checkpoints make this a slog to get through. The speedster parts make it a lot easier but even then there are some frustrating sections like getting into the alternate route where you barely have enough time to get through, even with the speedster part! I managed to get through on my first try this run though and grab the shock buffer part, which halves your damage taken, making it another one of the best parts in the game. After you’ve beaten High Max you’ll always encounter Dynamo from X5 as the boss of the alternate routes. It’s a fun cameo but the boss is essentially the same as the one from X5. It’s fun but not especially challenging or memorable. Metal Shark Player’s fight is similarly just fine. You spend most of the fight trying to figure out what the heck a Metal Shark Player even is.

Infinity Mijinion’s stage is ok. A big ass robot is in the background shooting lasers at you throughout the whole stage but if you keep moving he’s not a huge issue. Besides that the stage is pretty simple. I think the boss fight and upgrades make up for that though. In the alternate route you get a heart tank and the arm piece for the blade armor. After getting this I usually ditch the falcon armor entirely. The added defence is nice but its charge shot is puny compared to the blade armors. Infinity Mijinion is a fun fight. He spawns a bunch of copies of himself and they all shoot bubbles at you, it gets chaotic but it’s fun destroying all the bubbles whilst also trying to keep track of which Infinity Mijinion is the original among all the clones. Beating him gives you Zero’s second best technique, rekkoha. This is a screen nuke that you can use multiple times! Easily the best giga attack in the game and pretty much essential for the next stage.

Blaze Heatnix is the final maverick I had to go after and his stage is a pretty good approximation of the game as a whole. It’s something I can’t really call well designed and it can be pretty tedious but it can also be a lot of fun depending on your setup. The gimmick of this stage is that the big doughnut miniboss keeps reappearing throughout and you have to fight it over and over again. This seems like it would be a massive pain and it will be until you discover that the giga attacks absolutely destroy them. This is why I said that rekkoha is basically essential for this stage. With that technique you can breeze through all the encounters and it feels really satisfying. Heatnix himself is a fun boss with attacks that are fun to dodge and he gives X his best weapon in the game. The magma blade is essentially just a buffed up saber which I already loved to use. Beating this stage also resulted in one of my favorite additions to the Tweaks rom hack, the end game armors. In the original X6 you could unlock X’s ultimate armor and Zero’s black armor by inputting a cheat code at the main menu, which still works here, but in Tweaks you can also unlock the armor sets normally by collecting 6000 nightmare souls. This just feels really good both mechanically and narratively.

This brings us to the Gate’s Lab stages which have been lambasted as frustrating messes but again I don’t think they’re too bad, at least not in the Tweaks rom hack. There are a lot of spikes but you can just use the shadow armor which is immune to spikes or Zero with his double jump if you really want help avoiding them. It could be argued that you shouldn’t have to play as certain characters to get through but you certainly can get through as X with the blade armor, it’ll be tougher but if you’re going to deliberately hamper yourself and not use all the tools the game has given you then of course you’ll have a more difficult time. There’s one section I used to really hate where the fire rises from the floor and you barely have enough time to escape it but it turns out that all you need to do is scale the wall and the fire will fall back down so that part is actually really easy, I was just being stubborn. The first boss fight of Gate’s lab is really tough. It’s the hardest boss in the game actually and that’s with it’s health cut in half by the Tweaks rom hack. That being said, I don’t think it’s a horrible boss fight or anything. All of it’s attacks are dodgeable and you have both of your subtanks and the health recover part to help you. I also really love it’s design, it’s a gross combination of mechanical and organical parts, like a dark reflection of the reploids. It’s just good visual storytelling, which has always been the most effective storytelling in this franchise.

The fight against Gate himself is just ok. Again I don’t really agree with the general consensus that this fight is boring or frustrating. I will admit that it can be kind of slow since you can only damage Gate by hitting his attacks back at him so he entirely dictates the pace of the battle and will sometimes just move side to side. I’ve never found the fight to drag on too long though and I’ve certainly never been overly frustrated with it. Whilst the execution isn’t perfect I really like this fight conceptually. I like how it’s based more on positioning than anything, that suits Gate’s character as a scientist rather than a combat robot. I also love the design of his armor. He has the feeling of a character you could play as yourself. I do like Gate as a villain so it’s quite disappointing when you defeat him and Sigma is revealed as the final villain like in all of these games. I haven’t talked much about the story here because I think this is long enough as it is but in short I think it’s full of interesting ideas and lore additions like Gate and how Isoc is clearly Dr Wily from the classic series but I think it’s a little overly wordy to keep my interest. I planned on watching all the cutscenes and talking about the story more in depth here but halfway through the game I lost interest and started skipping them. I ultimately felt that reviving Zero was a good decision for the gameplay benefits even if it harmed the story but I can’t say the same for Sigma here. His boss fights are a joke. You can sweep through them really easily and it leaves me wishing that Gate was just the final boss, then he could’ve gotten a cool second phase.

Wrapping this all up, yeah I love this game. It has issues for sure, it’s messy and rushed and there’s some irritating sections you just need to learn how to navigate but I think it’s a short enough game that learning it doesn’t take very long and the process of doing so is immensely satisfying. I don’t really care to convince anyone that this game is actually a hidden gem but I wanted to shed some light on it’s fun qualities. I know that I avoided this game for a long time because of all the horror stories I’d heard but after actually playing it I found that I really liked it. It’s certainly not the best X game, I’d even still say it’s one of the weaker ones but a weaker entry in a series I love is still a very good position to be in

References:

Mega Man X6 (PS1, 2001)

Mega Man X6 Tweaks (PS1, 2018)

Mega Man X3 (SNES, 1995)

Mega Man X3 Zero Project (SNES, 2012)

Mega Man X5 (PS1, 2000)

Mega Man X5 Enhancement Project (PS1, 2019)

– Mark