The first "throwback" Mega Man? I know this is sometimes regarded as a step back by folks who were there when Mega Man X changed the game. It's funny to think about that now from a modern perspective, knowing that Classic and X are separate subseries. But I suppose that assurance wouldn't have existed at the time, so, fair enough, I guess.

MM7 definitely feels like it's trying to apply lessons learned from Mega Man X. The presence of an opening stage, plus the increased emphasis on things like cutscenes, hidden power-ups, and narrative themes feel like a deliberate choice to backport X's contributions. In particular, you have that ending, where Mega Man grapples with Asimov's First Law of Robotics. I can only assume this exists here since Mega Man X introduced robots that have free will. Ergo, it stands to reason that Rock Light, for as much as he's presented as a little boy with a strong sense of justice, would still be beholden to Asimov's Laws, at least in part.

...of course, this is futzed with somewhat in the localization, but hey. Incidentally: the reason Mega talks so slowly there is because the text was changed, but the text speed is consistent between versions. The original script simply had him say "...", so that slow speed effect would've been impactful. Having Mega speak a full line of dialogue at that speed, not so much.

It is insane to me that this game was developed in three/four months. If this was another NES title, that would still seem too short - Mega Man 2 had a hellish 8-month dev cycle, remember. But effectively having to build a game and its engine from the ground up in half that time? Yet by all accounts, the team had a ton of fun making this one! I guess it made for a fun challenge, kompressing development time and working to meet the challenge?

With this in mind, while I do have some criticisms, I actually find that there aren't any I specifically pin on this crunched dev cycle. Maybe how a couple of the stages (Slash Man, Turbo Man) are a little lackluster, despite how high-concept they are? But, like, the ridiculous difficulty spike of the Wily Capsule is clearly a deliberate decision, not a consequence of crunch. The Super Adaptor's implementation is a progression of existing Rush Adaptor ideas from 6 more than anything unique to this game.

Heck, the team was able to sneak in stuff like secret moves and boss fights, despite the crunch! Commendable for sure.

But for me personally, the game's biggest impact will always be Bob & George, and the downstream consequence of the sprite comic scene coming into existence out of Mega Man 7. True, Neglected Mario Characters predates Bob & George (and was a personal favorite, at least in its heyday); true, Mega Man 7 is relevant to Bob & George more out of coincidence than anything; true, sprite comics probably would've come into being anyway. Doesn't matter; I cannot look at a single main character sprite from this game without thinking about the long, long history of sprite comics and recolored OCs to stem from its iconography. I can't really rate the game based on that, but I'd be lying if I didn't mention it.

When it came time to make the jump to sixteen bits, Megaman had an awkward transition. I hope she feels more comfortable with herself now though. Anyway, you can't really just stick a series that's still known for being in 8-bits onto more powerful hardware and not have it be jarring to some extent. Especially since megaman made very minimal changes to its formula since the first few games.
This means no more classic mega man sprite, it's a very different style than we had seen in the series before, and it is a lot to get used to at first. Something you'll find is that not only is every sprite higher resolution than before but they're also much bigger than before, like everything actually takes up more space on the screen. Reminds me a lot of, as you can imagine, the Megaman X games on the snes. Both of them being on the snes means they share a variety of similarities, and i'm sure there was a lot of overlap in developing this and Megaman X1. It really does feel like I'm just playing Megaman X1 some of the time.
Also, after switching to a console that allows more than three colors per sprite, i think they took that as an obligation to use every single one of those colors. each one of the bosses uses orange at least once. the designs are really all over the place in general, they remind me of how if you bought more than one bionicle set they would have instructions to combine them together into a larger one, but the parts all had completely different color schemes, so they would have the color harmony of a sonic oc. they kind of look like they're made of Playmobil.
Something I like in particular about megaman 7 is that every time you die, the entire game just completely pauses for several frames in which megaman's face is contorted in the purest expression of agony and suffering that you can possibly imagine and i just really enjoy that part, i just think it's a nice little detail there.
What this game excels at is its weapons: they're all fun to use, and the game actually encourages you to use them by letting the environment respond to them- like, for example, how you can use the flame weapon to set trees on fire. this is also how you can find most of the secrets in the game, which are also a great touch. There's also a few gameplay differences it shares with megaman 8: the bosses being split into groups of four, an intro stage, and the ability to switch weapons with the side buttons. cool! it seems like they actually put thought into this, i sure hope these gameplay features stick around in future entries and they don't cut it out two games later for no reason.
Unfortunately it is rather unimaginative in some other respects, for example, Cloud man's entire stage is literally just air man's stage again. Apparently the designers ran out of ideas there. as for the story, it's very simple: shoot the eight robot masters, do the wily stages, commit homicide, and youre done, thats it, hurry it up please i got somewhere to be at nine ok? i guess there is bass, a character whose sole purpose is to kill you, which means i can relate to him a lot. i will find you
I think that most people who have played mega man 7 agree that the final boss (the wily capsule) is just way too fucking hard. It deals way too much damage and some of its attacks are borderline impossible to dodge, so it's mostly up to chance whether you live or die. Something a little lesser known though, is that this wasn't a situation where they just didn't playtest it enough or something. no, it was a purposeful choice to make it like this. They decided to make the final boss "insanely hard" for no reason, because, they just must've thought it would be funny i guess. to be honest i respect it.
overall, mega man 7 is really good, especially when you consider that it was made by like two dudes in one afternoon

