Another Konami game on the Famicom I picked up for quite cheap, this is one I'd heard good things about aaaages ago, but have just never got around to trying. I remember hearing it framed as some sort of Mario 3 wannabee that was also pretty good, so "something Mario 3-ish, I guess" is what I went in expecting. What I got was a bit more Konami than that, but I can certainly see where the comparisons come from aesthetically. It took me about 1.5 hours to beat the game on original hardware.
The story for the game is pretty simple. Buster Bunny goes to his TV one day to see Montana Max broadcasting a message to him. He's kidnapped Babs! The only way to get her back is for Buster to collect all the keys to Max's mansions scattered around the land. But that's easier said than done, as they're all guarded (in some respect) by Max's goons! It's a very cut and dry story, but it does the job fine of setting the stakes. This is one of the many Konami-made action platformers of the era with changeable characters as a mechanic to help add more depth to the game without the need for more buttons. When you enter one of the game's six stages, you have the choice to pick between Plucky Duck (who can hover by mashing the button, just like tanuki Mario), Dizzy Devil (who gets an attack by pressing the button that kills things he touches), or Furrball the cat (who can wall climb) to be your partner through the stage. However, you can't just swap between them at will, and you need to find the star powerup in a stage to swap between characters. Thankfully, you can just scroll the balloon it came out of off the screen to get another if you change your mind, but it feels a bit needlessly awkward. The stages themselves are pretty hard, and a lot of that comes down to the fact that it's one hit between you and death. Though you can find a heart powerup in a stage to give you an extra hit, they're increasingly rare as you go through the game so you can't rely on them to save you (I'm not sure stages 5 and 6 have one in them at all). The stage design is usually pretty good and fair, but especially in later stages projectiles or enemies that appear suddenly from the scenery or from the screen scrolling too fast can kill you in ways that are hardly fair. It's a mix of good challenge and "just memorize it" challenge, with the entirety of the (admittedly fairly short) final stage being a long sequence of "just do it nearly perfect" platforming sections that send you back to the start of the stage should you fail. At the very least the bosses are pretty good and not too hard, but dang can the stages be mean. The presentation is a mixed bag but overall quite nice. On the more positive end, this is a very pretty looking Famicom game, with sprites that are well detailed while not being too big, albeit the enemy variety isn't terribly large (not that it really needs to be). The less positive side is that while the music there is well done, there isn't very much of it, and a nice rendition of the Tiny Toons theme song plays through at least half of the game's stages. Verdict: Recommended. It's on the harder side, but this is a really solid Famicom action platformer. If you use save states, it'll make this a much more manageable and easy time, I imagine, but even if you don't, it's something that can likely be conquered in an evening if you put the time and energy in. It certainly ain't Mario 3 beyond how the color palette and sprite quality looks, but it's still a quite solid Famicom game worth looking into.
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Back when I was hunting down a copy of the first Wai Wai World, I discovered to my surprise that there's actually a sequel! Apparently a much better known sequel, as the resale mall had like a dozen copies of the sequel but only one of the original XD. After how much I enjoyed the first one, I just had to pick up the sequel to see how it compared. The answer to how it compared is, well, tricky to answer exactly, but I did ultimately enjoy my time with it, despite how surprised I was with what I got XD. It took me about an hour to beat on real hardware.
