YMMV / Mega Man X6

• Anti-Climax Boss: The final boss, Sigma, is significantly easier than the rest of the game. His first form is a complete joke, almost to the point of being a Zero-Effort Boss even if you don't use his weakness, as he just lumbers around the room and fires off attacks which barely even scratch you. His second form is somewhat more challenging, as his attacks can do serious damage if they connect, but he follows a predictable pattern and there are several safe spots in the room, meaning it's still quite manageable; the green blob-heads that he spawns can sometimes drop life energy (and even 1-ups!) if they're destroyed. Zero especially will have a good time attacking him with Guard Shell-enhanced normal saber attacks or Ensuizan.
• Ass Pull:
  • Zero's infamous Unexplained Recovery. X wonders how he survived, causing Zero to state the infamous "I hid myself while I tried to repair myself" line. Keep in mind that Mega Man X5 was supposed to be the last X entry, ending with his death. Furthermore, his next appearance was going to be his reemergence centuries later as seen in Mega Man Zero, making it clear that the dev team just Handwaved him into X6 with no real thought whatsoever. While players never get a coherent explanation beyond what Zero tells X, an exchange between Zero and Dr. Light has Zero admit he really doesn't know who was responsible for his repairs while in a critical state. Dialogue from Isoc instead suggests he was largely responsible for Zero's restoration between games — which might be a hard pill to swallow given Zero's nature if not for the fact that, like Serges before him in Mega Man X2, Isoc is implied to be an incarnation of Dr. Wily (who was established to be Sigma's benefactor in the previous game by Word of God).
  • Sigma being revived, seeing that he wasn't even mentioned once in the game until that point. (Not counting the intro, of course.) The only reasons players were expecting it at all or not surprised by his sudden appearance were a) it's series tradition for Sigma not to stay dead and b) Gate's plans involved the use of Zero's viral DNA, which was the original form of the Sigma Virus.
• Awesome Art: One thing the fanbase does agree on is that the sprite work looks awesome, some even considering it some of the best in the series.
• Awesome Music: Players often describe the music in this game as some of the best in the franchise (which is no easy feat), and even detractors usually have no problem admitting as much, leading many to wonder if Capcom put more time and effort into the songs than the actual game. Standout examples include (but certainly are not limited to):
  • The intro stage's theme starts the game's soundtrack off on the right foot: a somber, but cathartic piece, which perfectly describes the calamity of the crash site ruins. The international version adds in a couple of guitar riffs here and there, which gives the song a lot of flavor and shifts the mood to something a bit more hopeful and action-y.
  • Blaze Heatnix's theme is a fast-paced guitar track that never lets up, and is so rocking that it's common to see people complimenting the song and hating the level.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • After the boss of the intro stage, the D-1000, is defeated, it isn't completely obliterated after it explodes. Suddenly, the Zero Nightmare teleports in, slashes the D-1000's remains, and then teleports away as the latter explodes again. This time, there is no trace left of the D-1000. It comes across as a poor attempt at allowing X to be aware that Zero may still be alive...for some reason. Furthermore, it's never explained why the Zero Nightmare helped X in the first place, with later encounters only establishing it has a very erratic personality and possibly some of Zero's memories yet never following up from that first appearance — despite the fact that the Zero Nightmare sometimes attempts to pass itself off as Zero.
  • Dynamo. To fill up the Nightmare boss rooms once the Zero Nightmare and High Max are beaten, he's chilling there and collecting Nightmare Souls. That's all there is to his relevance.
• Breather Boss:
  • Ground Scaravich is by far pretty easy, and is almost an apology for how infuriating his randomly generated level is.
  • The relative ease of Blaze Heatnix's battle could be an apology for how annoying the Nightmare Snakes miniboss gauntlet in his stage is.
  • Just like he was in X5, Dynamo (one of the Optional Bosses) is the easiest boss in the game, compared to the Nightmare area you have to traverse to get to him. He also falls down easily to his weakness weapons, and if you do so, he drops a big Nightmare Soul (which you normally get from the eight bosses, for 200 points), up to three times. And the best part? You can engage him countless times.
