This is a 14 year old game, so, sorry, but I'm going to get a little spoilery with this. But hey. You had your chance. Almost 15 years worth of chances, actually.
In addition to a spoiler warning, I'm going to give a ramble warning. Replaying it made me think about more than just the game and I hit on some stuff that's more interesting to me than just reciting what I liked about the game.
First things first, let’s take a walk. A walk all the way back to 2004. It’s a long one, so strap in, pilgrim - because a lot of shit happened.
The Year was 2004 and…
Friends was ending so people were sad, but not too sad because America fell in love with Eva Longoria when Desperate Housewives came out later that year. Britney got softer with Everytime and forced my generation to think it was one word. The Red Sox won their first World Series in 86 years after the greatest comeback in sports history. against the Yankees in the ALCS. Beyoncé was still in Destiny’s Child. The New England Patriots became the first NFL dynasty of the new millennium after a(nother) Super Bowl winning field goal by Adam Vinatieri, though they failed to cover the spread. George W. Bush won his second term, and then Green Day won teenagers with American Idiot. Brian Michael Bendis killed Hawkeye and then Clint Eastwood killed Hilary Swank. Halo 2 taught the world what online gaming was and soon after you couldn’t pause games anymore. Nelly Furtado released her best song that no one cared about. U2 let the world know they can’t count in Spanish on their way to the middle. Usher took his shirt off for Confessions II and holy shit. Lost made everyone talk polar bears and smoke monsters. Sex and the City ended and everyone who’s ever read a book wondered what Carrie ever saw in Big. Edgar Wright graduated to feature films, and Lindsay Lohan dismantled the plastics when she wasn’t swinging in a bird cage denying rumors that were probably true.
Oh, and Paul Giamatti almost singlehandedly destroyed the merlot industry.
I wrote that little "We didn’t start the fire”, because while all that stuff was cool, one weekend of the 52 weeks that year I didn’t give a shit about popular culture. At all. I didn’t listen to music, I didn’t watch tv, read comics, anything. I didn’t care about shit. I didn’t care because I got the X-Men game I’d always wanted, and for 25 hours that was all that mattered.
And again in 2018, for 25 hours, I got the chance to play it again.
The Game Itself
X-Men Legends is a monument to a bygone era of gaming and a shrine to everything I loved about the hobby in high school. Legends comes from a time when games were allowed to be average, devs could lean on a license to sell copies, game design could be transplanted from other games, and there was something oddly refreshing about revisiting it in 2018, 14 years after its release.
The game came in an interesting for the franchise. The X-Men got a renaissance of sorts thanks to the Bryan Singer films, and those contemporary touches were reflected in Grant Morrison's run on the newly rebranded New X-Men series. On top of that, Ultimate X-Men launched in 2001 and was a retelling of the X-Men's atomic concept in a modern, digital, globalized world without the baggage of the old series. So, there was a lot to draw on for inspiration and Raven Software, the developers, did a wonderful job of blending all possible versions into an easily digestible team that feels more or less like its own thing. In fact, I had to look this up, but this game takes place in its own reality in the Marvel Multiverse, on Earth-7964. That's not important. But it's cool. Y’know, at least to me.
Here's a loading screen from the game:
And here's the naked cover to issue 43 of Ultimate X-Men by David Finch and Richard Isanove.
Before we touch on story, let's talk about what you'll be doing in it.
The game is an action RPG where you fight enemies, look for loot, level up your character, unlock new powers, and use experience points to make those powers even better. There's a map system with a fog on it that clears once you've explored it, so if you're like me - the dude who hates moving on to the next area until you're sure you've explored every nook and every nook's cranny, there's a system in place to make sure you won't.
The game just feels good to play. Landing one of Wolverine's strikes on an enemy feels powerful. Getting Colossus to punch a Sentinel to death in one hit gives you just enough dopamine to make you scramble to find the next thing to hit. Even just pulling off non-powered combos feels right. It's a joy to play even if it's hardly ever difficult or challenging and can quickly be repetitive if you don't mix the team up enough. You're able to assemble teams of 4 and switch between any of those characters at any point by pushing on the D-Pad. Some characters are better suited for certain situations, some aren't available for story reasons, some need to be unlocked, and it's fun as hell assembling your favorite mutants and wreaking havoc with them.
The only annoying gameplay mechanic is one that isn't fun in Pokemon either. Certain characters mutant skills are needed in certain situations, like HM's in Pokemon. Sometimes you'll need to make a bridge and only a few select characters like Jean Grey, Iceman, or Magma are able to create them using their powers. Similarly, sometimes you'll need to weld metal and only characters like Cyclops or Storm are able to do that. Sometimes you'll need fliers, and you get the picture. This forces certain team lineups and once I had to backtrack nearly 15 minutes because I didn't have the right assembly of characters and nearest extraction point, where you can change your team, actually wasn't near at all.
