Mid-period Mega Man is an exercise in ennui. After five perhaps creatively safe but steady entries, the Super Nintendo and Mega Man X seemed poised to barrel this series headstrongly into a bold future, or at least a powerfully entertaining new holding pattern. Instead, we got maybe two solid and ambitious games out of that series at the same time as we would get waffling half-steps into the past in Mega Mans 7, and, before long, Capcom would join many other third party developers in jumping ship to take advantage of the raw, sexy power of systems like the Playstation and the Saturn for flagship entries of their real cash cows. Mega Man X4 AND Mega Man 8 would debut on the PS1, radically transforming the X series in a pivotal moment and uh, making another Mega Man Classic in another inessential one. But Keiji Inafune didn’t forget his ROOTS, uh, I guess? Because in NINETEEN NINETY-EIGHT, a full two years after the N64 was released in Japan, we get this, something of an expansion pack sequel to Mega Man 8, which reuses that game’s assets, scaled back to run on the inferior hardware, and supposedly aimed at younger kids who couldn’t afford to just go out and buy a $300 machine every few years. A weird mission statement considering what we have here is the most difficult Mega Man game by a pretty wide margin up to this point, and often unfairly so, but we’ll get there.
The big thing in this game is its Sonic 3 & Knuckles situation, where you get to play as Mega Man’s very own Knuckles, Bass, a guy who is also a super robot hero-cop with a cool flying surfboard dog, but who has a shonen anime rival’s drive to be the best which mostly manifests in an occasional desire to murder Mega Man, the Other Best Robot Around. Bass acts on this need whenever it arises in him, he’s really funny and I love him. Nobody seems that worried about it. HE doesn’t seem that worried about PROTOMAN, the OTHER OTHER best robot, a worry which is proved to be warranted when Protoman is brutally murdered, completely bisected in one stroke by this game’s decoy villain King in the tutorial level, which is, again, very funny. These games rule. You could, I GUESS, also play as Mega Man, but I don’t know why you would want to? You’ve played as mega man 8 times already. Bass is new, AND he’s cool, his color scheme is BLACK AND YELLOW and A MURDERER, and when he absorbs boss powers he glows purple like a BADASS.
More importantly though, he plays very differently from good ol’ ‘Man, which is important because regardless of who you pick you’re running through the same levels and they seem to me to be more designed with Bass’ skills in mind than da Blue Bomber’s. Mega Man plays like Mega Man: he slides, shoots directly in front of him, and he can charge his gun into a big gun. He CANNOT utilize Rush in this game which does limit his movement options in ways that feel really consequential to the demanding platforming of this game. Bass has a rapidfire weapon that can’t charge but CAN shoot in eight directions, he can’t move and shoot at the same time, and he can’t slide, but he has a double jump and a dash and he can do the dash jump from Mega Man X. At first blush it seems like the game is designed to be fair to either character, but the more of the game that I saw the more I began to think that this game is actually tailor made to Bass’ skillset, with the “mega man” tailoring for the stages amounting mostly to built in little gaps for him to slide through that regularly lead to collectibles instead of progress. MUCH more useful is Bass’ omnidirectional machine gun, especially given how much of this game’s difficulty boils down placing a LOT of enemies in every room and in positions that would be really difficult to deal with if your only tool was a horizontal shot. Additionally, Bass’ dash jumps and ESPECIALLY his double jump make what could be some borderline unfair platforming bits into, y’know, normal ones.
This is the tension that underpins the entire experience – there’s a lot of good shit in there that’s just obfuscated by a patina of grating, surface level bullshit. Despite the most limited control over which robot master stage you pick in the series yet, which might suggest a more streamlined experience, this is one of the most demanding sets of levels and bosses in the series, with satisfying gimmicks to each level and a degree of strategy required against a few of the robot masters that goes beyond “use the weapon he’s weak to.” Timing windows, unique mechanics activated by the weapon applications – stuff the series has flirted with occasionally (particularly in the X games) but rarely to this degree of implementation, and it’s a great ask on top of learning the boss patterns. This is such a strong set that I don’t even particularly mind that two of them are straight up reused from Mega Man 8.
Also lifted from Mega Man 8 is the entire look and soundscape of this game, but I think it works a LOT better here? Compromises were made to retain the graphical style on the SNES but it doesn’t run BUTTERY SMOOTH like its next-gen predecessor which I think is to its benefit. I complained about the visuals in Mega Man 8 and to a lesser extent 7 when I played those games, because of their intense animation and popping colors keeping things extremely busy on screen. Everything was a little too hard to parse, Mega Man’s movements a little too difficult to track precisely given the demands of the platforming. It turns out that limiting the performance of the game cuts that problem almost entirely, and while the colors don’t pop quite as much I think that’s a fair trade.
