After Mega Man World was only okay, and after reading reviews for Mega Man World 2 that called it the worst of the Game Boy games, I went in pretty skeptical. People generally don’t like this game, but I think people often struggle to articulate why. That’s pretty frustrating to me, because I think this game is far and away better than the first Mega Man World game, and while it’s not an unsung masterpiece, it’s certainly not terrible. I’ll get into this more in the next review as well, but ultimately Mega Man World 2 and 3 are both games that blend together and are almost exactly equal in quality. Both are good, but neither is great.

Read the full review for free here: https://medium.com/@QueenEmilysCourt/mega-man-world-2-mega-man-ii-a-step-in-the-right-direction-74cba166a30b

I love Gameboy platformers. There’s such a charm to them that makes me enjoy them way more than I should, and the odd charm of playing good games on such bad hardware is undeniable to me. That doesn’t mean I love every game on it, of course. In fact, I think most of them aren’t very good. However, if I had to play a bad NES platformer or a bad Gameboy platformer, I would pick the handheld one every time. Unfortunately, Mega Man World is not a very good Gameboy platformer, but I respect the attempt.

Check out the full, longform review here!: https://medium.com/@QueenEmilysCourt/mega-man-world-mega-man-dr-wilys-revenge-everyone-s-gotta-start-somewhere-c65f3382c815

One of the last major games published on the NES, Mega Man 6 came out in late 1993 in Japan and early 1994 in the U.S. Most companies, by then, had moved onto the superior Nintendo hardware, the SNES, but Capcom still released one, final Mega Man game for the platform, and it really does feel like the pinnacle of what the NES can do in almost all ways. While I think Mega Man 6 does fall short of the heights of Mega Man 5 in terms of level design, it still made leaps and bounds forward in terms of new innovations to the series, interesting structural choices, and amount of content in a platformer. It even did all of that while being one of the absolute best looking games ever released on the NES. Mega Man 6 is a fantastic game, and deserves more acclaim than it got, since reviewers and players had already moved onto the SNES by then. It’s a shame.

Check out the full review for free here! https://medium.com/@QueenEmilysCourt/mega-man-6-a-great-ending-to-a-classic-nes-series-417abb162a50

Yeah, you read the title right. I think Mega Man 5 is both the best classic Mega Man game and one of the most underrated games I have ever played. I adore this game from start to finish, it is one of my all time favorite platformer games. The game features some of the best level variety I have found in a platformer game, especially for a game on the fucking NES. It’s wild. This game has great levels, pretty good weapons, great bosses, and feels like the pinnacle of what a platformer game from this era could be. For all of these reasons and more, it is my favorite NES game, and I hope I can convince some of the people who don’t love it as much as me to think about it more and perhaps give it a second chance.

See full review here: https://medium.com/@QueenEmilysCourt/mega-man-5-the-best-classic-mega-man-game-5ddb7301a208

I wanna get this out of the way right now: Mega Man 4 is a good game. It’s fun, it’s not bad. However, it is definitely the least interesting of the original six NES Mega Man games. It is the most standard game, the one that is not exceptionally good or notably bad. It’s just a solid and fun game in a great series. Now, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot to be said about it, or that game designers can’t learn from it. The game does add a decent amount of new elements to the series that are worth looking at, and of course since the game is fun overall, there are elements of its stage design that stand out.

See the full review here: https://medium.com/@QueenEmilysCourt/mega-man-4-its-pretty-good-i-guess-230998625324

In my eyes, Mega Man 3 is where the series finally got into gear, and the formula that Mega Man 3 perfected would pave the way for the remaining 4 NES Mega Man games to be some of the best platformer games on the system. This is a bit of a departure for me, since it’s the first review I am writing of a game I really enjoyed rather than one I disliked, so we’ll see how I do. This game perfected the core gameplay loop of the boss order, has good stages, and has the best visuals the series had ever seen at that point in time. It even had more content than the prior two games, as well as many quality of life improvements and touches of polish that make it one of the best in the series.

Full review continues here: https://medium.com/@QueenEmilysCourt/mega-man-3-the-first-great-mega-man-game-de3e448a95df

I have never understood the love for Mega Man 2. Among many fans of the Mega Man series, as well as fans of platformers and retro games in general, Mega Man 2 is often considered the best game in the series. Of the original classic games for the NES, it sold the best by a considerable margin. Some would say that is reflective of the game’s quality, but to me, that sales figure just reflects why the game is so beloved. It’s the most popular, and most people’s first entry into the series before the Legacy Collection came along. I think Mega Man 2 is the worst of the eleven classic Mega Man games, and I will try to explain my numerous issues with this game. Unlike in Mega Man 1, where most of the issues were systemic and affected many different parts of the game, in Mega Man 2, a lot of the issues are caused by a single bad decision that just casts a wide shadow over the game.

Full review at https://medium.com/@QueenEmilysCourt/mega-man-2-the-worst-classic-mega-man-e9c0c3c342ca

There are two ways to approach a review of a game like Mega Man 1. The first way is to look at what elements the game implements as the baseline formula that would eventually define the gameplay of the long series it spawned. You can look at whether or not those elements laid a good foundation for a long-running series, and how those building blocks set Mega Man apart from other games in the 2d Platformer genre. For example, every other game in the series afterwards takes ranged weaponry being the default as an assumption, but in the first Mega Man game, that was a deliberate choice made by the developers of the game. If you take this approach to reviewing Mega Man 1, it is a fantastic game. It lays down gameplay loops, moveset concepts, level design concepts, and overall game structure in a way that was unique and innovative for the time, and it deserves all the credit in the world for that. However, you can also take a second approach to reviewing Mega Man: The perspective of a player who first played the game in 2018 as a part of the Legacy Collection, and who thinks it’s significantly worse than most of the games that followed it.

See my full review here: https://medium.com/@QueenEmilysCourt/mega-man-1-the-subpar-start-to-an-amazing-series-46bf8ec75e7c