Mega Man X DiVE

» see mobile.capcom.com/rxd as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Mega Man X DiVE opened across East and Southeast Asia on 24 March 2020, with Australia and India two days behind it and Japan following that October. It was the first original title Capcom's Taiwan office ever built. The idea had started there around 2018, when Yoda Hideto, who was living in Taiwan and had a long attachment to the series, went to the Mega Man producer in Japan and asked to be allowed to make one.

What came out was a side-scrolling action game drawn in 3D models, with wall kicks and Ride Armor carried over from the X titles, wrapped around a gacha. Capcom's Osaka office supervised the intellectual property, and Keisuke Mizuno designed the two original characters, ViA and RiCO, along with new armor for X and Zero. The story dropped the player into a database called the Deep Log, where corrupted Maverick Data had scrambled the series' own history into something you had to fight back through.

It passed eight million downloads by January 2022. On 7 June 2023, at one in the afternoon Japan time, Capcom stopped selling the paid currency and announced the end of service in the same hour. The game ran another three and a half months and closed on 27 September.

~ the case file ~

~ the deep log ~

A large part of what you paid for only existed while the servers did. Cooperative play and the ranked battle mode were online features, and so were the raid bosses, where everyone on a server chipped damage into one shared health bar until it broke. The roster was the other draw, pulling characters from across the whole franchise, including a version of X called χ-kai that began life as an April Fool's joke and got promoted into a real character with a real personality. Crossover guests arrived from Monster Hunter Rise and Devil May Cry 5.

The franchise reached Turkey long before this game did, on cartridges and then emulators, and the blue armor is recognizable to anyone who was a child anywhere in the nineties. This version was not that. It launched in March 2020 into storefronts that did not include mine, and the mechanic at its center, the capsule pull against a currency called Element Metal, is one I have read a great deal about and never once performed.

~ a paid goodbye ~

Capcom then did something that almost nobody does. It announced an offline version at its June 2023 showcase and priced it that August. Mega Man X DiVE Offline went on sale on 1 September 2023 for 29.99 dollars, or 3,990 yen, on Steam and on phones. The servers it was replacing went dark twenty-six days later.

The offline build carried over the characters from the online game but left out the licensed crossover guests, Street Fighter's among them. It carried over nobody's save data and was treated as an independent title. There was no gacha in it and nothing to buy twice. Players who still held paid Element Metal had until the afternoon of 25 December 2023 to claim a refund on it.

~ two endings ~

The date most people will find is not the only one. Capcom's own service, covering Asia on phones and the Steam version worldwide, ended at 13:00 Japan time on 27 September 2023. A separate global version for the western markets and Korea had been operated under license by NebulaJoy since August 2021, and the official statement described it as an entirely separate game whose servers would stay online.

They stayed up for another ten months. NebulaJoy announced the end on 1 July 2024 and switched its servers off on 30 July. Capcom Taiwan's game had already been dead most of a year when that happened, and what outlived it was a licensed copy running somewhere else.

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