I’ve played a lot of Mega Man games in the last six months, and even when they start to show the signs of burgeoning narrative ambition in the X series, those games are too held up by their own stupidity and refusal to consider the implications of their own worldbuilding for me to say that they’re really About anything. By the year 1997 we’re at a clear point where the X series has established characters, sort of, and a jumble of recurring ideas, kind of, but there’s no real coherence to anything narratively, no actual throughline to that world. And that’s fine with me, it’s really not what I’m here for, it’s mostly something I focus on a lot in my writing about these games because that stuff takes an ever-growing presence in these games to thus far no payoff.

But that IS also what makes Mega Man Legends feel like such a breath of fresh air when it hits the scene on the Mega Man timeline. It’s not just the radical directional shift in gameplay this one adopts (though I do really enjoy that too), and I wouldn’t call it an entirely aesthetic thing either – no, this game is obviously one of the most beautiful and pleasant to look at in the history of the medium, but Mega Man has always had exceptional aesthetics, it’s the one thing that’s virtually unassailable across every iteration of the series so far. For me I think the thing that’s so immediately remarkable about Legends is the clear and deliberate focus on the voice of the game and the characters, something that has never been present in the franchise before. The series has a lot of CHARACTER, but it doesn’t really have characterS, right? Even X and Zero, the closest thing to fleshed out guys we have so far are kind of shallow and stupid caricatures of cardboard cutouts. Legends may not win any awards for MegaMan Volnutt’s personality but the fact that this guy has such a strongly defined voice and wants and, most importantly, that the cast of people around him is much more strongly defined and central to the game than he is, makes the game stand out immediately from its parent series.

Because as much as Mega Man Legends is a run n gun 3D dungeon crawler with light RPG elements it’s equally if not moreso one of those cool mid 90s to mid-00s Japanese games where you don’t have a lot of clearly defined goals (or if you do they’re not really urgent) and you kind of just vibe with all the side characters in a small semi-open world. This is a hard thing to describe but I feel like you know what I’m talking about right? Games like Majora’s Mask, Shenmue, Chulip, most mid-period Harvest Moons, maybe Chibi-Robo? The kind of game where when you were a kid it was easy to ignore the main plot and just chill out. I never played Mega Man Legends as a kid but it would have fit right in with that collection of “games that aren’t walking sims that I forced into that mold because I’ve always been like this I guess.”

This small island and it’s little city of comically fastidious bureaucrats and fantasy policeman who are just inept enough to be funny and unthreatening and workaday tradespeople baking bread and selling clothes and operating tv stations is outrageously detailed, full of little secrets and stuff that help you fill up your health bar during unexpected boss fights in normally safe zones or crafting materials that let your friend research new weapons for you, but it’s full of entirely superfluous stuff too, seemingly just for the sake of character. Multiple buildings and storefronts let you enter and are full of NPCs with bespoke dialogue that have no practical in-game benefit to you, with a fully modelled interior to explore. Lots of NPCs will give Volnutt a little yes or no question to answer for no reason, it’s cute! There are sidequests too but they’re usually stuff like help out the local kid gang with building up their clubhouse by finding a hammer and a saw, or hang out with a local sick kid, or find something this lady could use to add a little splash of color to her landscape painting. It’s a relaxed atmosphere, a game full of friendly people being generally nice, full of unthreatening villains and bright blue skies. The vibes, as they say, are immaculate here. I do want to shout out the voice acting in particular, which strikes that Saturday morning cartoon vibe perfectly but because it’s 1997 there’s not really an entrenched anime voice actor industry that just defaults into all of these roles, so you get a bunch of low budget Canadian tv people doing these voices instead in a way that gives this game some incredible character. MegaMan Volnutt himself is actually voiced by a thirteen-year-old boy rather than an adult woman doing an Anime Kid voice it’s a really distinct sound from anything you would hear today.

The gameplay is pretty slick too. I assume this is an unpopular statement here, I feel like it’s easy to see any game with tank controls and be like ah it’s clunky it’s old it doesn’t feel good or intuitive, and fuckin surprise surprise here comes ina crawling out of her well to defend an old game’s aged elements but hear me out a little bit. Anything that feels unintuitive only feels that way because we don’t have muscle memory for it, right? I have two really distinct memories from my childhood of Adult Non-Gamers pretending to take an interest in my video game at a family gathering and just being unable to conceptualize the basic movement controls of Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia and Dragon Ball Z Legacy of Goku II. These are not, these aren’t difficult games to parse, right, it’s just that someone who has literally never interacted with a game until her 50s doesn’t know how to do it. It’s fine!

So having the weird control scheme it has doesn’t automatically make Mega Man Legends unworthy, right? There’s more to it. You have to consider the game that’s built around those controls, and I think MML is pretty well constructed. If anything, the game is tuned a little too easy, with most enemies absolutely confounded by the very simple strategy of a nonstop circle strafe around them, which will serve you like 90% of the time. But by and large I found that enemies were placed pretty thoughtfully, platforming challenges were designed with the fact that your control over your character and the camera is slow and limited, and in general things are designed in such a way that I rarely felt that I was wrestling with the controller, it all felt really well done to me. There are a lot of movement options in this game too, within a couple hours of starting I was really just zooming the fuck around.

The ending of Mega Man Legends isn’t a triumph or a tragedy or a big sequel hook or anything. It has all of those thing but those aren’t the focus. The ending is the quiet few minutes where the car is getting packed up at the end of a trip and you have a moment to say goodbye. You’re encouraged to take one last lap around town, where all the important characters and sidequest NPCs are scattered around to let you know they’re gonna be thinking about you, and they appreciate the little stuff you’ve done for and with them over the last 15-or-so hours. It feels right. I did sing the praises of the dungeon crawling a bit, and I did like it, but the core of the game is fucking around, competing in game shows, helping out a pregnant woman, adopting cats, thwarting the world’s least threatening bank heist. It feels right to spend the real time saying goodbye to the stuff that matters, and spend relatively little on the actual plot stuff which is mostly pretty limp. Just like meeeee I’m very sick right now if this review is incoherent that's why okay I’m gonna go take a nap game good