Steam Curator
Can we agree to call these things “dead service games?”
The greatest tragedy introduced by live service games is the very idea of a game lifespan. You can’t have life without death after all, and I have to admit that at least part of the reason I’m enjoying “MegaMan X Dive Offline” so much is not just because of its addictive collection-based gameplay, but also because of getting to see such a big publisher attempt to cover that industry blind spot.
Because in its death, this Megaman-themed PC and mobile gacha is finding a second life. The original free to play 2020 release is ending its service later this month but a parting gift from Capcom is this regular-ol buy-to-play 30$ version where everything that was previously a timed event or microtransaction can just be… unlocked through regular play.
Just keep in mind that regular play does involve grinding: the removal of microtransactions hasn’t liberated a secret Megaman classic from its bonds. This is still structurally an incremental gacha--albeit one with direct grindable currency purchases instead of randomized premium ones.
Megaman X Dive offline is a game of numbers. A power meter in the main menu is this honest stamp about what the game is: increasing that number is your primary objective and whether or not you succeed in any given mission will have more to do with how that number compares to the missions number than any inputs you’re making mid-level.
That can be a little jarring at first: superficially this walks and talks like a Megaman X game, you’ve got running, jumping, dashes, and walljumps…but unlike its namesake, those aren’t really the challenge.
Level geometry is simple—owed to the game's mobile roots, an origin also betrayed by these big ugly touch buttons on the screen even if you’re using a controller.
Enemies are the real obstacle: and a default auto-aiming control scheme ensures that these encounters are largely decided by the prep work you’ve done before loading into a level in getting your character as strong as possible.
Because in addition to being a game of numbers, this is a game of tension. Tension brought about from hovering around the right power level for any given mission, then being presented with a challenge above that power you need to workaround. The slimy part was that this tension was always best relieved with a credit card, but in Offline it just means you need to re-evaluate your build or go back and grind old-school RPG style.
It’s a series of smooth curves then sharp walls, where getting a new item, weapon, or character can be a notable power increase to get you to the next well, and it’s the satisfaction of that climb where this version of Megaman is consistently enjoyable.
That’s partially owed to how wide of a net that progression is cast over: everything you touch and everything you do has some way to be numerically improved, the menus themselves even have progression.
The act of unlocking and upgrading weapons and characters is in and of itself an unlock and upgrade: you have an account wide “gallery” level that improves your power the more items you have progressed, giving you both an incentive to experiment with multiple builds and just one more dripfeed meter in a game that’s completely filled with them.
The first five hours of play is a combination of fighting through simple levels and receiving multiple ephinanies about new menus you didn’t know existed which gives you new powers you didn’t know existed.
The UI is this rats nest of recursive powers: you collect your gacha tokens to build characters of different rarities, each with their own rank and skills, but then you also mix and match different weapons which also have their own levels and their own ranks, and even their own assigned card modifiers which ALSO have levels.
It just goes on and on, and despite offering a wealth of choice, build variety, and tons of fun characters to play with, it's very inelegant in the way it introduces (or doesn’t introduce) some of these systems to you. It’s got some technical hiccups too: controller support emulates a mouse in menus instead of properly shifting between each menu item, and I crashed to desktop three times over the course of fifteen hours of play.
It’s death and rebirth into a micro transaction less version of itself isn’t exactly a pheonix rising from the ashes: Megaman X Dive Offline is clearly still a product of its free to play roots, but damnit am I glad it IS a product.
There are imperfections both in its construction and how its rolling out: players who invested in the original game get a raw deal than people jumping in now because nothing carries over and you still gotta buy regardless of how many microtransactions you pumped into it.
But as a conversion of an existing free-to-play game and the alternative to which would be complete non existence, it’s hard not to appreciate this little piece of game preservation.
It’s a playable reminder of the fact that game preservation isn’t a conversation for the future: that a graveyard of unplayable games is already our current reality, even if it’s disproportionately impacting a style of game that’s not exactly a press favorite.
Without better abandoned-software laws, we’re in a situation where the corporations are the only legal stewards of our games as a service, and Megaman is a commendable if unrefined glimpse into how live service games can offboard at the end of their life.
Ultimately it’s just a numbers go up game in its most crystallized form, and as much as I like it I also feel the need to over-convey what it actually is: my enjoyment is akin to a comforting digital pacifier more than a thrilling platforming adventure. But when evaluated for what it is instead of what it isn’t, Megaman X Dive Offline succeeds at being a long term game of incremental power gains and collection expansion. It’s wide cast of characters, meaningful incentives to experiment with them, and robust collecting systems take the addictive aspects of gacha and divorce them from the monetization methods that exploited those addictive qualities.
The result is a game that tickles your brain in the right spots without forcing you to reach for your wallet, and its both a worthy play in its own right and starting point for what end of life care could look like in a video game context.