I’ve played a lot of Mega Mans in the last like four or five months and there are only so many ways you can say “wow they did a weird one and I am interested to see where this transitional period in the series takes us!” because it seems at this point like this transitional period is most of the franchise. But I do think that And Bass is one of the bigger and better swings that they’ve done, really only held back by this weird, blistering fake difficulty slathered over what I think are genuinely some of the best levels in the series. So it’s good. As I stare down the barrel of the later X games and their reputations I do hope I continue to find myself feeling pleasant surprise like this. At least, if they’re bad, they’ll be interspersed with the Zeros. It’s weird that those were coming out at the same time. Mega Man’s a strange franchise!
The big thing in this game is its Sonic 3 & Knuckles situation, where you get to play as Mega Man’s very own Knuckles, Bass, a guy who is also a super robot hero-cop with a cool flying surfboard dog, but who has a shonen anime rival’s drive to be the best which mostly manifests in an occasional desire to murder Mega Man, the Other Best Robot Around. Bass acts on this need whenever it arises in him, he’s really funny and I love him. Nobody seems that worried about it. HE doesn’t seem that worried about PROTOMAN, the OTHER OTHER best robot, a worry which is proved to be warranted when Protoman is brutally murdered, completely bisected in one stroke by this game’s decoy villain King in the tutorial level, which is, again, very funny. These games rule. You could, I GUESS, also play as Mega Man, but I don’t know why you would want to? You’ve played as mega man 8 times already. Bass is new, AND he’s cool, his color scheme is BLACK AND YELLOW and A MURDERER, and when he absorbs boss powers he glows purple like a BADASS.
More importantly though, he plays very differently from good ol’ ‘Man, which is important because regardless of who you pick you’re running through the same levels and they seem to me to be more designed with Bass’ skills in mind than da Blue Bomber’s. Mega Man plays like Mega Man: he slides, shoots directly in front of him, and he can charge his gun into a big gun. He CANNOT utilize Rush in this game which does limit his movement options in ways that feel really consequential to the demanding platforming of this game. Bass has a rapidfire weapon that can’t charge but CAN shoot in eight directions, he can’t move and shoot at the same time, and he can’t slide, but he has a double jump and a dash and he can do the dash jump from Mega Man X. At first blush it seems like the game is designed to be fair to either character, but the more of the game that I saw the more I began to think that this game is actually tailor made to Bass’ skillset, with the “mega man” tailoring for the stages amounting mostly to built in little gaps for him to slide through that regularly lead to collectibles instead of progress. MUCH more useful is Bass’ omnidirectional machine gun, especially given how much of this game’s difficulty boils down placing a LOT of enemies in every room and in positions that would be really difficult to deal with if your only tool was a horizontal shot. Additionally, Bass’ dash jumps and ESPECIALLY his double jump make what could be some borderline unfair platforming bits into, y’know, normal ones.
This is the tension that underpins the entire experience – there’s a lot of good shit in there that’s just obfuscated by a patina of grating, surface level bullshit. Despite the most limited control over which robot master stage you pick in the series yet, which might suggest a more streamlined experience, this is one of the most demanding sets of levels and bosses in the series, with satisfying gimmicks to each level and a degree of strategy required against a few of the robot masters that goes beyond “use the weapon he’s weak to.” Timing windows, unique mechanics activated by the weapon applications – stuff the series has flirted with occasionally (particularly in the X games) but rarely to this degree of implementation, and it’s a great ask on top of learning the boss patterns. This is such a strong set that I don’t even particularly mind that two of them are straight up reused from Mega Man 8.
Also lifted from Mega Man 8 is the entire look and soundscape of this game, but I think it works a LOT better here? Compromises were made to retain the graphical style on the SNES but it doesn’t run BUTTERY SMOOTH like its next-gen predecessor which I think is to its benefit. I complained about the visuals in Mega Man 8 and to a lesser extent 7 when I played those games, because of their intense animation and popping colors keeping things extremely busy on screen. Everything was a little too hard to parse, Mega Man’s movements a little too difficult to track precisely given the demands of the platforming. It turns out that limiting the performance of the game cuts that problem almost entirely, and while the colors don’t pop quite as much I think that’s a fair trade.
I’ve played a lot of Mega Mans in the last like four or five months and there are only so many ways you can say “wow they did a weird one and I am interested to see where this transitional period in the series takes us!” because it seems at this point like this transitional period is most of the franchise. But I do think that And Bass is one of the bigger and better swings that they’ve done, really only held back by this weird, blistering fake difficulty slathered over what I think are genuinely some of the best levels in the series. So it’s good. As I stare down the barrel of the later X games and their reputations I do hope I continue to find myself feeling pleasant surprise like this. At least, if they’re bad, they’ll be interspersed with the Zeros. It’s weird that those were coming out at the same time. Mega Man’s a strange franchise!
2 Comments
My friend ‘Man
MeowPewterMeow
2 years ago