Mega Man 7 is a bit of a black sheep in how it feels and plays out. With Mega Man X proving a much greater commercial and critical success than 6 in early 1994, I'd assume they wanted to stick some elements of X into the next installment of the original series. The end result is this very "in-between" installment that doesn't know which design philosophy to stick to.

The level layouts are now more reminiscent of X, but Mega Man is limited to his own control scheme rather than gain X's wall jumping and dashing abilities. There's hidden items now, but without wall jumping and the like you have to use "Rush Search" in certain spots in certain levels to get upgrades and other various shit to make your life easier. The locations of these are either not indicated very well or not indicated at all, and it doesn't help that Rush Search is very specific, very finicky, and not at all fun to use. You also have to replay a level all the way through if you go hunting for items you missed, unless you find The One That Allows You To Exit Levels. Shouldn't this be a normal fucking feature on levels you already cleared? Start and select! It's not that hard!

You can also buy these items in the shop but the useful ones typically cost many screws, which are a hassle to grind for due to item drops from enemies being RNG based. There's not really any winning with that. You shouldn't need to grind for currency in a Mega Man game, and you shouldn't need to search all over the goddamn floors for hidden items, and really you shouldn't be needing to revisit levels anyway. This can be done with optional items in previous installments as well, but they're generally more inconsequential. If you don't get the Super Adaptor in particular, and the upgrade for the Super Adaptor, the final stages will all be maddening.

Even with all the preparation and secret items, though, nothing can really mitigate the final boss. Wily is infamously ridiculous in this game, and for good reason. They just felt like making him really difficult according to interviews, no real reason to do so, no gradual buildup in terms of difficulty, nothing. He sucks, and his weakness almost sucks more. One last kick in the head before the game comes to a close.

There's a lot to complain about, since it doesn't quite feel like classic Mega Man, and doesn't quite feel like Mega Man X, but really it's totally serviceable on its own two legs. I would probably play any of the previous five and definitely the first X game over this, but this is an okay game on its own. I just don't find that it lives up to expectations set by its precursors, yknow?

Mega Man was always one of those series that I reveered as a child but didn’t exactly play a lot. I mean, this series is one of the NES franchises, and as a teen raised by AVGN and those inspired by him, I just always heard about this motherfucker. So much so, that I got Mega Man 9 and Mega Man 10 on the Wii when the released way back when. A new game with NES graphics, I mean, I ate them up at the time. I got the second volume of the Legacy Collection because it not only had those two that I played a lot of as a kid, but also the 8th installment, which I had seen recently is very coveted among true fans of this series.

However, before moving on to the latter three games in this collection I felt obligated to play this one, and it may have soured me on Mega Man before I even got going! I feel like a lot of people are lukewarm on this installment, anyways, but I think I’m just lukewarm on the whole thing. See, because Mega Man is a series defined by its legacy as a classic NES game, it feels like every new game was designed not to be updated because half of the appeal, according to the designers, are those clunky and old school things that make a game less fun. Mega Man doesn’t crouch because, well, Mega Man doesn’t crouch. It doesn’t matter how nice it would be to have different heights for your attack, Mega Man DOESN’T CROUCH! Also, spikes are an instant death. It doesn’t matter that levels seemed designed without that fact in mind, and there are sections of some levels that seem like they want to launch you in the spikes once just to teach you about a level’s gimmick, but then you get sent back to the beginning. But, I mean, what can ya do? In Mega Man, spikes are an instant death. Because they always were.

Needless to say this game made me angry. Thank god for the Legacy Collection’s “LOAD LAST CHECKPOINT” option. I was clicking that button, plenty. The password system was honestly really funny, because I haven’t played a game that used that in ages, and I figured by the SNES we weren’t really using that for these bigger games. However! Then I remembered, after figuring I would just give up on the Wily’s Castle levels, that I can input a password to get me to the end! So I did, and then the boss kicked my ass, then when the second phases started, I said “actually, forget it.”

Slash Man and Shade Man being Universal references made for a set of pretty fun stages, some Robot Masters had good fights and...

