I'll always defend this game. It's an unfinished mess at times, but at others, it's hinting at something spectacular. It's a huge shame X6 was rushed out the door, because I enjoy it a lot more than X5 and it *could* have been one of the best games in the X series.
Things it did good and improved from X5:
- Alia is now ignorable and won't interrupt gameplay.
- You can skip text in cutscenes.
- Power-ups are now tied to the character and not individual armors.
- Rescuing Reploids is far more risky/rewarding. You can lose a Reploid, but if you save them, you could potentially get a useful power-up.
- Power-ups are actually useful and desirable.
- The game does not start you with the end-game secret armor minus the Giga Attack like X5 did with the Force Armor, which is literally just the Ultimate Armor without Nova Strike, and the ONLY one you will ever need until you get Ultimate.
- Armors are actually useful outside of item hunting, and some stages greatly benefit from having one or the other.
- Zero controls better, his animations feel smoother and quicker. Best Zero moveset in the entire PS1 trilogy.
- Some of the weapons are actually pretty neat, especially when charged.
- Zero's buster is useful and well worth the ground only limitation.
- X's rank is no longer determined in the asinine way it was in X5.
- Game offers an impressive (lol) level of challenge.
- Bosses don't scale with your level, so you don't have half hour boss rematches with giant lifebars.
- The story feels natural and flows from X5's end well -- Gate is a fleshed-out villain for being a one shot, and allows for enrichment of Alia's character as well.
- The soundtrack is
phenomenal.
- Dynamo's back and his improved boss fight is better and more fun than it was in X5.
Things it did badly:
- Nightmare effect is a very half-baked idea that looked good in concept, but was executed terribly. That shit is inexcusable.
- Reploids are high risk-high reward, but are often placed very annoyingly over bottomless pits or other places where it's easy for Nightmares to get to them, since they can go through walls, but hard for you to get in time.
- Some stages are blatantly unfinished, short, broken and/or poorly implemented. Blaze Heatnix's stage is stuffed with filler mini-bosses.
- Shield Sheldon's stage is ridiculously short if you go for the boss and not the alternate path.
- Some bosses have very poor animation. See Shield Sheldon.
- Stages often overwhelm you with objects flying at you from everywhere faster than you can react or defend yourself.
- That jump at the beginning of Gate's Laboratory 1 expects you to have the right loadout to deal with it (unless you play as Zero). It's not impossible, but it is a frustrating jump to do with anything but the right equipment (such as the Blade/Shadow Armor or using Ice Burst).
- It's far too easy to encounter High Max when you can't harm him. The game doesn't tell you what those portals are -- you go through it because it's there, and suddenly, unbeatable boss. At first it's Nightmare Zero, and well, you'd expect perhaps for there to be no more bosses in that room, when the game surprises you.
- While power-ups are tied to the characters instead of armors and have more slots, you have to unlock slots by increasing your rank.
- The plot becomes "LEL SIGMA AGAIN" when it really probably shouldn't have, at least not in the way that it did it.
- The piss-poor localisation. "There is no one else is left to fight." "There are few Reploids or humans are left on the Earth."
- Most bosses are very weak to Zero's buster for no reason. Saber-cancelling is also far easier to do now with Zero's new swinging animation.
- Blade Armor's wannabe plasma shot is very wonky and doesn't always work properly.
- Black Zero is unobtainable through "legitimate" means due to a stupid developmental oversight.
You get Black Zero by beating Nightmare Zero at level 4, which is only possibly through beating all the 8 bosses. However, once you beat all 8, Nightmare Zero and High Max no longer appear and are replaced with Dynamo, making Level 4 Nightmare Zero impossible to fight. Nightmare Zero actually changes to make his AI smarter at Level 4 as well, so this is especially stupid.
Obligatory HideofBeast video.