The story of Wai Wai World 2 is similar to the first game in that it doesn't really matter. A big bad guy, similar to the last one, is threatening the Konami multiverse, and Professor Cinnamon is once again sending a hero to save it! However, this time Konami Man and Konami Lady are staying behind, and the professor's newest invention, the robot Rickle is off to save the day with the help of some Konami comrades! You have some returning faces from the first game, as Fuuma, Goemon, and Simon Belmont are here to heck stuff up again, but there are also some new faces as Upa from Bio Miracle Bokkute Upa and Bill from Contra join the party (while Mikey, King Kong, and Moai are left out of this adventure). The biggest and most immediately obvious difference between this game and the first one is a big shift in genre. Instead of a Castlevania 2-style action adventure game, this is a straight up action platformer as you go through a succession of stages to reach the big baddy at the end. You also don't rescue friends who join your party, and instead you pick between four groups of three characters at the start of the game. You also can't change characters at will, as you need to collect a power up to be able to do that. The power up starts a little roulette going in the lower left (or right, as this is once again a co-op game) corner between the icons representing your three partners, and when you input the button command, you'll swap into being that character. To add in a further twist, only Rickle can actually take damage and die. Your comrades actually can't die, but they can only stick around for a limited time. They have about a minute to heck stuff up, and each hit they take takes five seconds off of their clock. Your comrades also play fairly faithfully to how they do in their own games, with some exceptions (Goemon throws his smoking pipe only to have it return to him like a boomerang, which I don't think is a thing in the Famicom Goemon games XD). Bill can shoot very far in four directions (sadly not eight like in real Contra), Simon Belmont has his whip and the good range that comes with it, Fuuma has quite short range but hits like a truck, and Upa may have short range with his rattle, but he's also tiny so he's harder to hit, and his hits turn enemies into platforms (just like it does in his own games). The whole thing is such a different approach from the first game that it's not super easy to directly compare them in many ways, but nonetheless it's certainly an interesting approach to putting a new spin on the neat idea presented in the first game. Further expanding on a way this game is similar to the first is the shifting genres that this game takes place in. While the first Wai Wai World was mostly an action platformer with a shooting homage to Twinbee and Vic Viper at the end, this game has several shmup stages (in both the Twinbee and Gradius styles, complete with their respective power up systems), a puzzle stage, and even a racing stage. It also has a couple points with branching paths, so for example you can pick if you'd rather do the puzzle stage or the racing stage. Even the platforming stages have some variety thrown in, as there are horizontally as well as vertically scrolling stages, and even an auto-scroller or two. Everything is quite competently done, and it makes for a well varied if a bit short romp (as this game isn't terribly hard compared to what you'd probably expect for a Konami Famicom game). The presentation is quite good, and what you'd likely expect from a late-life Famicom game from one of the greats like Konami. The sprites are big and well detailed, and the music is full of fun remixed tracks from the games they're based on. The only real complaint is that sprite flicker can get quite noticeable at times, as is also so common among more graphically ambitious late-life Famicom games. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is a platformer that's stood the test of time really well. It's quite short and also challenging in a fair way, and it's well worth checking out if you're able and a fan of these kinds of action games. The gameplay on display is nothing that's going to blow you away, sure, but if you want something familiar yet a little different to spend a retro afternoon on, this fits the bill very nicely. This was the last of the GameBoy games I played, and I was ready for a pretty good time. I'd heard for many years from other sources that this was the best of the GameBoy Mega Man games, largely due to how much genuinely new stuff it had, and I was ready to see which between this and the fourth entry was actually the superior game. It took me about 2.5 hours to reach the end of Mega Man's space adventure~.
In a change from the other GameBoy Mega Man games, this one actually has a more involved story than the others outside of breaking the trend of having robot masters from the NES games. In addition to canonizing the other four GameBoy entries as their own series, rather than as mid-adventures of the NES games, this game sees you fighting not robot masters, per se, but invading alien robots known as the Space Rulers, who hail from and are named after the 8 planets in the solar system, along with their mysterious leader simply named: Earth. Earth actually hecks Mega Man up pretty bad in the opening scene, so Dr. Light repairs him and gives him a new weapon to fight these new foes with. It's not quite the mega buster, but it's more like a mix between the mega buster and the melee-focused Rush transformation from Mega Man 6. The shop from Rock Man World 4 even returns, and Mega Man also gets a new companion for this adventure: a weaponized robot kitty named Tango~. The punch weapon doesn't knock you back like the weapon from Rock Man World 4 did, but it does mean you can't fire while the fist is traveling out and returning, and it makes for a game that seems to want to be different simply because it can. It's not just a different way to play, but it feels like an actively