I may be a bit spoiled coming off of games like Planescape Torment or Deus Ex, but I do feel like Bloodlines is maybe a hint too restrictive in its design- a lot of the stats are nearly useless or at least pretty niche, a lot of the vampire abilities are kinda lame-ish and much of the endgame can only really be completed with combat or a mix of stealth and combat- I understand that the game had to be rushed but I did still walk off Bloodlines wanting just maybe a hint more of what it had (Probably worth a replay, then, with the Plus Patch this time).

Still I did really like what was there. There's some real good atmosphere, some amazing worldbuilding (Although I'm not familiar with VtM so I'm not sure if it is mostly thanks to Troika or the source material), and generally very high tier quests, though I do feel the game peters off a bit near the end.

Mega Man X was a series in a somewhat privileged position of being both a subfranchise of something institutional AND built on the back of its own titanically successful and acclaimed first entry. The question of what IS Mega Man X exactly is one that’s been on the table from the beginning and it’s a blessing and a curse. Is it the new flagship evolution of Mega Man or a spinoff? Is it a killer app franchise for the Super Nintendo or another jewel in Sony’s growing crown? Are we dedicating ourselves to narrative in these games or not? Is this series where we play with the possibility space in terms of gameplay in the Mega Man framework? The answer to all of these questions, basically, has always been both yes and no, and in my opinion it’s paid off a lot more often than not so far. Here at what is very obviously a finale, even though very soon it will turn out not to be one, the successes are perhaps more mixed than they’ve been at the series’ highest points, but swinging hard and only connecting halfway is something I admire in a series as famous for its overblown stagnation as it is for anything else.

X5’s narrative is a lot like its gameplay, in that it’s not doing much new for the series but it IS coloring in the lines with some fresh ink. Sigma’s back and this time he’s got a VIRUS except I guess the virus was a thing this whole TIME and it was ACTUALLY the thing that makes people maverick and not the fact that they’re mad about being slaves, which is a stupid fucking choice but WHATEVER it’s Mega Man X it’s hard to be super mad about that particular aspect of these games five deep. In classic MMX fashion, though, the mechanics of the Sigma Virus are extremely, vague, like it also is said to be like harming the environment somehow? It’s the thing that destabilizes the space colony? It seems to have something to do with Zero’s mysterious past (mysterious if you’re five years old I mean), even though Sigma is surprised when he puts together Zero’s origin at the end of the game? Who can say, these things don’t really matter. What matters is the tutorial level ends with a giant Sigma face bursting out of the statue of liberty and then when you blow it up that like, triggers a colony drop or something? I forget the exact mechanics, but it spreads the Sigma Virus all over the world AND starts the countdown for a big orbiting space colony to crash into the earth, which seems needless when you’ve already turned basically everybody on Earth into a Maverick which as far as I know is what he wants??? THIS IS A FOOL’S ERRAND NONE OF THIS MATTERS.

What matters in this game, basically, is X and Zero concluding their character arcs, for a loose definition of those terms, and I think that as low as the bar I’ve set for this series is, X5 clears it. This is the first time these stupid boys and their melancholy has actually had any heft to it, and a lot of that has to do with the stakes of the game. All the stuff that we’ve come to expect from an X game is here: X is upset that he has to kill people who won’t listen to him, aware that the cycle of violence he perpetuates is cruel but unable to appreciate how needless and evil his position as an enforcer of the state is and that that is a primary driver of the misery he loathes. Zero may understand things better or he may not but he doesn’t care, really. He wants to do the job and go home, even when the home he wants to go to at the end of the day is increasingly ruinous; his characteristic angst and introspection seem more justified here in a truly apocalyptic setting as it seems the questions he’s always had about himself are taking on a global importance.

