I'm going to be pretty negative here but I only say these things because I love Mega Man. Mega Man for the NES is a video game that was made by only 7 people. 1 designer, 1 programmer, 3 artists (and the designer also did art), and 2 sound designers, and it shows. Every main stage outside of the game's last leg has its own musical theme, and both is clearly visually differentiated in color palette, tiles, and in the lively sprites of each boss.
One thing that always struck me about early NES games like Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda was the fact that none of the character sprites had outlines. As a kid this challenged my understanding of 2D art; any illustration I had seen that wasn't a painting featured lines of some kind, however bold, to differentiate figures and objects from their surroundings. Mega Man has a clear outline, Link does not (in the NES game). You can see the whites of Mega Man's eyes, where Mario just has a couple of dots.
The inspiration from Mega Man's different weapons came from sentai and tokusatsu shows (think Power Rangers). "A.K." saw the heroes, each with matching uniforms of different colors, each with different abilities, and thought "What if it was just one guy, and he could change the color of his suit, and thus change his abilities".
At the beginning of the game, you have no such special abilities, only a simple shot that fires straight forward. Originally, they had wanted Mega Man's default suit to be white, so that upon gathering more weapons, the changing suit color would be more striking. In order to collect the weapons, you must defeat one of the game's main six Robot Master bosses.
This is one of the core elements that has defined the Mega Man series even beyond the original "Classic" portion: once beyond the title screen the player is not dropped straight into a level, but instead is presented with a choice between six different levels, each with a unique boss that will give the player a unique weapon. These weapons will give the player an advantage against one of the other bosses, as well as often having some practical utility in the levels themselves.
In reading a translated interview with "A.K." on shmuplations.com I was honestly a bit surprised that the levels were in fact built more or less how Arin Hanson once described the level design in his "Sequelitis" video on Mega Man X. The goal of Akira Kitamura's design parameters were more or less this: introduce an element in a way that doesn't immediately threaten the player, but allows them to observe it, and once they understand the threat you can make the obstacles more actively dangerous.
One of the favorite ways of ramping up the difficulty was by reusing a piece of terrain that the player had already navigated, but placing more enemies around it, or keeping the enemies in similar positions, but making their surrounding environment more treacherous.
While this is theoretically a good way to build levels it isn't always how it happened in practice, and this is a significant problem in a game where any of six levels can be "level 1". The very first screen of Elecman's stage features a precision platforming challenge that, while pretty easy to brute force through, is very difficult to navigate without taking damage. Gutsman's stage features a level gimmick in the form of platforms which travel along a rail, and as it goes along it will run over gaps which will cause the platformer to tilt and drop an unattentive player. These platforms are without a doubt the peak of the level's difficulty, and they only appear at the very start. Iceman's stage marks the first time that one of the series' classic disappearing platform sections appears, and the floor beneath is being patrolled by a "spine" enemy, an immortal hazard; the new mechanic is introduced without giving the player a safe opportunity to observe.
One thing I do like is that this is one of (in my opinion) few Mega Man games where all of the boss weaknesses make enough logical sense that the average player could probably intuit which boss is weak to which weapon without a guide. Gutsman (the rock themed boss) is weak to Bombman's bombs, Gutsman's rock throwing ability beats Cutman's scissors, which in turn cut Elecman's cord.
Electricity is good against Ice, Ice is good against fire, which is interesting. This kind of abstract elemental advantage is ingrained enough in the popular understanding of video games, RPGs for example, that I buy it. What stands out to me is that in the later Mega Man Zero games, where there are no boss weapons and bosses are instead weak to one of these same three elements, it's the other way around. Fire is good against ice, ice is good against electricity, and to close the loop, electricity is good against fire.
Fire, of course, ignites Bombman's bombs.
I will be honest, I don't like the Robot Masters at all. I genuinely think the entire idea for these boss fights is flawed. When a typical fight begins, Mega Man and the enemy start on opposite corners of the arena. There are only two things that can happen, Mega Man and the enemy will attack each other with ranged weapons, or the boss will begin to approach Mega Man. Mega man, already being in the corner of the room, has only two options; meet the enemy in the center of the room, or stay in the corner. Either way, Mega Man and the enemy will almost without a doubt collide their bodies into one another, and when this happens the most obvious advantage that the bosses have makes itself apparent. Mega Man takes damage from the enemy's projectiles, the enemy takes damage from Mega Man's projectiles; Mega Man takes damage from coming into contact with the enemy, the enemy leaves unscathed.
On Miranda Paugh's fansite, "Mega Man Home Page", Bombman is recommended as the first boss that the player should fight, and looking at his movement patterns it's easy to see why. Bombman's patterns are marked by wide swooping jumps around the arena, jumps that give Mega Man enough time and space to find chances to walk beneath him. Most of the recommended first bosses of other classic series games (Metal Man in Mega Man 2 and Plant Man in Mega Man 6 to name a couple) have similar behavior.
