This post is an analysis of some of the bass battles in Mega Man X 2. Here are links to the rest of the deep dives:

• Story
• Environmental Storytelling
• Miscellaneous

Spoiler Preface!!!

This post contains content that some may deem as spoilers. You have been warned

In the main review of Mega Man X 2, I said the following about the boss battles:

Among these battles are a few that are extremely fun and engaging, as good or better as any fight in X1. Others feel like they’re specifically designed to be unreasonably difficult without the boss’ weapon weakness. These bosses have attacks and/or attack patterns that are abnormally difficult to dodge, which makes it that much harder to even get a shot in on them. Even if you do have their weakness, it may not be as potent as you might think. You don’t really conquer most of these boss fights. You endure them. And when you’re done, you want to erase them from your mind.

Let’s take a closer look, shall we?

Overdrive Ostrich

This is one of the better fights in the game, even though it looks like one of the most gimmicky. Ostensibly it takes place on a “long boss chamber” similar to the ones used by Flame Mammoth or Storm Eagle in X1. But this one takes place outside, hilly terrain, and this has an impact on how the fight plays out.

Ostrich has a number of different attacks, such as running at you:

Jumping/skipping/kicking at you:

Launching a boomerang-shaped projectile:

And jumping up to launch a whole line of projectiles from the sky:

The main gimmick of this battle is that Ostrich can move out beyond the boundaries of the stage. When this happens, you will see him running in the far distance, until he eventually stops and leaps back into the foreground to continue the fight. The idea is to sell how fast he can move by showing you just how far away he got in a mere matter of seconds. It’s a nice idea, but it falls flat, as he gets out there a little too fast.

There are two ways for Ostrich to wind up out there in the background. The first is that he intentionally runs off the screen as part of an attack. The second way is if he is technically within the stage’s boundaries, but is also technically off screen and is far enough away from you.

In any case, you might think you can cheese the fight by dashing away and causing Ostrich to keep having to jump back in from the background. He’s briefly vulnerable when he jumps back in, which is the perfect time for a charged shot. In practice, however, this is not possible. The only way you can implement this strategy is if you start dashing away as soon as Ostrich returns to the foreground. If instead you wait just long enough to attack, Ostrich will likely choose a running attack to come after you with, in which case he is going to close the gap.

In reality, the only way to win is to stay close to him, memorize the attack patterns, and keep up the attacks.

Speaking of which, I believe Ostrich’s attack patterns are a nice mix of easy and challenging. You need to get a feel for where to place yourself, but none of the attacks require perfect timing or reaction times.

All in all, a fun and well balanced fight.

Wheel Gator

Wheel Gator fights in a standard sized room, but the floor is basically a muddy pool. This is the gimmick of the stage, and it is miserable.

Gator’s favorite strategy is to hide beneath the surface of the water. He starts sending buzzsaws out that run along the wall and ceiling:

The buzzsaws fall down about halfway across the ceiling. If you try to move to the opposite wall to dodge them, they’ll hit you on the way down (something tells me the developers knew you’d do this, and designed the attack accordingly):

Anyway, the main purpose of the attack is actually not to hit you, but to distract you. Shortly after the second saw falls from the ceiling, Gator will leap up to try and grab you between his jaws:

You might think the only way to avoid this situation is by getting the timing right and memorizing when Gator is going to leap. And you would be … wrong! Turns out this attack is a joke. For one, Gator telegraphs his arrival. Normally, the muddy water moves around in waves - when it gets still, that means it is time to dodge:

Even better, just wall climb up to either corner of the room. Gator cannot leap high enough to get you:

This doesn’t mean the fight is a cakewalk. Sometimes Gator tries this move so much that he isn’t above the surface often enough for you to even try and hit him. And when he is, he uses a number of other attacks that either make him invincible:

Or just make it hard to get a clear shot:

This fight is a test of your patience. It can take so much time that you may lose simply due to your mental stamina depleting and your moves getting sloppy.

