Finding your favorite Mega Man is an invitation to one of gaming’s more respectable conversations. Declaring an answer—whether it’s fueled by nostalgia, objective truth, or genuine appreciation—is drawing line in a sand, and it’s a resolution Mega Man Legacy Collection is designed to facilitate. It’s not only how you remember these six games, it’s how you want others to see them, too.
The original Mega Man is the accepted prototype. One of Capcom’s first original console titles—and, in 1987, a game on the precipice of the Nintendo Entertainment System’s American explosion—it expressed indelible quantities of originality among its contemporaries. Astro Boy’s influence on Mega Man’s outline was obvious, but it was also outfitted with a lush sense of sentimentality. The six robot masters, not to mention Dr. Wily, were all weirdly adorable, and a far cry from the menacing thrash defined by its run ‘n gun peers. Discounting the worst box art in the world, Mega Man was an open invitation to a colorful, zany world of a robot boy against an evil uprising.
On the design side, Mega Man staked even bolder claims. Free of the chains of linearity, it allowed the player to tackle any of its six stages in any order. This may not seem like a big deal now, but it afforded a tremendous amount of responsibility to the player for a game made in the late 80’s! On top of that were the suite of new weapons earned by defeating each robot master, as well as the paper/rock/scissors relationship between the robot masters and their respective weapons. Indeed, solving the preferred Mega Man stage sequence was usually the first order of business in future titles.
Unfortunately Mega Man breaks down when it dicards its inventions in favor of period-appropriate conventions. The shifting platforms in Guts Man’s stage will drop Mega Man with hellish speed and ruthless efficiency. The arcing flames in Fire Man’s level operate without remorse, and trying to take down Elec Man with the default weapon is an exercise in futility. Mega Man also, more or less, breaks its own rules, with the first level in Wily’s end-game run requiring the optional but not so optional Magnet Beam that was tucked in a Super Arm-protected corner of Elec Man’s stage. From a series of gotcha-style deaths to its hastily assembled levels, Mega Man’s lack of forgiveness and general rawness makes it the roughest entry in the series.
Mega Man 2, on the other hand, may be perfect, and it’s often grouped with A Link to the Past, Super Metroid, and Super Mario Bros. 3 in The Greatest Game Ever Made™ conversations. Legend states that Mega Man 2 was developed as a side-project while Capcom employees were assigned to more profitable endeavors, which is believable considering everything in Mega Man 2 looks and performs like an absolute labor of love. It’s a harder, better, faster, and stronger version of the original game.
In this sense, Mega Man 2 is also a model sequel. It retains the thesis of the first game, but expands its scope with worthwhile improvements while cleverly subtracting everything that tried to drag it down. This generates a sense of aesthetic purity, even though the basic structure was augmented with a series of three extra powers meant to offer temporary aid to rigorous demands of platforming. With Mega Man 2, Capcom escaped the design trappings of their arcade ancestry and embraced what it meant to be console game in 1988/1989. The implementation of E-Tanks, a more generous distribution of health and extra lives, and a password system all functioned as helping hands for a wider audience. Mega Man wasn’t breaking down, he was getting stronger.
At a certain point a fondness for childhood adventures trumps rational observations, so, with that in mind, holy shit, Mega Man 2 was full of clever and endearing moments. The incredible music on that start screen (and later encored in Wily’s Castle), the realization that Time Stopper rendered the Force Beams of Quick Man’s stage powerless, the earthy sensation and spooky Battons haunting Wood Man’s stage, the palpable sensation of warmth bleeding through the walls of Heat Man’s stage, the incredible, huge cartoon Mecha Dragon in Wily’s Castle—I can go on like this forever but the point is that Mega Man 2, in its day and in retrospect, was the game that had it all and didn’t feel compromised by the looming threat of stagnation.