I think this game has the most atrocious Wily Stages in any Megaman I've played. Attacks feel impossible to dodge with Megaman's big fuckass sprite on a big screen, and the boss fights are MISERABLE. The bosses are invincible for so long (that turtle boss could've been decent if not for the we turtles three segment that wastes so much time, guts man g is just invulnerable with no tell as far as i can see, bass flying like a dumbass and somehow getting i-frames while doing so), and Wily himself just straight up breaks a rule that you've come to expect (why the fuck can you just slide under the leg that seems like it would damage you???), and the Wily Capsule having a god awfully bloated healthbar, I was honestly just slogging through the finale and while the ending cutscene was kind of cool, I kind of just wish I was playing X instead.

Yeah, actually, why the fuck did I play this? I could've just played X for a better SNES Megaman experience. Fuck. Don't waste your time.

Colorblindness Rating: A
yeah whatever i want nothing else to do with this miserable miserable game

The way that the classic Mega Man franchise had adamantly remained as stylistically consistent as it did through its run on the NES was always one of the biggest points of contention for me when going through the games, not really feeling as if the sequels had added a whole lot that meaningfully justified them, instead feeling stagnant. As such, the breath of fresh air I felt when I moved over to Mega Man 7 was pretty immense, with the visual differences alone immediately setting a sort of precedent that this was going to be THE game in the series that gave me a stronger sense of appreciation on the whole, and in some ways, it honestly was exactly that, even if the differences were yet again rather minor compared to what they might have seemed. On the other hand, I feel like Mega Man 7 is a pretty interesting look into how greater hardware capabilities are able to shape how a game approaches its design, seeing what parts exactly stay consistent while also witnessing a lot of bits and pieces that could finally be better realised to further provide the desired experience.

The visual differences of this game are what immediately stand out to me as a huuuge improvement for the most part, with everything having such a strong sense of fluidity to them, everything bursting with a far more exaggerated sense of cartoonish charm while only very rarely feeling as if the extra movement got in the way of clarity in various forms, most notably the enemy telegraphs. I say very rarely because the one big exception to this is Mega Man himself feeling a bit too all over the place with his animations, getting into the motion and flopping around slightly too much for jumping to feel as consistent as it was back on the NES. It's not a huge deal overall because it's minor enough that you can get used to it with a bit of time but it's still something that can make things feel more perilous than they often should. In basically all the other cases though, I really appreciate the visual overhaul and what it does to breath further life into a lot of these stages, being able to have so much more moving objects in the background and foreground without running the risk of forcing the player to play a game at 2 FPS. This is especially cool in places like Turbo Man's stage where part of the level is dedicated to riding on the back of a giant truck down a race course, now having so much more energy behind it without feeling as if there was a stark disconnect between the pretty visuals and the elements you could actually interact with.

This is also the first game in the series where I felt like I was actually encouraged to explore a bit more as well, with a few miscellaneous quality of life changes such as being able to swap through boss weapons with the shoulder buttons combined with a lot more unique and intuitive triggers to find secrets. Experimentation really for the first time feels as if it was fully considered in a way that didn't feel especially contrived, not quite having the same braindead "secrets" as Mega Man 6 would have, but not being especially obtuse either, leaving this nice middle ground where it feels genuinely engaging to mess around and see what effect your weapons have on the world. The weapons themselves are definitely not the most varied they've ever been but practically all of them actually feel useful in what individual quirks they each have, and the aforementioned quality of life improvement of weapon swapping makes it easier than ever to move to them without wasting time in a pause menu as well, which actually manages to provide a bit more appeal to one of the core ideas behind a Mega Man game, the different experiences depending on boss order.

While I'm still not entirely sold on the sense of replayability behind these games, given that there are only so many ways one can approach a lot of these platforming situations regardless of the weapon selection they have, this is certainly the most convincing game for this idea that I've seen yet, with the amount of little secrets and additional paths potentially shaping your route through the stages in very overt ways. Also while the idea of only giving you access to four of the robot masters at the start and showing off the others once you beat the first lot seems like a bad idea thanks to how it reduces that initial choice a great deal, the way it's able to better contribute to a difficulty curve and proper sense of progression more than makes up for it in my eyes. It swaps out the feeling of going from 0 to 100 that the past games had with the transition into the wily stages and now provides a nice middle ground to better prepare you without having to take into account the idea of one of them being the first level that someone would enter.

