This post is an analysis of the environmental storytelling in Mega Man X 2. Here are links to the rest of the deep dives:
Spoiler Preface!!!
This post contains content that some may deem as spoilers. You have been warned
Mega Man X 2 is quite the pretty game, but those visuals don’t tell much of a compelling story. MMX 1 portrayed many of its stages as taking place at or near civilian or industrial locations, but X2 mostly gives up on the idea in favor of generic bases (which, admittedly, are located in some exotic locales).
The intro level takes place in some sort of desert base. After flying in on a hover bike, X crashes it into the nearest enemy and proceeds to enter. Notice the other building in the background:
I suppose this suggests the base is spread out over multiple buildings. Seems like quite the elaborate setup.
As you move further in, you eventually discover some rather large robots under construction:
Before you ask - yes, this is foreshadowing. By the time we get to the end, we have to fight one of these big dudes as the boss:
In a bit of “bad storytelling through game design”, this guy looks like some sort of city-crusher, but in fact is a pushover. He doesn’t deal much damage, doesn’t take much damage, and those big noodly arms are not as aggressive as they could be. I understand its the opening boss, but come on. If the bad guys are building a ton of these, they’re wasting their time.
With that out of the way, we can get to the good stuff. Let’s start with Wheel Gator’s stage.
Wheel Gator
This is one of the few ones that takes place in some sort of civilian location. Specifically, you fight in and on a giant, gator-shaped rolling base as it moves through a destroyed city:
Don’t stare at the city background for too long, as it repeats very quickly, and once you see it you can’t unsee it.
One nice little touch is that the sky gets dark if you remain in the level for long enough. Few, if any Mega Man stages mark the passage of time like this:
It’s subtle, but I appreciate how you can peek outside through these little windows scattered throughout the base:
Wheel Gator’s stage also has what I might call an example of environmental unstorytelling, something that (likely) unintentionally craps on the worldbuilding. Hidden away on this mobile base is a Dr. Light capsule:
It is never explained who exactly placed these capsules, or when, but back in X1 it felt like a reasonable assumption that perhaps Dr. Light had them buried in various locations where he thought X would most likely need them. That theory gets thrown out the window, however, when there’s a capsule on an enemy base. How did it get there? Do they teleport or something?
I guess we’ll never know, just like we’ll never know what’s going on here:
Is that supposed to be the front of the base? Is it supposed to be shaped like a face? Or does Wheel Gator just like painting his ugly mug in front of the boss chamber?
Flame Stag
Flame Stag’s stage takes place in an active volcanic region:
There are all sorts of pipes strewn about the stage:
Are they using the stuff as a weapon? An energy source? It’s hard to tell. The stage is simply called “Volcanic Zone”.
Ripoff Watch: I also know that this feels like a ripoff of Launch Octopus’ stage in X1, without the “evil supervillain’s lair” vibe. Maybe if it was set on a volcanic island they could have channeled some of that same energy.
Bubble Crab
Bubble Crab’s stage starts out with this gorgeous shot:
It doesn’t really tell much of a story, but it was worth posting regardless.
Most of the underwater sections of the stage have this as the background:
I guess these giant, jellyfish-looking structures are supposed to be part of the Underwater Base. They are quite gorgeous, especially when the game is in motion and everything is scrolling.
Overdrive Ostritch
This stage takes place on a military base, no doubt about it. We know this because at the end of the stage, X jumps onto a launching missile and shoots it down:
The stage actually puts a ton of effort into making it look like, well, a base, one that might actually be (or had been) in use.
Here is a scene in which we see a garage full of hover bikes. Since there don’t seem to be a lot of standard sized human Mavericks, I wonder if maybe this was a non-Maverick base that was taken over?
The background art here doesn’t make a ton of sense. It looks like a hangar of some sort, but apparently it just ends at some point, in front of the bed of spikes we see in the foreground. That doesn’t seem practical.
The scene below throws me off a bit. It looks a lot like a normal highway in the desert:
I guess roads on a military base don’t tend to look different than any others.
The photo below is the same area without the road. It gives you a better view of the desert background, which does a fantastic job of portraying the sheer vastness of the sand dunes:
Notice too the tiny little buildings in the background. This is the kind of detail I wish they would have added to the desert scenes in Mega Man Zero 1.
Magna Centipede
This stage is the most “important” one of them all. It is extremely elaborate, and weirdly enough, it gets reused and recycled throughout the game. Early in the story, we see the main villains in the following scene:
Aaaaaaand here is the first thing you see when entering Magna Centipede’s stage:
Did they think they would fool us by changing the color palette a bit?
Anyway, first third of the stage has a security system. Get caught in any of the yellow searchlights:
And everything goes to hell:
A whole bunch of gun turrets (shaped like harmless blocks) drop down and open fire, while parts of the floor give way. This “red alert” phase doesn’t make life that much harder, though getting across without being caught is pretty tough (there’s even an achievement for it in the Legacy Collection).
Near the very end of the stage, things get weird. There are these gooey blobs that drop to the ground and turn into parts of the floor:
At the same time, a giant reticle floats around in the stage:
If it locks onto you, the game pauses as Magna Centipede (or someone) seemingly analyses X. This can happen several times on your way to the boss chamber, though I don’t think it makes any sort of difference:
Notice, too, the giant screens in the background showing schematics of X:
I like the story being told here - someone trying to use the powerful computer systems in this stage to try and gain some advantage against X - but the game doesn’t really follow through on it.
We’re not done with stage yet. When we get to the final Sigma stage, we travel back here again. Not only that, but the stage plays out exactly the same until you get to the midboss’ chamber, which is where the showdown with Sigma begins. Well, after he punches a hole in the ground that leads to an underground chamber:
I can laugh at the game recycling the stage in cutscenes, but to reuse a whole stretch of the level in the final moments of the game? It just goes to show how much of a time crunch the team was in with this game. What’s the point of getting them out year-after-year when the experience is going to feel slightly underbaked?
Morph Moth
I already covered this stage in detail in an older post. Everything I wrote there still applies. It is one of the only stages that takes place in a civilian-ish location, and there are lots of nice details throughout.
Crystal Snail
Crystal Snail hangs out in a giant crystal cave. That’s it. It is my pick for most boring stage in the game.
Wire Sponge
Wire Sponge lives in a “Weather Control Station”, which is such a speculative science fiction concept that I can’t tell whether it is originally meant to help control the weather, or if it was made to cause terror.
What I do know is that has a lot of robotic animals and nature scenes, which mostly exist as an excuse to simulate a bunch of weather changes in the stage:
I don’t know if there is any other purpose to the nature scenes. Seems like the artists might have just used this one to have some fun.
Conclusion
The environmental storytelling in X2 is weak. Too many of the stages take place in generic bases of some sort or another. Sure, they often look gorgeous, but so did X1. It can do better than that.
There was a way to turn this game’s existing scenery into storytelling - all the game had to do is explain (either implicitly or explicitly) that the Maverick Hunters drove Sigma’s army out of most of the civilian centers, and are now taking the fight to Sigma’s remaining military strongholds. Maybe that was, in fact, what the artists were going for, but it isn’t clear. I have to assume that this wasn’t much of a priority for them.