It's time to see the eight stages and get cracking on Mavericks once again.
All maps by X GOD.
After the post-intro cutscene, you'll enter the stage select screen. You'll meet Double, the rookie hunter. He's jumped ship from the Repliforce after their coup. Also, X calls him Colonel due to a mistake in the English translation.
You'll then get acquainted with the eight Maverick stages and their missions, which have no bearing on the game whatsoever other than creating a reason as to why you're going there:
Jungle: Infiltrate enemy-occupied jungle and destroy the weapon under construction. (Web Spider)
Cyber Space: A bug has corrupted the network. Dive into cyberspace and exterminate it. (Cyber Peacock)
Air Force: The Repliforce ship has taken off. Pursue and blast it out of the air. (Storm Owl)
Volcano: Dragoon of the 14th unit is a traitor. Locate and bring him back to Hunter HQ. (Magma Dragoon)
Marine Base: Repliforce decimated the city and left. Pursue them aboard a Land Chaser. (Jet Stingray)
Bio Lab: The abandoned lab is now operational. Investigate and destroy the lab. (Split Mushroom)
Military Train: A military train is moving supplies. Cut off Repliforce's supply route. (Slash Beast)
Snow Base: We've discovered a hidden snow base. Halt production of their new weapon. (Frost Walrus)
Volcano
The spiked balls will bounce towards you, but if you can position yourself and time your movements carefully, you can walk under them.
Volcanic rocks will go up and down the bottomless pits soon after the start, so don't cocky and simply dash jump over every single one. You might get smacked by one of those rocks for your impatience.
If an energy pick-up is laying on its side, it's a small pick-up. If it's upright, it's a large one.
The bats will drop bombs, and the Mettaurs just move towards you. There are craters which spew volcanic lava out, which damages to the touch.
The squid robots have three cannons and will fire missiles at you. Fire a fully-charged X-Buster shot at it, then lay waste to it with regular shots. They always fire missiles high, low, both, and then repeat, so be prepared to jump over some missiles if you're not quick enough at destroying them.
Near the end of the first section, watch out for the rolling rocks. They drop down at the top of the slope and then go down the slope, and it can be tough to jump over them as they can sometimes comes down in pairs.
Shoot the wall to get to the second section.
If you're low on health at the end of one area, you'll be completely refilled at the next one.
In the second section, you'll have to dash jump from one platform to the next. You'll be dealing with the volcanic rocks shooting up and down the screen again, and some of them will destroy the platforms after enough of these rocks hit them, so you'll want to be a little quicker when you see that happening.
The Reploids in the Robot Ride armors will slash at you if you get close enough to them.
After the first Robot Ride enemy, dash jump off the left edge to get a Heart Tank and increase your maximum health.
At this point, you'll see volcanic rocks coming down from above like meteors. Keep an eye out while progressing.
When you make it to the lava, you'll find a free Robot Ride armor. You can use this to destroy any volcanic rocks and to traverse the lava, which is really awesome. The Robot Ride has an overhead slash attack as opposed to previous games, and despite being something to get used to, it's pretty efficient. You can even use it to take a lower path and go straight to Magma Dragoon. You'll find out he was the one to let the Sky Lagoon fall, making it official that he's gone Maverick.
He's pretty easy to take on with the Robot Ride armor. Just pound away at him with it, since you'll have a lot of health on it to withstand more than enough punishment while whittling Magma Dragoon's health bar down. If you lose the Robot Ride armor, just blast him with fully-charged X-Buster shots.
Magma Dragoon will leap around the room, landing either at the center or one of the sides. He has a diving jump kick and will also shoot Street Fighter-esque Hadokens at you: one high and one low. He also has a Shoryuken, a flame thrower attack that covers the whole platform and can also be shot into the air, but more often than not, he'll be hitting you with Hadokens.
If you have Storm Owl's Double Cyclone, use it on him. It does the most damage. When it connects, Magma Dragoon will leap to the other side of the room, so follow him and hit him with it again. He'll keep leaping to the opposite end of the platform over and over.
When you beat Magma Dragoon, you'll find out someone goaded him into joining Repliforce and fighting Mega Man X. But who?
Beating Magma Dragoon with X will give you Rising Fire. It shoots fire vertically, affecting airborne enemies. It can also burn certain objects as well.
Snow Base
You'll see Blizzard Buffalo's frozen, battered body at the start of the stage. Blizzard Buffalo was in the third game.
The white gorilla robot will try to attack you with snow. Stay a good distance away when you shoot at him.
Shoot down the ice block above you shortly after the start with Rising Fire to get a Heart Tank.
The snowman robots will try to dive at you when you're close enough to them.
The snow platforms will break when you wall-jump onto them or land on them. You'll have to wait a few seconds for them to reset. Some of the larger ones will be situated above spikes and will have snowboarding robots that will get in your way with their extreme sports escapades. Shoot them down with a charged shot.
The upper-right corner of the stage has an item that we can't get to quite yet...
Near the end, you'll be seeing ice platforms rising from a bottomless pit. Yes, there's a bottomless pit, so you want to make sure you have something to land on as you drop towards the door to the mini-boss.
The mini-boss here is a sphere-shaped robot that encases itself in ice and becomes a three-pronged ice claw. Shoot it in its red center, then dash under it as it flies around in a sine wave pattern. When it takes enough damage, it balls up, jumps through the ceiling and comes down on the floor hard, causing some of the icicles on the ceiling to fall down. It will also try to dash at you, trying to catch you and put you in a vice-grip, so you'll want to wall-jump over it when it does that.
At half-health, the mini-boss turns into a large ice crystal and bounces around the room at 45-degree angles, shooting diagonal ice crystal spikes every so often.
Throughout the battle, you'll want to use Rising Fire as it will do more damage than the X-Buster. Just wait for it to be above you and let loose.
There are ice blocks to shoot down here. Some will contain Mettaurs and miniature flying enemies that fly back and forth and shoot at you, while others will contain bombs that take out whatever is above and below it.
There is also a whole field of ice blocks, and the upper-right most one contains the W-Tank of the game. This will collect weapon energy if all of your special weapons are full.
The ice birds will try to freeze the entire screen, and you'll want to destroy them as soon as possible. If they do freeze the screen, watch out for the icicles that are produced, as they will fall and cause damage. If any enemies are on the screen at the time, they'll be frozen.
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