At this point I've also just realised that I feel like I'd enjoy a lot of these games more if the Wily stages largely just, didn't exist, even though this one is less egregious than some previous entries. I feel like one of the big draws of this series for me personally is the rapid fire collection of unique environments and aesthetics thrown your way that don't have to coherently fit together, taking you on a journey through so many different, creative ideas. Contrasting this with the often deeply clinical and repetitive stages through the fortresses is instantly a huge mood killer that's made worse by how much less engaging it ends up being to play through for other reasons as well. The difficulty in Mega Man when it really ramps up almost never feels fully interesting, but more just annoying with the often silly precision it requires of you combined with being brutally unforgiving. The way these situations are chained together throughout a lot of the stages leads to a feeling unpleasant, everything feels like a challenge explicitly designed to mess you up rather than exploring a hostile environment that naturally wants you dead, and as such, the inherent artificiality in a lot of these levels rears its ugly head to a much greater degree. In this however it's mostly the bosses of the Wily stages that frustrate me the most, either being too erratic to feel as if there's a strategy greater than "just jump around and hope for the best", or being long, painful endurance tests. The final boss is both of these things to such a degree that I just want to find the main designer of it and have a stern talking to them, absolute garbage fire way to end the game even if it ultimately doesn't shape the experience as a whole too much for me.

In general, despite my complaints, I still would readily consider this to be my favourite game in the series so far, with the way it takes the ideas of the previous titles and expands upon a lot of them in ways that make it feel far more compelling. Nothing feels truly revolutionary, but it feels like there were a lot of more subtle design changes underneath it all to lead to a game that feels like it embraced the new possibilities it had with open arms while still remembering what it wanted to be. All my usual issues with the game are present enough that I don't outright love this as a whole, but it's certainly the closest I've been to doing so, and that surely has to count for something. Looking forward to MM8 considering that's apparently the one that shook things up the most.

Oficialmente a sequência de Mega Man 6, mas espiritualmente é a sequência de Mega Man V, lá do Game Boy. Vários de seus elementos pode ser traçados diretamente como vindos da subsérie dos portáteis: a estrutura do jogo, liberando só 4 estágios no começo e mais 4 na segunda metade; a presença de um robô rival darktrevas que te desafia no final; a loja de itens; e até o rocket punch de V, que retorna aqui como um powerup do Rush.

Até o visual é herdeiro dos jogos de GB. Se tudo parece meio espremido se comparado aos jogos de NES, os sprites grandões e a escala do mundo vão parecer confortáveis para veteranos da linha portátil. Inclusive, nesse ponto que parece ser uma grande contenda entre os fãs não tenho nada a reclamar. Sim, parece que a câmara está mais próxima e os inimigos grandões, mas os estágios foram bem planejados para considerar a nova escala das coisas e o Mega Man ainda se move de forma tão ágil quanto antes. Se qualquer coisa, ele se move melhor que na aventura imediatamente anterior, já que consertaram o dash, que agora se comporta como em 3/4/5.

Apesar de dever muito à subsérie portátil, 7 está longe de ser só uma reciclagem de ideias. Ele tem sua própria personalidade, às vezes para seu próprio detrimento. Isso é sentido especialmente na trilha sonora, que seria perfeita para um desenho animado matinal mas carece da energia característica da era NES, e nem se compara aos da série X.

No geral achei uma boa tradução da série clássica para a era 16 bits. Não fenomenal, mas boa.

Uau, que avanço...

Esse jogo é grandioso, tem tudo que faz Mega Man clássico ser bom e mais. Graficamente lindo, cores cheias de vida, sprites grandes, cenários memoráveis, incrível como nada se torna repetitivo de olhar. O level design é muito bem feito, não há nenhuma fase ruim aqui, os levels apresentam particularidades próprias, com diversos segredos, os inimigos são próprios de cada fase, é realmente raro ver inimigos se repetindo aqui. As lutas contra robot masters são um balanceadas, com alguns sendo mais difíceis e outros sendo mais fáceis, porém todos mantendo padrões ótimo, proporcionando uma ótima diversão.
Quero dar destaque á lore, que embora não seja o principal foco de Mega Man, é sempre algo interessante e aqui ela começou á ser mais bem explorada, sendo apresentados novos personagens, no caso Bass e Treble, que são ótimas antíteses de Rock e Rush, o final com um ar mais sombrio sobre o Rock e os diálogos aqui presentes.
Além disso, o jogo possui diversos segredos, muitos deles sendo preciso encontrar com o Rush Search, algo que de início eu achei algo ruim, mas se você for um jogador mais atento, poderá desbloquear esses itens na loja, assim tornando acessível pegá-los caso os tenha perdido, além da batalha contra Proto man, que além de ser um momento legal, nos dá a chance de usar o Proto Shield. Claro, alguns desses segredos são bem difíceis de se encontrar, porém nenhum é obrigatório para completar o jogo, ainda assim vale á pena vasculhar os cantos do game pois ajudam demais, principalmente o Super Adaptor, que além de dar um novo visual, deixa a gameplay mais variada e divertida e para completar, eu amo como as armas do robot masters tem grandes interações com as fases, algo que deixa as fases ainda mais variadas, como mudar o clima do Stage do Cloud Man, queimar as árvores na fase do Slash Man, ativar máquinas no caso do Junk Man, algo que mostra um grande capricho.

