Like its predecessors, the story in Mega Man X8: Paradise Lost is little more than just a weak reason to blow up more robots: someone is trying to take over the world and/or destroy all of humanity, and it’s up to you, a dorky little blue robot, to defeat the ultimate menace (a.k.a. the “bad guy”). In order to defeat the bad guy, you must first defeat his eight robot minions and, after killing each minion, assimilate their powers into your arm cannon.
In X8, there are three playable characters (Mega Man, Zero, and Axl) that you can switch between depending on the situation, all at the press of a button. Mega Man, for instance, has the ability to charge up attacks in order to unleash devastating shots, while Zero is an expert at fighting at close range with his sword to perform powerful combos. With Axl, you can hover in the air for a short amount of time and rapidly fire in any direction, almost like a machine gun. You can also perform powerful group attacks with your characters that can kill just about any robot in the game.
There are also a number of power-ups that you can get in two different ways: the first, and easier, method is to collect “metal” that the robots in the game drop, which you can then use to upgrade your characters in between missions. The second method involves looking for secret areas in each of the eight levels. Finding the secret areas can do a number of things, such as unlocking better upgrades that you can spend metal on or new body parts for Mega Man. The game has eight different body parts that you can get for Mega Man: two for his head, two for his body, two for his arm cannon, and two for his legs. You can mix and match the body parts to get the powers that suit your play style the most—very cool.
And then there’s the gameplay itself. The levels are essentially divided into two types: the first is what just about any Mega Man fan is used to seeing. You run from left-to-right, killing robots as you go. There are jumps, traps, and blasts coming from every direction. These levels are where most of the fun takes place, although they are, unfortunately, way too short and some of the level designs were absolutely atrocious. To offset the length of the levels, the designers decided to make them as difficult as possible, but instead of actually making the levels more challenging, they just added spike traps into almost every single jump in the game. If you miss any given jump in the game, you’re pretty much guaranteed to die in a spike trap, but luckily you’re given an infinite amount of continues, so there really aren’t any consequences to death.
Full, behind-your-back 3D is the second type of level, which let you go around in some sort of vehicle while shooting anything in front of you. These levels are downright frustrating, and the only redeeming aspect of them that I can see is that there are only two of them in the game. Actually taking control of your character in the awkward 3D landscape is a feat unto itself, never mind reaching the final boss at the end and defeating it.
The bosses in this game are fairly straightforward until you beat them to a certain point, then the battle goes into a phase called Hyper Mode. In Hyper Mode, the bosses use completely different attacks that are many times more powerful. The addition of this second stage in boss battles was really quite refreshing since it required me to not only plan out the battle better but also learn two different strategies for each boss.
In the end, however, it seems almost as if Mega Man X8 is misguided in what exactly it’s trying to do. Only three of the levels (four if you count the spike-riddled final level) are actually traditional linear Mega Man levels, and the rest were simply frustrating messes. In X8, old fans will be pining for the streamlined levels of yesteryear, and new fans will almost certainly be dismayed by the utter simplicity and ease of the game. There is one thing, however, that fans of both old and new can agree on: Mega Man X8 is, at best, simply mediocre.
