It's incredible to think about how much of a legacy Mega Man had with its ideas. Its open-ended level influenced later games like Shovel Knight, its concept of obtaining enemies' abilities was played around with by Kirby (handling it like in Mega Man would be a really cool idea for a Metroidvania, but that's not relevant here), and directly led to an entire franchise's worth of sequels, sub-series and spinoffs, with many platformers that people regard to be some of the best in the genre.
Mega Man does a surprisingly elegant job at executing these ideas, for the most part. The robot masters' stages are well-designed and fair, with each of them having distinct personalities to them in their visuals, music, and even level design!
Guts Man has players prove their worth in a challenging, but well-signposted moving platform section (or use the Magnet Beam, if that's your thing) and then gets players right into the boss arena very soon afterwards, for example; and Elec Man's level is heavily vertical, with an emphasis on climbing and tight staircase platforming.
The weapons are generally all decent, although Elec Man and Ice Man's weapons obsolete all the others' for the most part, in my opinion. Cut Man and Fire Man's weapons are circumstantial but have their uses - leaving the remaining two as being extremely situational.
But wouldn't it be fun for the game to open up after defeating all six robot masters? Wouldn't it be fun to be able to use all your weapons in interesting ways?
I think that was the intention behind the four Wily levels at the end of the game. In theory, I can respect it. The levels' length really establish it as a second half to the entire game, with the first half being for players to prepare and equip themselves in whatever order they choose before testing all of it in a fixed environment.
But I don't think it was well-executed in the slightest. The fair difficulty in the first half of the game just escalates into cheap territory: the Yellow Devil is infamous at this point, but so should be both boss rushes, as well as the copy Mega Man whom I swear is impossible to beat without just tackling him with the insta-shield provided by Fire Man's weapon.
And the game expects players to be able to beat all this with three lives - it probably expects players to retry it, fail, try, try again, before they master it and can plough through everything from muscle memory alone.
That's probably why they let players choose their robot master order in the first place: so that they can find a route that works personally for them, so that they can optimize the first half of the game so that they can get on to the "real game" as quickly as they can on every sitting.
Which suggests to me that the fair difficulty of the robot master stages was actually what they believed to be easy. That stings.
In a sense, Mega Man's innovations feel like a fluke, aside from the weapon mechanic.
It's a relief and a miracle that Mega Man 2 was allowed to be made, resolving some of the issues here (adding a password system, making the difficulty spikes less extreme). I'll have to see how future games handle this accident.
Mega Man does a surprisingly elegant job at executing these ideas, for the most part. The robot masters' stages are well-designed and fair, with each of them having distinct personalities to them in their visuals, music, and even level design!
Guts Man has players prove their worth in a challenging, but well-signposted moving platform section (or use the Magnet Beam, if that's your thing) and then gets players right into the boss arena very soon afterwards, for example; and Elec Man's level is heavily vertical, with an emphasis on climbing and tight staircase platforming.
The weapons are generally all decent, although Elec Man and Ice Man's weapons obsolete all the others' for the most part, in my opinion. Cut Man and Fire Man's weapons are circumstantial but have their uses - leaving the remaining two as being extremely situational.
But wouldn't it be fun for the game to open up after defeating all six robot masters? Wouldn't it be fun to be able to use all your weapons in interesting ways?
I think that was the intention behind the four Wily levels at the end of the game. In theory, I can respect it. The levels' length really establish it as a second half to the entire game, with the first half being for players to prepare and equip themselves in whatever order they choose before testing all of it in a fixed environment.
But I don't think it was well-executed in the slightest. The fair difficulty in the first half of the game just escalates into cheap territory: the Yellow Devil is infamous at this point, but so should be both boss rushes, as well as the copy Mega Man whom I swear is impossible to beat without just tackling him with the insta-shield provided by Fire Man's weapon.
And the game expects players to be able to beat all this with three lives - it probably expects players to retry it, fail, try, try again, before they master it and can plough through everything from muscle memory alone.
That's probably why they let players choose their robot master order in the first place: so that they can find a route that works personally for them, so that they can optimize the first half of the game so that they can get on to the "real game" as quickly as they can on every sitting.
Which suggests to me that the fair difficulty of the robot master stages was actually what they believed to be easy. That stings.
In a sense, Mega Man's innovations feel like a fluke, aside from the weapon mechanic.
It's a relief and a miracle that Mega Man 2 was allowed to be made, resolving some of the issues here (adding a password system, making the difficulty spikes less extreme). I'll have to see how future games handle this accident.