Most other bosses boil down to a certain rhythm, the two characters oscillate back and forth, engaging in a periodic jousting match where only one combatant can ever win. Some battles, Elecman probably being the worst example, even start with Mega Man in the center of the arena instead of the edge, putting him even closer to the enemy than usual. There is rarely an effective way to avoid this uncomfortable mechanical intimacy (as in the X series which introduced wall-jumping for vertical options), nor an incentive for the player to want it (as in the Zero series which gives the player a powerful melee option). The Vile fight in the intro stage to Mega Man X is intentionally designed to make the player feel helpless, and its attack pattern really just an average Robot Master with infinite health.
The bosses being weak to particular weapons is only a band-aid fix for this poor design; many bosses are only ever unfairly difficult or are made trivially easy by their vulnerability to a particular type of projectile. Some people claim that the other subseries of Mega Man are more difficult, but I think that this is because later games have boss designs that expect you to learn them at all. In classic Mega Man, they knew most of these bosses were bullcrap, so they give you an easy way out (though it often feels like the only way out).
In his video "Action Button Reviews Doom", Tim Rogers makes the claim that Mega Man only has a gun because they couldn't make platforming fun enough on its own; I'm pretty sure he only meant this as a kind of game design based piece of observational humor, but it is nonetheless factually incorrect. Again I pull this from the interview I found on shmuplations: Akira Kitamura originally wanted to make something more akin to a shooting game, but Nobuyuki Matsushima's hit detection code was too slow for what the kind of game he had envisioned. They had to decrease the number of enemies on screen, and had to focus on other elements like platforming. With fewer sprites on screen, they were able to make Mega Man's appearance more detailed: Mega Man's armor and his exposed face are actually two separate sprites.
So, while what Tim Rogers said was missing the details, it was in some way spiritually correct. Mega Man is a game produced not from a well met creative intent, but from compromises working within the limitations of what this particular small team could do. What's frustrating, to me, is that Mega Man has been so endlessly iterated upon with these compromises intact, and many of the games which try to address these compromises fail to capture the same cultural sway as the original.
This, to me, is why the original Mega Man is important, not because it's a particularly good game. Honestly, it's probably bad enough that in another world I would be content to completely write it off. In some ways I do think that, given the limitations placed upon the team who made it, the fact that it turned out as good as it did is remarkable, I don't think those 7 people did "a bad job". What makes Mega Man for the NES important is that the problems which plague the series start here, they exist here as the compromised vision of a couple of guys who would only ever work on one more Mega Man game before handing it off to other creatives. Yet, even after changing hands, these compromises never really went challenged until the series exploded into spin offs, re-imaginings, and spiritual successors.
This is the first one, but you shouldn't start here, you should only come back here when you wonder where it went wrong.
One thing that always struck me about early NES games like Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda was the fact that none of the character sprites had outlines. As a kid this challenged my understanding of 2D art; any illustration I had seen that wasn't a painting featured lines of some kind, however bold, to differentiate figures and objects from their surroundings. Mega Man has a clear outline, Link does not (in the NES game). You can see the whites of Mega Man's eyes, where Mario just has a couple of dots.
The inspiration from Mega Man's different weapons came from sentai and tokusatsu shows (think Power Rangers). "A.K." saw the heroes, each with matching uniforms of different colors, each with different abilities, and thought "What if it was just one guy, and he could change the color of his suit, and thus change his abilities".
At the beginning of the game, you have no such special abilities, only a simple shot that fires straight forward. Originally, they had wanted Mega Man's default suit to be white, so that upon gathering more weapons, the changing suit color would be more striking. In order to collect the weapons, you must defeat one of the game's main six Robot Master bosses.
This is one of the core elements that has defined the Mega Man series even beyond the original "Classic" portion: once beyond the title screen the player is not dropped straight into a level, but instead is presented with a choice between six different levels, each with a unique boss that will give the player a unique weapon. These weapons will give the player an advantage against one of the other bosses, as well as often having some practical utility in the levels themselves.
In reading a translated interview with "A.K." on shmuplations.com I was honestly a bit surprised that the levels were in fact built more or less how Arin Hanson once described the level design in his "Sequelitis" video on Mega Man X. The goal of Akira Kitamura's design parameters were more or less this: introduce an element in a way that doesn't immediately threaten the player, but allows them to observe it, and once they understand the threat you can make the obstacles more actively dangerous.
One of the favorite ways of ramping up the difficulty was by reusing a piece of terrain that the player had already navigated, but placing more enemies around it, or keeping the enemies in similar positions, but making their surrounding environment more treacherous.
While this is theoretically a good way to build levels it isn't always how it happened in practice, and this is a significant problem in a game where any of six levels can be "level 1". The very first screen of Elecman's stage features a precision platforming challenge that, while pretty easy to brute force through, is very difficult to navigate without taking damage. Gutsman's stage features a level gimmick in the form of platforms which travel along a rail, and as it goes along it will run over gaps which will cause the platformer to tilt and drop an unattentive player. These platforms are without a doubt the peak of the level's difficulty, and they only appear at the very start. Iceman's stage marks the first time that one of the series' classic disappearing platform sections appears, and the floor beneath is being patrolled by a "spine" enemy, an immortal hazard; the new mechanic is introduced without giving the player a safe opportunity to observe.
