<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>In short, this was a game that aspired to be like Megaman Zero (1) that turned out more like Final Fantasy X2 (YRP = XAZ). This game, on Hard, repeats every single mistake the Megaman genre has ever made except that it didn't have Sera's laser of death + HPs that will last 20 minutes of continous fire.
Axl is way overpowered. He's got the best shield breaker move (Blast Launcher) and he's got better range than anyone (Black Arrow hits pretty much anywhere, horizontal or vertical) and something like his first 8 hits ignore invinicibility frames. There are only two things I can think of that Axl can't do. First, X can get armor via the usual capsules while you need to find the rare metal and shell out 15K for Axl to do the same. Second, Axl is pretty slow at killing regular enemies unless you switch to Blast Launcher, which is not really effective on bosses, so unless you want to pause the game every 2 seconds it's easier to use someone like Zero on Avalanche Yeti, the only boss fight that you also have to knock out some regular enemies (the snowflakes) at the same time. Zero badly needs some range on his weapons. X I never used, because he's boring and really should be retired, ala MMZ.
The one part X8 got right is that the battles are sort of pretty well scripted like FFX2. By that I mean the battle actually appear to have a beginning and a conclusion, not just some set of action you repeat until the boss's HP goes to 0. Like FFX2, the integration of voice into battles is quite good. The final battle has a pretty impressive background and most importantly isn't some techno-fortress like every other X game.
I said X8 aspired to be like MMZ1, so hopefully this means the plot might actually go somewhere. But so far there are no signs of Omega or Dark Elf, and I really don't think X series is capable of coming up with a better opposition than either of them. The plot is old hat if you've played any of the X games, i.e. X crying about how life sucks and whatnot. They said Sigma's really gone for sure, but then I think they said that for every other game, and according to Z series Sigma doesn't stay dead until the Dark Elf was completed. Some consistency would be nice, really...</div>
Axl is way overpowered. He's got the best shield breaker move (Blast Launcher) and he's got better range than anyone (Black Arrow hits pretty much anywhere, horizontal or vertical) and something like his first 8 hits ignore invinicibility frames. There are only two things I can think of that Axl can't do. First, X can get armor via the usual capsules while you need to find the rare metal and shell out 15K for Axl to do the same. Second, Axl is pretty slow at killing regular enemies unless you switch to Blast Launcher, which is not really effective on bosses, so unless you want to pause the game every 2 seconds it's easier to use someone like Zero on Avalanche Yeti, the only boss fight that you also have to knock out some regular enemies (the snowflakes) at the same time. Zero badly needs some range on his weapons. X I never used, because he's boring and really should be retired, ala MMZ.
The one part X8 got right is that the battles are sort of pretty well scripted like FFX2. By that I mean the battle actually appear to have a beginning and a conclusion, not just some set of action you repeat until the boss's HP goes to 0. Like FFX2, the integration of voice into battles is quite good. The final battle has a pretty impressive background and most importantly isn't some techno-fortress like every other X game.
I said X8 aspired to be like MMZ1, so hopefully this means the plot might actually go somewhere. But so far there are no signs of Omega or Dark Elf, and I really don't think X series is capable of coming up with a better opposition than either of them. The plot is old hat if you've played any of the X games, i.e. X crying about how life sucks and whatnot. They said Sigma's really gone for sure, but then I think they said that for every other game, and according to Z series Sigma doesn't stay dead until the Dark Elf was completed. Some consistency would be nice, really...</div>
