Growing up, one of my favorite games was Megaman X4. I would eventually play through the entire Megaman X Collection simply because I loved that game and wanted more. The main series was good, sure, but it didn’t quite offer that fast-paced action high that I was getting from the X titles. Despite Megaman 11’s moderate success, it doesn’t seem like we’re getting X9 anytime soon, which is why I was very excited to hear about 20XX and 30XX. The first was a spiritual successor to the Megaman titles, made by the fans. The second, just releasing last year, is the same thing, but for the X titles, finally giving me another Megaman X game. I got the chance to play the demo at PAX last year, and was cautiously optimistic, but a bit turned off by the fact that it was a roguelite. Now that the game is out and in its final build, I can give it the proper review it deserves.

                So with that, 30XX is a 2D rougelite action-platformer. You choose between Nina, who has a long-range gun and who gets new weapons by defeating bosses, or Ace, who has a sword and who gets new maneuvers by defeating bosses, and launch yourself into a run. These two are, in case you hadn’t guessed, very much legally distinct versions of X and Zero, down to their color schemes and having some suspiciously similar attacks for boss powers. Each run consists of you going through eight stages in a random order, picking up additional improvements to your stats and weapons, pets that help you fight, and various other bonuses as each level becomes more and more difficult. Should you succeed in these eight stages, you’ll be thrust into the two endgame levels. Should you fall, you go right back to the start with none of those abilities you found, but with some Memoria currency that can be spent to permanently improve your characters for future runs.  The gameplay loop is just as engaging as in any other rougelite, with your abilities slowly improving every run, both in terms of upgrades, and in terms of skill. You also get a much better understanding of the various tools you can pick up, and which ones to aim for in the scattered shops and bonus challenges you may find in each level. Unlike most games of the genre, however, the levels are not truly randomized. Each of the eight main stages has eight variations of increasing difficulty, and the game maintains a fair difficulty curve by ensuring you’re always going through the appropriate version. So for example, you might breeze through Deepverse on your first playthrough, only to find a more difficult Deepverse 5 when it’s the fifth level on a future run. But you will always see Deepverse 5 if Deepverse is the fifth stage.

                And, for those like me who don’t love roguelites as a genre, the game also includes “Mega Mode,” which does away with those elements in favor of the classic Megaman style. In this mode, you have dedicated save files and can choose what order to go through the levels in, though all levels and bosses are set to their most difficult variation. Between levels, you have a small shop and training room you can visit, where you can choose from a pre-selected list of upgrades that might normally be found at random in the roguelite version.

                With explanations out of the way, we can talk about the game feel now. It’s fantastic. The player is given perfect control of their mobility with the dash and walljump mechanics, such that the most nonsensical of projectile patterns feels fair to push through. The default weapons on each character lend themselves to two very different, but equally viable playstyles, and while the gun is usually going to be the better weapon for the sake of safety, I never felt I was disadvantaged for preferring the sword. The different versions of each level are all built around the same central mechanic-per-level, meaning you always roughly know what to expect going into each level, and all of them have varied enough mechanics and aesthetics to standout. My favorites were probably the gravity lab and the crystal cavern with its burrowing mechanics, but each of the main eight levels gives you a unique experience, such that crawling through them never gets stale. Combined with a soundtrack that is as soothing as it is upbeat, and I genuinely like all the different areas you’ll visit during gameplay. Each level is sufficiently meaty while being laid out such that a skilled player can blitz through their mazelike designs. Getting lost is also never an issue, as every direction will either lead you back onto the main path, or to a bonus challenge/item that was tucked away for more exploratory players. Barring a basic bat enemy, each level also comes with its own enemy lineup, so the variety pack elements of these levels never truly wears off. You can learn everything eventually, but there’s enough here to keep you entertained long after you finally complete your first run.

