jet stingray tho
donât know if itâs kosher to ramble here about how much i donât particularly like Megaman, having played all of the NES games and a few of them to completion⌠but i donât really understand the appeal or fandom those games seem to garner⌠esp the NES ones. theyâre kind of all the same game over and over again. stages tend to blend together and feel like they were stamped out from a template outside of a handful of them (2 has some better stages but theyâre the exception to the rule). the same sorts of enemies and annoying encounters pop up again. @daphaknee said this but theyâre trivial if you complete the bosses in the right order and too hard/annoying if you donât. so whatâs the point? thereâs nothing interesting design-wise happening there, and no real changes between games. theyâre just⌠bland games to me. the only real saving grace for me is the music.
imo play Clash at Demonhead or Startropics or The Guardian Legend or Metal Storm or whatever lesser known cult title instead of the NES Megaman games. what i played of X i liked a little more (still not my style of game tho) but the Legends games def appeal to me though.
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I think the appeal comes down to good flavor â the music is great, the art style is big and bold and fun to look at and the characters are memorable, the gimmick of collecting powers from your enemies just feels inherently âcoolâ. Itâs all very polished. Im saying all this as someone who likes the series but doesnât love it, repeating something i said upthread itâs something i enjoy in spite of a lot of its core gimmicks (since i played through every game after looking up the âoptimalâ route, it might as well have been a linear trek each time)
If none of that hooks you then youâre left with games that are ultimately just, pretty good? i thought so anyway. As an adult i should probably seek more unique/challenging experiences and not just like something for its style, sure. This isnât really a series for me as an adult anyway. Itâs kinda like, i donât love Dragonball Z and donât think it needed hundreds of episodes, but thousands of kids ate that shit up, so what do i know?
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What I dislike most about the series is that every level is tedious. There are ladders, disappearing platforms, treadmills, bullet sponge enemies, etc. that waste your time, so when you finally reach the boss and find you arenât able to memorize itâs patterns or you didnât take the right gun, youâre forced to do it all over again.
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The brilliant part of the series (at least those entries that are brilliant) is that a lot of those tedious parts can be avoided or optimized. The very stodginess of the movement makes good execution both valuable (because, e.g., every pixel of ladder is so slow) and achievable (because the number and speed of actions is relatively low).
Thatâs a very particular kind of game, though, and if you donât feel like playing it, it sucks.
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I usually enjoy Methodical / Slow Action Platformers â˘, but Mega Man is purposefully annoying in ways that others are not. Failing to cover the distance of a bottomless pit is one of the worst feelings.
It is the only series to answer the question, âwhat if a man was Mega?â
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These are really good questions, and as someone whoâs fascinated by Mega Man games and has been ever since he first saw this screenshot on one of those NES library posters in like 1990
I find Mega Man as a series somehow difficult to talk about why I love it.
I think @sleepysmiles is definitely correct that itâs in part a flavor thing. Especially when compared to games of its era, even the first game had a strong cartoon vibe with clean outlines and a Tezuka-esque(/ripoff) design sense that made great use of color. The music basically universally slaps, too.
If the NES Mega Man games have one real drawback, I think itâs that after the first one, beating bosses with just the Mega Buster became an even bigger challenge (iirc, 3 is the worst about this), making ferreting out that order and then playing it linearly way too big a component of the play experience.
Iâm finding an uncomfortable number of my ideas are grounded in comparisons to what else was happening at the time, which is far from the best reason to endorse playing an NES game in the year 2020. However, the idea of a player character who could swap weapons/powers and appearance on the fly, becoming more powerful and varied as the game progressed, was a very appealing game design decision. The nonlinearity being broken by intended sequencing has been pointed out, but the idea of nonlinearity was/is exciting.
I still find them very fun to play on a strict mechanical level. Mega Man has a jump that feels perfect to me, he moves across the screen at a nice rate in proportion to the screen size, and that little metallic plink sound when he lands feels satisfying.
