Inti Creates, right? When Mega Man 9 came out they were ten years deep in the game, and had made some 18 games and (two hidden psx gems aside) had mostly seen success in the seven Mega Man games they'd made alongside Capcom, especially the legendary GBA series Mega Man Zero. So it makes sense that these were the guys to be trusted with the 9th entry in the classic series, which had been lying dormant for a good while. You'd expect them to be a safe bet, as long as they didn't do Battle Chip Challenge again.

It was, indeed, safe. Mega Man 9 is every bit a classic Mega Man game with the fat stripped out. Forget the charge shot, forget the slide (I miss the slide), forget the anime leanings, this is Mega Man as it suits ME, a gameplay-first experience that highlights the things that made the first couple of games as brilliant as they were, with only a few shiny new level gimmicks lumped in along the way.

It's not particularly original. Robot Masters and their weapons rarely surprise, and some weapons are just slightly more busted versions of fan-favourites, but it's game 9 in a series! Originality is optional at this point! We're all getting old and we just need Mega Man to jump, shoot, kill, and for Wily to appear and disappear in a little pod for the final battle. That'll do, just this once.

What we get instead of originality is polish, and MM9 has this in spades. Everything feels good, everything is clear, understandable, interacts cleanly and does what you want it to do. This shines most in the actual level designs, the real stars versus the robot masters, challenging but not unfair jaunts through enemy territory where you can use the robot master's weakness to progress easier, but YOU NEED THAT FOR THE BOSS. Elegant. Simple. Choices.

If I had three criticisms, and I do, it's that the designers love spikes too much, that I have no idea how I was supposed to know to use concrete on lava, and that the store is more pointless than ever.

Instant death is miserable, and Mega Man having it via endless spikes is just an admittance that the designers couldn't build ample threat elsewhere. It betrays a lack of diversity of thought, that no-one was bring enough ideas to the table to lessen their presence.

Seriously, why does concrete temporarily freeze lava. How does that work? What's supposed to prompt a-ha style seratonin here? Concrete. Sure.

The store is just wank. The energy balancer should be a default option. E Tanks should be in more stages as side challenges. Lives do not matter in this game at all thanks to the save system. Everything else feels like so much fluff (sorry Eddy and Beat) and it just leads to you going into Plug Man's stage, standing under a pipe or two, and leaving your game an hour or so it can grind endlessly with the power of diamonds. Get rid of it, or get ideas for more fun shit to do with it beyond taking your helmet off a bit or Roll looking a bit different. Awful thing.

But those are petty complaints. I genuinely love this game and would rank it up with the best in the series. Well, not up with Mega Man 3, but as close as it can get to that without its wings of wax melting.

Four stars, and don't you forget it.

(This is a review of the SFC game, playing as Mega Man. I will revise or provide an additional review one day with the GBA port and Bass)

Maybe it’s the re-use of assets, maybe it’s how different it feels from the first generation of Mega Man titles, maybe it’s how ridiculously cheap it feels at times, but if someone had told me this was a fan-game that Capcom decided to publish for whatever reason I would believe it. It just feels so off.

The gameplay is rough. Mega Man’s descent from one of the tightest action-platformers into a loosey-goosey one where it’s never clear if it’s you or the game’s fault for any given sudden death is disheartening. The robot masters are alternately minor distractions or cheap nightmares, save for the rare gem of Dynamo Man, who is incredibly exciting to face off with, even with his weakness in play.

The item store returns again, with a few good options and a WHOLE PILE of needless crap, all at prices that really push the player to grind bolts, which is a miserable concept for a Mega Man game. Even the really useful ones are lesser to what has come before, or as cheap as reducing energy use or increasing health gain, which feel more like the way things should have been as default than actual fun power-ups.

Nothing feels good. Enemies aren’t that satisfying to destroy, hard jumps feel more like luck than tests of skill, and so satisfaction is low. Using the aesthetics of MM8 really drives home that Mega Man needs a level of simplicity to its visuals and feedback to get that serotonin flowing.

All this said? The King/Wily levels are some of the series’ best in the 16/32-bit generations, and course corrected a bit on what I was sure was going to be one of the worst in the series. Not that I’d want to be that harsh, but as a sort of Mega Man 8.5, released as late as 1998, I was hoping for something that built upon the presentation-lead design of that game, and polished things up to a mirror shine. Alas, hopping back from the PSX to the SNES has reduced that presentation to… basically nothing. Some speech bubbles and a tiny little window for an ending scene during the credits.

This review feels a little scatty, though I’ll put that down to this taking almost a full month to complete. Hopefully as we see out the final 3 games of the classic series I can pull myself together, and maybe the games will, too!