With games, the third in line is usually the most challenging to conceive. A sequel gets a pass on expected refinement, but its poor form to pump out an identical copy a second time. This is often seen as Mega Man’s inevitable downfall—six games on one console over the course of seven years will do that—but the development teams at Capcom at least tried to do something different with Mega Man’s mechanics for successive outings. Whether these were the products of genuine inspiration or contrived filler material is open to interpretation, but the effort to change something was certainly there.
1990 brought Mega Man 3. New to the series was the addition of its first significant mechanic; a slide maneuver. Mega Man could now essentially chop his height in half and perform a cool slide move under lower objects. Sometimes this was just another way to pass through pieces of a level, but it was more often employed as another test of skill. Sliding under enemy fire, going back and forth at a rapid pace to properly time oncoming danger, and quickening Mega Man’s pace were all a pretty big deal. Mega Man 3 also saw the unified expansion of his platforming-helper powers in Rush, a robot dog that could transform into a platform booster, a jet-powered hover-board, and a submarine. Implementation of the latter was almost always employed as a way to cheese the hell out of Gemini Man’s aquatic challenges, but it was a neat gimmick all the same.
Mega Man 3 is also probably the last time a boss lineup escaped significant criticism. Both expertly composed and mechanically inspired, there was a sense of consistency I didn’t truly appreciate as an eight year old, but feels much smoother in my current critical eyes. Snake Man’s stage is basically the inside of a reptilian spaceship, and his power is to literally shoot homing snakes at people is aesthetically appropriate and, as it turns out, highly effective. Magnet Man’s stage had a cool challenge by introducing a slight magnetic pull from sky-bound robots, and Gemini’s Man’s DIY bubble platforming was also novel. I don’t know why Hard Man’s stage opened with plagues of bee’s amid its rocky surface, but such are the problems of robot revolts in 20XX. Mega Man 3 certainly relied a few ideas of past games (Shadow Man’s stage found another way to turn all the lights out!), but it also proved Mega Man 2 wasn’t some sublime accident. At this point, Capcom was knee deep in Mega Man’s legacy.
Sentiment and surprise may ultimately be gifts exclusively bestowed upon the young and foolish (when you’re a kid, everything is basically magic), but I have to express how revelatory and game-changing Mega Man 3 felt when I got it for my eighth birthday. The debut of Proto Man was an alluring enigma, but finishing off the robot masters, opening up a series of harder, remixed levels, and seeing those levels punctuated with boss fights from Mega Man 2 blew my young mind. These were bosses from another game and they were also in this game. Today, I realize Capcom was just reusing stationary assets as a means to artificially extend the life of Mega Man 3, but as a kid (and free of all the cynicism and disdain of the functioning adult world), this was unbelievable. I played through Mega Man 3 every weekend for what felt like years, or at least I did until…
Mega Man 4. My interpretations of Mega Man 4 as a child and an adult compose a never ending war. As a kid, I fell in love with its signature new mechanic. The Mega Buster, which as far as I knew was the first time Mega Man’s default weapon had an actual name, could now be charged for a truly powered-up shot with a cool comet tail and it didn’t require energy as ammunition. I had always played Mega Man conservatively, only using my earned weapons when they were truly needed, and a solution to that looming threat of anxiety—what if I run out of a weapon and then I actually need it!—was exactly what I required.
As an adult, I recognize the Mega Buster as Capcom’s unknowing attempt to poison the series. Not having shuffle through Mega Man’s weapons is neat, but it literally defeats the point of most of those weapons. It destroys the game. Other weapons, minus a few convenient situations, become perfunctory accessories. The Mega Buster was Capcom’s big idea for Mega Man 4 but, unlike the slide move or Rush, it forever altered the course of Mega Man. Nothing would ever be the same.
At the same time, nothing would have been the same anyway. They can’t remake Mega Man 2 again (until 2008 anyway). Some of the boss ideas were a reach, Pharaoh Man in particular was visibly stupid, but Mega Man 4 was still loaded with quality stages and boss fights. Toad Man’s night time rain and robot toads that barfed smaller robot toads were nightmarishly effective, and its cascading rivers were a neat spin on Mega Man’s brand of platforming. Ring Man’s disappearing rainbow platforms were an excellent twist on an established design, and even Pharaoh Man’s quicksand was new to Mega Man. Dust Man and Skull Man’s themes, even with an audio channel compromised by the Mega Buster, also stand among Mega Man’s best music.
