Mega Man X6

Mega Man X6 How sad… even the futuristic version of the Super Fighting Robot himself couldn’t escape being in a disaster of his creator’s own making. Genre(s): Action Platform Platform(s): PlayStation Microsoft Windows PlayStation Network Release: PlayStation JP: November 29, 2001 NA: December 4, 2001 EU: February 8, 2002 Microsoft Windows KOR: December 13, 2002 AS: June 13, 2003 PlayStation Network JP: July 8, 2015 PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch MMXLC2: 2018 Developer(s): Capcom Production Studio 3 Publisher(s): Capcom Series: Mega Man Predecessor: Mega Man X5 Successor: Mega Man X7

"I hate this game."

— ClementJ64

"Mega Man X6 is one of the worst videogames i have every played in my entire life. Sonic 06, i play in an instant over this garbage."

— J's Reviews

"So this is it right? It's not exactly a secret that Mega Man X6 is often considered the bottom of the barrel both the X franchise and Mega Man in its entirety."

— SomecallmeJohnny

"I didn't always feel this way towards X6. There was even a time where i praised it as one of the coolest games i've played, but this was back when my age was in the single digits. But come on, a direct sequel to one of my favorite X games at the time, whose plot was a direct result of the events that transpired in X5, boasting an original villain who wouldn't even exist if it weren't for the Eurasia Colony crash? Direct continuity like this is a rarity in Mega Man games, at least the ones that i had grown up with and if the game had a bit more time to cook, then i think that it would have been something truly special, but instead it became infamous for all of the wrong reasons."

— That Trav Guy

Mega Man X6, known as Rockman X6 (ロックマンX6 RokkumanX6) in Japan, is a 2D, Side-Scrolling, Action game made for the PlayStation 2. It is the sequel to Mega Man X5 and the sixth game in the Mega Man X series, released in late 2001 for the PlayStation, and later ported to Microsoft Windows in Korea in 2002. It is the sixth game in the Mega Man X series and the final title in the series to be released for the original PlayStation. The game was later re-released as part of the Mega Man X Collection for PlayStation 2 and GameCube, and it was released on the PlayStation Network as part of the PSOne classics in Japan on July 8, 2015.

Series artist and producer Keiji Inafune was not involved in the game's production, as he had originally intended for the series to end with Zero's death in Mega Man X5. As such, X6 caused a change of plans in the Mega Man X series, since it was originally intended to have Zero resurrected in the Mega Man Zero series.

In 2018, Mega Man X6 was re-released as part of Mega Man X Legacy Collection 2 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and Steam.

Bad Qualities

NOTE: It may depend on your point of view, as it's not a completely bad game and has been quite well received overall, but is considered inferior to the previous games.