• Breather Level:
  • Shield Sheldon is mercifully brief, and much more forgiving in difficulty than the rest of the game.
  • Infinity Mijinion as well, as it's the second shortest main level of the game (after Sheldon's) and has the easiest access to its Nightmare portal; its Nightmare area is also short, allowing you to reach its boss room (and Dynamo) easily.
• Broken Base:
  • Some players enjoy the difficulty and stage designs and others absolutely despise them, with little to no middle ground. It is undeniably a different kind of challenge than what Mega Man players are used to.
  • Zero has a completely different sword combo in this game from X4 and X5 (done to put a kibosh on his game-breaking slash-dash cancels), and whether players appreciate the change largely boils down to whether they enjoy the rest of the game or not.
  • Depending on who you ask, the presence of Japanese voices are either a proof of how poorly executed the game was or a good thing considering the bad quality of the English dubs in Mega Man X4 and Mega Man X7.
• Catharsis Factor: There's a big feeling of satisfaction to be had after successfully rescuing all 128 Reploids without losing one.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Difficult or not, players often go to Mijinion's level first since that's where the Nightmare area is reached both the fastest and easiest, so as to unlock Zero as a playable character. Speedruns especially go with defeating just Sheldon for his Guard Shell, and then go defeat High Max in one of the Nightmare stages to unlock the Gate's Lab stages early.
• Critical Backlash: Mega Man X6 received mediocre reviews from critics (scoring 65 at Metacritic) and has been torn apart by a great part of the fandom as one of the weakest installments in the series, but some fans like to give it some credit. They appreciate the harsh difficulty of this game as a fun challenge (as Mega Man X4, while far more popular, draws some criticism for being too easy), the gameplay upgrades over the previous PlayStation Mega Man X games (X4 and X5), the more balanced focus between X and Zero, and giving Alia more relevance to her character. Despite its confusing nature and its overdone difficulty (both of the fake and legitimate varieties), the difficulty actually is a selling point for some.
• Critic-Proof: Despite reciving middling to negative reviews due to its rushed quality and Fake Difficulty, it managed to sold 100k copies by the end of year in Japan, which by a game released at the end of November was quite impressive, and saw a re-print under the "PlayStation the Best" label the next year.
• Fan Nickname: The Nightmare Snakes in Blaze Heatnix's stage are often called "Donuts" due to their motif combined with their visually confusing sprite causing them to look as such.
• Faux Symbolism: For some reason, Gate's heavily fortified lab entrance has figures/statues that resemble a semi-mechanical devil and a similarly semi-mechanical headless angel. As you progress through the stage, the devil statue gains bat wings, and finally stands as if roaring, while the angel statue gets chained and progressively stripped of materials. Probably a vague commentary on Gate's Sanity Slippage, but it ends up comes off as tacky since religious themes barely have anything to do with the series except for X8.
• Event-Obscuring Camera: Most egregiously in Commander Yammark's Amazon Area, forcing the player into a Leap of Faith onto spikes and a caterpillar platform. It's very easy to miss the caterpillar and die instantly.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Aside from infecting civilian Reploids so you can't rescue them, Nightmare Viruses can pass through walls (in a game where your shots can't), have an aggravating projectile attack and lunge attack, and take a ton of hits to kill. And even if you kill them, if you don't grab the Nightmare Soul that's left behind in a timely manner, they'll quickly respawn.
  • Nightmare bugs that surround X/Zero. They're an Invincible Minor Minion (unless you use Yammar Option), and harmless...except they will literally get in the way of X/Zero's attacks.
• Goddamned Boss:
  • The Nightmare Snakes of Blaze Heatnix's stage. They're not that difficult to deal with, but they have ridiculous HP and spread shots that are deceptively hard to dodge. Oh, and there's five of them, which you have to engage sequentially. If you don't have the right tools to finish the battles faster, then it becomes a total chore as you pathetically run around those things, shooting/slashing each of the four glowing weakpoints every Snake carries. The fourth one in particular is The Dreaded for being fought during a climbing sequence where half of the screen consists of fire and the other a random assortment of platforms and Nightmares that only serve to get on your way.