HM09JeanGrey
The game starts in New York after a young mutant is attacked by the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants and loses control of her powers, causing a riot to break out. The mutant in question is an original character and as far as someone just created for a game, she's actually pretty cool and interesting. A lot of the time in games, characters like this are just farted out into the ether (Oh, hi X-Men Destiny), but Alison Crestmere is a genuinely fun character. After she's rescued by Wolverine and Cyclops, Alison is taken to the X-Mansion and thrown into the deep end of the team's mission (and drama). This game does a really nice job of tying disparate parts of the X-Men mythos into an engrossing story that's a tour of the X-Men's world.
You'll go to Weapon X facilities, deal with Morlocks, fight Sentinels, go to Magneto's Asteroid M, and even fight the Shadow King in the Astral Plane. You see just about everything cool the X-Men have to offer, and the few things you don't see are addressed in the game's sequel, which you can read about here soon. The story is good, but the writing is not. There's so much contrived, expository dialogue that pushes the story forward but I don't hate it. It looks 2004 but it doesn’t sound 2004, which probably helped the game hold up; it sounds more like a 60’s comic, which lends itself well towards a more mythic, timeless team.
So you see a lot of shit, but in what context? Make no mistake, this game is basically just a Diablo clone, but it's a very, very fun one. And if you're going to copy a game, why not copy the best in the genre? With cel-shaded graphics on the PlayStation 2, GameCube, and original Xbox generation of consoles, you'd never confuse this with something pretty, but even on a relatively underpowered system like the GameCube, frame rates are for the most part steady enough that the visual sacrifice is forgivable. I played it on a modern 1080 flatscreen TV and the only time I had issues was on the Astral Plane. The dark art direction bled with the all black backgrounds and made depth perception a little difficult to gauge. That's normally not a problem since you for the most part can't fall off the map, but the Astral Plane was one of the few locations where there were floating bridges that would ferry you between rooms and I definitely fell off the edge a few times not because of a lack of skill but because a lack of clarity.
The cutscenes themselves are actually pretty impressive for 2004, but the in-engine ones, the majority of the interstitial videos that play between missions are fucking hideous. That said, it's really hard to care now, and was infinitely harder to care back then.
Why It Mattered
I never thought I’d see Emma Frost or Gambit together as a kid.
Comic book movies are all the rage now but in 2004, they weren't. There were a lot more bad movies than good ones, and special effects still hadn't really... you could tell they were shitty. Never in my life as a 14 year old did I think I'd get an X-Men movie with Sentinels, with juggernaut tearing through the X-Mansion, or with Asteroid M falling towards the Earth while robots fight mutants in space.
Shit, even now that seems pretty ambitious, but at least plausible.
Those cutscenes though? They were the X-Men movie fans wanted and this game gave that to them. We never thought we'd see the fucking Morlocks and this game gave it to us. It gave us Emma Frost and Jubilee and a blue Beast, it gave us everything we wanted.
This game is a testament to the middle-tier of games. It's a textbook 6-7.5 and that's not an insult. Obviously I want an amazing X-Men game, but now we're not getting any fucking X-Men games and that's depressing as hell. These characters have never been more popular - they've never had more exposure to a global audience and now they're nowhere to be seen on consoles. Games like Batman Arkham Asylum set the bar so incredibly high that we're only now in 2018 seeing a competitor in the AAA space from Insomniac (PlayStation 4’s Spider-Man, look for a review soon).
Arkham raised the bar so high that anything less than it got shifted to mobile if it released at all. Until 2011 or so, there have only been a few random Spider-Man games, a few from Iron Man, one from Green Lantern, at least one Thor game, a Captain America, and that's pretty much it. No one has tried, no one has even attempted to be average.
You really can’t understate what Arkham Asylum did for licensed games.
And that sucks. I like dorking out with something from the middle but that's not an even an option. There are 8,000 superhero games on mobile but they're not feature-rich and they're just now how I want to engage with the license. These are modern myths, and for the same reasons I don't watch movies on my phone, I don't want to play games about these larger than life characters on such a small screen.
A few years ago, Activision re-released Marvel Ultimate Alliance 1 and 2 on modern consoles and I wish they'd taken it a step further and released these games as well since this is where that series started. I can confidently say that X-Men Legends is not great, but it's exceedingly good and deserves to be played today. The only recommendation I would make is to try and grab it on Xbox if you could. I personally prefer the the gamecube controller, but there’s actually one fewer button on it than the PS2 and Xbox Controller. It’s no biggie, but on top of that textures are a bit smoother, loading times are a bit faster, but hey - don’t let that get in the way of playing this old gem. The More You Know™