Enfim, um jogo extremamente importante para a série clássica, dando mais profundidade, tanto em gameplay e para a história, além de muito divertido, com certeza um clássico.

In my honest opinion, there is nothing more criminally underrated than the wonderful Mega Man 7 experience on the Super Nintendo. Many things that could have gone wrong, went right; saving the series from what could have been a disastrous descent into obscurity with complete success.

Mega Man 7 features an amazing presentation and polish, compared to its earlier NES entry, rushed at the end of the NES lifespan. An introduction stage sets the stage for the 4 robot masters you must defeat, before revealing the 4 final robot masters, with their more unforgiving stages and boss battles, helped keep the pace mid-game. Robot Masters joining the fight in this iteration are quite the menace:
"Cloud Man, Burst Man, Junk Man, Freeze Man, Shade Man, Slash Man, Spring Man, and Turbo Man" are masterfully designed, their stage unique from each other, with secrets to discover.

Capcom also went all-in on improving the game graphics for this 16-bit iteration, which to this day, remains one of the best-looking SNES games to our inner child's eyes. Every Robot Masters feel alive, with fluid animations and a lot of attention is put into every detail of their personality and quirks. Mega Man VII excelled in its generous nature, a labor of love.

The game is slower, easier for most, but becomes a challenge once you reach the Wily Fortress, Wily 7 notoriously being one of the hardest capsules to beat so far!

For those looking for an extra challenge, a Japanese fan-made project that takes Mega Man 7 and turns it into an NES-style game was made available in 2008, made by Japanese developer "Mend", also responsible for the equally excellent "Rockman 8 FC" which demake the eight game. We can't recommend them enough!

It must have been weird to be the people making Mega Man 7. Coming in after X and especially X2 really pushed the boundaries of what Mega Man can look like with their additions to the verbset, shift towards exploration within levels, and increased focus on spectacle and narrative (?), it seems like a tall order to take that tech and make Normal Mega Man with it. I personally don’t love the item hunting elements of the X games I’ve played and I understand the appeal of wanting to have a more traditional Mega Man experience on the SNES but I do wonder if there were a lot of people asking for it at the time. So I’m sure it’s an unenviable position to be bringing Classic Mega Man forward technologically for the first time, especially given the turgid reception to the ports and demakes it had received over the years. Given how specific the play experience of these games is and how extremely important that feel is to everything that unfolds out of it, it can’t have been an easy task, and I think where we land with Mega Man 7 is an admirable try, if not wholly successful.

The cornerstone of Mega Man, the movement, is here exactly as far as I can tell. It’s true in X too, no matter what console MM you’re playing he’s gonna run at the same speed, jump at the same height, slide the same distance. There’s a degree to which this should feel perfect. It’s everything else that’s just a little bit off. The sprites in this game are enormous – they just take up a lot of screen real estate, which is nice because the sprite work in this game is uniformly incredible, but the level design doesn’t really account for it. You’re doing all the same Mega Man stuff, and the tricky platforming sections and instances of instant death spikes zooming in from offscreen would FEEL a lot less cheap if the screen was zoomed out to NES or even Mega Man X levels.

