Mega Man X Review

The opening stage is a piece of teaching so good it is still cited in design talks. It shows you the dash before you own it, lets you fail a wall you can climb once you know how, and stages a boss fight you are supposed to lose so a mentor can arrive and change the terms. Nothing is explained in text and everything lands. The movement is the leap: wall jumping and dashing make X mobile in a way the classic games never allowed, and the armour parts and heart tanks hidden across the stages reward returning with a new boss weapon in a genuinely satisfying loop.

The soundtrack is the best in the franchise. It runs short, roughly five hours if you know it, and the difficulty is uneven, with the Sigma stages spiking well above anything before them. The secret Hadoken is buried behind requirements no player would ever find unaided, which is charming now and was maddening then.