Mega Man X: Command Mission [PS2/2004]

System Played: Playstation 2

Year Released: 2004

Year Reviewed: 2013

Mega Man X: Command Mission is a dungeon crawler-style RPG from Capcom Production Studio 3, sharing an engine and a lot of team members with their Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter game.

The year is still 20XX, and the Communist hunters are again on the trail of a baddie called Epsilon, who is trying to get his hands on some super MacGuffin called "Force Metal" which will grant him Godlike powers and allow him to fulfil his life’s goal of becoming an ultimate dick.

The games box reminds us that this is the first ever Mega Man RPG! (…if you don’t count the Legends games, or about 50 of those GBA Battle Network’s) which means lots of running about, endless/tedious/frustrating random encounters and dull turn-based combat.

The game is split into chapters, at the end of each being a boss fight with an animal themed Robot Master (or whatever they’re called these days), so the structure isn’t that much removed from traditional MM games, it’s just a lot longer and slower paced.

There’s no overworld, instead you get a HUB level with a teleporter for getting between locations.

The Levels themselves are mostly just linear corridors, each having some kind of unique security feature/traps which adds a (tiny) bit of variety to what would otherwise be just hours of identical walls …even if these things are mostly just there to annoy you, resulting in even more battles.

Random encounters occur with a maddening frequency and don’t serve much of a purpose, other than padding out the runtime.

Combat is pretty straight forward and familiar once you get used over the weird nomenclature… which is fortunate, as you don’t get a tutorial. The HUD feels a bit cluttered at first, but you learn the flow of it quick enough. It basically just comes down to taking turns to smack each other as usual, occasionally healing-up.

As well as your main attack, you get the option to use up to two additional sub-attacks each turn, assuming you have enough Weapon Energy (WE) to pay for it. Characters all have ‘Hyper Modes’ as well, which make them more powerful for a couple of rounds. There are some useful ones which you need to exploit to win some of the tougher boss battles, like Axl’s ability to bait the enemy and negate all damage.

Do enough damage in a single turn to knock off over 75% of the enemies shield and you get to perform a ‘Final Strike’. This is basically an overkill move where all your party members get to attack the poor schmo for a couple of seconds, by having you mash away on the attack buttons. It doesn’t really serve much of a purpose as the enemy is likely on deaths door as is. You do get a slight bonus in currency used to merge your Force Metal items (but this stuff isn’t very useful), so the whole thing just comes off as feeling a bit gimmicky …and you actually start to resent it later on when it seems to happen two or three times per battle, dragging out the length of the encounter by a few more laborious seconds each time.

All this might sound a bit complicated on paper, and it is at first, thanks to the lack of tutorials but you get the hang of it eventually. Part of the problem is that they’ve tried to put a Mega Man twist on all the common RPG tropes. Like instead of magic and potions, health is replenished using sub-tanks and ‘viruses’ are cured using ‘programs’, and since nothing is explained to you at the outset, it’s a bit daunting to begin with.

Difficulty-wise, the game is all over the place. Since you don’t heal with consumables you can stockpile, rather a set amount of sub-tank energy which you start the level with, you can find yourself low on reserves by the time you get to the boss (if not before), meaning you’ll likely have to retreat back to base for a top up, and then attempt the level again from the start. You can ‘run away’ from battles, and I never had this fail on me once, so theoretically, you could just keep running (as annoying and time-consuming as that would be) until you make it back to the boss, sub-tanks fully charged, but even when you get there, some of the bosses are extremely tough unless you know what attacks they are weak against. Luckily, gamefaqs’s does!

You can definitely feel the Dragon Quarter similarities in the animation and art-style. The cell shaded graphics have a lot of shadow, which gives the game less of a cartoony feel and a darker, grittier tone. It’s a step up over the 3D models used in X7, but the environments are all just corridors, so nothing to look at.

Cutscenes are pretty clunky and without exception, the script, story and voice over are just awful …again. (Good) RPG’s tend to be more narrative focused than platforming games but don’t expect anything above the usual level of MMX story ramblings from Command Mission.

Zero sounds like a surfer dude (I guess he has the hair for it) and the music is the usual rock/trance noise which all sounds the same to me. The theme over the combat gets insanely repetitive and you’ll probably just want to mute it to avoid this and the voiceovers.

I commend Capcom for trying something different with the tired Mega Man X formula, but at 20 hours, Command Mission feels twice as long as it needed to be, the majority being a pretty boring grind. It barely has a story and the frequency of random encounters is infuriating.

Not absolutely awful, not good either, just …

5/10