Mega Man X: Command Mission (2004)

This game has aesthetic, narrative and gameplay systems that unironically compete with modern games.

Seriously: play this game.

Traversal in a turn based game that has yet to be matched, the rocket jump makes moving around its own game.

The combat system lacks menus: you simply press a variety of buttons. The ultimate system draws on the thematic elements of each character - providing a unique system: poker for the card fighter, button mashing for Megaman, fighting game combos for Zero. Plus, each character has a form swap the re-defines their combat style.

The progress hooks are too good; entirely new character designs and Ultimates alongside weapons that all have models; it builds up a loop that really feels nice to engage with.

A soundtrack that any Megaman fan would expect. Art that still holds up. And a story that had drama and ambition.

I played this as a kid, and later as a jaded adult and both times it was amazing.

Pros

• I like X's design in this game.
• I think they did a pretty good job intregrating Mega Man X elements into a JRPG with the subtanks and how subweapons and weapon energy works.

• Encounter rate is really high.
• The last 2-3 chapters are really long and tedious. Especially chapter 9, the way to unlock doors in that chapter is just annoying and unenjoyable. It honestly felt like they wanted to increase the amount of battles you'd have to inflate the game time.
• I wish KOed party members would get automatically subbed out. That might be asking for a bit much, but losing a party member is a bit rough.
• Random enemies are stupid strong and tanky for no reason. Nameless enemies can sometimes do half your health in a single attack. Tanky enemies add to the frustration because of how high the encounter rate is. So not only are there going to be a lot of random battles, they're going to be arduous.
• The way they implemented retries is a nice gesture, but it wasn't done very well. Retries take you to the beginning of the battle, which sucks since you can't change equipment mid-battle, so if you just have bad weapons or force medals for the enemy you are fighting, you just have to deal with it. This system also made it possible to soft lock yourself into an unwinnable situation for the final boss, forcing you to have to restart and redo the boss battle before the final boss.