Video Game / X-Men Legends II

X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse (2005) is a sequel to X-Men Legends.

The game abandons the POV character mechanic (which, in the first game, led to long stretches of Magma wandering around the X-Mansion alone, giving only one player anything to do) and has the X-Men teaming up with the Brotherhood to prevent the evil immortal mutant Apocalypse from becoming invincible.

Playable X-Men and Brotherhood members

• X-Men: Wolverine, Cyclops, Storm, Jean Grey, Iceman, Rogue, Nightcrawler, Gambit, Colossus, Sunfire, Bishop
• Brotherhood of Mutants: Magneto, Toad, Scarlet Witch, Juggernaut. Sabretooth and Pyro were PC exclusive.
• Unlockable characters: Professor X, Iron Man, Deadpool. X-Man, Cable, Cannonball, and Dark Phoenix were PSP exclusives.

Followed by the Marvel Ultimate Alliance games, the first of which was also developed by Raven Software.

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Provides examples of:

• Adaptation Distillation: Apocalypse's goal is just his plan from the late 90s storyline The Twelve, condensed greatly, mixed in with some of Age of Apocalypse.
• Adaptational Villainy: The Stepford Cuckoos, who in the comics are with the X-Men, despite having been made by Weapon Plus to kill all mutants, here serve Apocalypse willingly out of revenge against Emma Frost for a Failure-to-Save Murder that resulted in one of their fellow Cuckoos being killed during a mission.
• All Your Powers Combined: Apocalypse's plan is to kidnap and steal the powers of 4 mutants with harmonic DNA, which when placed in one individual amplify each other. The resulting combination combined with Apocalypse's own powers would make him effectively invincible. The mutants are Polaris, Quicksilver, Emma Frost, and Sabretooth.
• The Artifact: Apocalypse's worshipers are called the Madri, which in Age of Apocalypse was because they were created from mass-cloning Jamie Madrox, the Multiple Man. Here, no such connection is even hinted at.
• Artificial Stupidity: Team members follow the player-controlled character too faithfully - which can result in disaster if the PC flies too carelessly over an open pit.
• Ascended Extra: Bishop has a cameo in New York as a small child in the first game, as is a playable character in this game.
• Bad Boss: Apocalypse detonated an EMP bomb that fried both Genosha's aircrafts and his own fleet.
• Bag of Spilling: All of your levels and any powerful gear you might have collected are completely lost from the first game to this game.
• Bait-and-Switch Boss: In the Infinite Factory, you're told that Sinister's super computer is in charge, and is implied that it will create a copy of Sinister to fight you. Instead you're forced to fight four holographic generators that constantly spawn evil copies of Storm, Ice Man, Wolverine and Cyclops.
• Bonus Dungeon: Characters could gain access to an extra-dimensional prison from which they could free Iron Man, who would then become a playable character. Stryfe as well, since his level can be bypassed entirely and the players can beat the game without having to fight him.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: Beast and Angel are captured by Apocalypse and brainwashed into helping him, resulting in the game's versions of Dark Beast (Beast's Age of Apocalypse counterpart) and Archangel. However, defeating them also undoes the brainwashing.
• Brick Joke: In Act 1, Mister Sinister muses on combining Nightcrawler's teleportation ability with Cyclops' Optic Blasts. One of the enemy types in Act 4 is the Optic Ghost, an enemy who can teleport and fire Optic Blasts.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome:
  • Despite being the main character of the first game, Magma is nowhere to be found in the second.
  • Psylocke and Jubilee flat-out don't even get mentioned in the second game.
  • From the Brotherhood side, Avalanche is the only one in the first game not to return in the second.
• Combat Medic: Rogue and Scarlet Witch are given party-wide healing powers in the second game.
• The Complainer Is Always Wrong: When Destiny makes a prediction that a team member will betray the others, Toad becomes paranoid and insists that the X-Men not do anything so that the traitor can't betray them any more. Everyone else tells him that they must fight Apocalypse and they can't let the prediction cause them to second-guess everything they do.
• Crisis Crossover: Where both X-Men and Brotherhood are forced to unite against the title villain, and Iron Man is a recruitable character.