negative change. The bosses themselves range from pretty good to sort of messy, and the stages range from pretty fun romps of action to longer, repetitious journeys that feel more like a slogs. Overall, I do like the new robot masters a fair bit, but this game's boss and stage design feel like it's often closer to Rock Man World 3 than 4, and that's not a good feeling. While it is nowhere near as messy as Rock Man World 3's downright vindictive stages and bosses, bosses like Mercury who have weapons that steal your money, weapon power, and even E-tanks leave a very rotten first impression that gets reinforced from time to time with other bosses who feel more cheap than they have any right to. The presentation is arguably the best in the series. The new boss designs look great, and the music is also most certainly the strongest out of all of the GameBoy games. Unfortunately, another feature this game shares with Rock Man World 3 is that you do occasionally get slowdown that affects gameplay to the point of making things needlessly difficult, but it's not nearly as constant a problem as it is in the third game. Verdict: Recommended. This game did annoy me quite a few times with how mean it is sometimes, but it's still a very solid game. It tries a lot of bold things, and while I don't like it as much as the fourth GameBoy game, it's still a good time that's well worth giving a go (if you can find a way to play it that doesn't break the bank too badly). I quite enjoyed playing through all these GameBoy Mega Man games. I'm not sure I like many of them better than the NES games, but I don't think the best of them are outright worse than those games. At the end of the day, I just prefer the larger resolution of the NES and the stage design it allows for compared to the more cramped experiences offered on the GameBoy entries. My ranking of the GameBoy Mega Man games is: IV > V > I > II > III I had heard from a few people on the Slack chat that this was the best of the GameBoy games, so I went into this one with high hopes. Granted, after my experience with just how rough the third Rock Man World game was, I was a little wary, but I went in hoping for something better at the very least. While I wasn't 100% overjoyed with what I found, I definitely understand why this game is held up above the other Mega Man games on the handheld. It took me around 2.5 hours to clear the Japanese version of the game.
As with the previous three GameBoy Mega Man games, this one's story is ultimately pretty simple and just boils down to stopping Dr. Wily as he tries to take over the world with four robot masters from Mega Man 4 (the four who weren't in the previous game) and four robot masters from Mega Man 5. There's even letters of Beat's name to collect to get him as a special weapon, just like in Mega Man 5~. You also have your E-tanks, slide dash, and chargeable mega buster, but with a few new twists this time. You can also collect mini-E-tanks, and four of them combine to make one normal (actually useable) E-tank, and there's even a shop you can collect money to buy powerups in, just like in Mega Man 7. However, the most important basic mechanical change is how your charge shots work for your mega buster. Unlike in all of the other 8-bit Mega Man games, when you fire a fully charged shot, you get bounced into the air slightly with a bit of recoil. This is something kinda neat that makes the game unique, but also probably the thing I like about it the least, as it makes certain bosses not feel too great to fight, since you can't jump immediately after shooting a charged shot. It isn't so much an outright bad thing, so much as it forces you to learn a new way to play Mega Man in a way I didn't really wanna engage with. That said, the bosses and stage design in this game are all really damn solid. The GameBoy rebalanced versions of a boss or two are just a bit too hard, such as Ring Man, and the end Wily Machine is also a bit too hard for its own good with how quick your reaction time needs to be, but the boss fights are overall really well done and fun. The stage design too is much more of the quality you'd expect from the NES entries to the series. They have the "Big Mega Man" sprite problem, but the stages are designed around that in much better ways than the past couple entries, and it feels more like "Mega Man" rather than just "Mega Man BUT on the GameBoy". The presentation manages to be pretty darn good as well. It's still quite a pretty game, and while it doesn't manage to be totally free of slowdown, it's much better optimized than the third Rock Man World game was, and the gameplay is never made significantly more difficult due to the slowdown like what is so common in the third game. The music is also generally quite good, with fine new tracks as well as good GameBoy renditions of the NES tracks you know. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is definitely my favorite of the GameBoy Mega Man games. While I'm not super in love with the change to how the charged mega buster works, everything else about it is much more along the caliber of design you'd expect from the series, and it's a very welcome jump in quality after how rough the third game in the series was. This was the first Mega Man GameBoy game I played after the first game, and I was expecting something more like Mega Man 2 had been when I was a kid. I figured that since the first GameBoy game was so difficult, the second game must set the trend for a generally easier experience than their NES counterparts. Hooooo boy was I in for a very rude awakening with just what a tough bastard this game is ^^;. Capcom returned to the company that made the first GameBoy Mega Man game for this one, and after criticisms (like I'd had) that Rock Man World 2 was too easy, they cranked the lever HARD in the other direction for easily one of the toughest Mega Man games out of all the 8-bit entries. It took me about 2.5 hours to get through this trial of a handheld Mega Man game.