                As you might have guessed based on the type of game this is, the story isn’t much to write home about. There’s some implied character dynamics between the villain and your mission control team, but the writing is mostly just fun one-liners and bare-minimum exposition to help transition you from one attempt to the next. What attempts there are at serious plot, namely the multiversal conflict going on in the background, is given too much effort to call phoned in, but isn’t going to interest the average player.

                Visually, the game’s got some nice-looking sprites and an enjoyable art style. The fact that this was made by an indie studio definitely shows at times, with certain sprites having some stiff transitions between animations, but this is never a distraction. My only complaint about the visuals is that the splash art for the heroes and the major bosses is inevitably always going to look so much better than their final sprites (excepting Hoot Omega, who is perfect). The UI design is also good, though I must note that in the pursuit of brevity, there isn’t quite enough description given to some items for me to understand what they do right away.

                All in all, I very much enjoyed this game, and will probably continue speeding through it for fun in the future. I have three important complaints though. The first is that in Mega Mode, there is a nasty glitch where your character sometimes becomes uncontrollable when loading into the final level, which prompted me to restart the game a number of times. Second, said final level is disproportionately lengthy, with way too many unique bosses in a row. It sincerely should have been cut up and made into two different levels, because even on Mega Mode, having to restart the entire thing just to hit yet another boss you don’t yet understand is brutal. Third, and this is going to sound almost hypocritical here, is that this game is effectively Megaman X9.

                30XX gets a B+ as a final grade. Could have been an A- if not for that glitch in the last level.

                So what do I mean that it’s just Megaman X9? Didn’t I want that? Yes, yes I very much wanted it. The game’s structure is Megaman X, heart and soul, and Nina/Ace are X/Zero through and through. There’s a few mechanical tweaks, such as making Nina’s gun charge passively when not being fired, or Ace refilling ammo for his boss powers by comboing enemies, but I kid you not when I say that, with a few graphical upgrades, this could have been the ninth game in the series. I am so happy to finally have a new Megaman X in my hands, and I’m sure the devs would consider this to be the ultimate praise (seriously, they did great work with this), but the fact that it almost feels like a rip-off of a major series stands out. Which begs the question of what a spiritual successor is.

                We all have games and other works that we love dearly. We all want to see more and more of them as time goes by. However, sometimes we see something we love fall to the wayside, and so we think about taking up the reigns and creating our own version. The folks at Batterstaple Games actually sat down and did the job, lovingly crafting their own ideal version of that hypothetical X9 we never got with original-ish characters, and I cannot give them enough credit for doing exactly that. Which raises the question of if they should be celebrated for making the thing they love, criticized for effectively copying another game, or both. Spiritual successors, when done well, are inevitably going to face this problem, and I don’t have a solid answer to my own question.

                Sure, the game plays like another series, but isn’t that exactly what I wanted? To have a new X game in my hands that felt the same and gave me that same rush from the high intensity action-platforming with its dash that feels way too good to use? Why do I deserve to criticize somebody for producing exactly what I was asking for? In the end, I think the answer is that I don’t have that right, because while there may be a little creativity lacking in copying the game’s structure and mechanics, it is still an incredibly well-done version, and the bosses especially prove a real degree of creativity, being much more varied, interesting, and involved than most of the X series mavericks were. Plus, while I sat here dreaming of that ideal sequel, these people actually got to work and made it. To that end, the people that make these dream projects, these spiritual successors, these realizations of childhood things they always wanted, deserve all the credit. There’s enough in here to warrant being its own game, even if I keep calling Ace Zero in my head. And they were pretty honest about that when I played the demo at packs, with the devs even referring to Nina as “Not-Megaman” as a joke.

                I think, at the end of the day, there’s nothing wrong with the fact that this game resembles another so heavily. They weren’t ripping it off when Capcom has refused to make a new title in over a decade. So long as these things are being crafted with love and respect, spiritual successors made by the fans deserve to exist. They’re just people making more of what we all want after all. So long as they keep doing it well, there’s no problem here.

                See you all in 40XX.