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In January 2025, I released dumps of two pre-release builds of Mega Man X7: the E3 2003 Special Edition and a U.S. press event disc. Both builds already had their share of differences from the final game, including X being fully playable in the intro stage. But only now are we learning that there’s even more unused content hiding in the code.
Rockman Corner reader lucasfera15 has spent the last few months digging into inaccessible content from the U.S. press disc. His early work turned up unused textures and models, but his latest findings are easily the most interesting yet: full-blown unused areas and alternate stages
Among them are an early version of the Crimson Fortress/Escape stage with different layouts and camera angles, a scrapped version of Flame Hyenard’s stage built around a completely unused mission, and several other remnants that never made it into the final game.
Mega Man X7 may not be anyone’s favorite game in the series, but I don’t think I’m alone in saying its development is pretty fascinating. Seeing stuff like this for the first time is really interesting, and it makes you wonder why some of these changes and cuts happened in the first place.
I remember looking up X7's production studio at one point and found that it had been credited with work on Resident Evil titles. As well, Tatsuya Kitabayashi turned out to be a Breath of Fire series veteran. So on the surface, it explained why X7's core felt so poor. Nobody involved in production had likely ever dealt with anything Mega Man, much less the PS1 entries the team was expected to succeed.
ReplyDeleteI'm actually wondering if Capcom actually did copy Legends' design and try to refine the basic movement of it control-wise for the full 3D sections.
X7 final does have nice explosions and smoke effects.
ReplyDeleteThank you for bringing this project to the community's attention! More cool finds are coming soon!
ReplyDeleteGod that game is terrible
ReplyDeleteThe game is not that bad and series immediately rebounded. Happy to look back on trivia such as this.
ReplyDeleteSometimes, I think Mega Man fans like to pretend X7 is worse than it is just so they can commiserate better with other fandoms.
DeleteBesides, X6 is objectively a much shoddier and more unpolished game.
Yeah, I will play it like any other X game, and it does have nice explosions, though some things, like a player being able to fall on their ass stunned when hit was annoying. Also could use more 2D mode. I like X8 more, of course.
Delete@Jark X6 still has a well-made gameplay core to fall back on, but yeah. For all the people that meme about Sonic Adventure being a 'rough transition', X7 actually is said rough transition.
DeleteThe more i watch of x7 gameplay, the more in its potential i believe. Its a crappy 3d, yes, but a lot of the issues could've been fixed through faster gameplay, better animations and well thought level layout to try to accomodate the X series characters in a 3d enviroment as similar as possible to its previous 6 games. I really think it can be done through a major improvement mod or something, but i guess 3d engines are just harder to change. But nowdays we're getting stuff like a nearly full fledged remake/reimagining of x6 through Viral Nightmare. This would've been unthinkable in the late 90s/ 2000s. Best we have for x7 now is N's edition, but it's still not hitting the mark for me.
ReplyDeleteX8 seemed to have fixed X7's flaws, I feel. It had faster gameplay, better animations (also nice they got rid of the cell shading), and levels looked better than X7.
DeleteTrue, and frankly it's my favourite in the series. Gameplay, lore, aesthetic and even small things like additional newgame+ content and doing Axl justice. However x8 abandoned x7's 3d third person gameplay, which is fine, the 2.5d was an incredible choice. But what i mean is the third person gameplay in x7 could've really been improved/fixed i think if someone really tried to give it a second chance.
DeleteYeah, sometimes one has to wonder if they playtest their own games enough before release, and back then, we did not have the benefit of it released online to receive updates and canon fixes like they do on Steam now, so much harder to fix games back then (would require another wave of hardcopies).
Deleteyeah, but i also think that allowed games to be very well thought out before release back then. In x7's case, i think it was more because the team was inexperienced and a very soon deadline for a 3d engine starting from scratch. Different from x2 and x3 which kinda reused X1's engine. Same for x5 and x6 reusing x4's engine. So a lot of things really didn't align for x7. And 3d was probably forced in there because of the new hardware advertisement for the new console gens at the time like the ps2, gamecube and xbox. So they really took much more risks than they should've.
DeleteThe team had experience, they were just working outside of their comfort zone (2D and survival horror) and had to replicate a 2D gameplay engine they inherited in 3D. They also didn't have the kind of shared toolset that they do now, so a lot of games had specialized software packages. If anything, they got the broad strokes right but the fine tuning is what failed and you can tell because the final product often feels like it was building around the failure points of its engine.
DeleteI think X7's failure was unavoidable, even if Capcom had good reference material.
Funny enough, that top pic and ugly cell shading makes the enemy look like a sprite. Back then when it started being common (not sure if it still is), I was tired of games using cartoony cell shading vs more realistic details (I hated that about Wind Waker while Twilight princess of the day looked better). At least MM12 looks better as did X8. Low detailed childish cell shading was a big fad in the 2000s for some reason.
DeleteI still don't really like the style of Wind Waker, but I admit it aged pretty well. IMO the biggest problem here are the incredibly thick black lines.
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