What sells this stuff so much better is the borderline abject bleakness of the game. The framing device for why you’re going from stage to stage has nothing to do with hunting and killing guys for maybe the first time in the series; instead you’re going around to collect parts to enhance the ramshackle rail gun and space shuttle the heroes have cobbled together in a desperate bid to shoot the falling space colony out of the sky. The entire game is haunted by the timer counting down to the impact, losing an hour every time you enter a stage. Every time though, X or Zero are met by the people who live in or own the places you’re going to, stealing from essentially, and some of them are typically MMX villains, maligning their place in society but framed as worthy of dismissal by the game because they’re also bloodthirsty mavericks. Just as many, though, are guys who sincerely would want to help with the effort to save the Earth if not for the fact that they’ve been affected by the Sigma Virus too, and they’ve been taken by it, or they feel it coming for them, and they ask to be put down. That’s the world we’re all fighting to save. One where, as far as we can tell, almost everybody is like this now. According to the text of the game we’re just all fated to be evil killers. It seems like this is reversed in the endings but it’s not REALLY addressed? It’s entirely possible it’s only the people in the heroes’ bunker who escaped. I’m sure this is all completely swept under the rug in Mega Man X6 but in a game that is widely known to have been intended as a series finale it’s a dark spot to leave things on, even when the good ending leaves off on a Mega Man Carries On The Fight note.

I don’t know how much there really is to say about what HAPPENS in the game. They pay off the X vs Zero fight that they’ve been teasing since X2 in the most comically anti-climactic way possible UNLESS you’re on the path for Da Bad Ending which you basically would have to be trying to do on purpose even given the random elements of the game. There are some new characters here, the most impactful one being Alia, the boys’ new Support Radio Guy, and from a narrative perspective I like her a lot, she gives a lot of color commentary on the world which I appreciate and again think enhances the general atmosphere of the game. There’s also this guy Dynamo who is like the secondary villain of the game and he is extremely funny he gets hyped up super hard but he only exists to be the Between Stages Miniboss that Mega Man games like to do, you fight him twice and he’s just gone he’s completely a non-character I love him, fucking loser.

I think this might be a hot take but I think the presentation is pretty great here too. I’m not sure WHAT happened between X4 and now beyond a general uptick in output of both Mega Man games and Capcom games in general in the late 90s/early 2000s, and maybe the looming hardware changeover had something to do with it, but it’s clear there’s less money on the screen here than in X4, which was a lavish production. X5 by comparison does come off looking a little shabby. Sprites that are carried over from the previous game look about as good as they did there which makes it even more noticeable that new ones, while beautifully drawn, animate a lot more stiffly and with fewer frames. Colors pop just a little bit less. They repeat the rotating staircase background in one level and it’s been completely biffed, the perspective is entirely off. Probably the most immediately obvious thing is that hand animated and voice acted cutscenes are OUT, replaced by sprite slideshows and text boxes. I can’t say I miss the anime cutscenes? The new ones are well drawn, and the music and slideshow animations pull enough weight that I didn’t mind at all that a lot of the big ones are digitized cells now instead. I honestly think they fit the tone a little better.

This extends to the play as well. I’ve decided that these PS1 era X games are not my favorites in the series in terms of game feel but X5 offers a LOT of options for tinkering with the way characters move and feel. I think it works out better than X4 in that regard even if the individual level designs aren’t as strong. They repeat a lot of gimmicks which is fine. I’m on the record as preferring this style of giving every level a specific gameplay hook in addition to an aesthetic one, and X5 keeps the variety up throughout. It’s a strong sleight of levels on paper kind of hamstrung by so-so implementation. A really good autoscroller rendered impotent by being too slow to be challenging; switch-based door obstacles that slow things down but don’t require effort to solve; a gravity swapping mechanic that is cool to look at but doesn’t meaningfully affect the way that you play. It’s not a DESERT out there – Burn Dinorex’s stage has a path split in the second half and both paths are cool, with one being a really challenging autoscrolling miniboss fight and the other being the game’s ride armor power fantasy segment. Cresent Gizzly’s stage is a fast-paced series of segments where you jump from truck to truck as you destroy them and it just feels sick. It’s a mixed bag with high highs and very medium lows which is a pretty good spot to find oneself in.