• Crippling Overspecialization: Due to the way damage works in the first game, characters are generally only good at dealing one type of damage: either physical, energy, or mental. As the game progresses, you will often encounter enemies that either resist or are outright immune to a certain type of damage, which really reduces the usefulness of bringing certain characters on missions. Psychics end up suffering the most since the last third or so of the game is populated mostly by Sentinel enemies, who resist mental damage. Thankfully, the 2nd game took steps to fix this and many characters are able to deal more than one type of damage.
• Demoted to Extra:
  • Emma Frost. Playable character in the first game, NPC in the second. Still, that's better than some other characters who were playable in the first game (such as Jubilee) who don't appear at all in the second game. Probably to make room for the Brotherhood characters.
  • Poor Magma only ever gets mentioned in a trivia question, despite being the main character from the first.
  • Mystique goes from being one of the major villains and a recurring boss to just another NPC at hubs. Like Shadowcat, there was likely no way to interpret her shapeshifting powers in a beat-em-up game.
• Developer's Foresight: On occasion, bringing certain characters to missions will trigger unique dialogue. For example, Rogue and Mystique when the latter is met in the Savage Land.
• DRM: The PC port makes use the Safedisk DRM. Years after the release, a Windows patch has made it impossible to play the game. This force players to either play the game on Windows XP or use a CD crack.
• Enemy Mine: The X-Men and the Brotherhood team up to take down Apocalypse.
• Evil Sounds Deep: Apocalypse has quite a deep voice.
• Flipping the Bird: Wolverine flips off Sabretooth with his middle claw in the opening.
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: If the characters are left standing around inactive for a while, they will directly address the player and tell them to get things moving.
  Magneto: I command you to play the game this instant!
• Flying Brick: Rogue and Iron Man (if you enable the power up ability).
• Game-Breaking Bug: The second half is prone to frequent crashing if the hero chest, used for storing unused equipment, is more than half full, since the levels get much larger from the Madri Temple onward. Worst case scenario, you will no longer be able to load your save file.
• Game Within a Game: The PSP version added bonus levels based on classic issues of the comics that could be unlocked by finding comics in the levels. Playing some of these levels unlocked PSP exclusive characters such as Cable and Cannonball.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • Pyro and Sabretooth are playable characters in the PC version. They appear as NPCs, and are captured in the game by Apocalypse's forces. The problem is that the characters are still playable while they've been captured. In Pyro's case, the party breaks him out of prison during Act 1, though he is available before that, allowing the player to have Pyro rescue himself. More serious is Sabretooth's case, since he is the fourth and final mutant with Harmonic DNA that Apocalypse captures for his evil plan.
  • It's also possible to do this with Deadpool once he has been unlocked, though it gets lampshaded this time given the kind of character he is. The two Deadpools argue over which is the real one.
• The Ghost: Marrow, after being a recurring villain in the first.
• Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: A lot of bosses, which the game feels no real need to explain who they are.
• Guest Fighter: The game features two:
  • Iron Man is unlocked by finding all of his armor and bringing the pieces to his alter ego Tony Stark, who has been kidnapped by Apocalypse's forces and put in a cave, but unfortunately without a box of scraps.
  • The second game also features Deadpool.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: During the final part of the boss battle against Abyss he absorbs the characters inside his body... where you can detonate the bombs left inside himself and defeat him for good.
• Horrible Judge of Character: Blink is unable to recognize Sabretooth is a demented murder-maniac, even though he's not really making any attempt to hide it.
• Hub Level: The game had the characters relocating their base of operations from one section of the game to the next, with locations like Genosha, the X-Mansion, and the Savage Land.
• In Medias Res: The game begins with Professor X already having been captured by Apocalypse, and the X-Men and the Brotherhood working together.
• Innocent Innuendo: Colossus compliments Scarlet Witch's intelligence and beauty. He's just being nice, but before he knows it Magneto is beaming at the thought of a powerful mutant that wants to be his future son-in-law. Hilarity Ensues as he has to explain this mess to Kitty Pryde, still not sure exactly what he did wrong in the first place.
• Instant Armor: Iceman make instant armor based on his elemental abilities after getting the armor upgrade. Storm and Jean Grey get elemental/psychic shields that can be shared with the party.
