(In a testament to the unreliability of childhood memories, the awesome game I remember playing as a child was in fact Mega Man 2 and not the original Mega Man as I remembered.)

How does the grandpappy of the series hold up? It certainly looks and sounds good, and establishes plenty of the core mechanics as well as the charm that would go on to be a hallmark of the franchise. But (and I'll admit to being a casual scrub) it's simply too difficult to be fun. In an alternate timeline somewhere, this fades into obscurity and is picked up two decades later by the Angry Video Game Nerd who declares it "ASS" and shoots the cartridge with a cheap-CGI mega buster. The gameplay certainly bears all the hallmarks of fake difficulty dialed up to eleven, but I'm glad we avoided that timeline because this flawed game contained the seeds which sprouted into the far more refined Mega Man 2 and the superlative Mega Man X and I'll always appreciate it for that.

Reviewed on Sep 09, 2021


1 Comment


2 years ago

Mega Man 2 was my first Mega Man game. I think for me, I went 2 -> 3 -> X -> 1 -> 4 for the order I played them in when I was growing up. It really is night and day between the first and second game, and I imagine that the scaled down difficulty probably factored into enjoyment for it for a lot of people.

But really, we can just say that it's because Wood Man's stage music slaps, because it's true.