I'll get my only negative out of the way immediately, and it's that I don't like that the game splits the Robot Masters you fight into two groups of 4 at a time. I figured the Game Boy RMX games did that because of platform limitations or something, but I don't think I understand exactly why they decided to do that with this game? Is it to make it more accessible for newcomers? That way, you feel less overwhelmed by eight Robot Masters? I'm not sure but that was my only complaint, because I felt limited in my options.

What immediately stood out to me in this game were its beautiful graphics and animation. After 6 games of being on the NES, I'm glad Capcom finally decided to move on. Better late than never. As much as I like the later NES Rockman games (esp 4-6), it was about time to make the leap to the next console generation. They also have quite a few cutscenes in the game. Most Rockman games before this had an intro, an outro or credits sequence with dialogue sometimes, and maybe one cutscene near the end of the game that elaborated on a major twist. This game has lots of dialogue, and it was super cool to feel the bump up in terms of story presentation thanks to the new hardware.

The game has another set of great Robot Masters and Wily Castle bosses that make up some of the most thoughtful and well-designed fights in the series, including the final boss. I previously said that Wily Capsule 4 was the best final boss the series had, but I think Capsule 7 was even better. The only bosses I thought sucked were Shade Man and Slash Man. Maybe I just couldn't figure out their patterns well enough, but they were more frustrating than fun. The secret Blues fight was really cool, but I felt like I didn't get much use out of his shield. The one time I thought to use it in a boss fight was against the first Forte fight in Wily Castle, but his beams just pass through my shield.

Loved the introduction of Forte and Gospel as new rival characters for Rock, as well. I don't think I ever heard of these guys before, so I had no clue that they were really built by Wily rather than the friendly rivals most of the game tries to convince you they are. Especially loved the bit where you find Forte damaged outside of one of the boss rooms, and you offer to bring him back to Dr. Right, only for him to betray us and steal the blueprints to copy the Rush Adaptor later on in the game. Fighting Super Forte as Super Rockman was a highlight of the game.

Rightot's shop was a great new feature as well. You can find everything you can buy from him in the levels naturally, but it just helps accelerate the process to be able to quickly buy things from the shop. Especially near the end, when I was exhausting all my items against Wily Capsule 7. I didn't really have to grind screws at all, so it was only a bit time-consuming mashing through the dialogue and waiting for my items to get crafted.

I don't think the levels themselves are as great as Rockman 5 or 6 with their interesting gimmicks or branching pathways, but the game rocks where it counts for me.

