Retro Redux: Mega Man

Howdy folks and welcome to yet another Retro Redux. This week we’re going to take a look back at a game that I only played for the first time a little over a year ago, Mega Man. The first installment in the series. I never played the Mega Man games when they originally came out. I don’t know why they were just never ones that I put into my system. It wasn’t until the release of Mega Man 9 when I really got interested in the Mega Man franchise and decided to try them out on the Virtual Console.

Designed by Keiji Infafune, Mega Man was released back in December of 1987 and set the tone for what the franchise would become. There would be some tweaks to the overall formula, but designs such as having a set number of stages all guarded by a robot master that would give you their power after you defeated them would be kept in every subsequent entry in the series. In this instance there were six robot masters that you needed to best; Ice Man, Fire Man, Elec Man, Guts Man, Bomb Man and Cut Man. There was a pattern to the way they could be defeated and if you found out the correct order each boss would be much easier to defeat. Once you bested the six robot masters you were sent to the Wily Stages where you had even tougher guardians on each level, including a section where you had to beat each of the six robot masters in succession.

Mega Man was not the prettiest game to look at and there were a number of times where the action on the screen would slow to a crawl because there was so much going on at one time. I can remember playing Cut Man’s stage for the first time and seeing that opening section with the teal blue walls and thinking this game did not hold up very well over the years. Much of this was just from the game being a product of the early NES era and it was corrected very quickly with Mega Man 2 which looks vastly superior to the original.

Sound is where Mega Man really shines. The games score was composed by Yoshihiro Sakaguchi, who was credited in the game as Yuukichan’s Papa, and Manami Matsumae. The original themes for this game are still remembered by many as some of the best in the series and there aren’t many games from that era that have soundtracks that are remembered as fondly as Mega Man.

If you were looking for a game that challenged your skills as gamer Mega Man is a good place to look. These games are famous for their difficulty and many games today are compared to the “Mega Man hard” level of difficulty. Some of the design elements of the game would be considered cheap by today’s standards and some would consider it bad game design. Things like enemies being placed on a ledge that is just barely big enough for Mega Man to fit on or enemies that could shoot in multiple directions hitting you when you’re over a pit of spikes. If you really wanted frustration, the moving platforms in Guts Man’s stage would drive you crazy. The infamous Yellow Devil, which could be defeated very easily if you wanted to cheat. If not, the pattern of his movement and attacks was really, really difficult to time and it took a lot of trial and error before you were able to beat him. There was even a scoring system that awarded you points, and it’s the only game in the main franchise to ever see a score attached to your progress. It was pretty much useless and was removed in Mega Man 2.

There were some issues when Capcom wanted to bring the game to America. Nintendo of America, at the time, had strict rules against any religious references in their games and this affected a number of games, including Mega Man. When the game was first released in America the Yellow Devil boss had his name changed to Rock Monster to avoid the devil reference. It’s known today by its proper name. Mega Man’s name also went through a change. In Japan the game is known as Rock Man and when you combine that with his sister’s name, Roll, you get a nice play on the term Rock ‘n Roll. There was an amplifier in the states known as Rockman and Nintendo, in order to avoid a lawsuit, told Capcom to change his name and Mega Man was born. Probably the most famous, or infamous depending on how you look at it, aspect of Mega Man’s release was the cover art for the box. The terrible art depicting a middle aged man wearing blue power armor and carrying a pistol did not give you any idea of what you’d expect in the game and is considered, by many, to be the worst box art of all-time.

What’s not considered on anyone’s worst of all-time list is the game itself. Though Mega Man 2 is considered a far superior game in a number of aspects Mega Man still ranks very highly on many peoples top NES games of all-time list. Because of this, the game has seen a number of ports, remake and re-releases throughout the years. The game saw release on Nintendo’s Game Boy handheld, and was ported to the PSP in the form of Mega Man Powered Up. That game was essentially a re-make featured enhanced, cuter graphics and new level design, but also had a mode that retained much of the original level design with the enhanced graphics. It was released on the Wii’s Virtual Console in preparation for 2008’s release of Mega Man 9, a game which would take the blue bomber back to his 8-bit roots.

Mega Man is remembered fondly by many people and after playing it last year I’m sorry to say I missed it all these years, but everyone should experience the game that was Mega Man. It will make you appreciate many of the games we have now and test your skills in ways you didn’t think possible.