There are many storied game franchises that struggled to survive the late-90s shift from 2D to 3D as the dominant style, and from cartridges to disc, with series from Castelvania to Sonic the Hedgehog putting in some supremely dicey entries before finding their feet. Others, like Mega Man X, never really recovered.

In splitting the eight-game saga into two pieces for this nostalgic collection, Capcom has (either intentionally or not) produced a pair of compilations that differ enormously. Mega Man X Legacy Collection contains the first four games and, taken together, it's a master class in mid-90s action-platformer design. If you play those blockbusters of yesteryear back to back, you get a sense of how the entire industry progressed over those four years, as the pixel art and music gets bigger and better and narrative becomes ever more important.

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But I wouldn't recommend anybody play the four games included in Mega Man X Legacy Collection 2 back to back. Even though the games are packaged with the same love and care seen in part one, they're simply not as good. The idea of continuing with a 2D, side-scrolling adventure series might not have seemed like a smart business move back then, but in a retrospect it was a much worse idea to shoehorn in 3D sections, bloat the story to the point of absurdity and utilise voice recordings in a way that, frankly, borders on abusive.

Mega Man X7 in particular is a write-off. This was the first entry for the series on PlayStation 2, and while scenes that shift the action to 3D look better here than they did previously thanks a bump in resolution, they're all painfully slow and clumsy. Meanwhile the entire game is filled with some of the most annoying voice clips ever heard in video games, played repeatedly and overlapping with each other any time any character does anything. For me, it's literally unbearable.

The other three games are better, and while as a whole there is some interesting historical insight to be gained (these four games are much harder to come by than the initial four), I'd suggest this collection is of little value to anyone who doesn't already really love Mega Man.