Surely though no one can talk about Mega Man X5 without spending some time talking about the veritable cavalcade of new and mostly very weird mechanics that it slathers over the top of the Mega Man formula to what I would call largely positive outcomes. The biggest one is the aforementioned ticking clock that hangs over the majority of the game; once you stop the threat of the colony in-universe that does go away and you can peruse the stages for collectibles at your leisure. Along with the timers the bosses all have a power level that goes higher the longer you take to beat them. I THINK this only affects their health? It’s a weird choice. When you refight them at the end of the game they’re all level 96 it’s truly tedious. However, if you get a good rank on their stage or fight them at a high enough level you can be rewarded with parts when you beat a boss, which can be developed in your hub menu into equippable items that change all kinds of parameters on X and Zero. They take two in-game hours to develop and you’re limited in equips but they affect shit like movement speed, special moves, attack potency, it’s really versatile. That’s another thing: rather than having separate campaigns, you select X or Zero at the start of every stage and levels are CLEARLY designed with one or the other in mind. It’s never as bad as say, Mega Man & Bass but you can spot it. Zero also just fuckin eats every boss in the game for lunch, tears through them like tissue paper, it’s bananas. There are little guys throughout the stages that you can go out of your way to save and some of them are tricky. There are RNG elements to multiple story points for how things will play into like three different endings. There’s so much WEIRD SHIT going on in this game and you can ignore basically all of it. The only really obtrusive new addition is that Alia interrupts you in every stage with the world’s most obnoxious text box tutorials which are never helpful and a very baffling thing to start doing in game 5 or like, 17 depending on how you’re looking at it.

That one frustration aside though I came out of X5 a lot more positive than I was expecting, given the general reputation of the latter half of the X series. It tries some new stuff and it’s almost entirely successful, which is never a guarantee when Mega Mans go out on a limb. Way more impressively though it ties the story and characters of the X games (well, mostly Zero, come on), which is, generously, a stupid heaping mess that I hate, into something that resembles a satisfying ending. We all know it’s not in any way an ending and that it would go on to have two separate continuations, the well-liked Mega Man Zero and the uh, well, Mega Man X6 is famously the sequel to Mega Man X5. I hope I like that one too! But on its own terms, taken for what it is, I think what we have here is very cool.

After the banger that XIV was, I'm kind of let down with this one a little since it feels like they took one step forward but a couple of steps back

First of all, the roster. What the hell, only 2 newcomers? Seriously? Why is the slogan "Shatter all expectations" when the entire roaster is probably one of the most predicable in the series? Ok, K9999 coming back is unexpected, I'll give them that. That's it. The DLC characters are fan favorites, so no surprises (so far)

Second, the gameplay. I didn't have any issues with how XIV played, so most of these changes are okay but not really necessary imo, but you gotta differentiate the entry somehow. Shatter Strike is fine, that's really it.
It's still a KOF game, so it's fun as heck. EX moves outside of MAX mode gives the game an easier way to combo, making it also more fun to just making up links and routes on the go. MAX mode itself it's easier too (maybe EX moves have become way too common, but that's nothing a future patch can't tweak)

My only actual negative critique with the game is the online modes. Rollback is a nice addition, sure, but not only is kind of hard to get an stable match (between friends from my country I still get random rollback spikes for no reason) but also the actual lobby system in this game is a big downgrade from 14. No simultaneous matches? No free typing in chat? No small groups divided in the type of match that you want to play? And you have to close the lobby if you want to edit anything major... Why?
Also, the matchmaking is still broken. And crossplay is coming to the game, so if they don't fix that, it's gonna be a bigger problem.

You can tell this game was affected by the global pandemic and it shows. Otherwise it's a pretty solid fighting game, tho they played it way too safe for my liking. I'm interested in seeing it evolving however.