What better way to kick off the weekend than with new gameplay from Mega Man X: Corrupted? Developer JKBGames has released several minutes of footage showcasing Zero battling through the Cyber Lab stage, ruled by Warp Vulpex.
While JKBGames has yet to announce a release date for Corrupted, you can stay updated on the fan game's progress and connect with the dev team on the official Discord. If you're new to the game, be sure to check out their YouTube channel for past gameplay footage.
Everything about the game looks incredible. Perhaps Ultimate Armor X will be a boss in addition to Viral Zero.
ReplyDeleteNo freaking way, this looks so awesome! Hopefully we see this game finished in a couple months
ReplyDeleteWHAT THE FUCK IS A DEMO
ReplyDeleteReal talk though, I always thought this Maverick had a weird design. Just a somewhat Japanesey kitsune would be fine, but the lab coat too?
It may look better than any X game made but it's milking youtube since 2009. 😂 Honestly I don't expect to live to play it should it ever be dropped.
ReplyDeleteYou know for how much flack we give Capcom for not dropping content. They at least released way more products in the spans of time that Corrupted has been a thing.
DeleteI can imagine maybe the big bad of this game could be a direct confrontation with Wily's viral self, maybe even one form being in the form of how Light's hologram looks, but purple and Wily. Who knows...
ReplyDeleteI dislike nearly everything I've seen from X Corrupted, but the effort from developers is undeniable. However, I still think the stage/boss design shown in previews is both often too similar between stages, and repeats similar issues of lacking any sort of flow, instead opting to abuse gimmicks and high health enemies. There doesn't seem to be much focus on how these stages would function in challenge runs, or just the kind of playstyles you'd see in a style-focused or arcade game. This, alongside with the sheer amount of new mechanics/"metroidvania" structure/upgrades/other elements makes me question both how this will even be balanced, and whether it will even resemble an action game.
ReplyDeleteMany people say that the mechanics added in later X games are "bloat", but I was impressed with how much depth they gain through challenge runs or experimentation, and the games still encouraged a quick, risk-heavy playstyle, along with a lot of care being put into enemy placement. This, on the other hand, seems more like a bizarre mix of an Igarashi Castlevania game and modern X-inspired indie games. I understand that a lot of people look to X for exploration/upgrades in the first place, and enemy placements are generally only focused on if they affect their enjoyment, regardless if said enemy placements are thought out or not, but even X8 was still an action game first and foremost.
I do think that making an X "metroidvania" game in the first place is a bad idea, so I suppose it's more that the developers of this don't see the same things in Mega Man that I do, and I don't see what they see. But the Zero battle is just... why? the wave slash attack seems incredibly basic, there's no attacks to throw the player off like the arena-wide ground blast executed relative to Zero's position (from X5/X6) and hearing X vs Zero again was only made worse by having X1 Zero's theme blare right after. Do these games really need to rely on the same fanservice concepts over and over? The later X games all attempted to go for different art directions, bring in new designs and concepts to stages, and yet here we are, X vs Zero and X5 Wily again, woooo...
Curious, what specifically is your favorite and least favorite thing/detail in the video?
DeleteIt has the open world of Mega Man ZX and it's set in the world of Mega Man X.
DeleteIt feels like a forced idea and might account for why this game is taking decades to get anywhere.
I'm not a fan. Not at all. I wasn't really much of a fan of the "mission-based" gameplay of Mega Man Zero, either. It was a fun series and all, but it was so weird and uncomfortable… I much prefer my 2D Mega Man games to have a simple stage select and minimal backtracking.
Still better than anything Capcom has done so far. Which is just Legacy Collections and Gachas. I'd take an innovative new approach over nostalgia/mobile cash grabs any day.
Delete@Jo Li KMC
DeleteI mean I grew up with Zero 2 so I’m not exactly an impartial judge, but the “missions” are pretty much the same as the level structure of 20XX and X. Go to a level, get to the boss, beat the boss, done. Sure there’s technically missions like rescuing Reploids and destroying generators, but I’m pretty sure those are mostly optional, and it’s not like they’re far out of the way.
And personally, I’d rather have small side objectives than Ride Chaser/hoverboard/flying stages.
Also Zero probably has the *least* backtracking of all 2D series, because there’s nothing that can’t be acquired on the first playthrough of a level. Even Mega Man 1 had the Magnet Beam (required by the way), which can only be acquired on first playthrough if you beat Guts Man before Elec Man.
@DoctorQuack
DeleteMy favorite aspect is that, in spite of everything, there's still an attempt at story elements, no matter how questionable the story writing and direction might end up being. I appreciate that, instead of trying to use the SNES-inspired approach as a reason to avoid story at all, the developers still sought to write unique dialogues for bosses, side characters, story events and more, along with having a progressing story throughout the game. Vulpex's design is also relatively refreshing for a fan design, with a more humanoid look, unique expressions/poses and a limited color palette. A lot of the fan designs I've seen tend to focus so much on replicating the animal they're inspired by, that they end up feeling out of place, making up for it by taking details from X1-X3 designs outright and making the end design more generic.
My least favorite aspect is difficult to pinpoint: I don't think saying that I dislike the entire direction/stage design of X Corrupted would be fair, so I'd say it's probably the Zero encounter. His fight seems very uninteresting in spite of how much it's made to look more flashy, and the dialogue/story context attempting to recreate X5, but with effectively no set up nor subtlety makes it disappointing to see that this is supposedly a story-important confrontation. X5's Awakened Zero had details like him speaking in a calm and respectful tone, which at least made him slightly more interesting than playing the "I was once Zero... but I've been shown the true path, so move out of the way!" so straight that it feels like some kind of self-aware humor.
If talking gameplay-wise, a large issue I have is how many enemies have explicit healthbars, sometimes very large ones, and yet the solution shown is to always just waste time on their basic attacks until they're destroyed. Enemies like Spark Gunners from X5, or Monbandos from X6 could be speedkilled in various ways, or ignored entirely through precise movement at the risk of their survival creating issues for the player after. Or, in X2, for example, large health enemies had weapon weaknesses to quickly destroy them in order to not stop moving. Even if X Corrupted allows dealing with them quicker through weapons/upgrades/armors, it still seems like this kind of approach would be an afterthought due to how prominent said enemies are in the stages, likely compromising the flow.
@Zephyr
I suppose? But it's odd how even fan projects are so heavy in trying to bring forth fanservice, chase the highs of the "most memorable moments" and take from tons of praised games. Is that not rooted in nostalgia, in a way?
I'll always give credit to folks who pour their heart into fangames, but Corrupted just has too much going on for me to get into it. The overall speed, attacks, enemy placement, stage gimmicks, backtracking, etc. gets to the point where it doesn't really feel like a MM game any longer. Not to say it wouldn't be a fun game to play, but it loses some of the "soul" of what makes a MM game for the sake of sheer number of gameplay elements. Just my two cents.
ReplyDeleteI think the super long dev time and unidirectional feedback have definitely caused the game’s scope to bloat. Credit where it’s due though, the fact that it’s still being worked on for close to two decades is damn impressive.
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