1. The inclusion of the sixth entry for the Mega Man X series is incredible unnecessary, as Mega Man X5 was suppose to be the final installment of the Mega Man X series.
2. It was clearly rushed in time for Christmas, as the entire project took ten months to finish.
3. No English dub, voice acting is only in Japanese and it cannot be changed. This is due to the game going through a rushed localization. The voices (possibly due to storage limitations) are removed from the version featured on the Mega Man X Collection for 6th gen consoles (though brought back in the second X Legacy Collection for 8th gen consoles and PC).
4. The controls are incredibly stiff and unresponsive, as they suffer from severe in-put lag and have slippery movement that's hard to handle in most platforming sections, and sometimes, they can make the game very difficult to adjust to and some parts of the game become impossible due to how terrible they are, and they make some stages a chore to complete when combined with the terrible level design overall. This applies to both X and Zero, who handle much worst than previous games and are almost impossible to control due to how fast they move, which can make certain parts like Reploid Rescues a pain due to the terrible controls.
5. The English localization was pretty much rushed. In fact, the Japanese and North American release dates are only five days apart. This also can't be helped by the fact that it was released late in the original PlayStation's lifecycle and the fact that the PlayStation 2 had already been out for a year and the fact that it was released one month after the Nintendo GameCube and original Xbox.
   • Due to this, the game has some incredibly laughable dialogue with no proofreading or copy editing. One infamous example is the scene where X meets Zero, Zero says "I hid myself while I tried to repair myself,". In the original script, however, Zero stated that he does not know how he came back. In a conversation with Dr. Light, is it implied that someone else repaired him.
   • The game has lots of spelling and grammar mistakes in the text, making it hard to know what they are saying at times.
   • They even misspelt the word overwrite! Here, it's written as overwright.
6. It is one of the buggiest Mega Man games, with one glitch that could probably be discovered by anyone. The rest you would certainly have to know how to pull off, however. Some of those glitches may be fixed in the Legacy Collection Fortunately. In fact, the glitches are everywhere but are easily avoidable, but they can hinder the entire game overall, so it's best for players to avoid them.
7. Getting some of the Armor Parts can be a real pain. Examples:
   • In Shield Sheldon's stage, there is a wall (that by the way is no different than any other wall in the stage) that you can go through in order to get the capsule for the Blade Armor Chest Part. The problem is that you wouldn't be able to know that unless you fell into that wall or something.
   • In Rainy Turtloid's stage, the Chest Part for the Shadow Armor is hidden behind two narrow spike-covered passages. To get past you must either have extremely good timing with the Blade Armor's dash, or let an enemy hit you and quickly move through.
   • In Metal Shark Player's stage, you must have either the Ultimate Armor (unlocked via a code), use Ice Burst, or have two specific upgrade parts equipped to even reach the capsule that contains the Shadow Armor Head Part.
8. You can tell also that the developers became lazy. One notable example is after defeating Illumina in Infinity Mijinion's stage, touch the teleporter to go to the alternate route. After loading in, simply go left to find not only a Heart Tank, but also an Armor Part.
9. For the entire game, we were led to believe that Gate would be the true villain, but after the boss battle with him, there is a generic plot twist revealing that Sigma is the true villain again.
10. X's use of the Z-Saber is usually only ever effective when either using a dash to perform slashes rapidly, or when used in conjunction with the buster.
11. If you defeat High Max early on (take a stage's alternate route after unlocking Zero), you will immediately unlock Gate's Laboratory. Not only does this greatly shorten the game, but going there without Parts and special weapons greatly increases the stage's already high difficulty. (see #23)
12. This game was rushed, causing it to have cheap and unfair difficulty, kinda like in Mega Man & Bass (GBA).
13. Some lame, uninspired and/or poorly designed boss battles.
    • Many have very little health and die in under a minute when using the best techniques.
    • High Max is a serious pain in the butt. He hits like a truck, his attacks are hard to avoid, and you need to destroy one of his two shields (or wait until he launches his shields at the sides), hit him with a charged X Buster, then use one of the Maverick's weapons to damage him. This battle can get tedious very quickly, as (A), he takes very little damage from the weapons and (B), you wouldn't be able to even know how to defeat him unless you looked it up or experimented via trial-and-error.
    • Dynamo's battle is alright but was reused from X5.
    • Commander Yammark is a decent boss as his fight isn't cheap and is kind of fun, but he is still an easy opponent as all you have to do is just spam the shoot button over and over again and his attacks won't even hit you. It's the boss that players should fight first.
    • Infinity Mijinion is incredibly annoying as he multiplies himself constantly, making this boss battle very clustered.
    • Ground Scaravich is too easy, as all he does is roll a giant boulder at you. He is also very dumb, as he will continuously roll the boulders, even if you are not in front of him.
    • Metal Shark Player is easy as you can just jump over his dig attack.
    • Blizzard Wolfang is too easy if you're playing as Zero as you can quite literally spam the Z-Buster at him. It also destroys the ice balls that he spews at you. Of course, you would have to know to do this.
    • The Nightmare Mother(s) is/are a humongous pain in the neck as it/they will rarely, but possibly, switch from going clockwise to counterclockwise (or vice versa) with essentially no warning.
    • Gate's battle is X-tremely annoying. You are on narrow platforms and Gate is immune to all of your attacks, including special weapons. In order to damage him you need to wait until he fires an energy ball, then shoot at it multiple times in order for it to split into smaller balls and make Gate hit one of them. This boss is also a pain for the following reasons:
      • As stated before, this battle takes place on smaller platforms, so you must watch you step.
      • Gate has a tendency to not fire energy balls, as he will sometimes spend the battle simply flying around like an idiot.
      • If you destroy one of the energy balls, they can sometimes miss, meaning you must start all over again.
      • As stated earlier, the energy balls will split, and they can hurt you, so you must be cautious to avoid them.
      • Once Gate loses about one third of his HP, he begins using an attack that can destroy one or two platforms. The platforms reappear after a few seconds, though.
      • If you get destroyed at any point, you have to start the battle right from the beginning!
    • The final boss against Sigma is one of the weakest final boss fights in the Mega Man X series:
      • Sigma's first form is kind of neat due to the concept of how Sigma was thought to be destroyed and now has returned all beaten up, but while designed well enough, is much too easy, as he only walks forward and cannot practically deal damage with his body.
      • Sigma's second form is a bit better due to his intimidating appearance and size, the fact that it's slightly harder, and that his attacking, green, Sigma-head-slug enemies drop health for sub tanks if you're having trouble, but it's still too simple. He can fire either massive dark energy balls, huge green laser walls and/or giant green energy beams from his mouth, despite his huge size, he doesn't do anything else. The dialogue after the fight is excellent, however.
