In addition to my normal game reviews, I wanted to start doing deeper analysis of games I like (or games I've recently played), going through each individual level, boss, mechanic, and presentation element to see what they do right, what they do wrong, and how it all clicks together. I'm still working on how to write them and they will come out far less frequently than standard reviews, but I think they could be a good chance for me to further develop my writing. I'll be doing these kinds of deep dives into a variety of games, ranging from new releases I latch onto, older games I've decided to come back to, or games I just generally have a lot of thoughts on, both good and bad.
To keep things simple, I wanted to start with the first Mega Man game. This is a game I come back to a lot and pretty much know inside and out, so I think it's a good first game to really delve deep into.
Manual Stories & Mega Man
The first Mega Man game does not give you any context to its story, at least not in-game. It's not until Mega Man 4 when we'd actually start getting proper intro cutscenes, but for now, we gotta rely on the manual. According to that, the main premise of this first game is that two scientists named Dr Light (referred to as Wright in the manual) and Dr Wily created their first near-human robot named Mega Man, before proceeding to make six more. However, Wily turned on Light, reprogrammed the aforementioned six robots, and turned them into his army. Now Mega Man is tasked with defeating the six Robot Masters before stopping Wily himself. It's very simple dress-setting, made even more messier by how unreliable the manual is, but it does establish the general status quo for Classic Mega Man. Most of these games would follow the same formula of Dr Wily doing a bad thing and getting access to robots that Mega Man must go ahead and defeat, though Mega Man 1 being essentially an origin story at the very least gives it some extra novelty.
The Ideal First Stage
Once you press start, you're taken to the first ever stage select. You get to see profile shots of all six Robot Masters and you can take them out in whichever order you want. This was a pretty ground-breaking feature at the time, not many NES gave you this much freedom in which order to beat all of its levels. Even more, each boss is weak to another's weapon so there is an ideal order that the player needs to figure out through experimentation and context clues. While the weakness order gets a bit more nonsensical in later games, it mostly makes sense here. Fire (Fire Man) sets off bombs (Bomb Man), electrical (Elec Man) wires can be cut (Cut Man), rock (Guts Man) beats scissors (Cut Man), and so on and so forth. When you start a new game, the cursor is placed on Cut Man's stage to encourage the player to start with him. Cut Man's stage is purposefully pretty easy and works as a good starting point for new players, but it's also a trick. If you want to follow weakness order, starting with Cut Man will force you to backtrack for reasons I'll get into later. The actual ideal order would be to start with Bomb Man and work from there. On one hand, this is kinda cruel, but on the other hand, it's a great way to encourage players to really try to figure out the best possible route across all the Robot Masters. This will be especially important once I get to the Mega Man X game.
So let's start with Bomb Man, because it's a pretty solid first stage as well. If anything, it feels even more fitting of a starting point than Cut Man's stage, as it just has that air of being the start of an adventure. You start in what appears to be a robot city, with upbeat music and few moving platforms to throw you off. The first Mega Man game often has pretty blank backgrounds, but Bomb Man's stage has some strange looking mechanical towers in the background giving it a bit more life. The enemy placement is a bit less forgiving, though. Bomb Man's stage has a big emphasis on projectile enemies. Wall-stationed cannons that shoot in multiple directions, mines that hop out of the ground and explode into dangerous shrapnel, and bullets that weave up and down to teach the player how to line their shots. It can be a bit overwhelming, especially once the stage starts introducing pitfalls that are very easy to be knocked into, but most of it is learnable, and it's satisfying to do so. However, there is one enemy type I'm not big on and that's the Sniper Joe, shielded enemies with beefy healthbars and unpredictable attack patterns. They're tough, especially if this is your first stage, and they only appear in this level. Unfortunately, the best weapon for dealing with Sniper Joes is the Hyper Bomb which you also get in this stage, and you'll never need to return to it either which just leaves the enemy feeling like wasted potential. The fight with Bomb Man is pretty good, though. The bombs he tosses leave a pretty big hurtbox when they explode, but they also take a while to do so which allows the player to ease into dodging boss attacks.