Once again, the conceit here is that Dr. Wily is back again with two sets of four robot masters plucked from two different NES games. In this case, it's four from Mega Man 3 (the four who weren't in Rock Man World 2) and four from Mega Man 4. For the first four, they flow pretty well and do a good job of recreating the feel of their NES stages without outright copying them. They're like a remix made for the smaller resolution that the GameBoy offered. However, it's once you get past those first four stages that Rock Man World 3 really starts to show its true colors. The second set of stages are filled with instant death spikes, very painful enemies that rush you out of nowhere, and bottomless pits that require absolute precision to get past safely. You also don't get Rush Jet until you've beaten the most demanding of these stages, so there won't be much help for you in that regard either. These stages are consistently frustrating in how demanding their difficulty is, and they are rarely actually fun. Wily's final stage is also similarly designed and mercilessly long, and gods help you if you need a continue during that level. There are a couple of mini-Wily stages in between the two sets of robot masters as well as Wily's stage himself, and they hide the unique bosses of Giant Suzy (a giant version of the normal enemy) and the new Mega Man Killer: Punk. Giant Suzy shakes the ground in an annoying way that bounces you around slightly and makes it difficult for you to jump, but Punk is the cherry on the pie of bad boss design in this game. He has a lot of health, he can kill you in three hits, and his attacks are so fast they're nearly impossible to dodge without a lot of luck. The rebalanced versions of the old bosses are generally a bit too hard and tough for their own good in this game, but it's the unique bosses that really take the cake for just how miserable they are to fight. While you do have E-tanks, the slide dash, and even Mega Man 4's chargeable mega buster to help you out, they'll never do much good to help you against the game's biggest enemy: the slowdown. Rock Man World 3 is a very ambitious game in how it tries to recreate the backgrounds and highly animated platforms of the NES games, but they work to the severe detriment of the actual product. All of those luxurious animations go a long way towards making the framerate jump around a ton as you kill enemies and transition from screen to screen, and it makes getting past all of those instant-kill traps that much more frustrating (especially in sections with platforms that disappear the moment you step on them). The slowdown issues compound all the other mean design decisions found in this game, and make it just that much harder to actually learn your way through the levels. The presentation is actually pretty good, but it comes at the cost of that slowdown mentioned earlier. While there are some pretty darn good GameBoy renditions of classic themes like Dive Man and Snake Man, and their stages as well as their gimmicks are quite well portrayed here, those pretty graphics just make the game feel so much less nice to play that it would've been much preferred if they'd just been toned down for the good of the experience. Verdict: Not Recommended. This is the only game out of any of the 8-bit Mega Man games I'd actually call an actively bad time you should avoid. If you play the other four GameBoy Mega Man games, you'll likely be tempted to try this one out, but it is a game better forgotten. The mean design piled onto the terrible slowdown make this a slog from beginning to end that will do nothing but make you wish you were actually playing the much better NES games this one is based on. This was the only one in the series that was a replay for me. These games (as I'm sure many reading this are aware) are quite a bit harder to find in the States, and they go for quite a heftier price tag over there as well, so this was all I had for GB-based Mega Man when I was younger. I remembered it being fairly easy, which is why the difficulty of the first entry in the series had caught me a bit off guard in how difficult it was, but after all that other Mega Man, it was quite jarring to go back to something quite so easy as this. It took me around an hour and a half to beat the Japanese version of the game.