With Mega Man 4, Capcom seemed open to a few shifts in perspective. In addition to Rush, it brought back the optional and hidden power-ups of the original Mega Man. I played Mega Man 4 for months before I found out about the Balloon Adaptor power-up lurking off to the side of Pharaoh Man’s stage, or the secret non-suicide pit in Dive Man’s stage for the Wire Adaptor. Likewise, the feint of Dr. Cossack being the objective villain worked on my ten-year-old mind, and Eddie, who would periodically appear to toss Mega Man either an E-Tank or nothing of immediate value, was certainly appreciated. If anything, I appeared to be beating Mega Man 4 more consistently than any of its predecessors. Either I was getting better or the games were getting easier.
Mega Man 5, released in North America in the same year as Mega Man 4, is where Mega Man starts visibly breaking down. In my youth, another Mega Man was a cause for celebration, an oh my god they made another of my favorite game ode to joy. I wasn’t reading many gaming magazines in 1992, so walking into the store and seeing Mega Man 5 on a shelf was one of the more exciting things that happened in my suburban life.
From a critical point of view, especially after marathon’ing the previous four games over the last few days, Mega Man 5’s shiftless disposition grows more transparent with age. Star Man (another victim of the rotating-projectile-shield-trick), Crystal Man, Gravity Man and Stone Man are brain dead, pushover robot masters. Stone Man’s stage, in particular is a hastily assembled mess of ideas, repurposing Battons, Metalls, and Hard Man’s art in contrived directions. Napalm Man’s stage, a thoughtless slog that could have more accurately been titled “Vietnam War Man,” is probably the worst in the entire series.
This isn’t to suggest that Mega Man 5 is completely devoid of good will. Gravity Man’s stage, which played with definitions of up and down, is the most engaging idea in the game (and its presence was still felt decades later with games like VVVVVV). Charge Man is a bottom-of-the-barrel idea, but setting a stage on a moving train added much needed diversity in Mega Man’s weary art direction. Even Star Man’s open-air underwater-style level offered a few careful novelties.
Had you, somehow, never played another Mega Man game, 5 might actually stand as one of the series’ best. If it’s your first time learning these lessons, Mega Man 5, while not the most tightly designed, is one probably the most accessible. It’s extremely easy and collecting letters hidden throughout each stage and unlocking BEAT, a blue bird that homes in and kills practically everything with ease, insures easy play-through. Outside of that ideal scenario, however, Mega Man 5 functions as penultimate episode, something of a placeholder before the expected grand finale.
Mega Man 6 was released stateside in 1994. Never mind the Genesis and Super Nintendo, which had already been eating 8-bit games for lunch for half a decade, 1994 saw the release of the 32-bit Saturn and PlayStation. Hell, Mega Man X had come out at that point, properly succeeded the aging core franchise. This year, this console, and this entire era was no place for another 8-bit Mega Man game. Capcom didn’t even publish it in North America, leaving Nintendo to push it out and soak up any residual interest.
Mega Man 6 actually isn’t too bad. Released during the final year of the NES’ life cycle, its rich color pallet, snazzy visual effects, and general composition employed every trick in the book. Outside of the remarkable 3D rotation effects in Kirby’s Adventure or the insane speed and activity of Recca, it’s one the NES’ best and most diverse looking games. Looking at Plant Man’s stage and comparing it to the similarly-themed Wood Man stage from Mega Man 2, and literal years of visual and technical progress are evident. Everything is bigger, brighter, and much more colorful. Tomahawk Man’s Wild West stage even boasts a rendition of monument valley alongside a setting sun for the sole purposes of exhibiting a neat haze effect on the sun. Choices in color schemes may be unconventional, Centaur Man’s hues of lavender and yellow are unsettling, but it felt like the team at Capcom constantly showing off the number of colors they could cram in a single screen.
