Mega Man X7 is a notorious game among Mega Man fans. It's generally considered one of the worst games in the franchise and absolutely so for the Mega Man X subseries specifically. That seems about right to me, although it's not an absolute worst game ever situation as is popularly claimed. There's definitely some serious issues, though. It kind of reminds me of Devil May Cry 2 in this way, being another Capcom game whose problems mostly come from being rushed and having a kind of chaotic development. Both games released in 2003, so it's likely there were bigger management challenges happening at Capcom that affected these two.

The big highlight of this game is how it incorporates both 2D and 3D gameplay sections. Normally, Mega Man games stick to a 2D plane but X7 occasionally gives you portions of levels built on fully 3D planes. The 2D parts are mostly fine, albeit more sluggish than the typical Mega Man fare. The 3D sections are weirdly stagnant, with enemies often placed in ways where you can just walk or dash around them without engaging at all. When you do need to fight them, it's difficult to judge depth perception with a melee-oriented character like Zero and so easy to take contact damage unwittingly. The platforming for 3D sections similarly suffers from the depth perception challenges. Meanwhile, the ranged characters like X and Axl have an auto-lock function that lets them blast enemies from a safe distance. Even that auto-lock is finnicky, though, when you have to choose between multiple enemies at once.

The other big highlight of the game is how you need to choose two of the three main characters to form a tag team before entering a stage. You can swap your main character with their partner at the push of a button. This idea is pretty nice and works okay. Some enemies make more sense to use a melee-oriented attack on while others are better to shoot from afar. Again, though, depth perception can be hard to gauge consistently, so even when I wanted to carve people up with Zero's saber, it often felt way less efficient and safe overall than just sticking with Axl or X who can handle everything from range.

The camera ranges from decent to poor at framing the action, especially during 3D sections. It's very claustrophobic and tends to hold too close on your current position, so enemies and platforms can be a pain to keep track sometimes as you or they move around. Add in some strange hitboxes on enemies and finnicky controls and this becomes aggravating to deal with. It's very weird how the camera can end up in positions where I'm pulling my character backwards with the control stick but somehow the game translates this into moving them forward to collide with an enemy. You also move slowly overall and need to use the dash ability constantly to get anywhere in reasonable time.

It feels like the dev team wasn't sure how to translate Mega Man's gameplay to 3D, so we get something that waffles between bad and mediocre during those sections. The story seems more emphasized than most Mega Man games would typically go for, although a lot of it is told through static text boxes, and the character designs and music are decent. The easiest way to sum up why this game sucks is that it often feels like an early 3D game that you'd expect from 1995 or 1996, but it came out in 2003. Not even DMC2 had that problem. It at least felt like a functional 3D game of the era, just unpolished and needing more time. Mega Man X7 is poor at best due to a weak concept for how to frame and execute 3D camera angles and gameplay at all. The 2D sections work better but are themselves average at best.

It's not entirely bad, but significant portions are weak enough that I'm fine with calling this poor overall. There are definitely worse kinds of games, but this is probably about as bad as a commercial release from a reputable studio/publisher would typically get. It's arguably worse than DMC2's rushed state, whose gameplay could be called mediocre overall but had good ideas that got some vindication when the much more polished Devil May Cry 3 incorporated them. Mega Man X7 is closer to being outright poor, but because of its story and levels at least feeling complete, it seems on the surface level like it'd be better. That is not the case, this is some weak gameplay down to the conceptual level.