It's more or less everything that the previous Gameboy game was, but this time taking elements from Mega Man 2 & 3 and making new level layouts around them. It seems like they were trying to play catch-up to the NES games by squeezing levels from two games. Makes you wonder if they were in a rush or something. The one big plus of this game over the prior one is that the final stage isn't bullshit, and the game's level of difficulty stays consistently good (if not a bit too easy sometimes) from beginning to end. The amount of main stages has also been bumped up from 4 to 8, like the NES games. Once again, it's worth playing as a Mega Man fan, but can probably be skipped otherwise.
The most bizarre and talked about part of this game is the soundtrack. They could've done what all the other Gameboy games did and just reuse music from the NES entries, but they opted to go for an original soundtrack here instead. And it doesn't take much of an ear to figure out just how ridiculously dissonant it is, just how high-pitched these instruments are. There was a rumor that this was an accident while importing the songs into the game, but I don't know how true it is.
Even if we ignore the headache-inducing pitch, the other weird thing is just how... sad it sounds? The previous Mega Man games emphasized a sound that bordered between dangerous and heroic, incoporating elements of jazz alongside it. Mega Man II's soundtrack gets kind of close to that, but it sounds more like someone just died. Or there was an apocalypse happening. And weirdly enough, I kinda like how some of it sounds, but in any case, it certainly doesn't carry the element of hope that it should for a hero character like Mega Man.
Anyway, you've got two options on how to deal with this soundtrack. Either lower the volume, or get a romhack that lowers the pitch. Once you deal with that problem, you end up with 1 pretty alright hour of Mega Man gameplay. I liked it, as weird as it was tonally.
The most bizarre and talked about part of this game is the soundtrack. They could've done what all the other Gameboy games did and just reuse music from the NES entries, but they opted to go for an original soundtrack here instead. And it doesn't take much of an ear to figure out just how ridiculously dissonant it is, just how high-pitched these instruments are. There was a rumor that this was an accident while importing the songs into the game, but I don't know how true it is.
Even if we ignore the headache-inducing pitch, the other weird thing is just how... sad it sounds? The previous Mega Man games emphasized a sound that bordered between dangerous and heroic, incoporating elements of jazz alongside it. Mega Man II's soundtrack gets kind of close to that, but it sounds more like someone just died. Or there was an apocalypse happening. And weirdly enough, I kinda like how some of it sounds, but in any case, it certainly doesn't carry the element of hope that it should for a hero character like Mega Man.
Anyway, you've got two options on how to deal with this soundtrack. Either lower the volume, or get a romhack that lowers the pitch. Once you deal with that problem, you end up with 1 pretty alright hour of Mega Man gameplay. I liked it, as weird as it was tonally.