14. Some of the stages can be either annoying, tedious or easy. Examples:
    • Infinity Mijinion's stage is nothing but battling hordes of enemies while a giant Reploid called Illumina in the background is firing yellow lasers as you.
    • Blaze Heatnix's stage is little more than a gauntlet of battling five mini-bosses (six if you take the hidden route).
    • In Metal Shark Player's stage, there are many insta-kill trash compactors, and due to a few annoying enemy placements, can cause cheap moments. Thankfully, there is Ride Armor in this stage that stops the compactors.
    • Shield Sheldon's stage is nothing but flipping around mirrors for lasers to fire at the right direction, and while the concept is cool and can be fun, the stage is either extremely short or drags on (alt path) and is easy.
    • In Blizzard Wolfang's stage there are ice physics, avalanches, you cannot wall jump anywhere, there is a section where you need to jump between narrow platforms while avoiding avalanches, and the last part of the stage involves avoiding falling ice blocks or else you get insta-killed. Due to the ice physics, it can be hard to do so.
    • In Ground Scaravich's stage, you need to go through holographic totem poles that take you to a different area in order to progress. While these areas are brief, they are completely random, meaning that if you want to take the hidden route or unlock the Armor Part, you may have to replay the stage a few times.
15. The Nightmare Phenomenons, while you can either use weapons to eliminate them or manipulate them to change, can make some stages frustratingly hard. Examples:
    • If you beat Commander Yammark's stage and then to go to Blaze Heatnix's or Shield Sheldon's stage, you will get surrounded by bug-like mechs that can block your shots. These mechs can only be destroyed with the Yammar Option
    • If you beat Blaze Heatnix's stage and then go to Blizzard Wolfang (as he is weak to fire), fireballs will be raining down all over the place, making it hard to navigate through due to its vertical design.
    • If you beat Infinity Mijinion's stage, Commander Yammark's and Rainy Turtloid's stages will occasionally get enveloped in darkness, making it difficult to navigate.
    • If you beat Shield Sheldon's stage and head to Blizzard Wolfang's or Rainy Turtloid's stage, various holographic Zero/X (depending on who you play as) enemies will appear at random and will attack you in tight situations.
16. Abrupt difficulty spikes.
17. Annoying enemy AI.
18. Crappy camera movements in a handful of areas.
19. The voice acting gets ear-bleeding in the scene after the boss fight with Gate, where he screams bloody murder after being blasted by Sigma.
20. The Nightmare enemies can be incredibly annoying as they can fire small energy balls that can be hard to avoid, and even worse, they can go through solid walls.
21. If a Reploid gets infected by a virus, it is destroyed and gone for the entire game unless you restart the game back up. So if you're too late, you might as well hit Reset because you're screwed!
22. When listening to a Light Capsule, the game will lock your control, and the enemies can walk to you and can damage you.
23. Gate's Laboratory, which is divided into two stages, has several issues:
    • The beginning of the first stage is a part where there are many spiked walls. It is impossible to progress as X unless you either (A), unlocked the Shadow Armor for X to climb the walls, (B), find the Jumper Part to jump higher, or (C), unlocked Zero as he can jump higher than X.
      • Something that should be mentioned about this is that in previous games, Armors and Parts were always optional. (not inherently a bad thing, but many are frustrated by this.) But due to this one stage, if you want to go through as X you are forced to unlock these Parts and Armors. To make matters worse, two of the Shadow Armor parts basically require having the Blade Armor to reach them, so you basically need to unlock all four parts for both armors.
      • Also as mentioned in #11 you can beat High Max early on and skip to Gate's stage, but you wouldn't be able to beat the stage without the Shadow Armor and/or Jumper Parts, making this entire concept of battling High Max to get to Gate's stage early completely pointless.
    • There is another part in the first stage where the game will lock your controls in a small room filled with lava. You would think that there will be some kind of boss fight, but it's really just a pointless obstacle where you must avoid the lava flow that is rising down or up. This caught some players off guard as they would get destroyed by the lava flow at this part because they thought there would be a cutscene or boss.
    • The second stage is actually two stages mixed into one (with two bosses), making it needlessly long.
    • There is one part in the second stage that by default is impossible to get past with regular X or with the Shadow Armor as well unless you use an exploit that requires an air dash or having both the Jumper and Hyper Dash Parts equipped, and abuse of the menus (as well as extremely good timing). This means that if you mess up, you have to exit the stage and pick Zero (who gets an entirely different section of the stage at this point) or a different armor, or find those parts, and go through the entire level as well as fighting High Max all over again. This is odd, given that the Shadow Armor was extremely useful in the first stage due to its abundance of spikes.
24. Despite Zero being at his best in this game as mentioned below, when he returns, no fanfare, or revealing music is heard, he just (in Somecallmejohnny's words) shows up like a office co-worker late for work.
25. A majority of the special weapons in this game are quite weak and nowhere as strong as the other special weapons in previous games, such as Guard Shell (which is easily one of the worst weapons in the entire series due to how useless it is, as it's meant for blocking enemy attacks, but due to poor programming and coding, it doesn't work and the charged version isn't any better either, making the weapon very difficult to use.
26. Some of the Maverick designs are rather poorly made in comparison to previous games, such as Ground Scaravich who looks like a bizzare combination of both Heracross from Pokémon and Toad Man from Mega Man 4 mixed with a Dung Beetle which results in this design being rather dumb looking. The worst offender is got to be Infinity Mijinion, a small Maverick that was supposed to be based on a water flea, but end looking nothing like one. His name doesn't help as well, as many casual players have no idea what a Mijinion is.
27. Speaking of Infinity Mijinion, his theme is blatantly plagiarised from the 80's hair metal classic The Final Countdown by Europe, as evident from when the track begins to play, which bears similarities to that iconic track. Capcom did this without crediting Europe for the track or asking them permission to use a snippet of it, which apparently they didn't get sued for but still.
28. The game was released on the original Sony PlayStation, which was already an outdated console by the time this game was released, as the PlayStation 2 had already released and was an extremely popular console at the time, and since several games were being released on the console and several past games got PS2 ports due to it's popularity, the only reason why the game was released on the original PlayStation was because it was made as a quick budget title and was developed in a vacuum by a small team at Capcom to spite Keiji Inafune at the time, who wanted to end the series with X5 and give Zero his own series as a continuation of the X series, thus proving why this game had no reason to exist at all.