Most of these GameBoy Mega Man games don't really have much of a story beyond "Wily is back, go beat him", and despite the fact that it wasn't made by the same company as the first GB Mega Man game, this one is no exception. Like in the first Rock Man World game, Wily is back and he's brought four robot masters from the NES game that this shares a number with, and four from the next one. In this case, that means four robot masters from Mega Man 2 (the four who weren't in the last game), and four from Mega Man 3. However, unlike the first GB game, the second group of four robot masters actually have their own stages instead of just filling the void of the boss rush. That makes for eight robot masters stages, one big Wily stage, and a special boss unique to this game: Quint. This game isn't just easy, it's way too easy. And not in the way that NES Mega Man 2's normal mode is quite easy compared to a lot of the other NES games, but it's so easy it's often downright boring. It has the same "Mega Man is just too big" stage design as the first GB game, but things just mostly feel a bit too empty and slow as a result. The gameplay isn't terribly snappy because there just isn't much to fear for your death other than falling into the pits littered about the place. But those slow stages give way to very simple boss fights that are for the most part pretty easy with the mega buster and comically simple with the boss's weakness. Even Quint is a pretty underwhelming boss fight. Add in that you also have the slide dash from Mega Man 3 and E-tanks from Mega Man 2 and you have a game that is super duper forgiving to the point that it really fails to make much of an impression at all. The presentation is fine, but really not that memorable in any particular way. It's a good recreation of the sprites they're going for, but it still feels very simplified and "NES Lite" in its presentation. That extends to the music as well, which delivers a few less than inspired new tracks as well as just adequate iterations of the included robot masters' themes. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. If you're in the mood for an easier Mega Man game, this will certainly fit the bill. I don't really have much all to say about this game other than that it's too easy for its own good. That isn't inherently a flaw, but for a series like Mega Man, it means that a lot of veterans will likely come away from this game not feeling terribly satisfied. Rock Man World 2 succeeds in being a competent action platformer, but it fails in delivering what most fans would probably want from their 8-bit Mega Man. Despite being so excited for Mega Man 9 when I was younger, Mega Man 10 was so much less of an event (it was back to being "just another Mega Man") that this was the only one of this marathon I'd genuinely never touched and knew nearly nothing about. I had heard it was definitely not as good as 9, which is at least partly why it took us so long to get Mega Man 11, but I'd still been looking forward to tackling this total unknown the whole time I was playing through the other nine games. Well, now that I've seen it to its end, I can definitely see what all the lack of hype had been about XD. It took me around two and a half hours to complete the English version of the game.
In a pretty serious tone shift, Mega Man 10 goes for a much more serious tone in its story. A computer virus is ravaging the globe, and this Roboenza virus sends any robot who gets it into first a fever, and then into a violent rage. Even Dr. Wily has been put out by this, and he comes to Dr. Light and Mega Man begging for their help in both developing a cure and subduing some robots who stole the parts of his old cure machine. It's largely the plot of Mega Man 3 again, but there's a lot more dialogue to the story, especially when Roll gets the virus. But the more serious story isn't just super wild whiplash compared to the rest of the series (not to mention Mega Man 9), but it's also just not very well done since the visual still communicate something silly and happy despite the more heavy way the cutscenes play out. It's very sloppily done, and I'm not sure why they did it, and that sorta sets the tone for the rest of my issues with the game. Mega Man 10's stage design is reminiscent of, if anything, Mega Man 5 in just how *empty* they so often feel. The gimmicks at play in them are often somewhere between frustrating or overly simple, and while they're not bad, per se, they're definitely far weaker than Mega Man 9's were. Now the reason for this, I believe, is that the game launched with not just Mega Man playable, but Proto Man too (and Bass came later as DLC). While Mega Man 9 also had Proto Man added later, what that game didn't have were easy and hard difficulty modes like this one has. These difficulty modes aren't like Mega Man 2's modes, however, and they affect the platforming as well, giving you more or less enemies to fight and platforms to land on depending on what difficulty you're on (instead of largely just damage rebalancing like Mega Man 2 had). This really restricted what the developers could do with level design, and it really shows in how plain and uninspired the stages feel compared to what came before. It was a noble attempt to try and add some accessibility features to the game like this, but this was definitely not the right