Weird Quirks With Guts Man
Upon defeating Bomb Man, you'll get your first weapon, the Hyper Bomb. It's not great. You can toss a bomb that'll explode after a few seconds, but since you can't detonate it manually, it's really only effective on stationary foes. Thankfully, the next stage is full of them. Guts Man's stage takes place on a construction site, so it has a lot of stationary, shielded enemies like Mets and Pickelmans, perfect for the Hyper Bomb. That's one of the best aspects of Mega Man 1, not every weapon is good, but there's always opportunities to use them all even outside of the bosses. Guts Man's stage starts with the introduction of these moving platforms on rails, which the twist being that they'll sink and drop you when they move over specific, defined parts of the rail. This is a good mechanic in theory, but the execution is a bit of a mess. First off, Mega Man's gravity works weird on these platforms. When they drop, you plummet to the ground, you have no way to save yourself if you mess up. But even worse, the level never eases you into this mechanic. Right from the start, you need to hop across three of these platforms with increasing amount of drops all over a pit. The game never eases you into the mechanic in a safe spot, and it doesn't develop it over the course of Guts Man's stage. Once you're done with this brutal opening segment, you won't see the rails again until Wily's castle.
The rest of the level is a lot more basic by comparison. You deal with a bunch of Pickelmans, before entering a pretty neat vertical section. Each room in this section has a number of gaps in which you can fall through, which some leading you to collectibles and others leading you to nothing. You're not guaranteed to get everything on your first go, but by memorizing the layout, you'll have an easier time if you die or decide to replay the game. It's kinda trial-and-error, but you're not punished for failing, only rewarded for succeeded, so I like it. Once you're at the bottom, it's not too far before you reach the boss room. Well, actually, there is the hallway before the boss. A weird quirk of Mega Man 1 is that the boss hallway is a short gauntlet with some of the level's enemies in it, something that would not carry over to later entries. Another thing that's exclusive to Mega Man 1 is the scoring system. Sometimes enemies can drop point balls rather than health or weapon pickups, and they serve pretty much no purpose other than arbitrarily making the game harder by depriving the player of actually useful resources. There's a reason MM2 reworded so much from the first game. Anyway, back to Guts Man. His fight is pretty solid too. He jumps constantly, freezing you on the ground every time he does, which can get annoying. However, his main attack where he throws a giant rock at you is well-telegraphed and figuring out the best way to dodge it (jumping over his head) is satisfying. He's not very mobile which makes him perfect for the Hyper Bomb, but even fighting him with just the Mega Buster is fairly manageable.
The Intended First Stage
Guts Man's weapon, the Super Arm, is quite situational, as it allows you to throw rocks placed around the levels. It's powerful and fun to use when you can use it, but by nature, it's far more limited and lacking compared to the other weapons. Thankfully, the next stage has a lot of blocks to toss around with it. It's finally time to do Cut Man's stage, and... well frankly I'm not even sure where this is. While the last two stages took place is identifiable locations, Cut Man's stage kinda just seems to take place on a nondescript mechanical tower. The music is easily the best track in the game though, it's intense, driving, and heroic, pretty much defining the Mega Man sound all on its own. Being the developer-intended first level, Cut Man's stage is quite easy. The primary enemy you'll be dealing with are these blocks with eyes that move across the screen. They're pretty beefy, but their patterns are very simple and easy to understand, so approaching them feels more like a puzzle than a twitchy reaction test. Cut Man's fight is one of the best in the game, with a deceptively simple attack pattern. Cut Man runs across the screen and jumps occassionally, he'll toss a boomerang that hangs in mid-air before going back to wherever Cut Man is. Frankly, I think he's a bit tougher than the last two bosses when going with the Buster since you really need to be mindful of where Cut Man is in relation to his boomerang, but he's fun nonetheless... unless you come in with the Super Arm, in which you can take him out in seconds with two rock tosses. Mega Man has always had an issue with weaknesses completely trivializing bosses, and it starts here.
Surprisingly Prescient Backtracking
Cut Man grants you the Rolling Cutter, the first genuinely great weapon and a very useful earlygame option. Its arc has a bit of a learning curve, but it can go through walls and pierce through enemies you can't hurt with the Buster. As you'd expect, the next stage, Elec Man, is full of them. Sadly, that's really the best thing I can say about it. Elec Man's stage is mostly just a long vertical climb up a tower, mostly involving you slowly climbing ladders. Your movement is limited, which makes the stage less fun and enemies more annoying. There are some neat touches like multiple paths with different enemies to dodge and electric currents you need to time getting around, but they're mostly pleasant flourishes on an otherwise dull stage. Elec Man is another fine boss, definitely a big step up in difficulty over the last few due to his aggressive movement and high-damage thunder attack, but he's still mostly fair and doesn't go down immediately with the Rolling Cutter.
