YMMV / Mega Man X

• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • Vile. While definitely cathartic after having two fights where he's impossible, it's still a disappointment to find that despite being The Dragon for Sigma, he's a bit of a pushover outside of his Ride Armor (especially with Homing Torpedo).
  • Sigma's first form. Climb the wall and he'll jump between walls to climb up to you, then when you drop down he'll make his way back to the ground too. He'll never attack; if you keep jumping up the wall and falling back down, he'll do the same as you take potshots at him with your X-Buster. As long as you can avoid physical contact with him (which isn't hard, he's not that fast), you can beat him without ever getting hit.
• Awesome Music: Simply put, one of the best soundtracks on the SNES, and that's saying something. From the opening Highway stage, to Spark Mandrill's power plant stage, to Storm Eagle's airport stage, to Flame Mammoth's trash disposal plant stage- hell, even the stage select theme rocked your socks off!
• Best Level Ever: Armored Armadillo, due to the sheer fun of riding on runaway minecarts while plowing into enemies. It's also a good place to farm energy for your Sub-Tanks, and if you plan on getting the Hadouken, you can kill two birds with one stone.
• Breather Level:
  • Flame Mammoth's level is a decent challenge normally, but after beating Chill Penguin, it gets frozen, removing all the lava elements so that it becomes very easy to speed through. Since Chill Penguin is the ideal first boss to fight, most players see the easy version on a given playthrough.
  • Armored Armadillo's stage is mostly automated on rail carts aside from a few sections of running from Mole Borers, and it has a life-grinding spot. Armadillo himself can be rough without his weakness, however.
  • The second Sigma stage is easier than the first and third stages, with fewer annoying sections, some of the easier Maverick refights (Chill Penguin and Storm Eagle), and Rangda Bangda being less hectic than Bospider and D. Rex.
• Cheese Strategy: Spark Mandrill's infamous weakness to Shotgun Ice can render him completely immobile.
• Common Knowledge: The RT-55J boss guarding the Armor Parts capsule is often assumed by fans to be an old Dr. Light creation, citing its resemblance to Auto as evidence. However, supplementary materials claim it is a sumo wrestler robot with no connection to Dr. Light that went Maverick — and Auto as a character didn't even exist when the game was first released.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Most players have a tendency to go for Chill Penguin first. Not only is he considered the easiest boss, his stage also contains the unavoidable and extremely useful Dash upgrade. If they don't go in weakness order afterwards, common bosses to fight are Storm Eagle, Flame Mammoth, and Sting Chameleon, since their stages contain the other upgrades and have easy bosses, strong weapons, or both.
  • Mega Man X has one of the best special weapon loadouts in the series, in that they're all powerful abilities that keep up with the X series' faster pace. Despite them all being fantastic weapons, Storm Tornado tends to be the favored weapon that sees the most use due to its great range, pseudo-barrier quality in how X can hide in the hurtbox, and its obscene amounts of damage to the many stationary, bulky enemies that populate the various stages.
• Complete Monster: In the manga adaptation, Boomer Kuwanger is one of the original Maverick Hunters who followed Sigma's example and betrayed humanity. Participating in the genocidal war solely because he was bored with his life as a hero and wanted the chance to kill innocent people, Kuwanger is left in charge of a Weapon of Mass Destruction and tests it on a populated city before trying to annihilate the entire country. Revived in X3 by his brother Gravity Beetle, Kuwanger teams up with him in bombarding another city, taking advantage of Dr. Doppler's rebellion to keep killing more and more people.
• Difficulty Spike: While not an easy game by any means, Sigma's fortress mandates that you have mastered your plaftorming skills right from the very start with a series of tricky jumps. And it only gets worse from there with a few strictly vertical sections that test your ability to jump and shoot simultaneously without falling.
• Evil Is Cool: Vile and Sigma, big time. Vile is an Expy to Boba Fett with a blast cannon attached to his shoulder and an awesome ride armor while Sigma has a lightsaber and a robotic pet dog.
• Fan Nickname: The game is often known as X1 to differentiate itself from the series as a whole.
• First Installment Wins: Mega Man X is widely-considered as the best of the entire series for its useful special weapons, unintrusive story, cool designs for the Mavericks, and interesting gimmicks like Ride Armor, different types of power-ups, and stage hazards changing when you complete other levels. While most subsequent games have been polarizing to some degree or another, most everyone agrees this one is excellent. The closest game to come to wrestling the title as most iconic in the series away from X1 is Mega Man X4, and even most people who like that game usually agree it comes just short of beating X1.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Rolling Shield's charge shot surrounds X in a barrier that protects him from most of the weaker enemies' attacks and will kill weaker enemies on contact, making it ideal for grinding health and 1Ups.
