Mega Man X7

Everything about the gameplay is horrible. It doesn't feel good to control; the main characters themselves are bad enough but the vehicle sections are even worse. They didn't really put any thought into how ranged weapons would work in 3D space, so they just let you lock onto enemies, even in side scrolling sections.

The intro stage is one of the worst in the series. At the end of the first 3D section there's a door that can only be unlocked after doing a weird little "puzzle" that acts as a check to see if the player understands how the lock on function works. Metroid Prime starts with a similar target practice "puzzle", and putting the two side by side just shows off how bizarre and unintuitive X7's lock-on system is by comparison. Then, in Zero's portion of the stage, there's an area where the screen won't scroll until some number of enemies are defeated, and they just spawn right on top of the player.

The cutscenes are atrocious, whether they're pre-rendered videos, text over images, or made with the in-game graphics. There's an early cutscene, right after beating the intro stage; a text box appears at the bottom of the screen as an image sets the scene. Axl is already in the image, but a second render of him is overlaid on top of the main image when he speaks. By the end of the cutscene, Axl, Signas, X, and Zero are all rendered in front of the background image, and they're all in random poses completely ignoring any context of the conversation or framing of the scene. There's a level transition where the camera just hangs on the player standing on an airship for a solid 10 seconds or so, I legitimately thought the game had bugged out. Sometimes when a cutscene uses in-game graphics, or after a boss has been defeated, the camera will just zoom into a random point in space, filling the screen with a blurry mess of blown up PS2 quality textures.

Navigating the UI in between missions is impressively frustrating. The first time you clear a stage, the game explains to you how the ranking system works, what factors control your rank; the Zero games don't do this because A: those games respect the player enough to know that someone game savvy enough to care about their rank can probably intuit how it works on their own, and B: the Zero games use a much more clear scoring system that tells you exactly how much of your percentage is affected by what factors on the scorecard itself.

Every time you want to change menus, go to the save screen, go to the level select screen, the game asks "are you sure?" and the default cursor position is always "no". When you finish the intro stage and are given the level select screen, the game gives you a lore blurb on each of the eight levels one by one. When you pick a level, the game spends time explaining how the character select screen works (it does this because the level and character screens use weird radial menus that aren't visually coherent enough for some players to immediately understand). When you switch from the level select menu to the options menu, the game explains how the options menu works.

In each main stage, you can rescue two NPCs who will give you a chip to add points to one of your characters' three skills; the game gives you a blurb about how "rescuing people can get you upgrade chips!" every time you enter the upgrade menu, even if you are upgrading twice in a row from the same level. Once again, after distributing your points, the game will ask if you're sure about your selection, and the cursor will default to "no".

Some of the levels in this game are split into as many as 4 or 5 sections, all stitched together by loading screens. Several times throughout a level, a character will ask you to hit a button prompt to receive a hint, shouting "Can you hear me? [Current player character]?" Many levels consist of copy and pasted assets, sometimes with a change in hue. Red, blue, and green airships. Orange and blue virtual reality hexagons.

The difficulty is ridiculous, and after multiple attempts at playing through the game on the standard difficulty I gave up, I finished the game on the Legacy Collection's "Rookie Hunter" mode. Most of the time it feels like your health is infinite in this mode, but I still almost died in several of the boss fights. The only time that I did die in Rookie Hunter mode was in the motor bike stage, because of the time limit. Unlike previous games bike levels, which force you into a high speed auto-scroller, in this one you need to go as slow as possible in order to not miss the tight turns you have to make to pick up all of the bombs you need to diffuse.

The voice acting is embarrassing, but that's nothing out of the ordinary for Mega Man. What is out of the ordinary is the fact that I don't remember a single song from this game's soundtrack.

Burn to the ground, Mega Man X7.

In ways X7 is an improvement over X6, but in others its worse. The terrible thing about X7 is that it tries to incorporate some 3D segments and these are just so terrible, and most of the bosses you fight in 3D, which feels so out of place in Mega Man. The controls in this game aren't too good and there are some really poorly designed areas and bosses, and the difficulty on this game just ends up being too extreme at times. And the graphics just have aged so poorly. The game also has really slow dialog that you are forced to read and can't skip through. And saving and upgrading in this game are so frustrating because the game automatically selects no as the default. I mean this game isn't as poorly designed as X6, but the design of this is bad because its forgettable and it almost feels like it was rushed out. X should have died with PS1, but instead it went on way longer than it did, and we get this odd game as a result.