An experimental game on the part of Atlus, Maken X is a solid adventure game, despite it's flaws. It's plot is interesting, and has some unique premises, but falls into the trap of making little sense at time, and being difficult to follow. The characters designs are top notch, and the gameplay is a unique hybrid a fps and combat mechanics found in action adventure games. I personally enjoyed it, due to branching paths which allow for replayability, however, the first person view may not be for some. Better than it's remake of sorts on the ps2, which changes the perspective to 3rd person, despite the combat system being developed for 1st person.

I played a little bit of this and, what a weird game. First person mind control adventure whose reputation for wonky voice acting is perhaps only partly deserved. Some of the voice actors are doing fine and some have clearly been given no direction. Definitely ambitious for the time in its delivery of cutscenes and dialogue. The actual gameplay is very odd, and the difficulty seems to waver wildly; an optional boss I elected to fight was a pushover, while the main story has some much more difficult parts.

There’s also a body-swapping mechanic, “brainjacking,” which while poorly explained initially in-game, robs the people you take over of their “psi,” putting them in a vegetative state whilst outside of your control. One early point sees you deciding whether to accept a mission given to you by a character, and if you accept they offer for you to use their body to do so, knowing full well that it robs them of life. If you don’t accept, they just sort of stand there awkwardly, and it seems that you can either decide to kill them and take their body anyway (which the character you’re sharing a mind with chastises you for) or possibly walk away (I only just thought of that possibility, the game doesn’t make the next objective clear in that case, might have to see what happens there…)

Your first opportunity to brainjack as the player is presented as the only obvious means of progression, but it appears that none of them are actually mandatory, and the character you get there as might in fact be a better choice for the next few missions?

The actual combat is kind of neat, you have a lock on, which makes the single-stick controls vaguely workable. I’d have appreciated a quick 180º turn button, but no such thing is present. Most enemies will take critical damage from behind, so if your character can jump high enough, you can leap over them and attack from there. Once you’re in the rhythm of this it’s pretty fun. Some enemies know what you’re up to and will spin around quickly. There’re also some enemies whose pattern I’ve yet to work out, they attack twice in a row, which your block can’t handle, and they’re very difficult to hit without a ranged attack otherwise. There’s a trick I’m missing there for sure.

Anyway, it’s interesting, and I seem to be doing okay so far. I’m curious where it’s going.

On paper this game seems really really awesome, its plot and worldbuilding are cool, the whole brainjacking thing is a very awesome concept, and just has a lot of that old ATLUS charm. After replaying both this and Shao on the PS2, my opinion has changed radically, and I'm really not sure how I enjoyed it as much as I did before.

Gameplay is a very very early first-person hack and slash type game. (third-person on the PS2, apparently people got motion sickness from the first-person gameplay, which i can understand) My biggest problem with it is that its so tanky and clunky, attacks and animations are so annoying to deal with when you can't combo moves at all (you have a special move list but good luck getting them to work at all lol), and it's the exact same on the PS2, they didn't change anything at all and I find that incredibly stupid. It's better because you can see a lot more enemies on-screen without slowly turning around like a snail, but the clunkiness is still there and it frustrates me.

Oh yeah, and the music is pretty good. I'm pretty sure this was Shoji Meguro's first soundtrack he composed, and he did a damn good job in both versions. Most tracks are able to fit the stages pretty well, and he used some of the motifs for these songs in other Atlus games, which I find cool. It's definitely worth a listen if you're into Meguro music, or Atlus OSTs in general.

I also find it funny how the Dreamcast version has really bad voice acting, but a fine translation, and the PS2 version has fine voice acting, but a really really bad translation. It's weird since they could have copy pasted the whole thing, but nah, they had to redo it and make it worse.

It's hard to decide which version is definitive. They both have their pros and cons, but personally I'd go with the PS2 version since it's easier to see what's in front and behind you, and I prefer the OST as well.
It's quite a shame, if this game was developed in collaborations with other studios who knew how to make games, this could be really awesome.

This is definitely one of the most unique games I've ever played, a first person hack n slash that's like.. 3 - 4 hours long with 20 different endings and it was sick. Controls were the biggest gripe I had with the game since I feel like there should've been a quick turn command similar to a resident evil/silent hill game. There were also some spots where i lost my footing for a second. But other than that this game was just a smooth vibey ride from start to finish, memorable enemies and all of them have different patterns. A boatload of characters to take control of with different abilities and weapons, good level design with a bunch of exploration, and the music is so damn good, has this bad acid trip club rave sound that is very intoxicating. Very good listen. The last quarter of the game gets a little BS with the amount of strong enemies there are surrounding you, yet I still had a great time killing things, I don't think others will like this game as much as I do and I don't care. Good ass game that I'll replay for the other endings due to it's short length.

I played about 2/3 through of this one, but got really sick of it in the end. It’s a first person sword-fighting game, and it's actually pretty fun in 1v1 but falls apart completely against multiple opponents: Your vision range is very narrow, your turning speed is very slow and you’re unable to strafe or quick turn, which means that the very mobile enemies will often get around you while you’re fighting another one and do basically unavoidable damage while you can’t even see them. You can lock on and then begin to strafe, which is fine against one enemy but doesn't hold up in the above situation.

Additionally, enemies with ranged attacks are particularly annoying, because you can't actually move towards them without getting hit (lock on has a pretty short range), which means you can't actually look at them at all until you somehow manage to find yourself in their melee range. There's one boss with a laser attack who just killed me with one attack three seconds into the fight because I made the foolish choice to actually move towards her and couldn't turn and move away from the beam in time once it began hitting me. I guess there's some fun to be had in mastering Maken X, but I don't think it holds up. I dropped the game after being frustrated with most levels I had the ability to play and getting stuck in the Brazil one. I think I was something like 2/3 into the game, so I'm fairly confident that it won't change too much since that.

The game's primary draw is the ability to switch between bodies, and that is admittedly very cool, there's enough difference between characters for the change to make things a bit fresher, but ultimately that can't redeem the fundamentally unfun gameplay. Also, this is secondary, but stages go on forever with no checkpoints and sometimes have annoying gimmicks. They're kinda lame too, I expected something way wilder considering that Kaneko's style is definitely felt in the character designs.

Overall Maken X is just an almost unbearable experience, which is a shame, because despite the laughably awful VA, the story is actually pretty interesting, casting you in the role of a sentient, mind-controlling weapon and giving you a lot of freedom in your choices, leading to a variety of endings. Unfortunately the game was just too frustrating for me to even want to get to one of them. Perhaps someone with more patience could enjoy it. Even then, while I hated it, I keep thinking back about Maken, months later, much more than many games that I adored, ignored or despised. It must have been doing something right, in the middle of the awful design choices. Those aren't going anywhere and neither is my overall opinion, but it's a shame. I wouldn't expect one, but this is one of the rare games that'd definitely benefit greatly from a remake.

EDIT: There's a Maken X manga (Maken X Another Jack) made by the Dorohedoro mangaka and it fucking rules, go read that if you have literally any interest in the game whether you have played it or not.

This game took me a good ass time to understand. It kinda throws you in there and explains none of its mechanics, which are not orthodox by any means. HOWEVER once you start engaging with those mechanics, you find an unique, charming experience with absolutely insane music and phenomenal character/world design. Beating this game was a very memorable experience for me. I take away one star for having to replay potentially 15+ minute long levels every time you die.

Also, definitely 10 times better than the PS2 version.