I am a Mega Man lover/grump.
Here are thirteen Mega Man 11 demo thoughts after ~1 hour with it:
- It feels good for the most part. Jumping feels right. Mega Man is smaller on the screen than in MM7.
- 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.
- Alluded to above, but the compact little obstacle-ridden rooms on the conveyer-belt is a great sequence.
- 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.
- The flashy visual effects are way overdone and make the screen busier than they need to be.
- Which Mega Man game introduced screws? Was it 7? I still don’t like them. In fact, screw 'em.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Anyway, Speed Gear and Power Gear are fine mechanical ideas, I guess, but ultimately don’t feel essential.
- 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.
- Mega Man 9 and Mega Man 10 had mostly amazing soundtracks and… this is not amazing.
- 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).