Making it even worse is that Wheel Gator’s supposed weapon weakness - Wire Sponge’s chain attack - is not all that effective, and is hard to time. You are best off using the X-Buster.

Yeah, this fight is just painful, with a stupid gimmick.

Flame Stag

Flame Stag’s fight is like a less fair version of Sigma’s first form in Mega Man X 1. It takes place in a room that is taller than the screen, and Stag leaps between the walls just like Sigma. However, this room is taller Sigma’s chamber, and that makes a difference. It means that Flame Stag can bounce back and forth several more times than Sigma could, which makes it harder to memorize his jumping patterns.

Did I mention he can also dash up along the wall?

Flame Stag also has some ground based moves. There is the dash attack, which is not only fast, but leaves a flaming trail along the ground:

He also throws fireballs. The image below doesn’t capture the sheer variety of the attack. Depending on your position, the fireballs may go straight, or veer upward, or move up the wall.

Fighting Flame Stag is like playing pretend with a five year old:

Five Year Old: I use my charge attack.

Me: Okay, well I jump over it.

Five Year Old: Well actually I left a trail of flame behind me so you fall into the flame and lose

Me: Okay, well then instead I go up on the wall

Five Year Old: Well actually I can go up the wall and chase you

Me: Man, this is tough. Okay fine, I take some damage.

Five Year Old: Now I throw my fireballs at you

Me: I jump over them

Five Year Old: Well actually they follow you wherever you go so you still get hit

You get the picture. It’s just weird how many variations and permutations there are to each individual attack, each of which are designed to disrupt nearly every single counter measure you might think of. This isn’t to say there are no ways of playing defense, just that there are very specific ways, with little to no wiggle room. It just isn’t a fun fight.

Crystal Snail

Crystal Snail is basically the Armored Armadillo fight from X1, only it hates you.

Snail’s opening attack is to spit a bunch of globs of goo at you:

You can’t really tell in this photo, but they move extremely fast, and their trajectory makes it hard to guess where they’re going to end up. The bottom line is that it is extremely hard to dodge them.

But what if you do? Crystal Snail’s response is to do it again. And again. Until he gets you.

Once he does get you, you are trapped in a block of crystal. As far as I can tell, no amount of button mashing will break you free, meaning you are at Snail’s mercy until he decides to hit you:

Which he will! Eventually. Once you are trapped, Crystal Snail crawls into his shell and flies around the room. I mean that literally - he flies around the room a bit until he decides to finally zero in on you. It’s like he is toying with they player, and it is agonizing to have to go that long while not in control of the game.

I said before that this fight is like Armored Armadillo’s, so you might be thinking “his weapon weakness must get him out of that hard shell”. This is true, but it’s not what you think.

You see, Snail is weak to the Magnet Mine. Think about how magnets work. If you fire the mine, it will pull Snail out of the shell, and toward the mine (and you). He basically does an unintentional body slam:

He then tries to scurry back to his shell, and at this point you better fire off another Magnet Mine before he can get off his regular attack.

Fighting a Mega Man X boss with a weapon weakness tends to go one of two ways. Either you do extra damage while the fight plays out as usual, or the weakness completely nullifies the boss’ ability to attack. Crystal Snail (as well as Flame Stag) demonstrates a third option, where the weakness is the only plausible way to deal damage, and you need to time it properly if you want a chance to stay alive. The margin for error in these fights is too narrow, and the viable strategy too specific.

Morph Moth

Morph Moth fights in two forms. He starts out as a pupa (or is it a larva?):

In this form, his attacks involve hitting you with garbage. He also eats garbage in order to get bigger. He puts himself at the center of the screen and sucks in an unbroken line of junk that moves along the screen in a circular pattern:

The only way to dodge it is to stay ahead of it by moving along the ground, up a wall, and over Moth.

If you attack Moth enough, he’ll eventually stop, leave, and return in his full Moth form.

Once grown, Morph Moth becomes, well, a moth. He flies down toward you in a zigzag pattern, leaving a trail of toxic Moth Dust behind him. I honestly have no idea how to avoid these attacks. This is another fight where it’s just best to use the weakness and move on.