  • High Max's new pattern in the Secret Lab. It's not that you can't hurt him by that point in the game; but it can take some time to get a shot in on him ^note unless you use Blade Armor's Charged Attack that you'll be waiting for a long ass time to get that hit in.
• Good Bad Bugs: Due to the game's rushed development, there are plenty of ways to break it. Unsurprisingly, Zero hoards the lion's share.
  • The Guard Shell wreaks havoc on any enemy's Mercy Invincibility, letting you deal tons of hits at once. It's especially nasty with Zero's standard jump attack: activate it, get close enough, and you can jump-slash bosses to shreds in seconds. It's even faster than X4 and X5's infamous slash-dash-cancel (which is still possible in this game, but is made obsolete by Guard Shell's insane power).
    • X can also use the Guard Shell bug with the Blade Armor's Mach Dash, which is one of the fastest ways to take out High Max: activate it, stun him with a Charge Shot, then hit him with a Mach Dash to deal more damage at once than ever normally possible.
  • Ensuizan messes with Zero's invincibility; the game makes him invincible when starting Ensuizan and only removes it as the spin ends. If Ensuizan is interrupted somehow (such as destroying the platform Zero's standing on), Zero can keep the invincibility for the rest of the area since the spin technically never ended. Entering a new area or using another Ensuizan cancels the effect.
  • X's Magma Blade resets his gravity. He can glide against otherwise uncrossable Bottomless Pits by spamming the blade while in midair.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Turtonator from Pokémon Sun and Moon has the exact same stance as Rainy Turtloid, which people familiar with X6 made out immediately upon its reveal.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: The game's very high difficulty (both fake and legitimate) is known to alienate more than a few players, although others are actually attracted to the game because of it.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: For all of the changes later releases of the game have made, fixing the infamous "Blind Idiot" Translation is not one of them. There's also been some requests to re-map Sentsuizan's command to Down+Attack instead of Up+Attack due to the frustrating rope segments, but this was never changed either.
• It Was His Sled: That Zero is alive, which is important because Zero was explicitly destroyed in the previous game. Then again, with the manual mentioning a "Resurrected Hunter" who cannot be anyone other than Zero as a Secret Character, featuring artwork of X and Zero back-to-back (with X looking pretty chipper for a guy whose best friend is supposedly dead), and stating that Zero is merely MIA as opposed to KIA (along with the back of the game case reading "Zero is Missing"), one wonders if Capcom actually intended for this to be a secret at all.
• More Popular Replacement: Some fans believe that Gate served as a better Big Bad than Sigma did, citing that his involvement in the story is more personalized, that he has a unique backstory and dynamic with Alia, and that his ultimate plan of a Monster Protection Racket to let society know of his genius when they had previously turned it down is brilliant. It also helps that, unlike Dr. Doppler, Repliforce, or Red Alert, he's not actually being used by Sigma, and is instead using Sigma as his secret weapon, which is a concept that (depending on who you ask) wouldn't be explored again until Lumine in X8.
• Most Wonderful Sound: Zero's victory theme, especially after an extremely difficult level.
• Narm: After you defeat Gate, he reveals that he resurrected Sigma as a last resort. Sigma claims he didn't need Gate to bring him back from the dead and brutally injures him, and Gate lets out a ridiculously high-pitched and drawn-out scream which sounds way more hilarious than it should have been given the circumstances.
• Obvious Beta: This game was rushed out in ten months, and it shows in many places.
  • Many enemy sprites and music tracks are recycled from previous games. (Curiously, the latter tracks are missing from the sound test.)
  • The level design ranges from barren to sloppy and uneven, and most of its challenge comes from Fake Difficulty tricks.
