This review contains spoilers
It's pretty cool that this game is the origin of the Screw Shop feature from later games. Dr. Right has you collect P-Chips as a currency to buy lives, E/W/S-Cans, the Energy Balancer, and other useful upgrades.
I loved the new take on the revolving stage selection screen, and how it keeps track of the BEAT/WILY plates. I'd love for a hypothetical Rockman 12 to do something like this rather than the traditional grid.
The stages in the second half of the game are really good. Like, "makes me go 'wow, that was cool' after I notice it" good. Crystal Man's stage had a section with a branching pathway that I thought was interesting, and then I used Rain Flush to put out a fire in Napalm Man's stage and found a hidden stash guarded by Blues with an E-Can and a P-Chip. In Stone Man's stage roughly halfway through, there's a branching path where you can either take a ladder down to continue on through the stage, or you have to figure out a way to slide through a one-block-tall hole above the Tatepakkan. I used Rush Jet to quickly slide through before Rush hit the side of the wall and vanished, and it led me to a free E-Can! I love levels that reward both your curiosity and your understanding of how to utilize the tools at your disposal.
The Wily Station level was really challenging and fun, exactly how I like my Rockman games. But it is the funniest shit that you can game over AFTER you beat the final boss. For some reason the screen starts scrolling before the boss is officially dead and I got caught off-guard, missed a jump, and had to redo the whole boss over again. Dying in between each phase of the Wily Golem gives you a checkpoint, though, so I didn't have to do the whole thing over again, thankfully.
I wasn't expecting this game to have so many cutscenes and so much dialogue. Especially the final cutscenes of the game, when Rock first sees the Wily Golem and the sequence where Ballade sacrifices himself to help Rock escape Wily Station. The only other game I can think of that's close to this level of quality in terms of cutscenes on the Game Boy is the Dragon's Lair port, and maybe Link's Awakening. At least for this franchise, where the previous 3 Rockman World titles on Game Boy had little to no conversations or cutscenes, this was a big step up in story and presentation that I wanted to acknowledge.
Though I'm not sure how I feel about the recoil on the Charge Shot (it hardly affects me, but it's still an odd inclusion), this is a really impressive Game Boy game. Far from the best game on the system, but they do some really cool stuff in this game!
I loved the new take on the revolving stage selection screen, and how it keeps track of the BEAT/WILY plates. I'd love for a hypothetical Rockman 12 to do something like this rather than the traditional grid.
The stages in the second half of the game are really good. Like, "makes me go 'wow, that was cool' after I notice it" good. Crystal Man's stage had a section with a branching pathway that I thought was interesting, and then I used Rain Flush to put out a fire in Napalm Man's stage and found a hidden stash guarded by Blues with an E-Can and a P-Chip. In Stone Man's stage roughly halfway through, there's a branching path where you can either take a ladder down to continue on through the stage, or you have to figure out a way to slide through a one-block-tall hole above the Tatepakkan. I used Rush Jet to quickly slide through before Rush hit the side of the wall and vanished, and it led me to a free E-Can! I love levels that reward both your curiosity and your understanding of how to utilize the tools at your disposal.
The Wily Station level was really challenging and fun, exactly how I like my Rockman games. But it is the funniest shit that you can game over AFTER you beat the final boss. For some reason the screen starts scrolling before the boss is officially dead and I got caught off-guard, missed a jump, and had to redo the whole boss over again. Dying in between each phase of the Wily Golem gives you a checkpoint, though, so I didn't have to do the whole thing over again, thankfully.
I wasn't expecting this game to have so many cutscenes and so much dialogue. Especially the final cutscenes of the game, when Rock first sees the Wily Golem and the sequence where Ballade sacrifices himself to help Rock escape Wily Station. The only other game I can think of that's close to this level of quality in terms of cutscenes on the Game Boy is the Dragon's Lair port, and maybe Link's Awakening. At least for this franchise, where the previous 3 Rockman World titles on Game Boy had little to no conversations or cutscenes, this was a big step up in story and presentation that I wanted to acknowledge.
Though I'm not sure how I feel about the recoil on the Charge Shot (it hardly affects me, but it's still an odd inclusion), this is a really impressive Game Boy game. Far from the best game on the system, but they do some really cool stuff in this game!