• Interface Spoiler: After you find the first secret items (dramatic emphasis) in the game, Professor X states that these are the key to locating a certain individual who will help the team greatly. He chooses not to reveal this individual's identity, leaving you to discover it for yourself once all the secret items are uncovered. So you look at the pause menu and it tells you how many Iron Man armour pieces you have thus far...
• I Shall Taunt You: Toad and Rogue have attacks goading enemies to attack them, with Toad's one even being called "Taunt".
• Large Ham: Apocalypse hams it up by just his inflections and growly voice, especially thanks to his long-winded speeches. He also apparently has No Indoor Voice.
  "YOU FOOLS. YOU SHOULD BE THANKING ME, NOT PURSUING ME. I'M THE ONE WHO SHOWED YOU THE X-MEN AND BROTHERHOOD COULD WORK TOGETHAH! YOU'RE STRONGER FOR-IT!"
• Lone Wolf Boss: Sauron. He is encountered in the entrance of a Nuwali temple necessary to advance the plot, but straight up tells the heroes he has no interest in joining Apocalypse. He does attack them when he realizes they are friends (or in the Brotherhood's case "acquaintances") with his arch-enemy Ka-Zar.
• MacGuffin Girl: The four mutants that provide Harmonic DNA which will grant Apocalypse with ultimate power: Polaris, Emma Frost, Sabretooth and Quicksilver.
• Mirror Match: The Infinite Factory's level culminates in a boss fight with evil clones of the X-Men.
• Movie Superheroes Wear Black: Most characters wear black or other dark shades. The more colorful costumes from the comics are still featured as alternates (though even if the player changes a costume, it will not show up on the cutscenes).
• Mythology Gag: During the briefing on Blink, Magneto tells the X-Men that when sufficiently pushed, she can teleport as far as the Moon. In Age of Apocalypse, she did just that.
• Nerf:
  • In the first game, Magneto is the penultimate boss and has more than enough power to provide a challenge for your four-mutant team; in this one, Mags becomes a playable character, and his powers are toned down so he would not be a God-Tier character. Weirdly, this is an accurate representation of his powers in the comics. Whenever Magneto makes a Heel–Face Turn, it's always accompanied by him being powered down by some contrived plot device, simply so he doesn't curb stomp the rest of the X-Men's rogues gallery, few of whom even approach his normal power levels.
  • Storm is also toned down a bit in the second game. For example, her lightning bolt comes directly from her and not the sky, meaning she can no longer hit enemies not in her line of sight.
  • Jean Grey is also nerfed. No more clearing rooms with boosted Psychic Scream. At least not without the proper equipment.
  • Inverted with Nightcrawler. In the first game, his greatest asset to the party is as a CPU-controlled character who can Leap of Faith members out of danger as his actual offense is really weak, based entirely around teleportation. In the second game, he has an incredibly useful dash attack, can use teleporting as a double jump, and his Master of Chaos super is very handy in boss fights with a lot of mooks. Master of Chaos is also THE single most effective boss killing Extreme in the game. Whereas other Extreme attacks are AoE blasts (or wide Cones in the case of Cyclops) Master of Chaos has Nightcrawler zapping around the field, attacking enemies. But if there is only one enemy on the screen....each and every single attack homes in on that enemy for HUGE damage.
• Offscreen Villain Dark Matter:
  • Fresh from the destruction of Asteroid M, Magneto somehow managed to conquer Genosha between the first and the second game, built a city and beef up its defenses.
  • Even though Apocalypse hasn't taken over America and reduced the rest of the world to ruins like in Age of Apocalypse, he boasts an impressive amount of resources and manpower such an massive army of mercenaries, Infinites, a fleet of ships and his own Religion of Evil in the form of the Church of Madri, and managing to invade Genosha, the Savage Land and New York. This actually becomes a plot point in Act 3 when the X-Men and the Brotherhood must sabotage his factories in order to hinder his plans.
• Once Done, Never Forgotten: Havok's still getting shirt from the X-Men for the whole "side with Magneto" thing.
• One-Man Army: Deadpool qualifies, if you play a New Game Plus file - As he only unlocks after completing the game once, he's already as strong as the rest of the characters are at the end of the game, and as he's one of the few characters to feature a mix of close and long range attacks, you can play a large portion of the game with a party consisting of just Deadpool.
