The Megaman Legends Retrospective - Part 1
I adore Megaman Legends. I played this game for the first time in 2021, and despite many aged aspects of the title, I ended up really, really enjoying it. For this review I’ll highlight a couple things I both liked and disliked.
The Good
I. Presentation
This is one of the best looking 3D PS1 games by far. The anime art style, with very angular and sharp character designs blend in perfectly with the polygonal 32-bit hardware. Some areas do look really big and blocky sometimes, but all of the characters transitioned perfectly from the page to the screen. As a friend of mine stated, the visual style “oozes nostalgia” and I couldn’t agree more.
The English dub of this game is surprisingly actually really good. Coming from a 90’s Capcom game, I was expecting more of “wow what a mansion” or “w-megaman” quality voice ““acting””, but the dub had actual effort and competent voice direction. Sometimes I feel characters need to speak up, they’ll sound like they are mumbling and can be hard to hear, but mostly it’s passable. Reminds me of a charming English dub for an old OVA or something.
I honestly couldn’t remember very much of this game’s soundtrack. Not to say that it’s bad, I did like a couple tunes (Apple Market, Roll’s Car, The Flutter), but it’s definitely very different from what you’d expect of a “Rock”man game (although basically everything about Legends is what you wouldn’t expect of this series).
II. Characters
I absolutely adore this game’s cast of characters. Volnutt is one of my favorite iterations of the Blue Bomber, and Roll Caskett is just plain adorable. However, the Bonnes absolutely steal the show. They’re so cartoonishly evil (specifically Teisel) and kinda give off Jesse/James/Meowth vibes, being the comic relief bad guys but still being an active threat. I mean seriously, if you don’t like Tron Bonne you’re probably soulless. Most of the NPCs in Kattelox island are also charming, I really liked doing the sidequests to help them (i.e curing the girl who lost her ability to walk by donating to the hospital), it made me feel good.
III. Overall Story
Short but sweet is the best way to describe it. Aside from the pre-final boss stuff (believe me I’ll get to that), It’s a fun and enjoyable plot that’s simple to follow. The structure also allows for Legends to feel almost like… a children’s/teen’s anime from that era. I actually cared for these characters and how they would be involved in the story.
The Stinky Bits
There are a couple bits about this game I’d like to address, nothing game ruining but they did miff me off to a certain degree.
I. Vehicle Defending
Both of the vehicle defense bits in this game absolutely suck. The boat one isn’t too bad once you retreat the first time so you can appropriately face the boss, but the aerial battles are really bad, since you gotta do THREE whole parts with only one life bar on your ship. To make matters worse, if you’re super underpowered, you could borderline sotflock your entire playthrough because of how the progression works during that bit. It’s a very punishing and unfair difficulty spike, especially when everything else about the game is fairly balanced. Luckily it’s only these two segments and you’ll never have to deal with them ever again.
II. Grinding
Although somewhat expected of a game with RPG-like elements, grinding to upgrade your arsenal in this game kinda blows. I was planning on upgrading my active buster subweapon all the way, but the amount of time I’d have to spend grinding was absurd, so I settled on only leveling it up halfway and just tanking the final boss. Really the only valid strategy for grinding is to constantly clear out the sub-cities and respawn the enemies each time, even so it’s just unfun and time consuming. I can only imagine how long it would take to max level out the Shining Laser (a super overpowered weapon in the game which is basically a completion reward), and it would most likely not be fun.
III. The “Central” Antagonist (Endgame Spoilers)
This game has one of the weirdest tone shifts I’ve ever seen. You go from the “charming and sometimes atmospheric” feel of the story to “oh ok everyone’s about to die” extremely quick once Juno shows his face. It feels unearned as there’s no buildup or payoff as Juno just goes “I am going to kill everyone I just activated the thing immediately.” Like you can give a motivation to the player to make them want to conquer the villain, but this just feels cheap. Juno himself just isn’t even an intriguing or nuanced villain, let alone even having character. He just pops in at the very end to kick Volnutt in the robo-nuts before final boss time.
IV. Sequel Baiting (Ending Spoilers)
The one element that has fricked this subseries into oblivion is the tendency to sequel bait the audience. I should say that this is NEVER a good idea especially if you have no idea if your product will even succeed to begin with. After beating Juno the game dumps a bunch of plot twist exposition on us, giving us more questions with this ending rather than answers. It makes the ending feel almost hollow and undercooked. However, like I said, basically everything else about this story is pretty good.
Conclusion
And those are my overall thoughts on Megaman Legends 1. In my opinion, it’s very good, a little rough around the edges in some areas, but great regardless. If you want to play this game, I’d recommend buying it off of the United States PSN store (it’s only 10 bucks) before the shop is inevitably shut down because funni Sony hating stinky old games for whatever reason. However you’ll really only be able to play it on PS3/Vita because of the PSP not having enough buttons.
If you couldn’t tell, I really really like this game lol. I might not revisit this one often, but I had a spectacular experience with only a few things I actually disliked. I will look forward to playing through Misadventures of Tron Bonne and Legends 2 when the time comes, I hope they hold up just as well.
9/10