Additionally, the animations, while beautiful and elaborate, are maybe…too much so? For the kind of gameplay we’re doing here. SNES fidelity has enabled Mega Man 7 to look basically one for one exactly like all the official Mega Man art always has, and I wonder if maybe we overcorrected from the very stiff robotic animations we were trapped with on the NES. Everything has these super loose squash n’ stretch quality to their animations to match their new cartoonish art style, and this is fine for everyone except Mega Man himself, where this really extravagant animation work actually made it difficult to judge where I was at on a ledge or how far my jump might actually go. He’s got these floppy feet, it’s weird to look at! It’s not a huge problem, it’s mostly just a learning curve to adapt to and the game got easier as I did get used to it, but every now and then I would still misread my position based on uh, looking at my guy, which feels like it shouldn’t happen.

The good news, though, is despite those issues which do seem pretty big but I mostly spent so much time on because they are new and interesting and weird, they made Mega Man! And it’s a pretty good one imo! I don’t find 7 particularly appealing on an aesthetic level – cloud man’s music is the only one I can recall with any fondness, and I don’t find any of the level themes particularly exciting or nearly as attractively represented as the ones in the second NES trilogy – but the actual level design and play is here and it’s good. Lotta cool level gimmicks that don’t overstay their welcome or fuck around too much, more than one cool weapon that’s never been done by the series before, a sleight of solid bosses (who are rendered too easy by their weaknesses imo, but the fights are mostly fun, if not particularly challenging until the very very end where it suddenly becomes a nightmare), and a really gentle difficulty curve that might be the best ramp up the series has ever done, sure helped by splitting the robot master section into two sets of four instead of eight guys off the bat. If I had to guess I would assume that’s not a popular change among Fans but I think it’s fine, you get the same choice experience and it narrows down the guess work for people who really want to suss out the weaknesses. 7 brings back the multiple path and hidden area structure of 6, too, but it does so a lot more confidently and with a lot more finesse. Most of these areas are actually hidden, special items require some thinking or fancy fingerwork to get to, and the rewards are appropriate to the work you’ve done instead of outrageously skipping most of the level and pumping you with powerups for the incredible feat of “seeing a ladder and jumping up to it.” It definitely feels like some cues were taken and lessons were learned from the way Mega Man X hides secrets and in moderation I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all.

First tries are always hard, so I was ready to give Mega Man 7 some benefit of the doubt going in, but I was really pleasantly surprised by what a great time I had with it. My quibbles are real and I think they do affect the game pretty strongly but it’s ultimately difficult to actually ruin Mega Man if the core of it is strong, and this is one of the most solid core experiences in the series as far as I’m concerned.

Oh also Bass is here I love this guy he even has an edgy dog to counter Mega Man’s dog this rules so much I wish we lived in a world where EVERY franchise that ran long enough introduced a dumb fucking Knuckles character, things would be better.

Mega Man 7 had the potential to be the best entry in the whole franchise, by borrowing the best parts of X's formula, and combining them with the more simple structure of the classic gameplay. The more secret-oriented nature of 7 is by far the most obvious X influence, encouraging use of weapons to discover lots of new routes that'll lead you to optional upgrades. It also borrows a little from the Gameboy games, by carrying over the shop, where you can use your acquired currency for more goodies.

The visual aesthetic is wonderfully colorful - far more interesting to look at than what X has been doing imo - the music is on point, and every stage packs its own memorable setpieces, alongside bosses I really enjoyed fighting even without their weaknesses. The localization is the sort of charmingly put together trainwreck that you would expect out of a 90's SNES localization, turning the otherwise whatever dialogue into something a lot more incidentally funny and memorable. The ending also may be one of the rawest moments in this series's history, even if it's totally uncharacteristic in hindsight. All in all, the recipe for an all-time classic is all here, and more or less proves itself as one throughout.

Until you get to the final set of stages. Many things have already been said about this game's finale, so I doubt I have anything original to contribute here. But, when you read the wiki page and find out that they deliberately wanted to make the final boss unbeatable without an Energy Tank, it speaks volumes to the level of balancing that went on here, where they wanted you to tank through it rather than show any use of skill. It may be one of the worst bosses in Mega Man history, and I would honestly recommend at least placing a save state at the beginning of it, so you don't end up using up your E-tanks and weapon energy only to die 80% of the way through.

Mega Man 7 fucks with me, and it seems to fuck with a lot of others. You'd think it's one of the best games in the classic series, but all it takes is that one boss to suddenly convince you it's one of the worst. That's how bad 7's difficulty can be, but it's doubtful you'll see that at first. You'll have a really good time with this one. And then it'll sneak up on you. That one fuckin' bit.