One thing I do like is that this is one of (in my opinion) few Mega Man games where all of the boss weaknesses make enough logical sense that the average player could probably intuit which boss is weak to which weapon without a guide. Gutsman (the rock themed boss) is weak to Bombman's bombs, Gutsman's rock throwing ability beats Cutman's scissors, which in turn cut Elecman's cord.
Electricity is good against Ice, Ice is good against fire, which is interesting. This kind of abstract elemental advantage is ingrained enough in the popular understanding of video games, RPGs for example, that I buy it. What stands out to me is that in the later Mega Man Zero games, where there are no boss weapons and bosses are instead weak to one of these same three elements, it's the other way around. Fire is good against ice, ice is good against electricity, and to close the loop, electricity is good against fire.
Fire, of course, ignites Bombman's bombs.
I will be honest, I don't like the Robot Masters at all. I genuinely think the entire idea for these boss fights is flawed. When a typical fight begins, Mega Man and the enemy start on opposite corners of the arena. There are only two things that can happen, Mega Man and the enemy will attack each other with ranged weapons, or the boss will begin to approach Mega Man. Mega man, already being in the corner of the room, has only two options; meet the enemy in the center of the room, or stay in the corner. Either way, Mega Man and the enemy will almost without a doubt collide their bodies into one another, and when this happens the most obvious advantage that the bosses have makes itself apparent. Mega Man takes damage from the enemy's projectiles, the enemy takes damage from Mega Man's projectiles; Mega Man takes damage from coming into contact with the enemy, the enemy leaves unscathed.
On Miranda Paugh's fansite, "Mega Man Home Page", Bombman is recommended as the first boss that the player should fight, and looking at his movement patterns it's easy to see why. Bombman's patterns are marked by wide swooping jumps around the arena, jumps that give Mega Man enough time and space to find chances to walk beneath him. Most of the recommended first bosses of other classic series games (Metal Man in Mega Man 2 and Plant Man in Mega Man 6 to name a couple) have similar behavior.
Most other bosses boil down to a certain rhythm, the two characters oscillate back and forth, engaging in a periodic jousting match where only one combatant can ever win. Some battles, Elecman probably being the worst example, even start with Mega Man in the center of the arena instead of the edge, putting him even closer to the enemy than usual. There is rarely an effective way to avoid this uncomfortable mechanical intimacy (as in the X series which introduced wall-jumping for vertical options), nor an incentive for the player to want it (as in the Zero series which gives the player a powerful melee option). The Vile fight in the intro stage to Mega Man X is intentionally designed to make the player feel helpless, and its attack pattern really just an average Robot Master with infinite health.
The bosses being weak to particular weapons is only a band-aid fix for this poor design; many bosses are only ever unfairly difficult or are made trivially easy by their vulnerability to a particular type of projectile. Some people claim that the other subseries of Mega Man are more difficult, but I think that this is because later games have boss designs that expect you to learn them at all. In classic Mega Man, they knew most of these bosses were bullcrap, so they give you an easy way out (though it often feels like the only way out).
In his video "Action Button Reviews Doom", Tim Rogers makes the claim that Mega Man only has a gun because they couldn't make platforming fun enough on its own; I'm pretty sure he only meant this as a kind of game design based piece of observational humor, but it is nonetheless factually incorrect. Again I pull this from the interview I found on shmuplations: Akira Kitamura originally wanted to make something more akin to a shooting game, but Nobuyuki Matsushima's hit detection code was too slow for what the kind of game he had envisioned. They had to decrease the number of enemies on screen, and had to focus on other elements like platforming. With fewer sprites on screen, they were able to make Mega Man's appearance more detailed: Mega Man's armor and his exposed face are actually two separate sprites.
So, while what Tim Rogers said was missing the details, it was in some way spiritually correct. Mega Man is a game produced not from a well met creative intent, but from compromises working within the limitations of what this particular small team could do. What's frustrating, to me, is that Mega Man has been so endlessly iterated upon with these compromises intact, and many of the games which try to address these compromises fail to capture the same cultural sway as the original.
This, to me, is why the original Mega Man is important, not because it's a particularly good game. Honestly, it's probably bad enough that in another world I would be content to completely write it off. In some ways I do think that, given the limitations placed upon the team who made it, the fact that it turned out as good as it did is remarkable, I don't think those 7 people did "a bad job". What makes Mega Man for the NES important is that the problems which plague the series start here, they exist here as the compromised vision of a couple of guys who would only ever work on one more Mega Man game before handing it off to other creatives. Yet, even after changing hands, these compromises never really went challenged until the series exploded into spin offs, re-imaginings, and spiritual successors.
This is the first one, but you shouldn't start here, you should only come back here when you wonder where it went wrong.