way to go about it. The bosses are thankfully still pretty solid, but also still not as well done as Mega Man 9's were. They're still technical and fun in a way most of the earlier games weren't, but they are much harder than 9's were, and often for not great reasons such as difficult to read patterns or requiring some pretty damn great reaction time. While they thankfully aren't outright bad, they are a decidedly firm step backwards from where the series was just one entry ago, and they really could've used some more polish. The presentation is quite conflicted in the graphics department, as was discussed earlier in the story section, but thankfully the music helps make up for it a bit. One area where this game is just about on par with Mega Man 9 is that the music is pretty damn good the whole way through. While it certainly doesn't make up for all the other problems I have with it, it's a nice consolation given every other way this is a step back from Mega Man 9. Verdict: Recommended. At the end of the day, Mega Man 10 is far more disappointing than outright badly done. If this had been Mega Man 9, I think people would've been relatively happy with it and it might've gotten a sequel, but being a disappointing sequel to SUCH a strong revival just wasn't what the doctor ordered at the time. I definitely don't think there's much reason to pick this game over something like even Mega Man 4 or 6, let alone Mega Man 9 if given the choice, but it's certainly a nice addition to round out the second Legacy Collection. Now that my marathon is over, I guess I'm ready to give my overall ranking on the series. While some of these could change depending on how I'm feeling on the day, today's particular ranking is: 9 > 4 > 6 > 8 > 3 > 2 > 10 > 5 > 7 > 1 I really enjoyed playing through them all, and am looking forward to the GameBoy games (or rather at this point, reviewing the rest of them, as I actually played through the other two I hadn't gotten to yet earlier today, at the time of writing ^^;) as well as the X series~. If I've learned anything from this, it's that at the end of the day, even the worst of the classic Mega Man games are still pretty good games, and each one has something to make it stand out from the crowd with its own appeal (even if that particular thing might not actually be all that appealing to a lot of other people XD). One last special shoutout once again to my friend DogStrong, but also to my friend Fii, for sticking with me and sharing in the celebration of Mega Man as she watched me play through all of these ^w^ Thanks to my big brother's game collection, I was quite the retro gamer when I was little, so despite being only 12 when it came out, I was really excited for Mega Man 9 and bought it right when it came out back in 2008. It's been more than 12 years since I last played the game, so I had forgotten just about everything about it except for sorta what order to fight the bosses, but I was super pleasantly surprised by what I found. I knew people said Mega Man 9 was good, and I went in ready to be met with just a middling game, but heck am I glad to have been wrong. It took me around an hour and a half to finish the Japanese version of the game.
Eight robot masters are once again trying to take over the world, but this time it's allegedly Dr. Light controlling them! Dr. Light is thrown in prison, and it's Mega Man's job to help prove him innocent! Mega Man 9 was made some 12 years after Mega Man 8, and it was quite the event back when it was announced. The story is very well aware of the twisted, awkward road that Mega Man had stumbled through (such as the later Mega Man X games) and the somewhat Sonic-like reputation the Blue Bomber had gained over the years, so this game is quite tongue-in-cheek with its story quite often (down to the point where they even made deliberately awful box art for it just like the American game boxes for Mega Man used to have X3). The news anchor is dressed like Chun Li from Street Fighter, Wily uses a Swiss bank account, Roll rides around dangerously on the Rush jet, and the animations on some of the stills used for narration and cutscenes are hilarious. Sure it turns out that, of course, Dr. Wily is behind it all, but it's a lighthearted return to the good old days as you remember them being, and not just in the 8-bit graphical style. Mega Man 2 is a game that's really tightly designed for the time, but it's got a lot of problems when you look back at it with some two or three decades of hindsight. However, Mega Man 9 is how good you REMEMBER Mega Man 2 being. Mega Man is back to only his pea shooter and Rush (no ground dashing or charge buster), but despite that this game is still just so well made. Traps and enemies are almost always in places they can be reasonably delt with, and though there are a couple places where things feel less than fair, just how well put together the rest of the game is makes the odd blip in fairness that much more noticeable. It might take you a bit of trial and error to get enemy or platform patterns down, but every challenge can be gotten through with the right timing, patience, and use of special weapons. The special weapons in this game are especially worth mentioning because so many of them, like the concrete shot, have uses outside of combat for getting rid of enemy platforms, grabbing out of the way