Looking Back and Ahead to Mega Man X DiVE

Hoo-boy. This article has been nothing, if not challenging to figure out, lemme tell you. As I write this, I’m still not even sure what the title is going to be.

Originally, it was going to be a review of Mega Man X DiVE, after it came to Steam last year and I could finally play it in a way I felt comfortable with (read: with a controller). But, how does one review a game that’s constantly adding new content and changing all the time? Okay, sure, some people do it, but I decided it would be more of an “impressions” piece I could follow up on. Then it got lost in the shuffle until updates started to really slow down, and I played wait-and-see.

Then it was announced it would be ending. Alright, so I can do a retrospective. But then it was announced that it would be back in a new form, Mega Man X DiVE Offline.

Okay, then! So, I’ll probably review Mega Man X DiVE Offline when it comes out later this year. For now, I’m going to look back at the game that was Mega Man X DiVE “Online,” and give my thoughts about what I liked and didn’t like about it, and in turn, what I hope will carry forward to the Offline release later this year. Good? Good.

Daily Check-Ins

This might be a little contemptuous among some, and to be honest, I’m not thrilled about it in some games I’ve played on mobile and consoles over the years. But with Mega Man X DiVE, it was a little bit different.

Squeezing in time to play Mega Man each day isn’t always easy, or necessarily even desirable, as it could lead to burn-out. But I enjoyed checking in each day for my daily rewards on Mega Man X DiVE, since it gave me that extra bit of Blue Bomber goodness in my day. A little rockin’ Mega Man X music, some nice visuals, and I’m good to go! (Oh, and the rewards themselves can be nice, too.) To that end, I sort of hope the Offline version continues this.

The Wealth of Characters

Mega Man X DiVE has a ton of playable characters to choose from — 141, if my math is right.

That’s more than any Mega Man game to come before it, and includes many who have never been playable in a Mega Man game before, such as Sigma, Roll Caskett, Pandora, and Colonel. There were also some guest characters, such as Ryu, Chun Li, and Akuma from Street Fighter, and… well, that’s it on that front, really.

Which in itself reveals kind of the opposite side of the coin: There were so many great characters included, but many of the inclusions also highlighted those who weren’t included, too. We got Aile, but no Vent. Pandora, but no Prometheus. Harpuia and Leviathan, but no Fefnir or Phantom. Every member of the Command Mission team, except Spider. Heck, among the Street Fighter guests, we got Ryu and Akuma, but no Ken. All these Zeros, but no X1 Zero?

While ostensibly about Mega Man X first and foremost, we only got one Maverick — that is, the Stage Select type of Mavericks, as there are others here. Magma Dragoon is playable, which is really cool, but after him… no more. No Chill Penguin, no Storm Eagle, no Magna Centipede… these are all characters featured in the game, mind you. But unlike Magma Dragoon, while you can fight them, they aren’t playable. I’d much rather have them be playable than Rising Fire X or Thunder Beam Mega Man.

It would be nice if Capcom were to fill some of these holes and continue to expand the roster in the Offline version of the game, but that remains to be seen. As it stands, that one is actually going to have a deficit of characters, seeing as the various crossover event characters are said to be excluded. Hopefully new events will come up that will provide them as DLC.

Character Customization

Ah, boy. This one, I have what feels like layers of mixed feelings about.

For starters, as great as being able to choose from a wide variety of characters is, a lot of them don’t really feel like those characters. In some cases, it’s because they’re assigned to one of a number of fixed movement/animation sets, hence why MegaMan Volnutt doesn’t get to use his cool Jet Skates to dash, but instead slides like the original Mega Man (and MegaMan.EXE, if you ever played Mega Man Network Transmission).

But more than that, they often don’t come with their weapons. Or if they do, it’s only as a special attack. For instance, Steel Massimo. Big tank of a Reploid who swings an awesome energy axe. Yeah, I want some of that action — oh, but you don’t get to use his axe, except as a Skill, even though he’s holding it when you select him. His axe isn’t even available as an obtainable weapon (there is one, single axe you can get, but it looks nothing like his). At that point, are you even really playing as Massimo? (Okay, fine, technically you’re playing as yourself, aka “Player,” masquerading as Massimo. Still.)

This might not be so bad, except for a lot of weapons, there isn’t even anything to make it look like they go with the characters you assign them to. Just look at Zero above; no Z-Buster here, so you give him the X-Buster. Only it looks kind of ridiculous. Even just letting it be red to match his armor would go a long way here.

Perhaps it’s a silly complaint, but it’s also kind of silly that Mega Man and MegaMan Volnutt, among others, don’t have their signature weapons, and that using X’s Buster with them still clashes.

That aside, I do enjoy the wealth of weapons that are here to draw from. I may not be able to play as Nytetrayn here, but MegaMan Volnutt Alt. is close enough for me, and he does look pretty dang good with that Gatling Gun. It’s like it was made for him!

Still, a little doubling up might have been nice in some cases. Unlock a character, unlock their weapon to use with whoever you like. It’s the kind of thing that would give some characters who might be otherwise undesirable to someone a bit more value.

Bite-Size Stages

One neat thing was having these bite-sized versions of stages we could recognize from previous entries in the series. Good for a quick fix, or if you’re in for a longer session, then you could play several in a row (as long as you had the AP to do it).

I also really liked when they would do something different with stage elements. In the case of the opening highway stage, they played with that setting a bit by having crashed vehicles act as actual obstacles instead of background dressing. And in one case, as seen above, you actually get to ride atop a truck as it barrels down the highway!

