I last played most of the original Mega Man games on the Anniversary Collection on my GameCube when I was much younger, and it's been way too long since I've played them. A friend of mine in the UK asked me to pick her up a few Famicom games, and I figured it wouldn't hurt to indulge in a couple of them before I sent them off to her X3. Rock Man 4 is one such of those games. I didn't remember damn near any of this game, having only played through it once so long ago, but I ended up being quite pleasantly surprised (especially by how much I love the rightfully lauded dog bone-style Famicom controllers I used to play it X3). It took me about 4 hours to complete the Japanese version of the game.
Most Mega Man games don't really have a terribly important narrative, at least in the original series, and this is no exception. The bad guy this time isn't Dr. Wily, but a new evil inventor: Dr. Cossack! Of course it's revealed that Dr. Wily was really behind it all in the first place, but the fact that there's such storytelling at all in a Mega Man game at the time is sorta neat, and it really caught me off guard when text suddenly started appearing on screen once I'd beaten Dr. Cossak XD. It's a neat twist to the formula as it'd been done up to that point, and it sets up the action at play more than well enough.
The action at play is, predictably, Mega Man as it'd been up to that point, but with a bit of a twist. In addition to his dash he gained in Mega Man 3, this is the first game in the series that allowed you to charge your main weapon: the mega buster (or "Rock Buster", as it's called in Japanese). Like the dash, the ability to charge the mega buster is an addition to Mega Man that is pretty divisive among fans on if it's actually a good change, but I at least love it. The mobility and lowered height that the dash gives you combined with this new ability to charge one big shot makes boss fights so much more fun than they were in the past. Instead of it being a choice of a quite hard fight with only your normal pea shooter or demolishing the boss with their weakness, now you have a middle-road option via the charged mega buster. There was only one boss I ended up not fighting with only the mega buster as a result (Dive Man, who was just too hard for me XP), because it was just so much fun fighting them that way.
There are of course eight robot masters to fight, and they're all pretty good fights. My personal favorite was Pharaoh Man, as he makes for a really great fight if you're fighting him with only the charged buster (though I did use their weakness when fighting them in the boss rush. I'm not quite THAT gung ho about it ^^;). The level design is really solid as well, with only really Bright Man being the one I thought had a pretty unfair part or two. It's what you'd expect from a Mega Man game, and it's a very polished version of that experience.
The presentation is again what you'd expect Mega Man 4 to have. The enemy and robot master designs are fun and interesting, and Mega Man himself is as iconic as ever in his traditional 8-bit look. The music is also predictably excellent, with my favorite track being Dive Man's stage. He may be the hardest robot master in this game, but his stage's music is really good~
Verdict: Highly Recommended. This was only the first of what has proven to be quite the dive/re-dive into retro Mega Man stuff, but it was one I enjoyed a lot! It's a very polished experience that brings both old and new together in a really satisfying and fun way. If you've got it on one of the loads of collections its been released on over the years, or can somehow find an original copy, this is absolutely a Mega Man game not worth skipping.
Most Mega Man games don't really have a terribly important narrative, at least in the original series, and this is no exception. The bad guy this time isn't Dr. Wily, but a new evil inventor: Dr. Cossack! Of course it's revealed that Dr. Wily was really behind it all in the first place, but the fact that there's such storytelling at all in a Mega Man game at the time is sorta neat, and it really caught me off guard when text suddenly started appearing on screen once I'd beaten Dr. Cossak XD. It's a neat twist to the formula as it'd been done up to that point, and it sets up the action at play more than well enough.
The action at play is, predictably, Mega Man as it'd been up to that point, but with a bit of a twist. In addition to his dash he gained in Mega Man 3, this is the first game in the series that allowed you to charge your main weapon: the mega buster (or "Rock Buster", as it's called in Japanese). Like the dash, the ability to charge the mega buster is an addition to Mega Man that is pretty divisive among fans on if it's actually a good change, but I at least love it. The mobility and lowered height that the dash gives you combined with this new ability to charge one big shot makes boss fights so much more fun than they were in the past. Instead of it being a choice of a quite hard fight with only your normal pea shooter or demolishing the boss with their weakness, now you have a middle-road option via the charged mega buster. There was only one boss I ended up not fighting with only the mega buster as a result (Dive Man, who was just too hard for me XP), because it was just so much fun fighting them that way.
There are of course eight robot masters to fight, and they're all pretty good fights. My personal favorite was Pharaoh Man, as he makes for a really great fight if you're fighting him with only the charged buster (though I did use their weakness when fighting them in the boss rush. I'm not quite THAT gung ho about it ^^;). The level design is really solid as well, with only really Bright Man being the one I thought had a pretty unfair part or two. It's what you'd expect from a Mega Man game, and it's a very polished version of that experience.
The presentation is again what you'd expect Mega Man 4 to have. The enemy and robot master designs are fun and interesting, and Mega Man himself is as iconic as ever in his traditional 8-bit look. The music is also predictably excellent, with my favorite track being Dive Man's stage. He may be the hardest robot master in this game, but his stage's music is really good~
Verdict: Highly Recommended. This was only the first of what has proven to be quite the dive/re-dive into retro Mega Man stuff, but it was one I enjoyed a lot! It's a very polished experience that brings both old and new together in a really satisfying and fun way. If you've got it on one of the loads of collections its been released on over the years, or can somehow find an original copy, this is absolutely a Mega Man game not worth skipping.