Mega Man X5 Masochist Challenge Part 06: Duff... McWhalen...

Ugh.

There's my analysis.

Okay, fine. I'll say something.

Uhh.

It's a side-scroller. No way to really speed things up. This is the stage that a lot of people cite when talking about why they don't like X5. And that's fair. It's not that you have to go through the stage once. I can tolerate once. It's the fact that in a 100% run, you need to go through the stage a total of three times.

The gimmick is pretty fun. It's trying to be different. That's fine. But side-scroller that moves at a snail's pace in a Mega Man game is so counter-productive to everything the X series is all about that I just can't let that pass.

And I've warmed up to X5 recently. I'd even put it before the widely beloved X4.

I respect the fact that a lot of new ideas were tried in X5. It just really needed an editor. It seems like every idea that Capcom came up with ultimately made it into the game without enough thought put into them.

X5 has some of my favorite stages and favorite bosses of the entire series.

But then there's stuff like Alia and this stage right here that make it impossible for me to exactly put X5 on a pedestal. I guess you could say that X5 suffers from schizophrenia; it's not quite sure about what it wants to be. It wants to be a fast-paced X game, as well as a platformer in the vein of the classic Mega Man series, and can never seem to be able to make up its mind.

Sort of reminds me of X3 in that sense. But with less empty stretches with no enemies or obstacles, so that part of it is all dandy.

Another problem with X5 - that's not apparent in this challenge - is that it's like Mega Man and Bass in the sense that there's a serious case of character bias going on here.

X5 is designed around Zero. And no, I don't have any evidence to point to that - it's just something that is so painfully apparent when actually playing the game and studying the level design.

Just like Mega Man and Bass was designed around Bass, even though Mega Man was also a playable character.

This is where X4's level design did the job better: the levels complimented X and Zero equally, and there was no real bias to be found.

But the main core of X5 is still fun. Despite its problems. I just wish it had had a little bit more time in development, so that some of the more grating flaws could have been ironed out.

All that having been said, I appreciate the ambition of X5. After four games that were mostly the same thing over and over, X5 tried to spice things up a little. And that's a daring move when developing a game that's supposed to be the end of the series - not to mention a game that's already guaranteed to make an X amount of money just based on name alone. So I applaud the decision made to take risks.

However, the boss' name here is Duff McWhalen.

Come on, Capcom.