  • The game is seemingly designed around the Falcon Armor, its upgrades, and Zero, and is near-impossible to play as unarmored X. Several Parts are even harder or legitimately Unwinnable without specific Parts or armors; most Parts are lost forever if you can't rescue their respective Reploids. And the game never tells you to find them beforehand.
  • As listed in Good Bad Bugs, there are glitches that can absolutely break the game's difficulty, such as using Magma Blade to fly or doing a simple trick with Zero to become completely invincible to everything except being crushed. He's even immune to spikes in this state.
  • Zero's special upgrade, Black Zero, is only obtainable through an in-game code on the title screen. However, it was intended to be possible to obtain it in normal gameplay, by beating the Zero Nightmare when it is at Level 4, requiring you to collect 5,000 Nightmare Souls. The issue comes from the fact that you unlock the final stages with 3,000 souls due to an oversight, and once you unlock those stages you cannot fight it at all, making the Black Zero armor impossible to obtain without the code.
  • The localization was so rushed that the English script became a "Blind Idiot" Translation full of terrible grammar and nonsensical lines, and the Japanese voiceovers were left intact.
• Polished Port: The Legacy Collection version has the Rookie Hunter mode, which cuts the difficulty to more bearable levels.
• Porting Disaster:
  • The Korean-only PC port has much higher system requirements than the ports of X4 and X5 and has noticeable screen flickering problems.
  • To a lesser extent, the version of X6 found in the X Collection removes most of the voices, mainly to minimize the Japanese. Fans were not pleased.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: This game took the first steps on upgrading Alia by making most of her calls skippable, more relevant, and less of a shoehorned tutorial. She also got an intriguing backstory featuring Gate too.
• The Scrappy: You are not going to enjoy fighting Infinity Mijinion. Not only is he That One Boss, but he has annoyingly high-pitched voice lines and sound effects to boot.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Rescuing Reploids. The devs sought to better develop the system as the players believed it to be underdeveloped in X5. However, their mortality from Nightmare Virus possession ruins the fun this could have had. This is worsened by the fact that some carry with them Parts that may be necessary for you to complete certain objectives, and when they die (due to the Nightmare Virus infecting them — and they may be put very close to those Reploids), so do your chances of obtaining them. It becomes so distracting to the overall gameplay experience that a few people view it as an irritation rather than a feature.
  • The Nightmare Phenomenon. Although comparable to X1's own stage effects, they are far more detrimental here. Special mention goes to Infinity Mijinion's Nightmare Dark, which renders Commander Yammark and Rainy Turtloid's stages near-unplayable. Another is the Yammark Nightmare which produces little flies that take some immense punishment to get rid of unless you shoot them with with the Yammar Option. Zero has no trouble with them, but they love to get in the way of X's shots. What's more, the game is vague on what exactly triggers a Phenomenon in the first place and more importantly how to get rid of it. ^note Each stage has two specific Phenomenon that can affect it at a time, and going to a stage will trigger its related Phenomenon in the other affected stages. However, each stage can only have one active Phenomenon at a time. The only way to get rid of the Phenomenon in a stage is to play another stage to trigger the other specific Phenomenon. Good luck memorizing which stages are affected by which Phenomenon triggered by what source stages, on top of either completing the stage in question or just killing yourself several times to force a game over and return to the stage select screen manually to get the desired Phenomenon.
  • The secret areas are very tough. They are reached through blue teleporters (which are also sometimes used to just get to the next part of the stage) and you're trapped once you go inside, forcing you to face whoever's waiting in the boss room before you can exit. If it's the Zero Nightmare, it's not that big of a deal, but if it's High Max and you're unprepared...either try to defeat him before you're ready, or kill yourself until you can return to the stage select screen. (And thanks to the Reploids all giving you extra lives, this may take a while too.)
  • As part of the Nerf to Zero's game-breaking Lag Cancel antics in the previous two games, the Z-Saber is now rather slow in its slashes. This is problematic when Zero goes against invulnerable targets, since the final slash can last very long and cannot be canceled.
