Interesting read so far, I'm glad that everyone has their own memories with the franchise, since I really do think it's great and of course a shame that they didn't continue it till this day.
major_chaos said:
Hmmmm, I actually had to think about this. In the end I settled on X. X6 and X7 may have been colossal stinkers, but at its best the X games were a great balance of challenge and fun with superb weapon and level design. To rank the others (because I love megaman and will take the excuse to talk about it):
#2: Legends. It may only be 2 games, but those two were incredibly unique and charming on top of being simply fun to play. I would love to see a what modern graphics could do with a game about exploring high tech ruins for upgrades and loot.
#3: ZX. A better balenced and more fleshed out take on the Zero games, dragged down very slightly by the pointless pseudo-open world that served no point other than wasting time, the boss transformations in ZXA being nearly useless, and some severely lackluster final boss fights.
#4: Zero: A much more frenetic, flowing, pace made these stand out from the X games, but Zero 1 was awful thanks to cheap boss design and brutal yet uninspired stages that you would sometimes have to repeat, and the later games while much better still bore a bit of the unfair difficult genes. Still incredibly fun however, with a standout award for Zero 4 being the only 2D game to ever make me tear up a bit.
#5 Battle network: The grid based battle system was cool especially in boss battles, but virtualy everything else was poor. The limited amount of moment options reduced levels to overlong padded out "puzzles" that generally loved forcing you down circuitous routs that comboed very badly with the obnoxious random encounter rate. The breaks in this consisted mostly of controlling Lan in the real world to solve more annoying time waster puzzles, although in these bits the lack of battles was offset by the puzzles being much more annoying and badly signposted. Add to that the horrid presentation, with nearly no animations to speak of in or out of battle, and a vapid anime cliche ridden storyline that ins't good even if you can understand it past the appalling translation, and you have a game that I did consider enjoyable for one playthrough, but I'm certainly never coming back.
#NA Original: great for their time, but aged poorly, I feel bad judging a NES game by modern standards, especially a historic one.
#NA Starforce: Never played it, no idea how it compares to the older BN titles.
I don't think X6 was that bad. Sure it was overly Nintendo-hard and not forgiving
(Wow... Expect a kid to save all the reploids on his first try? in one play through?!)
X7 was really the worst, Camera was everywhere, the new-back-in-the-day 2.5D'ish battles was really awkward to navigate at times and the worst...
NO PLAYING AS MEGAMAN AT ALL TILL MUCH LATER!Seriously, what we're they thinking?
X8 was... alright. Not that bad but not really fun or difficult as the previous games. On the contrary with the combo attacks it made everything overly easy. Not to mention Megaman's armors are just recolors now.
#2: Agreed. Legends was amazing
(Another game which I only managed to play as a kid via emulation, even then it blew my mind all the freedom and interesting stuff it gave you) The world and setting alone was more than enough to keep me interested and playing all the time.
#3: ZX and ZX Advent I never really... understood it.
Sure it's still a X\Zero styled game but the whole backtracking really lost me. I'm used to metroidvania style game's but in this game it really barely tells you where to go, it vaguely gives you a correct direction
("Go east and talk to this guy" Oh... Sure.. East okay best explanation ever)
There great games and the music is really good too, but the lack of direction really holds it back for me.
#4: The Zero series is one of my absolute favorites! Hands down.
What confused me as a child was why he looked so different (
It wasn't till much later that I understood that it was an art style, that technically he still looks the same as in the X series) Other than that, it's a must play.
#5: The Battle network series looking back at it, might not really be the most fleshed out games in the series. Especially the first one. You're right, it does lack animations but since I played the games as a child the charactors felt more alive to me than ever and the very few animations that they had combined with the music and tone of the games made me understand exactly how they felt.
It's kind hard to explain, I would suggest going back to it with an open-mind because they really do get alot better (
MMBN2 and forwards, each game only get's better from their)
The Starforce is the sequel to Battle Network, and it plays similarly on a grid but with a different camera perspective and requires a bit more skill since you can only move in 3 directions (
But you can block with a shield now for a split second to compensate) It only has 3 games but it's really really well made with a great story, I think you would enjoy it.