After a seemingly never-ending period of stagnation for most who weren’t die-hard fans of the Mega Man franchise, receiving game after game after game AFTER GAME that did nothing more to expand upon the franchise in a way that would be worth constantly going back to again and again and again, the series managed to pull itself out of that rut with the original Mega Man X. For the most part, it was still your average Mega Man title, but it managed to pump in just enough speed, action, new features, and iconic elements that would not only help start up a brand new sub-series for this franchise, but would also bring the series back up to shine in the spotlight for millions once again. So, after that brief detour into nirvana, the classic set of Mega Man games would continuing doing its own thing for a bit, releasing another NES and Game Boy game now and then, but then, the time came to where Capcom decided to finally take the classic series to the 16-bit era, and they would naturally do so with the next chapter in the mainline series, simply known as Mega Man 7.

Just from the sake of circumstance alone, Mega Man 7 exists in this… odd little bubble, especially for the time that it came out. People were already so used to the hotness that was Mega Man X, loving how that game would take the classic formula and expand it in not just that game, but future sequels to come out, so whenever this game came out, it definitely went pretty much ignored by most people, for very clear reasons. Even today, when people go back to the classic games, this one is probably gonna be one of the last games anyone ever brings up, just because of the fact that it just kinda… exists. However, don’t think for a second that I am gonna diss this game because of that, because let me tell you…. I FUCKING LOVE Mega Man 7. Seriously, ever since I initially played it however many years ago, I have loved it oh so dearly, much like plenty of the other Mega Man titles, and if I can be so bold to say this, I would even consider it to be my favorite entry in the entire classic Mega Man series. I can definitely see why others would have a vastly different opinion then mine, which I will definitely get into as we go on, but for me, this game manages to continue the classic gameplay that we all know and love, while also adding just that little bit of extra content, to make it so wonderful to go back to even after all this time.

The story picks up sometime after the events of Mega Man 6, where Dr. Wily is FINALLY put behind bars by Mega Man, and the world seems to be at peace once more… that is, until due to Dr. Wily’s absence, several backup Robot Masters that he created out of fear of failure are activated, who would then start searching for Dr. Wily for quite some time. Eventually, they would locate where Dr. Wily is being held, and would thus start a rampage in the city to get him back, so it is up to Mega Man to get back in action, see what is going on, and defeat Dr. Wily once again in order to save the world….. again… for the millionth time………… the struggle never ends. The plot is pretty standard for a Mega Man game, but I do like how it does have some continuity with the previous game, and I really appreciate that they don’t try to hide the fact that it is actually Dr. Wily who is the villain the whole time (RIP Mr. X).

The graphics are absolutely fantastic, having an art style that I think fits classic Mega Man PERFECTLY, and having plenty of great enemy, character, and boss designs, as well as plenty of great animations to be seen throughout, the music is, naturally, pretty fucking great, having plenty of great tracks that I love like this one and this one, but I will admit, a lot of the tracks are a little too “samey”, which can make it feel pretty repetitive at points, and the gameplay and control is exactly what you would expect from a typical Mega Man game, except there are now elements of Mega Man X leaked into it, which does wonders to make the game much more interesting and fun to play, especially for me, who sees this as a match made in heaven, clearly.

The game is a 2D action platformer, where you take control of Mega Man yet again, go through plenty of different levels in whatever order you want (for the most part), run, jump, and shoot your way through plenty of different robo baddies, big or small, that will attack you on your way, gather plenty of different health/ammo pickups, different types of Tanks, extra lives, and plenty of upgrades to assist you in both the short and long-term, and take on a lot of bosses that are….. complete jokes most of the time, but there are one or two difficult bosses in there, so hey, I guess that… somewhat makes up for it, especially when you acquire their special weapons to use as your own against the many other foes that await you. A lot of what you typically expect in a Mega Man game is here and accounted for, which is already great for someone like me, but all of the new additions, the art style, and more make this what I would consider a damn-near perfect entry in this series, despite its very apparent shortcomings.

