A huge celebration at the World Robot Expo is shattered by the sight of a flying saucer streaking across the sky. But instead of holding little green men, this saucer holds one very mad scientist! Armed with a mind control machine that transmits a sinister signal. Dr. Wily is ready to mesmerize all the robots of the city into an army of mindless metallic mercenaries! Battling the effects of Wily's mind control machine, Mega Man and his robotic reenforcements, Rush and Beat must blast to molten metal an army of foes led by eight of Wily's greatest robot masters! And should Mega Man survive, Dr. Wily is waiting to unleash the heavy artillery with his latest creation, the awesome Wily Tank!
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Another solid Mega Man game on the go. Like the other Game Boy Mega Man games, it plays solid and resembles that of the original NES games, only with a smaller viewport. There's challenge, but not too overly difficult. Not much is different from Mega Man 2 on the Game Boy, outside of the power ups and shop system later used on other Mega Man games.
This review contains spoilers
A great and fun game, mechanically felt like it could hold its ground beside the NES titles. However I think that towards the end it overstayed its welcome.
Playing on the 3DS Virtual Console, collected all items and cleared the game. For future replays, I will use mGBA on my modded Wii instead.
I predicted that every subsequent handheld adventure featuring the Blue Bomber would be better than the last, and that remains to be true. Mega Man IV Game Boy (Rockman World 4) is a major improvement over the first three games, sticking to what worked before and implementing elements from the NES games that weren't featured in the GB predecessors like the typical boss rush, while adding in new features that became staples in future mainline entries. We have new items such as the Weapon and Super Energy Tanks, the Energy Balancer which makes its debut here, and the most notable feature of all, the shop. Predating Mega Man 7 in about two years, this uses P Chips as currency that can be obtained in levels or by defeating enemies and can be spent on 1-Ups and the items I've alluded to earlier.
For the returning Robot Masters, we have Bright Man, Toad Man, Pharaoh Man, and Ring Man from Mega Man 4, and in the second half, we have Stone Man, Charge Man, Napalm Man, and Crystal Man from Mega Man 5 with the Mega Man Killer this time being Ballade. That's cool and all, and I do like Ballade's design, but I want to give a shout-out to its presentation. It's gorgeous and a huge step up from before, and I can visually see it in its opening cutscene and Wily Battleship. My favorite has got to be the cutscene before we fight Dr. Wily where we see Mega Man running in an isometric view before he stops dead in his tracks and looks up at Wily's giant mech in the background in another angle; very impressive for a 1993 Game Boy game. I do think the levels inside Wily Battleship drag on a bit, and the recoil after Mega Man releases his Charge Shot is a bit strange; nothing game-breaking, just found it to be weird that this is the only game so far where he has a bit of kickback.
Mega Man World 4 is a solid experience that is definitely worth your time if you're a fan of the series. It improves on its predecessors and at the same time provides new features that became mainstays for console entries to come, and that's something I can appreciate. I hope the fifth and final entry in the pentalogy will continue with the pattern by improving over what came before.
For the returning Robot Masters, we have Bright Man, Toad Man, Pharaoh Man, and Ring Man from Mega Man 4, and in the second half, we have Stone Man, Charge Man, Napalm Man, and Crystal Man from Mega Man 5 with the Mega Man Killer this time being Ballade. That's cool and all, and I do like Ballade's design, but I want to give a shout-out to its presentation. It's gorgeous and a huge step up from before, and I can visually see it in its opening cutscene and Wily Battleship. My favorite has got to be the cutscene before we fight Dr. Wily where we see Mega Man running in an isometric view before he stops dead in his tracks and looks up at Wily's giant mech in the background in another angle; very impressive for a 1993 Game Boy game. I do think the levels inside Wily Battleship drag on a bit, and the recoil after Mega Man releases his Charge Shot is a bit strange; nothing game-breaking, just found it to be weird that this is the only game so far where he has a bit of kickback.
Mega Man World 4 is a solid experience that is definitely worth your time if you're a fan of the series. It improves on its predecessors and at the same time provides new features that became mainstays for console entries to come, and that's something I can appreciate. I hope the fifth and final entry in the pentalogy will continue with the pattern by improving over what came before.
