Command Mission is a good turn-based RPG.
I wasn't expecting much out of this game. It was cheap and I heard it was short and easy. While the game itself was easy, the bosses gave some amount of challenge. I put over 24 hours into the game, while the main review claims it can be beaten in 16 hours. While I'm sure that’s perfectly possible, I just don't think you'll get any enjoyment out of a game rushing through it.
There was plenty of sidequests in the game like collecting tokens, collecting figures, completing challenges, doing the Mechaniloid fetch missions, optional bosses and the Eternal Tree. I did most of that.
----------Battle System----------
Megman X Command Mission is a basic Turn-Based RPG. There can be a maximum of 3 playable characters on a team and 4 enemies on their side. You can switch out any character with reserve characters when the character you want switched out turn comes up. You won't lose a turn or anything at all for switching characters out, this makes the game a bit simple.
You can equip everyone with 1 character specific weapon. There's no armor in the game, so the weapon counts as the armor. The weapon can drop or raise your Attack, Shield, Armor and Speed overall. You can also equip 2 secondary weapons that anyone can equip. This weapons use up WE points. You can use each weapon once per turn if you have the correct amount of WE points. After each turn you gain 25 extra WE points to use, you can save these up or use them for your secondary attack. Once you use your main weapon, your turn is over.
There's only one special attack per character. Special attacks use up all your WE points that you've collected. You can collect up to 100 WE points, the more you use for your special attack the more time you'll get to complete it, or the bigger the attack. Each Special Attack is radically different from each other. For example, Axl can summon a boss or giant enemy from a DNA list, you have to put in a series of button commands to command it before time runs out, while Megaman X can charge his attack by holding in the A button and hit multiple enemies.
Each character can morph into "Hyper" mode. Hyper mode will give your character extra strength for a few turns. Special attacks are stronger and sometimes they might change slightly. Your extra and normal attacks might change as well. You can only use Hyper mode once fight, but you can regain Hyper mode again by using items.
You gain experience for each enemy you kill after the battle. The experience is divided between all of your characters equally. If you gain 1,200 experience with 6 characters on your team, you'll only gain 200 experience each. Leveling up can take a long time towards the end of the game because of this.
You can add up to 4 accessories per characters, although some can only equip 2 or 3. Each character gets a Erosion limit, and each accessory has Erosion points. If you go over your limit something bad might happen to you during battle.
You can view your characters and enemies entire turn list. On this list also shows your HP percentage and your enemies HP percentage. The enemies also have a VIT meter, this shows up when you attack them. If you knock their VIT meter down to 25% and have 3 active (not dead or missing) characters on screen you can perform a "Final Strike". This Final Strike will give you a few seconds to hit the A, Y and X buttons as many times as possible as your characters all attack at once. This is an overkill attack and by the time you can perform a Final Strike the enemy is pretty much dead, this is only useful for smaller enemies you want to just get rid of to speed up a fight.
You can't heal yourself using items, you have to use your classic Megaman tanks. You can find tank parts scattered around the game to create a new tank, similar to Zelda's heart pieces. Each tank is 100% full. You can heal yourself or your whole team by percentages. For example, to heal your whole team's HP by half you have you use 60% of a tank.
On the field you'll find crystals, these crystals will give you an item or partially fill up your tank. You open these crystals you have to charge at them. You can use this charge to break through rocks and stip over traps as well. The levels puzzles are usually very simple and they always walk you through when you enter a new puzzle, so the game is pretty simple in that sense.
The random encounter rate is very bad. You can run away very easily, but it still gets frustrating to the point of throwing your controller when you just want to get to the next room.
There's some Final Fantasy Tactics style side jobs where you use broken down Mechaniloid and sent them out to previously played levels and they find items and money for you. These Mechaniloid max out their levels up to 10. There's three types, ones that fight, ones that search for items and the rest that search for discs. You don't physically use them, you just send them out on a mission and wait for them to come back with the goods.
----------Characters / Story----------
You play as Megaman (X), and you're sent on a reconnaissance mission with Shadow and Zero to stop the Rebellion Army. I could go on more about the story, but it would spoil to much. The game shocked me with how many plot twists, dialog and story is put into this. I certainly wasn't expecting much out of this game, but I did end up enjoying the story. I haven't played a Megaman X game before, but I knew of characters like Zero and Axl, and they're both in this game. The townsfolk always have interesting things to say as well for each chapter. The only problem I had with the story is the bosses would always disclose their evil plans before and sometimes after they fight with Megaman.
----------Graphics----------
The character designs look great. Everything from the bosses, characters, enemies and regular towns folk are made in a cel-shaded graphics style. I love cel-shaded graphics. The cel-shaded graphics really shine during dialog and cutscenes. Everything else like special attacks, level environments, etc are generic CGI styled graphics.
The level design is really bad, almost as bad as Evolution Worlds or LOTR's: The Third Age. Each and every level is just a series of hallways, almost feels randomly generated. Sometimes there's dead ends with switches and treasures, but it's mostly always linear and you would blow by a level really quick if it wasn't for the high level of random battles you'll encounter in the game.
When characters have dialog with each other they're pitted against each other similar to an intro of an arcade fighter game. For example you might have Megaman X on the right and Zero on the left speaking with each other, if a third character butts in the one not addressed will be removed and replaced with the new character's dialog. The subtitles are often hard to read during cutscenes though. They put the first line where the characters are, and then the second line is in the black letterbox. They have voice overs, so it doesn't matter to much, but it still ticks me off a bit.
There's an intro anime for the game and also an even better outro to the game.
----------Sound----------
All the main characters are voiced out. The only ones that aren't are the town folks you'll find scattered around your base. All your characters will have battle cries in the game and when taking a hit your characters will also display sounds of agony.
The music isn't so good though, it's very techno-y and I can't stand that. Some parts of the game remind me of music from Oni.
----------World Map----------
The game is split up into chapters, each chapter opens up a new level or world. The only reason its split into chapters is to introduce the new level boss similar to old NES Megaman games do after selecting a robot, but you don't get to choose since it’s a linear RPG. Otherwise the only difference between chapters is new items in shops, you can still go back and visit old levels at any point in the game. To visit old levels you need to find the Shopping Arcade at the Hunter's Base. You'll go through a line of shops and meet up with a person that can warp you for free to any previously visited level to finish up any sidequests. When you want to warp, you'll be presented with a world map that looks like a grid with all the areas places around your base. This is the only world map in the game.
In levels you will get a small level map in the corner of the screen. On this map they will show you doors, unlocked doors, the last door you entered, and items. You can also open a map menu and check out entire level. The whole map is a giant tree that branches off to each room, it's very difficult to read and pretty ugly. This is one of the worst maps I've seen in a game, coming in second to only Evolution Worlds.
----------Time to Complete Game (first run through, last save after credits)----------
24:28
After you beat the game you can continue on playing doing sidequests you missed and even unlocking new secrets. This is alot like Paper Mario for the Gamecube.