  • As previously mentioned, getting Parts is a Scrappy Mechanic in and of itself; getting the ability to equip a lot of them stinks. You have to collect a ton of Nightmare Souls to boost your Rank, which is tied to your ability to hold Parts. To be able to equip three or four Parts, you have to collect over 5,000 and the maximum 9,999 souls respectively. The souls however only go eight per Nightmare Virus (four if you let the orb shrink from not grabbing it fast enough), 200 for each of the eight Nightmare Investigators (and if you take too long to defeat one, you'll actually only get 100), and 600 per Dynamo encounter if you hit him with his weakness weapon and make him drop three souls worth 200 apiece. The grind is so tedious and frustrating that many just settle for two Parts and a Limited upgrade (which only requires 1,200 souls, which is bearable in a normal run for both X and Zero without much grinding).
• Scrappy Weapon:
  • The Guard Shell is meant to protect from and reflect enemy shots, but the attacks of several enemies (including Nightmare Viruses, the most common enemy in the game) will simply pass through the shield. If the shot is compatible with the shield, it won't be reflected right away and take a moment to charge up in which the enemy can just move out of the way. Also, it is supposed to be Infinity Mijinion's weakness, but it barely does any damage to him and forces the player to rely on the boss doing specific moves to even work at all. Because of this, many consider the Yammark Option to be a better "weakness" to Mijinion than the actual weakness. However, it has a decent charged version and as noted in Good Bad Bugs above, Guard Shell somehow empowers Zero.
  • Sentsuizan has its detractors for making rope sections even harder. If you keep Up pressed down and need to do a saber attack, Zero will instead dive to the floor or, much worse, spikes or Bottomless Pits. This is most apparent in the secret area of Infinity Mijinion's stage, the Weapon Center, which has almost no solid footing and relies mainly on rope navigation.
• Seasonal Rot: Mega Man X6 is usually considered the weakest of the PlayStation games, and one of the least popular games in the Mega Man X series overall. The low points include the poor localization, being extremely difficult for all of the wrong reasons, being an unplanned sequel that caused more confusion plot-wise, and the rushed development cycle clearly showing in the final product.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: Generally considered the hardest game in the X series and one of the hardest in the whole Mega Man franchise.
• Spoiled by the Format: Fans used to the series traditions might have been able to tell that there's more after Gate because of how the Boss Rush hadn't happened yet.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: Inifinity Mijinion's theme starts with a synth brass riff that sounds just like Europe's "The Final Countdown", Metal Shark Player's theme bears a resemblance to the main theme of The Terminator, and Gate's Secret Lab theme is a reprise of the second X-Hunter Stage theme from Mega Man X2.
• That One Attack: Gate's orb attacks. To damage Gate at all, the player has to blow the orbs up and let the backlash from each orb hit him. However, you're constantly above a bottomless pit during the entire fight and the orbs that launch back at him also shoot at the player who is likely too close to the orbs to get away without taking a hit. You can straight up lose the fight if you don't have two full Sub Tanks with you into the battle.
• That One Boss: Has a page.
• That One Level: Also has a page.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • The downgrades to the Falcon Armor (e.g. removing its nigh-invincible flight in place of an air dash, charge shots can't go though walls anymore) were understandable given how much of a Game-Breaker it was in X5, but the strip-down was so bad — especially in the face of the game's upscale in difficulty — that it was poorly received by players.
  • The X Legacy Collection 2 release completely replaced the original opening and ending songs with new tunes that many fans didn't find as memorable or fitting. Even worse, even switching to the Japanese version doesn't help with this. This doesn't apply to the Japanese release of the collection, however, since all songs were kept there (suggesting licensing issues may have played a hand).
