Aw come on, don't tell me you didn't like the Missile Base themes. Especially when you board the Ride Armor. That was awesome!
Can't argue with that.
The ground crystal move for X is necessary to find some of Zero's weapons and other knick-knacks throughout the stages. The others are barely memorable, and you're better off just sticking with X's charged shots to clear the screen. I'm glad they buffed his charge shot this time around. Much more effective than in the PSX games.
Charged Crystal Wall is essentially Rush Search X, which I feel is one of the worst ideas to hit Mega Man. It's somewhat less insulting in X8 because you're not relegating a whole character to such a useless and unwieldy function, but it's still moronic. Hiding crap in invisible spots in the ground only works when your method of uncovering them is fast and is not limited by ammunition.
I wouldn't call grinding for Nightmare Souls and forcing you to reload saved games to save a corrupted Reploid here and there "perfected", but it's a little better than how X5 handled it. And as rewarding as that secret info cutscene was, inadvertently collecting 3000 souls to get it--and then removing High Max from the secret areas--wasn't the best way to do it.
No gaming perfectionist expects to not grind or hit the reset button occasionally. As far as killed Reploids go, most of them don't hold anything. For practical purposes the only things at risk are Speedster, D. Converter, one Life Up (out of 16), and one Energy Up (out of 8 ). None of that is vital, nor does it come CLOSE to the amount of crap that is absolutely impossible to obtain in X5. As for rank, PA rank is perfectly reasonable to clear the game with and I hit it today by my fifth investigator (it helps to know Dynamo's weakness, but I hadn't deliberately camped him).
Isn't defense merely a factor who rescues more Reploids and collect life-ups with?
Nope. Any of X's armors reduce his damage by half (besides Shadow they also reduce his weapon energy consumption by 1/4). Zero (red) takes the same damage as unarmored X. If you want to counter that, you have to blow a slot on the Shock Buffer part.
Also, Zero's Z-buster is stronger than X's standard buster while X's saber is much weaker than Zero's. Sure, you can only fire the Z-buster when you're standing, but you can still take out a wider range of enemies in midair in a single swipe of the Z-saber than X can, making short work of mid-bosses and the like, so it hardly matters.
The Z-Buster is awesome, but it is also situational. It specializes either against bosses (kinda like the Gaea buster) or at point-blank range (where it would otherwise have been redundant with the saber). For distance attacks against standard enemies, it's actually rather weak.
The saber does like 5-10 hits of chip damage whereas X does 1-2.
So Zero's better with the saber than X, shocker.
Oh, and get this: the Z-buster is devastating against High Max, whereas the X-buster only manages to stun him. Evidently just hitting him with Zero's saber is enough to do damage to him, whereas X's doesn't even do damage. Same deal with the Blade Armor. How [tornado fang]ing retarded is that? So you can't even blame me for fighting High-Max with regular X (and even if you did, I'd point you to the name of the game).
You need to actually test this stuff before you go spouting it off. As either character, High Max must be stunned first, then damaged (unless in the secret-routes battle he is low on health and uses his spread-shot, then you can skip stunning him). As X, you stun with the charged buster, then damage with a special weapon. As Zero, you stun with a special weapon, then damage with a normal attack (although the Ensuizan can count as both, it still has to hit twice).
X has quite a few methods of putting High Max to shame in ways that Zero is nowhere near capable of (and even the Z-Buster only works if you stun him at ground level, which is not always possible, and generally more trouble than it's worth). Mach Dash and Guard Shell for one, bizarre as it is. Shadow Armor's charged saber wails on him as it does pretty much everybody, and High Max is absolutely WRECKED by the Nova Strike (and I know what you're thinking, everybody is, but High Max is about as weak to it as Metal Man is to his own weapon).
"Vanilla" X is also able to bypass High Max's shield in the Gate's Lab fight by firing point-blank, something that Falcon and Blade armors are not capable of.
I'd much rather just use vanilla X with some parts equipped, but clearly the game doesn't want me to do that, because certain stages require greater mobility than he's capable of in order for me to progress and not die. Central Museum is one example. The least they could've done is just given the air dash to regular X and scrapped the Falcon Armor altogether, but they decided to wait until X8 to do that.
I mean, besides the game being called Mega Man X. That reasoning is just a step away from being the optional unlockable. >.>
Falcon X is still X. You're supposed to be familiar with what you're up against before you forsake what was given to you at the title screen. If you're not, and it bites you in the ass, you have nobody to blame but yourself.
There is not a single obstacle in the entire game that cannot be cleared with unarmored X, you just need to know what weapons and parts are best used to compensate for the lack of armor.
And the general game design. They do literally throw [parasitic bomb] at you that you couldn't have possibly seen coming.
If it's not unfair, it's probably just put there to have no effect but annoy and frustrate you, despite your best efforts. Those [tornado fang]ing mosquitos, man. During Blaze Heatnix's stage, no less. And how about that stupid blackout rave party effect? [tornado fang] the Nightmare System.
The Nightmare System is annoying as hell, but it's also predictable and easily manipulated.
You can't even beat the game with just X because of how the Gate stages are designed
You, sir, surprise me. I thought one as stubborn as yourself would be more determined than that. There is NO REASON you should not be able to clear Gate's Lab unarmored. I've done it, and I never once played any mode BUT Xtreme, so if you're looking for bragging rights, you have a ways to go.
Make that thread. Right now. I want to read it.
An 8-boss teleporter room with absolutely no health restores. X6 was never that crazy.