Modification to the Rush’s abilities is the core change to Mega Man 6’s layout. Rather than a hover-board, coil, or some other awkward contraption, Rush now transformers into two different suit adaptors. The Rush Jet adaptor grants Mega Man a jetpack and the Power Adaptor enables a Mega Buster-like power punch. Implementation is predictable; use Rush Jet’s temporary boost to reach some out of the way ladders or over some particularly lethal spikes. Likewise, the Power Adaptor is primarily employed to break down specially marked blocks that conceal hidden paths or power-ups. There are a few abstract uses, however, including the Power Adaptor’s ability to neutralize Knight Man’s pesky shield. Mega Man’s slide move is sacrificed as a tradeoff for using either ability, but at least they’re not bound to a finite energy meter like traditional weapons.
Basic enemy design is another strength of Mega Man 6. Flame Man’s level features oil-slick surfaces that can be ignited by flame-spewing Fire Telly passing by. Metalls are bottled up and contained inside a dispenser as a Mettal Potton, perhaps issuing the ultimate futility of wasting time killing those dumb things. Pelicanus, basically robot pelicans, dropping fish bombs from their big dumb mouths in Centaur Man’s stage are goofy, but it proves Mega Man 6 never wavers in the series commitment to concealing imminent menace with endearment.
Elsewhere, Mega Man 6 seemed to cut back on the fluff that dragged Mega Man 5 down to the series’ lowest point. Rather than an assortment of out-of-the way letters to collect to earn BEAT, Mega Man 6 creates alternate pathways to boss doors reachable through clever use of Rush adaptors. Mega Man 6 also ditched the restore-everything M-Tanks exclusive to Mega Man 5 and, sort of, replaced them by concealing an Equalizer adaptor, which evens all of your weapons’ energy, in a corner of Tomahawk Man’s level. I’m rambling at this point, but I’ve come to the realization that Mega Man 6 came out too late for anyone to give a damn, and it’s (probably) better than you expect.
All six original Mega Man games are wrapped up inside Mega Man Legacy Collection. You’ll notice this is two short of the main-line Mega Man games (the Super Nintendo’s Mega Man 7 and PlayStation/Saturn’s Mega Man 8) and a host of extras that were included on the 2004 PlayStation 2/Xbox/GameCube release of Mega Man Anniversary Collection. Also absent is the Navi mode included on the PlayStation re-releases, some different musical arrangements, the GameCube’s awful controller scheme, and all around spotty emulation that washed out colors and created audio issues.
The immediate reaction is to wonder what happened to Mega Man 7 and Mega Man 8 (or even the 8-bit influenced Mega Man 9 and Mega Man 10, for that matter). These are part of Mega Man’s legacy, why aren’t they included in this collection? The obvious answer is money and time — or least as far as what Digital Eclipse was able to produce with time and money allotted by Capcom. I’m sure everyone would have liked some sort of master collection encompassing Mega Man Soccer and every other crazy offshoot, but that probably wasn’t feasible in the given timeframe and certainly wouldn’t have been brought to you for $15.
Mega Man Legacy Collection is $15. Each game is $5 on 3DS, which is the only other modern device that sells Mega Man related material. This collection has been marketed as a Criterion-like all-encompassing celebration of the original six games, and the painstaking detail which Digital Eclipse has gone to in order to reproduce the not-100%-cycle-accurate-but-close-enough appearance of this games is well documented. Digital Eclipse also likes use the word “simulation” (over traditional emulation) to describe their work; I have no idea what technical specs are employed to qualify that term, but I’m inclined to believe them.
It’s all here. That strange color bleed-over effect while the game fills in the right side of the level. Drastic slowdown whenever onscreen action gets especially crazy. The flickering sprites. That second-player controller super jump cheat in Mega Man 3 that no one found out about for years. Either by way of creating a functioning emulator or hand-making every adverse effect, these six games play (as best I can tell) exactly like their original incarnations. No compromised music, no weird discoloration, no cropped windows, and no asinine button layouts. For better or for worse, these games are exactly as you remember them.