Good Qualities

1. Good graphics though mostly recycled from X4 & X5.
2. The soundtrack is among one of the best the series has ever had (like Infinity Mijinion's stage theme and Sigma's first form's theme).
3. Zero is very strong in this game, he is fast and strong (with some really bad delays in his 3rd slash).
4. Alia gets a lot of character development. She no longer bugs you by calling you throughout stages as you can know ignore popups if you want.
5. The parts/upgrades system has been simplified and along with other aspects, improved from X5.
6. While the process of getting most of the armor parts in the game is a pain, the Armors introduced in this game are quite interesting: The Shadow Armor is totally a great looking one with nice move set as well as sticking to walls and ceilings and being impervious to spikes, and the Blade Armor has a useful multi-directional air dash plus a powerful Giga Attack.
7. If you don't mind using codes, you can unlock the Ultimate Armor before starting a New Game. Said armor makes the game less frustrating and has the very powerful Nova Strike from the last two games and can easily take out High Max (In the main menu, input Left Left Left Right on the D-Pad. A noise will play if you did it correctly. Then select New Game, and you will start with the Ultimate Armor).
   • There is also another cheat code that unlocks the Black Zero armor which gives Zero a defense boost, gives him an extra spinning slash, and makes the Z buster extremely powerful. (Note: Only one of the cheats can be active in a play through).
8. The port in Mega Man X Legacy Collection 2 gives the option to turn off the voices if you like, and has Rookie Hunter mode, which reduces some of the frustrating difficulty for those who want to learn it efficiently.
9. In 2018, a mod called Mega Man X6 Tweaks was released by acediez, which fixes most of the game's padding and limitations, makes adjustments to the stages and bosses to make the difficulty more balanced, and adds some quality-of-life improvements, such as the ability to use the armor parts before completing the armor set, an option to disable the Nightmare Phemonenons, and a completely retranslated script.
10. The Japanese voice acting is kind of okay (at least better than Mega Man X4's English dub).

Reception

Despite receiving mixed-to-positive reviews from critics and positive reviews from gamers, Mega Man X6 has been panned by web reviewers for its poor translation, bad stage design, many glitches all over the place and bland story. It is memorable for being one of YouTuber ClementJ64's most hated games besides Sonic 06, which both coincidentally has the number 6 in their title, as well as also formally being one of YouTuber J's most hate video games.

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