There is one other important detail, though, and it's that Elec Man's stage is where you find the Magnet Beam, which lets you create a limited amount of platforms in midair. It's not the best, the platforms flicker way too much, it feels pretty crummy to use, and it's affected by the wack gravity issues Guts Man's stage had... but it can be very useful in certain areas, and it's mandatory to get into the Wily Castle. The problem is that the Magnet Beam is locked behind rocks that you can only remove with the Super Arm, so you need to do Guts Man's stage before Elec Man's if you don't want to backtrack. See the problem? If you start with Cut Man's stage and go in weakness order, you won't have the Super Arm when you enter Elec Man's stage. Guts Man's stage is too hard to be a starting point, Ice Man's stage is best played with the Magnet Beam, and Fire Man's stage is nigh unplayable without the Ice Slasher, so the best place to start is in fact Bomb Man's stage.
Bottom Tier Stage Design
Elec Man gets you the Thunder Beam which is easily the best weapon in the game. It's big, multidirectional, and can deal sustained damage using a pause glitch. It's not as bad as other infamously OP weapons like the Metal Blade, though, mostly because of how well the game makes use of every weapon. However, unlike the last three stages, it doesn't feel like Ice Man's stage is particularly designed with the Thunder Beam in mind. And frankly, that's the least of its problems. Ice Man's stage is far and away the worst one in the game, and I think most would agree it even ranks among the worst in the series. It's very odd on pretty much every level. The first part introduces water, but this is before Bubble Man's stage so the water only slows Mega Man to a crawl. After that, you get a brutal series of disappearing block sequences, mercifully not taking place over a pit. This isn't the first appearance of Mega Man's infamous disappearing blocks, they do show up a bit in Elec Man's stage, but it is the first showcase of just how obnoxious they could be.
But even worse is the final stretch, which forces you to hop across slowly moving platforms each with repeatedly firing cannons on both ends. It lasts incredibly long, feels unpredictable and cheap, and is far better skipped by the Magnet Beam. As a matter of fact, between this segment, the sluggish water you'd want to avoid going into, and the invisible blocks, and the fact that you get the Magnet Beam in the previous level, it almost feels like Ice Man's stage was purposefully designed with that weapon in mind. It's an absolute mess of a stage on every level that is not only fundamentally unfun to play, but may just even break Mega Man 1's internal logic. However, there are two high points. First off, it looks quite nice. After two dull, somewhat ugly tower stages, Ice Man's cool blues and frosted hues give it a much stronger sense of place. Second off, Ice Man is a pretty fun boss fight, tough but very fair, especially with the Thunder Beam. His ice attacks take out a third of your health, your Thunder Beam takes out a third of his. He lines up a series of ice slashers before sending them at you, you need to line up your shots to take him out before he does the same to you. It's not a fight where you can go in guns blazing like with Cut Man or Elec Man, it's more deliberate and precise, and I think it nails it.
Weapon/Environment Interactibility
I've noted how most of Mega Man 1's stages take advantage of the weapon you get from the previous level. Guts Man has shielded enemies to encourage the Hyper Bomb, Cut Man has lots of blocks to toss with the Super Arm, Elec Man has impenetrable enemies and lots of walls you need the Rolling Cutter for, and Ice Man has a lot of platforming that demands the Magnet Beam. But Fire Man is the best execution of this concept, a stage that entirely transforms if you have the Ice Slasher. On its own, Fire Man has a tough but quite fun obstacle course filled with fire-based hazards like flamethrowers on the ground, lava bubbles that pop up out of the lava, and a weird flame-y wind tunnel thing. With the Ice Slashers, though, you can interact with nearly all of this. You can freeze the flamethrowers and jump on them to reach higher ground, usually containing bonuses. You can actually take out the lava bubbles and make the stage easier. And most importantly, you can make Fire Man somewhat tolerable.