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • There a few hints that imply that Isoc is actually a vessel for Dr. Wily (hints include calling Zero a "robot" instead of a Reploid as well as having a vested interest in Zero while showing X nothing but contempt), but he "dies" at the end and nothing comes out of this. The only assumption is that it was a plot point to be followed up in a sequel, but X7 and X8 never even come close to bringing up Isoc again. Also, despite being shown to be able to paralyze Zero (and therefore that he has some extra powers at his disposal, or at least the ability to tamper with Zero given his knowledge of Zero's inner workings), he is one of the only villains in the series to be The Unfought.
  • Like Dr. Doppler before him, Gate was almost the series' first antagonist to not have anything to do with Sigma. His interesting backstory and relationship with Alia were more than enough to make him a potentially compelling villain. And what did they reveal in the end? Well...
  • Sigma is so superfluous to the plot that he might as well have been left out. The idea of a desperate Sigma on his last legs is explored much better in X8, where his vulnerability pushes him to Fling a Light into the Future for his Maverick dream, rather than just being an angry zombie. It doesn't help that Sigma was meant to stay dead after X5.
  • After disappearing from X5 as a Karma Houdini, Dynamo is back, and is mirroring the player by collecting Nightmare Souls. Unfortunately, instead of being a plot-relevant rival gradually powering himself up over multiple encounters using his collected Nightmare Souls the same way the player does, he's a completely irrelevant Optional Boss with only one variant, you still can't give him his comeuppance, and he hasn't made an appearance since.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • As it is completely possible to beat the game without unlocking Zero, the game could have taken the opportunity to explore X having to fight on his own for the first time in a while by changing his cutscenes depending on if Zero has reunited with X or not to show contrast between how he handles conflicts under his current circumstances. Instead, the only X-exclusive cutscene to be adjusted by Zero's presence (or lack thereof) is the final one, and since every other scene has to work with or without Zero, there isn't a chance to develop the impact of X fighting by himself.
  • Sigma was meant to be permanently defeated at the end of X5. X6 brings in new villains like Gate (a Reploid researcher with ties to Alia who was ostracized for his intelligence) and Isoc (Dr. Wily's implied vessel), suggesting the game would take a slightly different path from previous entries but continue to build upon certain aspects of the X series' Myth Arc. Instead, Sigma becomes the Final Boss as usual (even claiming in a rare moment of clarity that he didn't even need Gate's help to return) and Isoc disappears from the plot altogether in its closing stages, meaning Status Quo Is God and the bombshell reveal that Wily is still around and directly influencing events goes nowhere.
  • Isoc's presence and the implications of his character, while solving the issue of Zero's Unexplained Recovery, raises a few other questions as a result. The biggest is Isoc going through the trouble of repairing Zero without trying to "fix" his programming — which was the goal of Sigma and Wily's Evil Plan in the previous game (and canonically failed to happen). This also could've been a way to give the Zero Nightmare more relevance to the plot, as while he's an Evil Knockoff created by Gate as a means to justify the existence of the Nightmare Investigators, he appears to have some of the original's memories. (Note how X's exchange with him in the secret area of Blizzard Wolfang's stage has the Zero Nightmare refer to X as a blue robot, for example.) On the other hand, fans would've likely seen anything regarding a Heel-turned Zero as a rehash of both the aforementioned X5 and the Fake Zero scenario from X2 (which coincidentally featured Serges, another character implied to be an incarnation of Wily). Additionally, while out-of-canon, Tatsunoko vs. Capcom shows Wily delivering Zero to safety after the Final Boss and expressing pride in Zero's accomplishments despite the fact that he never fulfilled his original purpose, possibly explaining away Isoc's decision to let Zero be and sing his praises should he triumph over High Max.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Commander Yammark can be confused for a woman at first glance, what with those big eyelashes and slender frame... Then you get into battle and hear his surprisingly masculine voice.
• The Woobie: Several villains in this game alternate between this and Jerkass Woobie (with the exception of Blaze Heatnix because he's just an asshole). Put simply, several of them are victims of unfortunate circumstances that ended with being unjustly labeled Mavericks, or in Gate's case, the victim of being looked down on for his creations being too powerful, despite the existence of X and Zero being accepted.

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