  • The Storm Tornado. It deals enough damage to one-shot any normal enemy in the entire game via how many hits it lands, has a ton of ammo, goes through walls, and has a gigantic hitbox. Once you have it, you'll steamroll every level, and there's no real reason to use any other weapon outside of bosses.
  • Sting Chameleon's charge shot straight-up turns you invincible for a brief period of time, letting you rush through enemy filled areas with ease.
• Goddamned Boss:
  • Armored Armadillo is pretty manageable with his weakness, but is the most irritating Maverick to fight without it. His body armor (which can only be destroyed by his weakness) blocks attacks unless he exposes himself, and he not only takes 1 bar of damage from charge shots, but he actively punishes using them by absorbing them for a hard-hitting spreadshot attack. His attacks aren't too hard to dodge, but he stalls the fight out for so long that it's easy to get hit a lot and die before he goes down.
  • RT-55J, the boss that guards the armor upgrade in Sting Chameleon's stage. He has twice the health of the Maverick bosses, and his weakness, the Boomerang Cutter, is awkward to hit him with unless he has his claw extended. Combined with his minor invincibility frames when attacked, and a small weak spot (his head) this makes for a Damage-Sponge Boss that will, in terms of real time, be one of the longest fights you have in the game.
  • Sting Chameleon himself can be irritating and time-consuming to fight without his weakness, in no small part due to his frequent habit of turning invisible (and invulnerable), staying in high corners, and causing thorns to rain down to make reaching him difficult. His attacks aren't even that dangerous, save for his tongue lash.
  • D-Rex, the third Sigma Fortress boss. He's composed of two halves that move independently of each other and at different speeds, with the upper half also able to move diagonally up and down as it goes back and forth. The bottom half can knock you off the walls if it hits them at its faster speed, which stuns for a second and can allow the upper half to slam into you or drop onto you (which it will also do any time you're standing on the bottom half and the top half moves over it). On top of all that it can also create and fire a very large energy sphere that aims at your current location and moves very quickly, so you have to bait it to. Oh, and the more damage it takes the faster both sections move, to the point where when it's near defeat the sections are practically rocketing around and across the room.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • For some reason, dashing while shooting your arm cannon will double the damage done with it, which is very helpful for speedrunning and turns the boss fights into a cakewalk.
  • Boomerang Cutter interacts oddly with the edge of the screen, allowing for shenanigans such as grabbing the heart tank in Armored Armadillo's stage from the opposite wall, or using the platforms in Storm Eagle's stage as a personal magic carpet.
  • Standing on the Shotgun Ice sled counts as being grounded for the purposes of throwing a Hadoken. That means, with good enough timing, you can create a sled in midair, stand on it, and throw a Hadoken at airborne bosses. (This is used in 100% runs to speedkill Sting Chameleon in his rematch.)
  • It's also possible to use the Shotgun Ice sled, combined with the way the game loads in enemies, and skip the Armored Armadillo rematch.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The opening battle (and inevitable loss) against Vile is meant to highlight X's desire to be strong and capable enough to fight the increasing Maverick threat. However, come X8, Zero reveals that Vile was a former Class A Hunter, meaning he and X may have actually worked together. Having a comrade pull a Face–Heel Turn followed by having to fight him and the subsequent curbstomping he gave you must have been a punch to the gut for X.
• Narm: Sigma's pose on the game cover seems more like he's waving hello to someone than presenting himself as the Big Bad.
• One-Scene Wonder: Zero only has three scenes, but he is memorable nonetheless.
• Player Punch: Zero, when he kamikazes Vile and it doesn't even kill him. It seems that X himself channels the Player Punch by breaking out of paralysis, gaining full life and weapon energy from no where. The conversation after killing Vile, and potentially the gift of the Z-Buster, is also a Tear Jerker.
• Polished Port: The MS-DOS could be considered an example of Porting Disaster... Until you take into account how it was developed, and suddenly it looks much more impressive. It has inferior music and sound quality compared to the original SNES version despite being packaged in a CD-ROM instead of being limited by an SNES cartridge, muted colors, and complete lacked ride armors. The game also came with a Sega Genesis-like 6-button gamepad (as did Street Fighter II's DOS port). The reason that the port isn't in the below trope, however, is because the game's entire code was recreated entirely from scratch with the audiovisual elements provided by Capcom to the original developer of the port (Rozner Labs, headed by Stephen Rozner, who made both Mega Man (DOS) games) but not the source code, which explains pretty much most the discrepancies, and despite some minor differences otherwise, it's a really faithful and playable port. Rozner himself explained on The Gaming Historian's video on the Mega Man DOS games that DOS publishers at the time were more interested in getting games out as quickly as possible even if they were terrible (which probably explains why Ride Armors were cut), so the fact that the MS-DOS port of this game was actually fairly playable and reasonably comparable to the original was a pretty impressive achievement.
