Making a sequel to something that was as radically ambitious as Mega Man X4 is a difficult thing, especially when X4 was the game that it ended up being. How do you even begin to top the awful voice acting and melodrama? The ridiculously high-stakes plot beats? A bevy of new characters who the game doesn't properly establish yet expects you to care about?

X5's reponse to the absurdity of X4 was understandable: simply ratchet it up. Gone are the hilarious cutscenes, unfortunately, but the plot has gotten even more insane. A gigantic satellite/space station named Eurasia (for some reason) is barreling towards the Earth at a whopping speed of fifteen hours until collision, and also X and Zero are having some intense friendship issues for no discernible reason. Sigma is also involved. Two more new characters show up that we are never given any reason to care about. This game additionally has the distinct privilege of being nearly impossible for me to understand. Every other X game's plot was fairly straightforward to me, but this one is conveyed in such a way that I find it really difficult to fully parse. What is the Sigma Virus? How did it merge with Zero? Why did Zero and X stop being friends so suddenly?

This continues into the gameplay: there's an arbitrary level-up system and an arbitrary crafting system. What is the point of these? To have them? Why use regular X when you can use the Fourth Armor, the fully upgraded X, at any time you want? These systems exist simply to exist, grafted onto a perfectly fine Mega Man game.

At its core, that is all this is: a perfectly fine Mega Man game. It just has so much going on that it doesn't seem to want to be one, but it ultimately ends up falling flat and becoming a series of baffling choices.