Mega Man X2 - Development

Development

Mega Man X2 was developed by team at Capcom, which included artists and designers Keiji Inafune, Sho Tsuge, and Yoshihisa Tsuda. A majority of the people who worked on Mega Man X2 had either been heavily involved with the development of the first Mega Man X or were completely new to the franchise. Though he was largely responsible for designing characters for the original Mega Man series as well as Mega Man X, Inafune was "hands-off" with the art design in Mega Man X2. He instead began focusing more on directing, producing, and story writing for the newer series beginning with this title. According to Tsuda, it was Inafune's decision to bring Zero back to life in Mega Man X2 simply because he thought he would be "a shame" to keep him dead. Inafune felt particularly attached to Zero, a character whom he had originally intended to be the main protagonist of the X series. Even though Inafune had mostly relinquished his character design duties in Mega Man X2, he refused to allow any drastic changes to the illustration of Zero.

The game's antagonists, the X-Hunters, were present as several illustrations within Inafune's sketchbook prior to the completion of the first Mega Man X. Their aesthetic features were combined to create the basis for Sigma's design in Mega Man X; the three designs were then fleshed out as three separate characters for the sequel. The team had planned to include a fourth, female X-Hunter and were going to denote them as the "Four Guardians". However, both this character and Violen's second form were cut from the final version of the game due to a lack of resources. In creating the eight, ancillary Maverick bosses, the development team considered holding public, fan submissions as they had done with several games in the original Mega Man series. They ultimately decided against the idea as they wanted to further establish a contrast between the two series. Tsuge elaborated, "With Mega Man, we wanted the players to feel a certain familiarity with the characters, but it was our intention that the X series would have a world with a more hardcore feel to it. We didn't want the bosses in this world to be cute products of kids' imaginations, we needed them to be solid characters refined by professionals."

Mega Man X2 has an in-cartridge enhancement by Capcom called the Cx4 chip, a digital signal processor which allows for limited 3D graphical effects like rotation, enlarging, and shrinking of wireframe objects. The company held weekly meetings devoted to utilizing the chip to its maximum potential in Mega Man X2. Tsuge commented that the Cx4 was their "greatest adversary to date" as they were instructed to use it in as many ways as possible. The musical score for Mega Man X2 was chiefly composed by Yuki Iwai. Others, such as Ippo Yamada, were involved in some of the game's sound production. Tsuge wanted the Flame Stag stage theme cut from the game, but the song was kept due to its popularity among the development staff. Additionally, the game's ending theme was originally its final boss track. As the team felt it was more appropriate for the ending music, it was slightly altered and made as such. The Mega Man X2 soundtrack, featuring the original SNES instrumentals, was included as part of the Capcom Music Generation: Rockman X1 ~ X6 compilation released by Suleputer in 2003.