Mega Man X3 is notoriously difficult to track down—it was such a late-era SNES game that it faced a small print run, though there are Saturn and PSX ports featuring animated cutscenes! North American games finally got a second chance to play the game in the Mega Man X Collection, which came out for GameCube and PS2 back in 2006. Oddly, MMX3 was never released on the Wii Virtual Console, but it was recently released on the Wii U VC, where I snatched it up.

MMX3 continues the trends set by MMX2. Ride Armors are more important to finding secrets, but you must unfortunately find the four different Ride Armors! This, along with all the Heart Tanks, Subtanks, Dr. Light Capsules, and new Enhancement Capsules means that MMX3 feels more like a level-based Metroid game in the amount of backtracking you end up doing. I found this tedious and unbecoming of the MMX brand, but you might enjoy it more. The X Hunters from MMX2 have been replaced by…new X Hunters in this game, including Bobba Fett cosplayer Vile from MMX1. The MMX series does in three games what it took the NES Mega Man series four games to do: introduce a puppet villain. This time it’s Dr. Doppler, but everyone knows who he works for.

Zero is actually playable for the first time, but in a half-assed way: he can’t fight bosses or X Hunters, his attacks are weak compared to X’s upgraded X-Buster, and if he dies once, that’s the end of it (you even get a different ending). I got my fill after using Zero for about five minutes before switching back to X for the rest of the game. I should also note that MMX3 is considerably more difficult than its predecessors, although it’s surprisingly easy to get Mavericks into a weak point-exploiting animation loop. Let’s put it this way: there are lots of opportunities to use Save States in MMX3.

MMX3 is a good, but not the best, MMX game (that’s still the original). The soundtrack is particularly weak, the level design is uninspired, and it doesn’t differentiate itself from MMX2 aside from the piled-on collect-a-thon. But at some level, it’s still MMX, and that’s good enough for me.