Mega Man was always one of those series that I reveered as a child but didn’t exactly play a lot. I mean, this series is one of the NES franchises, and as a teen raised by AVGN and those inspired by him, I just always heard about this motherfucker. So much so, that I got Mega Man 9 and Mega Man 10 on the Wii when the released way back when. A new game with NES graphics, I mean, I ate them up at the time. I got the second volume of the Legacy Collection because it not only had those two that I played a lot of as a kid, but also the 8th installment, which I had seen recently is very coveted among true fans of this series.

However, before moving on to the latter three games in this collection I felt obligated to play this one, and it may have soured me on Mega Man before I even got going! I feel like a lot of people are lukewarm on this installment, anyways, but I think I’m just lukewarm on the whole thing. See, because Mega Man is a series defined by its legacy as a classic NES game, it feels like every new game was designed not to be updated because half of the appeal, according to the designers, are those clunky and old school things that make a game less fun. Mega Man doesn’t crouch because, well, Mega Man doesn’t crouch. It doesn’t matter how nice it would be to have different heights for your attack, Mega Man DOESN’T CROUCH! Also, spikes are an instant death. It doesn’t matter that levels seemed designed without that fact in mind, and there are sections of some levels that seem like they want to launch you in the spikes once just to teach you about a level’s gimmick, but then you get sent back to the beginning. But, I mean, what can ya do? In Mega Man, spikes are an instant death. Because they always were.

Needless to say this game made me angry. Thank god for the Legacy Collection’s “LOAD LAST CHECKPOINT” option. I was clicking that button, plenty. The password system was honestly really funny, because I haven’t played a game that used that in ages, and I figured by the SNES we weren’t really using that for these bigger games. However! Then I remembered, after figuring I would just give up on the Wily’s Castle levels, that I can input a password to get me to the end! So I did, and then the boss kicked my ass, then when the second phases started, I said “actually, forget it.”

They call it Mega Man 7 because it's a Mega Man 7/10

This might just be the coolest set of Robot Masters yet, and the stages have a lot of cool theming to them, and it's awesome how dynamic the stages are with loads of secrets in them. And even if you don't like the 4 Robot Masters at a time method, there's a cheat input to have all 8 at once! Neat!

My one real problem is it feels like Mega Man himself takes up too much space on screen, so it feels a little claustrophobic.

It’s very interesting that, when moving classic Mega Man onto the Super Nintendo, that they leaned more towards Mega Man IV of the Game Boy line than anything else, though aspects of MM6 are also here. Produced under an ungodly deadline, it had to be hard to decide what aspects were worth carrying across, but it feels notable that they went with the GB ‘4 masters at a time’ approach, with shopping functionality for a less reserved use of items. An understanding, perhaps, that it represented the best opportunity for change on the mainline, and was tried and tested enough to expect some success.

Anyway, this game is some cartoon shit, and as unfair a Mega Man game as I can ever imagine. The former is a matter of presentation: going from 8-bit to 16-bit afforded the artistic side of the development team to create something was more visually pleasing, and story cutscenes with laboriously slow text dialogue is as good an opportunity as any to show it off. I don’t like it myself, because for the most part classic Mega Man’s plot is naff, and drawing attention to it with another mysterious frenemy and the woeful antics of shopkeeper robot Auto is a terrible mistake. John Carmack one said that story in a video game is like story in a porno film, expected but not important. John himself has acknowledged that the statement was erroneous in years since, but if it was specifically classic Mega Man that he was referring to (it wasn’t) then I’d be fully on board. The story should never draw focus over the gameplay, and at this point it’s over the line. And yet it’ll get worse soon enough.

The unfairness seems to be related to the presentation. Hitboxes are rough in this, and instant death traps are everywhere. In the NES or GB games this wasn’t that much of a bother, but it felt like I was experiencing pointless twitch deaths for holding or not holding a button long enough way too often. I’d call it a challenge after so many games where dying was mostly saved for health checks at robot master fights, but if it doesn’t feel like an earned death, then it’s just so much getting kicked in the dick for no reason.

The robot masters themselves are… fine. Buster-only fights are few and far between for me on this outing, just for difficulty, and in its place are the laughably overpowered weaknesses matching of following the boss order. If you have the weakness of any given robot master they simplify their move sets and die on the spot. I’m told Cloud Man has moves, but with careful timing that dude just landed on his butt five times and fucked off into nowhere. It’s dull.