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 review contains spoilers
It's pretty cool that this game is the origin of the Screw Shop feature from later games. Dr. Right has you collect P-Chips as a currency to buy lives, E/W/S-Cans, the Energy Balancer, and other useful upgrades.
I loved the new take on the revolving stage selection screen, and how it keeps track of the BEAT/WILY plates. I'd love for a hypothetical Rockman 12 to do something like this rather than the traditional grid.
The stages in the second half of the game are really good. Like, "makes me go 'wow, that was cool' after I notice it" good. Crystal Man's stage had a section with a branching pathway that I thought was interesting, and then I used Rain Flush to put out a fire in Napalm Man's stage and found a hidden stash guarded by Blues with an E-Can and a P-Chip. In Stone Man's stage roughly halfway through, there's a branching path where you can either take a ladder down to continue on through the stage, or you have to figure out a way to slide through a one-block-tall hole above the Tatepakkan. I used Rush Jet to quickly slide through before Rush hit the side of the wall and vanished, and it led me to a free E-Can! I love levels that reward both your curiosity and your understanding of how to utilize the tools at your disposal.
The Wily Station level was really challenging and fun, exactly how I like my Rockman games. But it is the funniest shit that you can game over AFTER you beat the final boss. For some reason the screen starts scrolling before the boss is officially dead and I got caught off-guard, missed a jump, and had to redo the whole boss over again. Dying in between each phase of the Wily Golem gives you a checkpoint, though, so I didn't have to do the whole thing over again, thankfully.
I wasn't expecting this game to have so many cutscenes and so much dialogue. Especially the final cutscenes of the game, when Rock first sees the Wily Golem and the sequence where Ballade sacrifices himself to help Rock escape Wily Station. The only other game I can think of that's close to this level of quality in terms of cutscenes on the Game Boy is the Dragon's Lair port, and maybe Link's Awakening. At least for this franchise, where the previous 3 Rockman World titles on Game Boy had little to no conversations or cutscenes, this was a big step up in story and presentation that I wanted to acknowledge.
Though I'm not sure how I feel about the recoil on the Charge Shot (it hardly affects me, but it's still an odd inclusion), this is a really impressive Game Boy game. Far from the best game on the system, but they do some really cool stuff in this game!
I loved the new take on the revolving stage selection screen, and how it keeps track of the BEAT/WILY plates. I'd love for a hypothetical Rockman 12 to do something like this rather than the traditional grid.
The stages in the second half of the game are really good. Like, "makes me go 'wow, that was cool' after I notice it" good. Crystal Man's stage had a section with a branching pathway that I thought was interesting, and then I used Rain Flush to put out a fire in Napalm Man's stage and found a hidden stash guarded by Blues with an E-Can and a P-Chip. In Stone Man's stage roughly halfway through, there's a branching path where you can either take a ladder down to continue on through the stage, or you have to figure out a way to slide through a one-block-tall hole above the Tatepakkan. I used Rush Jet to quickly slide through before Rush hit the side of the wall and vanished, and it led me to a free E-Can! I love levels that reward both your curiosity and your understanding of how to utilize the tools at your disposal.
The Wily Station level was really challenging and fun, exactly how I like my Rockman games. But it is the funniest shit that you can game over AFTER you beat the final boss. For some reason the screen starts scrolling before the boss is officially dead and I got caught off-guard, missed a jump, and had to redo the whole boss over again. Dying in between each phase of the Wily Golem gives you a checkpoint, though, so I didn't have to do the whole thing over again, thankfully.
I wasn't expecting this game to have so many cutscenes and so much dialogue. Especially the final cutscenes of the game, when Rock first sees the Wily Golem and the sequence where Ballade sacrifices himself to help Rock escape Wily Station. The only other game I can think of that's close to this level of quality in terms of cutscenes on the Game Boy is the Dragon's Lair port, and maybe Link's Awakening. At least for this franchise, where the previous 3 Rockman World titles on Game Boy had little to no conversations or cutscenes, this was a big step up in story and presentation that I wanted to acknowledge.
Though I'm not sure how I feel about the recoil on the Charge Shot (it hardly affects me, but it's still an odd inclusion), this is a really impressive Game Boy game. Far from the best game on the system, but they do some really cool stuff in this game!