48. Mega Man X3 (SNES)
As a fan of SHMUPs and to a lessor extent Run and Gun style games, I'm not one to shy away from a challenge in game. In fact, I like to pride myself in the challenge of beating a hard game. However, with increased difficulty comes increased responsibility from the developer to give you the tools to succeed in a specific game. If the game is programmed horribly, the controls suck, or the mechanics in the game don't lend themselves well to meeting whatever challenge the game throws at you, the difficulty is no longer about allowing the player to extract fun out of the game, but rather the game becomes an exercise in annoyance and frustration. A prime example of this is Mega Man X3.
After playing a decent chunk of the X series at this point, I've become all too aware that it's pretty much a downhill journey after the first game in terms of quality. That's not to say some of the other X games don't have enjoyable aspects to them, they certainly do. However, that first game was so amazingly crafted and fun that no other X game comes close to touching it, at least in my humble opinion. X3 is even further away from X's benchmark of quality than nearly any other X game I've played in recent years (keep in mind I've never played X7 and it's been 25 years since I last played X6). And would you know it, Mega Man X3's greatest flaw is its demoralizing difficulty mostly as a result of some shoddy game design.
X3 isn't an entirely bad game by any means. X and Zero are both fun to control and there are plenty of interesting, cool things to explore and discover in the game. However, every time I found myself thinking this game was actually pretty good, I encountered something that immediately changed my mind. Sometimes it was the frequent use of gotcha traps in stages, or how annoyingly vertical some levels become. Or sometimes it was how poorly designed the majority of boss encounters are and how those encounters felt far less dynamic and enjoyable that the previous two X games. However, Mega Man X3's greatest flaw is how underpowered this game makes you while making virtually every enemy way overpowered.
That's right, your X buster, even when fully upgraded and charged, feels like a glorified pea shooter most of the time. This is particularly true with boss encounters, even when using a sub weapon that boss is weak against. But maybe more egregious than this is how quickly your life bar goes from full to dead. Seriously, there are basic enemies in this game that hit harder than any boss attack, which also hit like a truck. The combo of weak attacks from your weapons while turning attacks from enemies into mini nukes, really amps up how annoying this game is to play most of the time and is what really drained my enjoyment of X3 before I'd even got halfway through.
Fortunately, X3's presentation fairs much better than its gameplay. While certainly a step down from X, and about on par with X2, X3's artwork, level and character design, as well as the inclusion of more cutscenes, definitely make this a very attractive SNES game. The soundtrack is pretty good too, although it lacks the punch of X2's OST, and is noticeably inferior to Mega Man X's OST by a long shot. A few audio tracks caught my ear, but nothing I'd care to listen to outside the game for the most part. More or less, this game looks and sound about as good as youd expect a mid 90s 16-bit Capcom game to be, which is a pretty high bar as most of us know.
Sadly, I'm starting to tink more and more that the X series might end up being one legendary game, a few good games, and a lot of mediocre and even some bad games. I'd say X definitely straddles that line of mediocrity, not quite being offensive enough to say this game is more bad than good, but also not necessarily being a good game other. I'd say maybe by a tiny, tiny amount it's a slightly better game than it is a bad one, but its broken difficulty and game design don't do it any favors to make it any better than that. (7/16/26) [30/50]