Power-ups are… fine. The Rush power-ups feature a fair compromise on Rush Jet and an okay Rush Coil, as well as a hilariously downgraded Power Adaptor, combining power and flight forms into something not quite as good as either. Still, you can find/buy a homing fist to make it an essential bit of kit, so it’s not all bad. Beat’s been turned into a fall save, which is a huge downgrade from the homing pigeon that allowed me to focus on dodging while it fought for me. The robot master weapons are… all quite fun and unique, actually, thumbs up. I enjoy how Freeze Cracker (best name) and Scorch Wheel make substantial environmental changes, and Thunder Bolt’s powering of machines is a neat touch.

The non-master bosses are a mixed bag. Bass is a joke, which is worrying when I have to play as him in the near future, Wily is infamously torturous (though I actually started to work out how to dodge the four lights by the end), but… I’ve lost my point, actually, maybe they all just suck. I hated the fat clown who kept losing his head, too. They are, at the least, pretty polished, as are most things in this, for good or ill. They look and feel finished, even if they are a bit shit.

It would be easy to dismiss this game, as I have done in the past, by looking at how Mega Man X changed things up, but the short development time didn’t allow for much innovation or satisfaction, and they were also making a new entry in a franchise that felt pretty complete. The world didn’t need Mega Man 7. I didn’t need it.

Imagine how I’ll feel about Mega Man 8.

The graphics are great but at the same time the size of the screen makes them somewhat cumbersome, unlike the NES games.
The sound / music is probably the worst so far (GAWDS, the peashooter sound of MM blaster is terrible).
The bosses designs are interesting with some cool fights as well. The last boss is terrible, had to use every last e-tank to beat him, not a fun fight at all.
The rush adaptor is back, somewhat changed, and is very strong with the upgrade.

A good megaman but far from the top of the list.

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 (not to mention how that makes fighting enemies harder), 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).

A fun adventure full of secrets that sadly doesn't stick the landing.

Mega Man 7 is an interesting game. i like it. it takes the secrets and upgrades from Mega Man 6 and runs wild with it. Each stage in 7 has a secret in it that you might have to come back for later, and it adds a level of intrigue that was not present in earlier Mega Man games. They might not have needed that intrigue, but i gladly welcome it here.

One of those secrets involves an overarching side quest with Proto Man, that ends in a really cool reward, i'm a big fan of it.

Even though Mega Man 7 doesn't follow the gameplay of the newly started sequel series, Mega Man X, it does heavily emphasize using the Super Adaptor Armor, a very Mega Man X powerup. Sure, don't give Mega Man the dash, but he can absolutely have the double jump. Thankfully, the double jump doesn't break the game like Mega Man 6's Jet Adaptor does.

The music of Mega Man 7 is odd to me. Up until this point, the musical identity of Mega Man was just 8bit chiptunes, so there was nothing specific to bass this identity off of. So Mega Man 7 goes in the interesting direction of being midi semi-orchestral songs. It sounds softer and slower than its predecessors. It's not bad by any means, but especially considering how Mega Man 8 and 11 would take the more Techno-inspired route, Mega Man 7 feels pretty out of place, musically.

The final boss of Mega Man 7 is a really rough time. It's a war of attrition that spits in your face if you get far enough and fail anyway. Unless you play perfectly, in which case i'm proud of you, you will be forced to use a health and/or weapon refill, and then when you die you will not have that refill next time.

I did not beat Mega Man 7 the first time i played it. Thankfully i pulled it off years later, but good lord. Here's a hint for you that i would have loved to know back then: you can mash buttons to get out of the burning animation sooner.

And then you beat the game and, if you're playing in english, you get a cringeworthy character assassination of everyone's favorite little blue guy Mega Man. it just can't stick that landing, man.

I recommend Mega Man 7 to anyone who likes Mega Man and anyone who wants a taste of everything Mega Man has to offer but doesn't want to wade through over 10 games. Consider Mega Man 7 as your second course after 2 or 3.