• One Stat to Rule Them All: Focus, which increases the amount of energy you have for special attacks and how quickly you regenerate energy, because most special attacks do a fixed amount of damage. In the second game, characters whose attacks are X% of melee damage (typically, X>100) also need Striking.
• Optional Boss: Lady Deathstrike: if your main character is an X-Man or if you have Wolverine in your party, she will attack you. If your main character is a member of the Brotherhood, he can just bribe her with money and let her go.
• Papa Wolf: Heartwarmingly enough, Magneto is this to Quicksilver in this version. He's livid when he finds out Apocalypse has kidnapped Quicksilver and is anxious to frantically fly off to save him later in the game.
  Magneto: May the Gods help you if my son is harmed!
• Playable Epilogue: You can return to previous levels after defeating Apocalypse to explore any missing collectibles and fight a couple of enemies (bosses are gone however).
• Pragmatic Adaptation: The game is a loose adaptation of the Age of Apocalypse mixed with The Twelve, forgoing time travel and the death of Charles Xavier, basing some characters strictly on their AoA selves (Abyss and Colossus' brother, Mikhail Rasputin are lackeys of Apocalypse like in AoA, as opposed to—respectively—a hero and a threat in his own right in the traditional Marvel Universe), basing others on their classic selves (Sebastian Shaw, Selene, Bastion) and making Dark Beast a brainwashed Beast.
• Purposely Overpowered: The Secret Characters Deadpool and Iron Man, unlocked after beating the game (or right before the final boss, in the case of the latter). The former is a One-Man Army for most of the game, and the latter can clear whole rooms on his own with his bolts or repulsors when his Boost is activated.
• Red Herring: Destiny foresees that someone within the X-Men or Brotherhood will betray the alliance. We are led to believe it's Angel, since he's captured and a cutscene shows him being turned into Archangel, the last Horseman of Apocalypse. In reality, there were two traitors, Destiny only foresaw one. The other traitor was Beast, who's been captured and rescued by your party, as part of Apocalypse's plan since he was brainwashed to be The Mole.
• Remember the New Guy?: A lot of characters are just sort of there, as if they'd always been.
• Rivals Team Up: Magneto and the Brotherhood are playable characters.
• Schmuck Bait: How did Apocalypse capture Iron Man? Turns out all he needed was a beautiful woman. Tony fell for it.
• Secret Character: Iron Man and Deadpool.
• Shaped Like Itself: A combo between Gambit's Charged Card and Sunfire's Atomic Charge leads to message... Atomic Atom!
• Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids!: Magneto's counterpoint at the end to Charles's Silly Rabbit, Cynicism Is for Losers!.
• Skill Point Reset: Available for increasingly steep prices.
• Smurfette Principle: Scarlet Witch is the only woman on the Brotherhood's side. Mystique and Destiny are also women in the Brotherhood, but they are not playable.
• The Starscream: At the end of the game, Apocalypse falls victim to his machine overloading him. As the X-Men walk away, Wolverine assures Beast he obviously just made a mistake. Nearby, a still-alive Sinister lets off an evil laugh, making it very clear it wasn't.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: The X-Men and the Brotherhood Members constantly get into arguments with one another, especially during briefings. Fortunately, Professor X and Magneto are able to stop them before they get serious.
• Token Good Teammate: Scarlet Witch may be a member of the Brotherhood here, but she's the least jerkiest.
• Trash the Set: Apocalypse destroys the X-Mansion in the second game. It is still used as the Hub Level during the fourth chapter, but is heavily damaged.
• Troll:
  • Juggernaut frequently riles up the X-Men during the mission briefings with insulting or insensitive comments. He goes too far when he starts hitting on Jean Grey right in front of Cyclops, causing Cyclops to lose his temper and fire a warning laser at Juggernaut.
  • Toad occasionally joins in, but he is much more weak-willed than Juggernaut and will stop when another character calls him out on it.
• Truer to the Text: Mystique and Rogue are more like their comics incarnation, having a strained mother-daughter relationship, which wasn't mentioned at all in the previous game.
• Version-Exclusive Content:
  • The PC port came with with Pyro and Sabretooth as playable characters.
  • The PSP port came with bonus stages and 4 characters: Cable, Cannonball, Dark Phoenix and X-Man.
• Villain Override: One mission has the X-Men attacking Apocalypse's sea wall with a bunch of Sentinels as backup. Then Bastion (who is a Sentinel himself) hijacks the Sentinels.

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