Taking inspiration from its younger sibling series, this game now adds hidden collectibles and upgrades that you can find throughout the game, and there are a FUCK TON of these things to find too, ranging from simple stuff like the letters R, U, S, and H that can grant you the Super Adapter, to some more hidden goodies and secrets that you can find such as being able to get Proto Man’s shield. While I wouldn’t necessarily say all of these upgrades are all that useful (Beat got a major downgrade in this game, unfortunately), a lot of them are a big help, especially later down the road, making the game that much more fun whenever you do get these and take full advantage of them. Not to mention, they aren’t that hard to find either, which makes one-hundred-percenting this game feel like a breeze, which is a nice change of pace for once. The secrets in this game don’t just extend to the items either, as there are also plenty of different hidden pathways you can take in stages if you know where they are, and there is even a hidden track that you can find in a certain stage if you know what combination of buttons to hit whenever you are going into the level. It sucks that it only plays once, but as a fan of GNG, this shit is legendary to me.

Alongside that, not much is changed about what you can see and do in this game, but there are several new, noteworthy additions that would become staples of the series, such as with the new characters that show up in this game, Bass and Treble. These two are pretty much just meant to be the rivals of Mega Man and Rush, with you fighting against him in the beginning intro stage of the game, who you will then find/fight again multiple times throughout the remainder of the game, and in this game, he is…. kinda whatever? I mean, he’s a cool character and all, and I love that he becomes a staple character in the series from here on out, but I dunno, aside from his final fight where he and Treble combine to take you down, he doesn’t really come off as that interesting or likable. Despite that though, he does get better in later games, so it is great to see that they stuck with him for quite a while, and he would even get his own chance to star in a game right alongside Mega Man as well…………….. to mixed results (we are gonna have fun with that game, let me tell ya).

In terms of how the game itself plays, it does play pretty much like your standard Mega Man game. Ya run, ya jump, ya shoot things, ya get new powers, ya set fire to the forest and murder all of the innocent animals because Mega Man is an asshole…… y’know, the usual shit. If you have played any of the other games in this series before and since this one, you know pretty much what to get out of this game, and it still manages to be really fun and addicting all the same…….. to me, that is. Yeah, we may as well bring up one aspect of this game that does manage to turn people away a lot of the time, and that is that, compared to the other Mega Man games before this, this game is… kinda stunted, at least, in terms of the main gameplay. It still plays and feels like Mega Man, but your movement speed feels reduced, all of the environments and enemies feel a lot bigger and more condensed, and Mega Man himself has a MUCH bigger sprite than before, making this game kinda feel like a bit of slog in comparison. Despite all that though… I have never really been bothered by that at all. Yes, it is undeniable how sluggish this game can feel compared to the other Mega Man games, but the way that you do move, shoot, and find all of these hidden secrets and upgrades still feels really great, just as great as playing one of these games should feel, and I manage to have a fantastic time with it either way. Does this make me weird? Eh, probably, but if you didn’t think that already at this point, you clearly haven’t been here long enough then.

Now, despite how much I will praise and defend this game, I can still definitely agree with some common criticisms that this game faces, such as the fact that some of the boss fights in this game FUCKING BLOW. In the previous Mega Man games, whenever you got to a boss with the weapon that was their weakness, it made the boss fights relatively easier for the most part, but there was still that sense of challenge that you could plainly face with a lot of them. In this game, however, if you go to any boss with their weakness, they become YOUR BITCH. Anytime you hit them with the weapon, they will get stunned long enough to get into a lock, meaning that you can constantly hit them over and over again before they even get the chance to do anything, and they will die very quickly. This isn’t an issue with all the bosses, but for some like Cloud Man, Junk Man, and ESPECIALLY Spring Man, they don’t stand a chance against you like this, which does kinda make them less fun. Ah well, at least we have other bosses that are still challenging…. even if they can be a bit much at times (fucking Wily Capsule, man…).

Aside from that though, the only other criticism in this game that I have is that the cutscenes, for as little of them as they are, are REALLY slow. Throughout the game, there will be plenty of instances where you will have characters talking about something, such as after you get a weapon in one of the main stages, or even after you defeat a boss, and while a good number of these have text that you can speed through, a lot of other times, you have to just sit there and waaaaaaaaait for them to go by, and maybe it’s just because I’m an impatient shit, but this drives me crazy. This is especially true with the intro cutscene, where whenever you start the game, you HAVE to watch this opening sequence of Mega Man, Roll, and Auto driving through this city, and then seeing Mega Man find Dr. Light, and everything else that follows. There is no option to skip this scene at all, so yeah, it really is somewhat of a buzzkill whenever I come back to replay this game and this cutscene shows up, meaning I just have to sit back and wait, tapping my foot impatiently. But hey, it’s ok, because in the good ol’ Mega Man tradition, we do get some fun little typos that are funny to see in some of these cutscenes. Makes you laugh and remember to just have a great time with the game.