The Rest

Magna Centipede’s fight feels almost beat for beat like X1’s Boomer Kuwanger. It’s pretty lame.

Wire Sponge and Bubble Crab don’t directly rip off any X1 bosses, but they have the same general feel. They’re a good challenge, and you can take them out with the X-Buster without too much trial and error. I like these ones a lot.

X Hunters

The X Hunters are all very different fights, but I don’t have much else to say about them. I remember beating them all with nothing more than a single Subtank one or two Heart Container upgrades. That was enough to win all three fights while giving me enough leeway to get extremely sloppy at times. All three X Hunters take a decent amount of damage from a charged X-Buster.

These fights were the bane of my existence as a teenager, but this time they went down like chumps. I’m not sure what this says about their overall difficulty.

X Hunters, Second Round

Once you get to the final Sigma Stages, you have to fight the X Hunters again in new and improved forms. Well, technically Violen has the same form, as his second one was cut due to time constraints. We’ll just talk about the other two then.

Serges fights in a tall vehicle with four cannons, each of which you must destroy. Meanwhile you have to jump between floating platforms so as not to fall into the spikes below. After a while, Serges will destroy some of the platforms until only two remain, making your life that much harder:

In a fair fight, this one ends up being tricky, but there is a way to cheese it. It’s a terrible and ridiculous way to cheese it, but boy howdy does it work.

The secret can actually be seen in the screenshot above - I have X equipped with the Giga Crush attack. This is a technique granted by the Chest Armor Upgrade. You fill it up by getting hit, and once you build meter, you can launch the Giga Crush to clear all the enemies on the screen.

Sounds cool right? Not really. There are rarely enough enemies on the screen that you would need to use Giga Crush, and it doesn’t work on bosses (it deals two squares of damage to a boss, and that’s it). I basically ignored it for most of the game.

So why use it here? It turns out that for the purpose of Giga Crush, the four cannons on Serges’ ride are not considered “bosses”. That means if you use the attack, it will destroy all four instantly.

Once those are out of the picture, you can safely stand at the bottom the vehicle and hit Serges with a fully charged Sonic Slicer.

Normally I like when games come up with clever and hidden ways to cheese a boss, but this one requires you to do things (namely, use Giga Crush on a boss and come in contact with the boss) that you are normally trained to avoid. It is too counterintuitive, and feels less like a fun secret and more like a tease. “We put in this really effective strategy for this endgame boss, but GOOD LUCK FIGURING IT OUT!!!”

Moving on, the second fight with Agile can also be cheesed. This is the one and only instance in which the secret Shoryuken/Dragon Punch move is worth a darn. If you launch a Dragon Punch as soon as the fight starts, you should be able to one hit kill him, and end the fight in less than three seconds.

Sigma

Once again Sigma has multiple forms you must fight through, but his final form is one of the most bizarre battles in any Mega Man game.

For one, he spawns regular enemies, who drop health. This doesn’t mean the fight is unloseable, but it makes it a lot easier to stay alive and keep fighting.

Secondly, his final form has no health bar. so you can never really tell how close you are to victory.

I think there is a single explanation for both these oddities - the point of this Sigma fight is not to challenge you, but to wow you as a tech showcase. Mega Man X 2 contains a special chip on the cartridge that allows for limited wireframe polygons, and it uses this feature in a number of fights. By far the most impressive/intense example, however, is the Sigma battle. I get the feeling the developers wanted us to stare at this creepy vectorized Sigma head for as long as possible, hence the generous health drops and lack of distracting health bar.

Conclusion

Boss fight design in a Mega Man game is tricky. It has to be tough but fair. It has to be fun, but maybe also a little frustrating. And there are a number of different way in which you can challenge the player’s skill set.

In my opinion, the failure of Mega Man X 2’s boss battles is that, on a whole, they don’t strive to do any of these things.They are so obsessed with being different that no one ever stopped and asked themselves whether “different” in this case was also engaging. You can’t just toss in a gimmick or a bunch of unexpected stipulations and call it a day.