One of the rare good memories I have of spending time with family over Christmas break when I was a kid was the video games. Starting at age five, the year my parents brought home a Nintendo and a gold Zelda cartridge, we always took the week between Christmas and New Year's Eve to sit in front of the TV and save the world. My father had the controller, my mother had the notes and the guidebook, and we kids sat on the floor and kibbitzed. ("Have you gone through that door, Dad? No, that door. No, that door. No, Dad, that thing is a door.") We kids had no school, Dad took the week off work, and we lived on cheese and crackers and sandwiches and takeout so that Mom could take a break from cooking. After Zelda, I remember playing the original Final Fantasy for NES, and later the first one for the SNES; Dragon Warrior (Dragon Quest, in Japan) I, II and IV; The Secret of Mana; The Illusion of Gaia; and ChronoTrigger. I think I'm forgetting a couple. I don't think we ever left any of them incomplete.
It stopped the year I got a Playstation for my birthday. I was in high school, none of us could stand each other anymore, and the Playstation was very much mine. I camped in my room and played Final Fantasy VII and VIII, Xenogears, Vandal Hearts, Suikoden, and Vagrant Story. The last one I remember seeing credits for was Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete, which I actually played on an emulator. After that I started volunteering to work over break so I could stay on campus, because dragging myself back to Phoenix for a month to stay with my parents was awful.
It's been ages since I got to properly finish an RPG. I always get pulled away, and by the time I can even think about getting back to it I've started feeling bad about not doing something more "useful" with my time, and give up.
This year I said fuck it and sat down to play Mega Man X: Command Mission. I first played it about fifteen years ago, on someone else's first-run PS3 that I was babysitting for them while they were out of the country. I was playing it on what was then a brand-new and rather swanky LCD computer monitor, passed through a TV tuner card for the PC that I had bought for the express purpose of playing console games without having to own a television. In those days, the PS2 and its Emotion Engine graphics system were considered an un-emulatable spaghetti-ridden mess; even the PS3 was cheating and playing PS2 games by using the PS2 brain it normally used to deal with the controller I/O. In a testament to the continual march of technology, I am now playing it on a bog-standard emulator called PCSX2, on a laptop that cost about as much as the slim PS2 I later acquired, and does everything but make waffles. I'm still using an external flat panel, but it turns out the game has a semi-secret 16:9 progressive scan option that actually looks pretty good, or at least as good as a PS2 game is going to look by modern standards.
Command Mission is colorful, stupid fun. It is not nearly as quasi-serious as Mega Man Legends, which involves a lot more strategy and side-questing and general RPGing to complete. You do not need to be familiar with Mega Man -- or Mega Man X, the darker grittier AU sister series -- to play MMX:CM. The MMX universe actually has a lot of intriguing implications and discussion points; you only really see reploid society from the point of view of the reploids, but it seems to be imitating the unseen human society in many respects. The way the reploids interact with each other raises a lot of interesting questions about how they handle friendships and romance and other very human things that robots are normally depicted as incapable of experiencing. There are moral arguments to be made about the way reploids seem to be both above and subservient to the humans of Earth, and about the responsibility of beings who have such enormous power.
None of that is at all relevant to Command Mission. All you need to know is that everybody is a robot, and your protagonist is the hero. There is a Rebellion and a Resistance and a bunch of MacGuffins to chase after, and none of that matters in the slightest. There is no moral ambiguity here. Your party is not so much pointed in the direction of the bad guys as you are all physically spun around to face them and given a good hard shove between the shoulder blades. If the game tells you that someone needs to be crushed under the heel of your colorful robot armor boots, then you may rest easy knowing that whoever you're being aimed at is evil and definitely deserves it. The story makes basically no sense, and that doesn't matter either. The game does not expect you to pay any attention to it, as evinced by the fact that if you mash enough buttons on the controller you can skip all of the cutscenes, even the ones you've never seen before.
The game balance is slanted heavily in favor of the player. It's certainly possible to get a game over in Command Mission; there is some element of strategy and resource management. But if you keep faceplanting in the same boss fight over and over, it is only because you are not paying enough attention to catch some obvious elemental or shield open/close gimmick. None of your characters are useless, but you are pretty clearly meant to bash your way through most of the plot with X, Zero, and Axl, the protagonists from the main series. Everyone else exists so that you don't have to fly solo for too long before X meets up with his friends. You can kit anyone out with any subweapon/armor/accessory you want, but the three S-Class Maverick hunters are the only one with a full range of elemental attacks at their disposal at pretty much all times (X and Zero have ice/fire/lightning versions of their buster and saber, respectively, and Axl's Action Trigger can be used to imitate the elemental attacks of all the bosses you've faced). The Sub-Tank system means that anybody can heal anybody or everybody at any point, as long as you have spare energy left. You can swap any active character out for any of your second-stringers on any turn with no movement penalty, and the game is generous with item drops, even stat buffs and revives. Taking an enemy down to under 25% of their current health without killing it activates a mechanism called Final Strike, where you are given several seconds to spam all of the attack buttons as fast as you physically can, with rewards for getting in a certain number of hits or cracking a certain amount of damage. It even works on bosses.
In short, the challenge is not so much "can I survive this battle?" as it is "how effectively can I grind this opponent right down to its component molecules?" It is a cartoonishly cathartic level of smashy-smashy.
The main downside for me is that X walks around using tank controls, with camera wrangling assigned to the right stick and re-centering on L2/R2. One of the reasons I don't play many FPSes and action RPGs, aside from not enjoying the jump scare of getting shot in the back, is that I'm awful at navigating 3D spaces on a screen. In real life I do most of my direction-finding using muscle memory for turns and what I can only describe as "tracking the atmosphere" -- probably some combination of air currents and acoustic properties that depend on the size and shape of a space -- none of which exists for a place I'm not physically in. I am eternally lost and turned-around in rendered environments, even with a mini-map. I bludgeon my way through using the traditional labyrinth technique of following one wall, which only works if the game world is built in Euclidean space, which this one is, and if I don't care about hundred-percenting the map or item collection, which here I don't.
MMX:CM does have a lot of collectibles that you can make one of the mini-games grab for you. The renderer on PCSX2 annoyingly doesn't work right on the figures, which is sad because they look really cool. It does fine on transparencies, and I have already spent way too much time deciding what color I want X's pointless flappy beam muffler to be.
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