Overall, despite how different it may feel, some pretty pathetic bosses, and how some of the cutscenes can be quite an annoyance, Mega Man 7 is yet another phenomenal entry in this phenomenal series, keeping the gameplay as fun and addicting as ever, adding plenty of fun upgrades and secrets to find and use throughout, and having the kind of presentation that makes this feel like a true, proper evolution for the classic series as a whole. I would absolutely recommend it for those who are big fans of the other games in the series, as well as for those who are tired of the 8-bit look that a lot of these games tend to get, because this one manages to be a massive upgrade in the looks department, and you will most likely end up loving the gameplay just as much as well. But y’know what… now that I think about it, I may have been a little too harsh on the cutscenes in this game, because you know what, they aren’t THAT bad……….. because trust me, they could’ve been a whole lot worse.

Game #595

Whoever is changing the cover art for these games to their US counterparts, I will find you, and I will kill you.

Megaman 7 is awesome. If you've played a bunch of NES Megaman before this one, you'll have to get used to the slightly slower physics and bigger sprite size, especially since things can get a little claustrophobic. But MM7 is incredibly tightly designed; fun levels, good bosses, useful weapons, really good spritework, and a banger soundtrack. Bass is also one cool dude, I love his design.

That final boss can eat shit, though. On top of having to deal with his chicanery for seven games now, I can't blame Megaman for wanting to fucking rip Dr. Wily's head off.

The first "throwback" Mega Man? I know this is sometimes regarded as a step back by folks who were there when Mega Man X changed the game. It's funny to think about that now from a modern perspective, knowing that Classic and X are separate subseries. But I suppose that assurance wouldn't have existed at the time, so, fair enough, I guess.

MM7 definitely feels like it's trying to apply lessons learned from Mega Man X. The presence of an opening stage, plus the increased emphasis on things like cutscenes, hidden power-ups, and narrative themes feel like a deliberate choice to backport X's contributions. In particular, you have that ending, where Mega Man grapples with Asimov's First Law of Robotics. I can only assume this exists here since Mega Man X introduced robots that have free will. Ergo, it stands to reason that Rock Light, for as much as he's presented as a little boy with a strong sense of justice, would still be beholden to Asimov's Laws, at least in part.

...of course, this is futzed with somewhat in the localization, but hey. Incidentally: the reason Mega talks so slowly there is because the text was changed, but the text speed is consistent between versions. The original script simply had him say "...", so that slow speed effect would've been impactful. Having Mega speak a full line of dialogue at that speed, not so much.

It is insane to me that this game was developed in three/four months. If this was another NES title, that would still seem too short - Mega Man 2 had a hellish 8-month dev cycle, remember. But effectively having to build a game and its engine from the ground up in half that time? Yet by all accounts, the team had a ton of fun making this one! I guess it made for a fun challenge, kompressing development time and working to meet the challenge?

With this in mind, while I do have some criticisms, I actually find that there aren't any I specifically pin on this crunched dev cycle. Maybe how a couple of the stages (Slash Man, Turbo Man) are a little lackluster, despite how high-concept they are? But, like, the ridiculous difficulty spike of the Wily Capsule is clearly a deliberate decision, not a consequence of crunch. The Super Adaptor's implementation is a progression of existing Rush Adaptor ideas from 6 more than anything unique to this game.

Heck, the team was able to sneak in stuff like secret moves and boss fights, despite the crunch! Commendable for sure.

But for me personally, the game's biggest impact will always be Bob & George, and the downstream consequence of the sprite comic scene coming into existence out of Mega Man 7. True, Neglected Mario Characters predates Bob & George (and was a personal favorite, at least in its heyday); true, Mega Man 7 is relevant to Bob & George more out of coincidence than anything; true, sprite comics probably would've come into being anyway. Doesn't matter; I cannot look at a single main character sprite from this game without thinking about the long, long history of sprite comics and recolored OCs to stem from its iconography. I can't really rate the game based on that, but I'd be lying if I didn't mention it.