No series filters me quite like Mega Man. I'm already a hater of how lives are implemented in both normal and X MM games. I usually love lives in old games, I love being forced to git gud, I'm a heckin battletoads fan man. But Megaman's lives system has tormented me to no end. But to find out that getting a game over in this one locks you out of completing the stage? It's SO rare for me to say this but I find this truly makes the game entirely unplayable beyond all reason. I hesitate to say because it's such a tired trope to compare difficult things to this particular series, and thus feels like it invalidates anything I say, but like...Imagine if in Dark Souls you died once on the lead up to the fight, then died to the fight 2 times. Then the game said lol you failed idiot you're locked out of this content now and as a result are now weaker going into the rest of the game. Forgive the brief tangent but how is it that people hold decades long grudges against incredibly forgiving Sonic games for having an ounce of difficulty at points but Mega Man's allowed to be actively sadistic at all times and be applauded while doing it? MM fans truly built different, more power to 'em. This is where I draw the line tho I'd sooner learn hardcore Kaizo Mario stuff, this is just cruel and unusual.

But yeah I was able to beat this through the modern collection which added built in save points. Makes the game at least playable. Then it's just the typical MM formula of having extremely easy, nothing levels, capped with trial and error boss fights that are 50 times more challenging than anything leading up to them. Nothing too memorable, there's only like one song in the ost I actually like, the story's really not worth it either. If I was reviewing the modern release I'd probably say like a 2 maybe a 2.5. But playing on actual GBA hardware as was originally intended is truly miserable.

One of the many examples of your average megaman game being impossible to play and X6 being better in every way. Time to do another no-armor X6 run 'cuz that's a solid enjoyable challenge instead of the psychotic, poorly designed trainwrecks seen in so much of the franchise elsewhere.

This came is almost amazing but there are so many issues where it just feels like the dev team needed more time with play testing. The timing is incredibly unforgiving. When I was going through the segment in Neo Arcadia with kinto blocks and being attacked by birds I realized that this is Mega Man X married with Ninja Gaiden and that's not a good thing.

There's no reason to engage with the elemental chips outside of bosses. I do like the stun-lock dance the developers want you doing.

Cyber-elves are idiocy. They're purely a collectible because they're single use. What am I feeding these guys for?

The aesthetics are so on point even if the audio quality is pretty trash. I played this through with the patch that reduced weapon grinding.

Tip for those emulating, use one of the control-types that doesn't require chorded inputs for the sub weapon and just map it onto a face button and put both shoulder buttons to dash, it's a much better experience.

Great art direction, some pretty good gameplay, and just the fact that we got a Mega Man X style experience on the GBA back in the day was pretty cool. A few things hold it back, though: the resolution of the GBA means the camera is zoomed in pretty close to Zero, making it hard to tell what's hazards are about to appear until they're almost right in your face. I'm also not a fan of how grindy the Cyber Elf system is and how harshly the game ranks you. Even if you had a perfect run you will get docked big time for having any health upgrades.