Convoluted Progression

One of my biggest pet peeves about the game, and one I really hope gets tweaked for Offline, is the Story mode’s convoluted form of progression it presents.

At first, things are fine. You go through stages as you would expect, gathering items and experience and all that fun. But then, a few worlds in, it suddenly stops you in your tracks. Now you have to go back to the first world, and then do the same stages again, only now you have to do it on Hard instead of Normal.

“That’s not so bad,” one might think. “I’m a Mega Man master, I’ll just crank it up to Hard and get it all out of the way in one go.”

Ah, I once thought like that. But the problem there is, it won’t let you choose Hard. Not at first. You have to progress through the game to a certain point before you’re allowed to go back and redo the earlier stages at a harder difficulty.

It’s just really awkward and annoying, in my opinion. If you could just choose Hard from the outset, or even do a level and then its Hard version right after, that might be tolerable. But the weird forward-and-back stuff, I can do without. Hopefully Offline tidies this up a bit, or even just lets you play through on Normal, or on Hard, as you wish. What a novel concept!

Event Stages

One of my absolute favorite parts of getting to play Mega Man X DiVE has been the event stages. Not only do they tend to have something unusual going on, but it’s been a great opportunity to see characters who normally occupy Mega Man games that differ from the side-scrollers in a more traditional setting, as well. Looking at you, Mega Man X: Command Mission, Mega Man Legends, and to a lesser degree, Mega Man Battle Network.

Of course, some of my favorites among these have just been getting to see the world of Mega Man Legends given a more modern coat of paint, giving us some idea of what a more contemporary game in the series might look like. They even went out of their way to reskin some of the normal enemies as Reaverbots — too cool!

The only problem? As the name on the tin suggests, these only come out during special events, which means if you miss them, you’ll have to wait for them to cycle back around, and you can’t just enjoy them whenever you want. And to be honest, that’s a feature I would love to see in Mega Man X DiVE Offline — you beat an event stage, and it’s added to some sort of log or database or something, so you can revisit it as many times as you like!

I can dare to dream.

What-If Scenarios

Probably one of the coolest and most underutilized scenarios for Event stages was the “What If” type of scenario. Some played a little loosely with the concept, introducing characters like X-kai who aren’t in the games, or were the home of wild crossovers and themes like Monster Hunter, Halloween, or wedding season.

Probably the popular favorite, though, was “Trial from the Supreme Commander.” This introduced us to the alternate scenario to Mega Man X4‘s backstory, where Iris and Colonel’s different attributes could be reconciled into an “ideal” Reploid, resulting in Iris -another-. I definitely prefer this to the big purple mech suit, and I like big mech suits!

It’s just a shame that few, if any, other such scenarios were explored within Mega Man X DiVE. Maybe, with any luck, there will be some new content for the Offline version, and we’ll get to see some other possibilities explored.

Banter and Character Interaction

Look, I’m not going to pretend that Mega Man X DiVE had a top-notch translation or anything, but at least it was probably better than Mega Man X6.

And with that, there was some enjoyable banter with characters we haven’t gotten to see interact often. Going back to Mega Man X4, Colonel and Iris’s time in the world of Mega Man X was far too short, so DiVE was able to remedy that in some ways. For instance, having Zero get caught in the middle between wanting to train with X, and Iris cursing — well, as much as “hell” is a curse, anyway — him out about it. Or the Halloween event set before Sigma and Vile went Maverick, so we get to hear more from them as actual Maverick Hunters. Or Chill Penguin getting fed up with arctic duty, painting himself up as a watermelon, and going on a beachside theme park vacation.

We got some nice bits of lore thrown in, too. Ever wonder why Bit has a big honking shield in everything from his artwork to his merchandise, but not in Mega Man X3 itself? Well, not if you read the Mega Man X: Maverick Hunter’s Field Guide (available at better book retailers now), but thanks to Mega Man X DiVE, we now know it’s due to the shield’s heavy weight.

These are small things, but they can go far for those invested in the world of Mega Man.

The Art

More than anything else, my favorite thing that Mega Man X DiVE has done is bring us a whopping metric ton of new art.

Capcom could have cheaped out here, and reused assets from previous games for characters who already had it, but no — everyone got new art… unless you were just a straight-up recolor, like Rising Fire X or Thunder Beam Mega Man.

So not only did we get some fantastic new art for new characters, a number of old favorites, and some who may never make a major appearance in a Mega Man game again, but we also got art for characters who never had it before! Truth be told, I wish we’d had some of this when we were doing the aforementioned Mega Man X: Maverick Hunter’s Field Guide, like Ultimate Armor X and Absolute Zero from Mega Man X: Command Mission — it might have saved us some trouble!

What’s even better is that Capcom has apparently not stopped yet — they created the above graphic just for Mega Man X DiVE Offline. Entirely unnecessary, but a most welcome and appreciated gesture — especially if it happens to herald still more new art to come.

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So, those are some of my thoughts on the Mega Man X DiVE that was (well, still is, technically), and the Mega Man DiVE Offline that will be. I could go on, but this has already clocked over 2,000 words — a little more than I was expecting at the outset, but that seems to happen a lot. Maybe a follow-up in the future will be warranted?

In the meantime, feel free to share your thoughts on Mega Man X DiVE, and what you’d like to see out of its Offline counterpart in the comments below, or by replying on Twitter!

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