There are, however, a generous assortment of bonus features and original challenges. The most alluring is the full translation and reproduction of the Complete Works database feature afforded to Mega Man’s PlayStation reissues. Usually I don’t get excited over what amounts to concept art, but seeing the original drawings, along with a sidebar of relevant information, felt vital to unraveling Mega Man’s greater world. A lot of the robots and robot masters that populate each stage have some practical purpose behind their otherwise murderous intent, and exploring their original art leads credence to the goofy enthusiasm that powers their design. Mega Man has always been an extremely difficult game, but seeing huge robot squids, snorkeling Metalls, and Goblins straight from the robot circus (Note: the world of 20XX contains a robot circus) creates another level of appreciation.
Mega Man Legacy Collection also contains a roving challenge mode with over fifty different missions. Functioning between boss rushes and cut-and-paste level remixes; challenge mode is Digital Eclipse’s attempt to do something original with Mega Man while protecting the sanctity of the original content. Some of these challenges include warp points to different pieces of different games and task you with making it out under the stress of a time limit. Others boss-specific challenges, like taking down a Yellow Devil, Mecha Dragon, or an escalating series of screen-filling robots, are also available. I appreciate the novelty of these challenges, especially the ability to use a robot master’s power in unconventional ways, but I didn’t stick with them for too long. I like Mega Man as I remember it, and while challenge mode isn’t without merit, it just wasn’t for me.
Speaking of times remembered Mega Man Legacy Collection offers a host of viewing options across each game. It defaults to the traditional 4:3, clean-pixel setup, but it also carries filter options for a CRT and a VGA monitor The CRT filter, in particular, is one of the best I’ve ever seen, simulating blurriness and weird distortion so well I can practically feel the static electricity coming off my monitor. The other option just seemed to add a thin layer of scanlines, which I could take or leave. There’s also a widescreen option if you’re some kind of monster, but I usually just played with a border underneath a default, clean screen.
Save states are also on the table. Popular in the emulation scene for years and the only certifiable way to make it through something like Battletoads, save-states allow you to save the game at any time and resume that save whenever you’d like. Each title in Mega Man Legacy Collection receives one slot. They can’t be used in challenge mode, which makes sense since save states are also cheating, but they can be used to get past some tricky parts. Or they can be completely abused to cheese your way through the whole thing, but I’m not here to judge.
My only significant grievance with Mega Man Legacy Collection’s curation (and this is admittedly superficial); I wish the North American box art would have been used on the menu to select each game. This is a silly thing to complain about! It’s just a menu! And I recognize the original Famicom art as leagues better than the horrid-to-OK box shots we got on this side of the planet, but they don’t speak to me the same way those original boxes did. I’ll never forget the feeling when I went to a store and saw that Mega Man 4 was a real thing, or when I went to Blockbuster, saw the box for the original Mega Man, and wondered what the hell I was looking at. The original boxes are super dumb and way off model, but they’re part of the nostalgia many of us experienced. It’s the reason why we’re here.
Digital Eclipse’s mission to preserve and maintain the original six Mega Man games feels executed to perfection. The actual quality of the original games is debatable—and it’s been debated, regularly, for over twenty years at this point—but it’s safe to say Mega Man Legacy Collection provides the defining vessel to experience these games today. Digital Eclipse’s interest in one-to-one preservation rules out comparisons to the 3D Classics line M2 has produced for the 3DS, or the PlayStation 2’s stellar Sega Ages compilations, but there’s no fault in the ambition of pure reproduction. Mega Man Legacy Collection gathers the most beloved Mega Man games around, and while they may have been collected, modified, and exhibited before, they’ve certainly never been done better. Short of having a time machine or an exorbitant amount of cash to procure a pure retro setup, there’s no better way to play these (mostly) beloved games.
