Mega Man X+1

Okay, there’s a demo out now on the consoles (you may have seen a lot of articles announcing it’s available “ON SWITCH,” but yes its on all the consoles). So maybe we can start talkin about Rokkuman irebun unmei no haguruma!! (Mega Man 11), you dorks.

Here’s a recent trailer I haven’t even watched:

I am a Mega Man lover/grump.

Here are thirteen Mega Man 11 demo thoughts after ~1 hour with it:

  1. It feels good for the most part. Jumping feels right. Mega Man is smaller on the screen than in MM7.
  2. The first couple sections with the destructible blocks feels… bad. They’re setting these up for their (good) implementation later, which I think is building on the refined sense of escalating obstacle and puzzle implementation from MM9 and so on, but the first encounter with these, Idunno, feels like busywork.
  3. Alluded to above, but the compact little obstacle-ridden rooms on the conveyer-belt is a great sequence.
  4. The cartoony enemy designs looks great and 100% in harmony with the NES games. I’m not super inspired by the behavior design (especially the big stationary thing with the hammer), but it works.
  5. The flashy visual effects are way overdone and make the screen busier than they need to be.
  6. Which Mega Man game introduced screws? Was it 7? I still don’t like them. In fact, screw 'em.
  7. I’m glad that the 3D elements on the level that we actually play is visually flattened. It’s barely more than 2D and that looks good.
  8. On the other hand, the 3D backgrounds and foregrounds are too busy, don’t always look great in contrast with foreground elements (especially the outside section of the demo), and are especially too visually noisy when things are in motion.
  9. The multi-piece miniboss is troubled and perhaps reflects part of the game’s troubled relationship to its predecessors. It’s a really solid, clever idea for a classic Mega Man miniboss. The speed at which the pieces fall is a tic or two too fast–so fast that I expect (like the wheel enemies from elsewhere in the stage), it’s designed to make the player use the Speed Gear mechanic–but I don’t think that’s the biggest flaw. By forgoing the fidelity guaranteed by perfect rows and columns of pixels adehred to by MM1-6,9-10, the fuzziness of what is safe and what is going to be crushed feels furstratingly unclear. Also, even though I don’t think Mega Man is much or maybe even at all smaller in width on the screen, he’s taller, and this miniboss fight makes the game feel like it’s trying to cram too much onto a single screen.
  10. Anyway, Speed Gear and Power Gear are fine mechanical ideas, I guess, but ultimately don’t feel essential.
  11. Why is the boss appearance for the model on the boss intro screen so low-polygon? The game isn’t exactly boasting PSX-era low-poly visuals or something.
  12. Mega Man 9 and Mega Man 10 had mostly amazing soundtracks and… this is not amazing.
  13. I hate seeing the word “casual” in a difficulty setting list, because I hate that it strongly evokes the tedious and offensive hardcore vs. casual gamer debate of the 2000s and I hate to see it carved into the text of a game itself.

Actually I haven’t beaten the demo yet on either normal or casual modes. The back half of the stage or the boss fight could win me over, I guess. But based on the time I spent with it last night, I feel like the classic Mega Man series is stuck between a rock (man) and a hard (man) place (lol). I will definitely be buying and playing the whole thing, though, because that’s who I am (and I will attempt to approach it all with as open a heart as I can).

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I said this in the news thread, but this game feels sort of unnecessary after the Mighty no. 9 debacle and when 20XX already exists.

I’ve never been a fan of the post 8-bit mainline MegaMan games… it just doesn’t need anymore graphics than it had, unless you go into MMX territory, which 20XX already does.

anyway, point is, as a big dumb Mega Man fan, I don’t particularly care about this game

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I really need to play 20XX, I guess.

I think a problem that exists for main line Mega Man games is that the game is built on a foundation of sequel iterations with minor alterations. Each of the 5 NES sequels served to further cement the 8-bit-style formula–graphics, controls, structure, etc.–as absolutely essential components of the series. 9 and 10 understood that. 11 is trying to understand that while also trying to step outside those bounds, but it’s constrained by the dictates of that essential heart of the series that it has to adapt to create a new game. If Capcom had built Mega Man 3 or 4 for the Super NES and started varying visual style, game structure, and the basic verbal grammar of the games earlier, that’d be one thing. Instead, a Mega Man sequel now has a harder time coloring outside the lines, because the lines are so restrictive and monumental to begin with.

OR SOMETHING LIKE THAT.

So X is cool. And Zero. And ZX.

I guess in a sense MN9 was an attempt to make MM11 somewhat freed from those bounds and free from the Capcom label. But it ultimately was maybe even more hobbled by needing to prove its fidelity with old Mega Man games.

