YMMV / Mega Man X: Mavericks

• Captain Obvious Reveal: You'll probably have figured out it's Wily behind everything long before the official confirmation, especially in the final fortress where the game gives up trying to really hide it and starts slavering his logo across the background.
• Difficulty Spike:
  • In the second game, Frost Man's stage is where things start really getting bad, as the enemies have much more health and hit significantly harder.
  • For the fourth game, it's when you go after the Stardroids for similar reasons. Luckily, you have access to the Ultimate Armors to balance it out. The final fortress stage also ramps it up.
• Ending Fatigue: The third game is notably longer than the others. Besides the opening stage, an intermission stage and ten Maverick stages, you've got an extra five stages on Planet Maverick and three fortresses of four to five stages each to go through.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Super Energy Capsule. Full LE and WE for only 20 WE? You can pretty much sell all but your status recovery items once you buy this. It's only limited by the fact that it's only available in Final and is the second-most expensive item, so to get it, you'll have to sacrifice more powerful attacks and equipment to use it anytime soon.
  • The Ultimate Armors with their no-WE cost attacks, but those are intentional.
• Growing the Beard: The second game is where things really got good, staying truer to the source material and setting the tone the rest of the games would follow.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In the original iteration of the first game, Sigma threatened to drop the sun on the Earth. Dr. Eggman and Infinite would attempt a similar move at the climax of Sonic Forces.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Fefnir and Harupia become this in the fourth game, due to the fact that they're the only ones who can't use special weapons outside of their purchasable skills, greatly reducing their usefulness until you buy them. Even then, they still lack the diversity of the other party members due to the far heavier emphasis of proper special weapon choice.
• Narm:
  • In the first game, Sigma claimed to somehow have the power to throw the sun at the Earth right before the final boss fight. A pretty out-there claim with zero foreshadowing or explanation. The remake notably removed this line in favor of a more straightforward pre-fight conversation.
  • The second fight against Dr. Weil in the third game has him pull out one of Dr. Wily's old machines to fight with. Yes, intended as foreshadowing as to Wily's involvement, but the moment is undercut by the fact that you're facing one of the scariest Mega Man Big Bads riding around in a giant skull mech with a pair of Gamma fists.
• Narm Charm: The games overall have a very stilted writing style that sometimes mischaracterizes some of the protagonists and Mavericks, but it's nonetheless entertaining to read as a product of their time (keep in mind that as of writing, Mavericks 1 and 2 are both over a decade old.)
• Remade and Improved: The first game in the series was certainly playable and set the tone for the rest of the series, but it played more like a generic RPG and didn't quite capture the feel of the home series until the second game. When the Compilation Re-release of the first three games came out, the first game was remade to match the feel of the rest of the series. In doing so, it added a more reasonable difficulty, the weapon skills and armor system of the other games from the X games and improved map design.
• Scrappy Weapon: The Lightning Web. Besides being one of the few special weapons that can miss, it has a 50/50 chance to either inflict damage or paralysis, the latter of which is useless against bosses. This makes it much less effective against its boss than you would think.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: The second game is much harder than the previous or following games. Enemies hit very hard, one-hit kill field obstacles are in every stage and the bosses have some crazy endurance. It's telling that the original game had a second version released just to tone it down some. The remake put it more in line with the reasonable difficulty of the other games, but it's still hard compared to them to the point that it is strongly recommended during the Nightmare in Final to clear out the Mavericks 1 and 3 refights before moving onto 2, rather than progressing in chronological order.
• Unexpected Character: Dynamo, who only appeared once in the second game, is a playable party member in the fifth game.

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