• Porting Disaster: While its understandable that Capcom would rebuild the iOS port from the ground up due to the App Store's "no emulators" policy, it does not excuse how sloppily it was done. It has lousily "enhanced" graphics by way of a graphic filter, no extra colors or added details, animations were cut and some lost frames of animation, all of which making it horrid compared to the original SNES version. No more smooth scrolling levels, some of the music went missing, and gone is the stage alteration feature where defeating certain bosses will affect another boss' stage, something that made the original Mega Man X stand out from other action side-scrollers for its time. For whatever reason, Capcom chose this as the version to port over to Android, despite the Google Play Store's more lax policies... and made it cost $5 USD more than the iOS version.
• Scrappy Weapon: While none of the normal boss weapons are truly awful, their charged versions (outside of Rolling Shield and Chameleon Sting) can be...less than impressive. The stand-outs, however, are Shotgun Ice, which just creates a rolling platform that seems to only exist so the player can get to the Heart Tank in Boomer Kuwanger's stage, Fire Wave, which due to the way the normal weapon works, requires you to burn ammo just to charge the damn thing^note although you can get around this if you know the trick of charging up your X-Buster then toggling to the Fire Wave before releasing the charged attack, can disrupt you if you're trying to use the normal fire in long bursts, and the payoff - a ground-hugging fire projectile — isn't particularly impressive enough to make up for it, and the Storm Tornado, which is completely underwhelming that you'd rather prefer its uncharged version^note While a regular Storm Tornado is horizontal, it was such a Game-Breaker because it can hit enemies both in front of and behind X, the charged version is vertical instead that's only good for enemies directly above him.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: Players who wish to make the game more challenging can opt to do a low % run (not collecting any upgrades except the Boots, which cannot be skipped except via password, and Zero's cannon); beat the game without dashing, taking damage or using weapons other than the default buster; or playing in reverse boss order (defeating the bosses in the opposite order of their weakness); or any combination of the above.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: The game is easier than any of the Mega Man (Classic) series, thanks to the wide array of powerful abilities you have compared to prior games. Dashing, wall jumping, alternate firing modes for all boss weapons (one of which literally turns you invincible), refillable energy tanks, health bar extensions, the armor upgrade that halves all damage, and so on. Also, farming for health and energy is much easier than in prior games, because X can move so much faster (via dashing) than OG Mega Man, the SNES can put more enemies onscreen at a time than in the NES games, and you can re-enter (and exit) levels whenever you want.
• Signature Scene:
  • Zero's death was already a huge Tear Jerker, but the manga version takes it up to eleven because it actually shows X's reaction to it. The scene was even recreated as a collectable statue.
  • Another scene from the manga that people remember is X's conversation with Vile at a Bad Guy Bar. The D-Arts Vile figure released by Bandai even comes with a bourbon glass referencing this scene.
• That One Boss: Here.
• That One Level: Also here.
• That One Sidequest: Getting the Arm Cannon upgrade in Flame Mammoth's stage. Even if you have the Leg and Helmet upgrades needed to get it, it's a pain in the ass to reach it. You need to do a pixel-perfect jump dash to reach the blocks, and it is very easy to fall off after you smashed some of the blocks, forcing the player to restart the level in order to get a shot at getting it again. The dev team anticipated how hard this was, and have Zero give the player an arm cannon upgrade anyway in the first level of Sigma's Fortress if they failed to get it beforehand.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Some fans consider the lack of a proper Ride Armor Vile boss fight in the final stages to be a missed opportunity, as Zero encouraging X to become stronger at the start of the game loses a lot of its meaning when X still can't beat Vile and Zero has to bail him out again(albeit having lost to Vile offscreen).
• Tough Act to Follow: X1 was such a rousing success, it overshadowed any and all of its sequels, not to mention the SNES' lone Classic series entry, Mega Man 7. Mega Man X4, however, is generally considered the one game that comes close to matching X1 (while X2 and X8 are usually the other runner-ups).
• Underused Game Mechanic: The Helmet upgrade's ability (breaking ceiling blocks) is only ever needed a handful of times, and one of the things you need it for (the Arm upgrade) can be obtained from Zero later in the game anyway. At that point, it's mainly for cosmetic purposes.

---