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all of the revealed robot master -man prefixes can be both nouns and verbs

this is a good gimmick

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i couldnt beat the miniboss on normal difficulty

also a pretty hudge Mega Man fanboy,

i played and beat the demo a few times and i’m pretty meh about the whole thing. sliding feels off, to me. like it feels like the slide from 8, but that doesn’t make sense with NES handling.

everything just looks, sounds, and feels so bland. the new mechanic feels entirely unnecessary and doesn’t really add much. i can’t see how it could develop into anything interesting later on.

i’ll buy it when it’s on sale, one day.

also. the boss gates. i mean like, really, come on. i know it seems like a petty thing to pick on, but…it’s really dumb.

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I can’t believe I forgot to mention how the voice acting is bad.

The voice acting is bad!

That is also how I feel about basically every 2D platformer with voice acting!

This is Canon to megaman experience.

this sure does look & sound like ass

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really loving those campfire stage enemies and I think a lot of everything looks good except megaman himself

I beat this game on Casual and then Normal (note: the difficulty names were changed in localization).

It’s a good Mega Man game.

The gears are a fun system to use.

The speed gear is fun to use, but never really necessary. In one sense, it feels like using the select glitch in MM1, giving you the ability to pump a lot of pellets into things in a short time. In another sense, it feels like an excuse for the game to throw in challenges with tighter timing windows and shorter tells, which I rather appreciate. As a result, I found myself using it less often in my second playthrough having gotten more used to those timings/tells.

In contrast, I found myself using the power gear much more in my second playthrough. It’s kind of cumbersome to use with the default Mega Buster, since it resets your charge and gives your charge shots some recoil (it’s still very dangerous in the right hands). With special weapons, however, it really shines. Every enemy and miniboss in the game has a weakness (or multiple). With the right weapon and the power gear, every miniboss can be killed in one to three hits. The special weapons in this game are already quite good, and the power gear just makes them monstrous.

The level design is pretty good, although the levels are pretty long. The checkpoints feel sparse in normal mode and almost comically dense in casual mode.

I’m fine with how the game looks, but I understand that I’m in the minority here.

The music generally feels like undercooked EDM. Most of the songs feel like they could be really good if only they had better mixing and instrumentation, but as it stands there are only a couple of standout songs. wordswordswords This paragraph is an excuse to post this remix:

Other notes:

  • Every boss either uses the speed gear or power gear for the second phase of the fight. Block Man (the demo’s boss) is however the only boss with a transformation with an extra life bar.
  • Every one of the 8 main stages has a miniboss. Thankfully, none of them are as tiresome as MM4’s minibosses, and all of them have weaknesses that trivialize them.
  • Charge shots can cause shielded enemies to stagger and become vulnerable for a couple seconds.
  • Don’t bother using the L/R buttons for switching weapons. Using the shortcut on the right stick is much more convenient, and you’ll wish that it had always been a thing.
  • Sliding has a dedicated button you can map, if you so desire.
  • Mega Man has an animation for exiting the slide like in Mega Man 8. Caveat emptor.
  • Don’t quote me on this, but I’m pretty sure bosses have secondary weaknesses in this game. (Just speaking anecdotally. I haven’t seen a comprehensive damage chart yet.)

In conclusion, I’d say this is almost as good as Mega Man 9.

(Did I mention I spent the last month and a half plugging away at the previous 10 numbered games in anticipation? I have a lot more Mega Man takes I can offer if you’re interested.)

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I’m interested

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Tim hits on a lot of things. The hitbox is a bit off…
I feel like the amount of insta death is a bit high, the only time the health bar feels consequential is during boss fights.

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I finally picked this up and started playing it last night. I played 3 of the stages that weren’t in the demo.

I don’t think I like this game very much.

Largely for reasons outlined in the demo impressions.

I’ve heard some people say that Mega Man was never good. I spent far too much of my childhood playing the NES games to be able to be able to decouple my defenses of the series entirely from nostalgia (or at least I haven’t worked through my thoughts enough yet), but in playing this game, Mega Man & Bass, 8, and 7–games I’ve never been able to fully connect to–I feel pretty confident in saying what all four of these non-8-bit-presenting sequels fail at that makes Mega Man 1-6,9,10 so compelling and engaging is legibility.

8-bit Mega Man thrives on a high-contrast hyperlegibility. The thick black outlines that surround characters, most bullets, most platforms (and the high contrast shading that gives dimension to and helps shape various objects as well) literally let you know where you stand constantly. This is an easy thing to say about the era of low-resolution sprite-based games, where every sprite is confined to a grid. But the precision of the outstanding outlines matches well with the precise feeling of the mechanics (I’d say the same for a lot of the Capcom platformers, particularly the licensed Disney ones).

This Mega Man is full of visual noise. Things move smoothly and look pretty good for the most part, but I’ve run into more than one miniboss where I feel like I’m not sure if I’m even hitting them properly–or actually where my bullet landed. It’s a problem. It feels messy. It feels crowded.

This is in addition to thing I said upthread:

Note my use of the “coloring outside the lines” idiom. That dovetails so nicely with my thoughts about the dark contrasty lines of the earlier games in the series that I could puke.

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