items, or just a little boost to get you through a tough spot. It's hard to put into words exactly *how* Mega Man 9 is so tightly designed, but those wizards at Inti Creates only heckin' went and did it. Another place the quality of the design extends to is the boss deseign, and they're easily a handful of the best fights in the series. Again, despite having no charge shot or ground dash, you always feel super well equipped to take on these bosses with only your mega buster, and I had a blast taking them down without their special weaknesses in a way I've never had in the older entries. All of the bosses are really well designed, technical fights that vary in difficulty (Concrete Man is definitely the hardest out of the first eight bosses) but never in quality, and it makes the boss rush time attack mode a blast as well. The presentation is also top of the line. Sure, the graphics are great and in a very 8-bit style (though they're of a quality that they probably wouldn't've run on an actual old NES), but plenty of Mega Man games are pretty. What plenty of Mega Man games are NOT is full of awesome music, and that is where Mega Man 9 shines. It's like we're back to the old days of Mega Man 2 and 3 with just how heckin' great basically every track in the game is, and I am all here for a return to basics like that. Verdict: Highly Recommended. Throughout my marathon of playing Mega Man, I was thinking a lot about which entry in the series was my favorite, but that thinking stopped with Mega Man 9. This takes all the best things of the old games and of games made since and uses them to absolutely masterful effect. As far as the classic style is concerned, this is the Mega Man game without peer. Perhaps someday Capcom will put out a better one (and I haven't played 11 yet, so perhaps they've already got something good going on), but damn if they haven't set themselves a VERY high bar to clear. While this IS another one I've beaten before, I only kinda think I've beaten it before, as I remembered just about nothing at all about this game. It's very possible I've actually mis-remembered beating it as a kid, since there is SO little about this game I recalled compared to other games I've only beaten once like Mega Man 7. Nevertheless, I've beaten it here again, and it took me around four hours to 100% the Japanese version game.
Mega Man 8 was released quite closely to Mega Man X4, and it shares some similarities in its presentation and story in that regard. You have a lot of animated anime cutscenes that get you up to speed that are really well voice acted in Japanese and very infamously poorly voice acted (even for the time) in English ^^;. Investigating a "meteorite" that has crashed on a remote island that was a former Dr. Wily base, Mega Man finds a crashed robot from space, Duo, as well as shards of some horrible enemy he was fighting before he crashed. However, Dr. Wily gathers up the evil bits and plans to use them for his own devices, and Mega Man is here to stop him! Honestly, while he may be cool, Duo's presence in the story feels fairly contrived and unimportant, even for a Mega Man game ^^;. But the story isn't really why we're here. We're here for action and shooting, and this game thankfully delivers on that, albeit in its own strange way. Made so much later and on the PS1 to boot, Mega Man 8 feels like a serious black sheep of the classic series, and in many ways it feels more like a spin-off of the X series. The stages are fun, and have two sections with a continue point in the middle (just like Mega Man X4), and they also have gimmicks quite frequently, such as a shoot'em up-style section, or the infamously difficult snowboarding sections. I honestly have trouble articulating exactly how they don't quite feel like classic Mega Man levels, but I think it's down to the pacing of their design. Between the traversal gimmicks and even the traversal powers such as the grappling hook, the stages have a much different pacing to them. The move to much larger areas full of platforms and away from the very room/corridor-based quicker action of the previous titles also contributes to this. Heck, they even remove E-tanks (and give you different mid-stage healing), give you dedicated mega buster and special weapon buttons, and there's even the new weapon the Mega Ball which you can use to get up to some interesting platforming shenanigans. This isn't to say that Mega Man 8 is bad, so much as I understand why it is such a divisive entry in the series, as it is definitely not Mega Man as it'd been before. While I quite liked how the stages worked, I can easily understand people not gelling with how this game does its thing. Another change they've thankfully done is made the camera zoomed out more and made Mega Man smaller, and that contributes both to better feeling stage design as well as better boss fights. The robot masters make for really entertaining and technical fights, and you can really feel the inspiration from the X-series in just how much you'll need to dash and utilize your special weapons in order to defeat them. Bosses are no longer quite so comically weak to their weaknesses, so even if you're fighting them "the easy way", you'll need to stay on your toes to win these fights. That approach to boss design as well as the removal of E-tanks does ultimately make this a bit of a harder game