That the mechanics and even enemy/boss encounters donât vary all that much between certain entries has never really bothered me. Minor variations and new coats of paint were fun to engage in. That doesnât seem particularly defensible when I say it, but âsequels that are basically level packsâ to me has never been the damning observation some people seem to think it is. I do think the variations in level design and enemy design, while small, mixed with the aesthetic change-ups create enough difference to make each entry compelling on its own merits in comparison.
These are my thoughts as I type them out and they are not fully baked! I can definitely say a lot more critically about why I like the NES Zeldas and Marios, which Iâve been playing for about as long (though, also, Iâve had far fewer conversations about Mega Man). Will maybe have to revisit the games if I want to flesh out my thoughts and apply a more critical eye.
Anyway, thanks for going on this journey if you read this far and also sorry.
tl;dr not much really
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played through mmz1 normal mode A rank last week and itâs real good, though honestly kind of easy until the very end? which is funny considering how every word written about the mmz collection is just shrieking about how hard they are
realizing hollow knight nail/boss fights seem to owe an awful lot to mmz, wow
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Reading everyoneâs defenses of Mega Man is very heartwarming to me, but it has made me realize that all of the criticisms that started this thread are things that Iâve always felt about the OG Castlevania series, almost word for word (well except for 2 having better level design lol), most importantly the detail that âchallengeâ ends up feeling much more like âchore,â but the music being undeniably awesome.
I think part of this is that the pure kinetic pleasure of Mario-style platformers is such a reliable formula that it has rendered all other approaches to the genre kind of retroactively broken-feeling. Or at least to have the potential to be broken feeling.
Both CV and Mega Man offer more restrictive and less forgiving approaches to platforming, and momentum is handled totally differently, but for me at least when you hit a groove in a Mega Man game and figure out the best route through a screen it can actually be rewarding. Iâm sure the same is true for people that enjoy Castlevania physics but Iâve never been able to do it.
If youâre taking it seriously and genuinely donât know the âcorrectâ boss order, though, having to leave and return to levels constantly over the course of your relationship with the game adds to this experience, imo. Like you could spend hours on a single level figuring out how to get to the end without taking much damage, only to get annihilated by the boss because you donât have the right weapon. Then you putter around in other levels and get more abilities, and return to said level, at which point hopefully your muscle memory kicks in and something that felt impossible the first time around suddenly seems trivial.
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If youâre good enough to memorize the layouts and execute the dex challenges each level presents, itâs really not that much more to do the same to a boss except the boss⌠keeps going until you kill it. Thatâs why theyâre called mid-bosses â because you canât avoid them and you have to overcome them.
It would be best to say Mega Manâs structure e.g. //struggling through a level >> overcoming a boss// is more delineations about themes (or even inspiration) than it is about challenges. I really think that something like Metroidâs or Metal Gearâs escape sequences are inversions of these structures. Instead of a sense of calm after a boss itâs one more intense escape where defeating things might actually even be a hinderance.
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astro boy: omega factor
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play this one
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Blocking every single person who called him âMegamanâ. Itâs Mega Man. Two words. Two names. Go back and edit all your posts and send a DM apologizing and then Iâll unblock you. Thanks.
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Meg-a-man
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I think it is silly that Mega Man Legends localized the dudeâs name as Mega Man. His nameâs Rock! Mega Man/Rockman is his superhero name! Even the older localizations understood this!
rock rockman at your service
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Youâd think so, right? But in Mega Man 11 heâs called Mega Man even in his civilian form, and in Mega Man 9 and 10 they avoid mentioning it by always having him in hero mode. I donât think a Capcom gameâs english version has referred to him as Rock since at least 2006 and Mega Man Powered Up, where his first name was Mega instead of Rock, and for that matter Iâm not sure he was ever called Rock in-game after Mega Man 4 (discounting the manuals which I havenât checked).
The Archie comics did call him Rock but that was part of their whole thing of cramming in as many references as they could.
I will now believe this is a Speed Racer thing and that heâs the son of Pops Man and Mom Man.