than a lot of the earlier Mega Man games, but it's thankfully more so a good challenging than a frustrating challenge. The presentation is really well done, as you'd hope for with an early-/mid-life PS1 game. The animated cutscenes are, as mentioned before, very pretty, but the in-game sprites are also highly detailed and full of character. The VA for the bosses gives them just a bit more personality that brings them to life in a way previous bosses weren't. You also have a more electronic music-style of soundtrack, and while that isn't so much my jam compared to music in the older classic games or in the X series, it's still really quality. Verdict: Highly Recommended. Mega Man 8 is a divisive Mega Man game and it really deserves that reputation. It's classic Mega Man as he'd never been (and, at least since then, never be in the future) imagined again, and I really understand people not enjoying that. It's so unique and quirky that it's actually pretty hard for me to feel super good about comparing it to other entries in the series, but despite that it's still a game I enjoyed a lot. It's not my favorite in the series, but I still enjoyed it way more than I thought I would, to the point I'm even considering trying to hunt down the hella expensive and rare Saturn version because it adds a couple extra optional bosses and has remixed music~ This was yet another game I only beat once when I was younger on the Mega Man Anniversary Collection, but I had generally positive memories of it. I remembered it as "another one" of a generally positive slew of Mega Man games post-Mega Man 3. Hooooo boy, was I in for a surprise going through it again this time XP. It took me about three hours to complete the Japanese version of the game.
Mega Man 7 is the first entry in the classic series on the Super Nintendo, but it still has a fairly simple story. Taking place soon after Mega Man 6, Dr. Wily had a back-up army ready to break him out of jail, and it's up to Mega Man to put him back there once again! You're assisted by your new robot friend Auto, who runs a shop you can buy power ups at, and you're going against a rival made by Dr. Wily, Bass (and his Rush-analogue named Treble), but it's still an ultimately quite simple and typical story for Mega Man. Despite not being anywhere close to Mega Man's first outing on a 16-bit console (both Mega Man X and X2 were out already), you would think this was the second Mega Man game ever with how many mistakes they make. In order to get Mega Man to be a big and detailed sprite, he's, well, BIG. he takes up a lot of real estate on the screen compared to how much he did on the NES, and it ends up feeling a lot more like the Game Boy entries in many less than positive ways. Your hitbox is often unclear, so getting onto ladders is often frustrating, and how big arenas/areas are compared to how big the screen is can make some bosses like Cloud Man feel far more frustrating than they need to. The game's stages overall just have far more mean and unfair-feeling traps than you had in previous games, even in Mega Man X, and it makes them far less fun to replay as a result if you're hunting for the hidden items (which this game has very similarly to how Mega Man X did) or just going for yet another attempt at a boss. This game's bosses are also harmed by how big you are and generally feel really unpolished. Mega Man feels slow and heavy a lot of the time, despite his ground-dash, and bosses frequently feel way more mobile than you. I very often only tried to kill them with just the mega buster once, if even that, because my expectations for how fun they'd even be to fight were lowered so much by the end of things. The final boss has a reputation for being a really tough bastard, deliberately designed to be "impossible without an E-tank", and that's a well deserved reputation. Dr. Wily is about as difficult as he'd ever be, and is just one huge cherry on the sundae of generally unpolished and needlessly difficult bosses this game is plagued with. The presentation of the game is fine, but not really what you'd expect by now. While the graphics are very pretty, their largeness and prettiness comes at the expense of the level design (in my opinion), and while the music is nice, it's never nearly as good as the music in Mega Man X. None of the presentation is bad, per se, but it doesn't exactly impress when compared to Capcom's previous SNES titles even in just this series. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. I recommend this game really only in the view that it's still ultimately a fairly solid game compared to a lot of other SNES action titles. However, as a Mega Man game, it's a severe disappointment. It was developed over only three months, and damn if it doesn't feel like it. While within that frame of reference, it's still super remarkable that Mega Man 7 is even as good as it actually is, it's still a really unpolished experience that will likely frustrate just as often as it entertains, and if you were going to skip any entry in the classic Mega Man series, it should really be this one. I know some people hold this up as their favorite Mega Man game, but I just cannot see the appeal when I compare it to what came before (let alone what came later). |
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
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