Yeah, while Ice Man has the worst stage and my favorite boss fight out of the Robot Masters, Fire Man is the complete opposite. The intention was that Fire Man moves back and forth and attacks you if he takes damage or if you're too far away, but the end result was a glitchy mess of a boss fight. If you don't know his pattern, Fire Man will spam you with attacks at an impossible rate, forcing a battle of attrition to even be able to win reasonably. If you do know his pattern, Fire Man is completely cheesable by jumping at the right time. No matter which way you slice it, his fight is broken and unfun, and there's a reason most remakes of this game have tweaked it in some way. Fire Man's weapon, Fire Storm, may seem useless at first. It's a simple straight fire blast that initially seems useless compared to the Thunder Beam or even the Mega Buster, but there's a perk. Shooting a Fire Storm will also cause a shield to spawn around Mega Man. This shield can deal contact damage and block projectile, and when you add in the fact that your fire blasts can also pierce enemy shields, then yes, it is in fact perfect for Bomb Man's stage.
Flawed First Impression
After beating all six Robot Masters, you reach the first ever Wily Castle, a gauntlet of four stages back-to-back with no breaks and no weapon refills. The Wily Castles get a lot of flack especially the early ones for how much of a massive difficulty spike they can be. I can't say it's entirely undeserved (just wait until I get to Mega Man 2), but I actually think this first game has a pretty great Wily Castle... but it sure as hell doesn't make a very good first impression. Before I start praising these stages, I just want to run over most of the obvious issues with MM1's Wily Castle. The music isn't great, it tries to be somber but comes off more as sparse and grating especially with how hard they are. The mandatory Magnet Beam bit being all the way at the end of Wily Castle 1 is straight-up bad design, it's a huge beginner's trap for players who didn't retrieve it in Elec Man's stage. And most of the castle bosses are rough. I love the Yellow Devil and his complex attack pattern, but he's brutal, unforgiving, and mindbogglingly difficult if you don't abuse the pause glitch like crazy. The Copy Robot has similar AI issues to Fire Man, an ambitious concept but absolutely borked on NES hardware. The bubbles in Wily Castle 3 are another pretty bad bit of beginner's trap since you have seven bots to defeat and only five blocks to toss at them with Super Arm, so a new player will get to the ridiculously fast bots and run out of blocks. And the Wily Machine is comically easy, though at least that has an excuse which I'll get to later.
The Most Underappreciated Wily Castle
However, even with all these issues, I think MM1's Wily Castle gets a lot right. Wily Castle 1 brings back many mechanics from previous stages and tests you on pretty much all your weapons, requiring you to use the Super Arm, Ice Slasher, and Magnet Beam at least. Having all these mandatory weapon bits at the start of the castle before you're likely to run out of ammo is a good choice too. Wily Castle 2 is more combat focused, with enemies flying above and below you that once again are best dealt with by using weapons such as the Thunder Beam. Wily Castle 3 is a fun breather that takes place in a sewer, not just a unique change of scene, but leads to a nice dose of adrenaline as gushing water pushes you towards the boss room. Each of these stages has a unique appearance and tests the player on distinct elements of Mega Man's gameplay: Weapon usage and platforming, combat and lining up shots, and reaction time.
Wily Castle 4 has a short hallway with some enemies, one final Guts
Man rail, and the boss rush, a Mega Man tradition. However, it's a different kind of boss rush than the rest of the series. First off, Cut Man and Elec Man are actually fought in Wily Castle 2. I was a bit split on this decision at first, but the more I think about it, the more sense it makes. Cut Man and Elec Man are the most aggressive bosses in the game, with Cut Man in particular not giving you any blocks to use against him this time. It's way more preferable to fight them outside of a lengthy boss rush, and they help to break up and bolster the difficulty of Wily Castle 2. With only four Robot Masters and the Wily Machine fight, the actual boss rush doesn't let you choose your fights like in the previous game either, you fight them all in a set order. Even more, the game gives you a unique item called a Yashichi which refills all your health and weapon ammo before the boss rush, but you don't get any weapon ammo in between fights. This may seem utterly brutal, but between the boss weaknesses and the Wily Machine being quite easy as previously mentioned, I think Capcom struck the perfect difficulty here. I wouldn't want every boss rush to be like the one in Mega Man 1, but I think this is still one of the better executions of the concept, and I do think it's strange the Yashichi never carried over to other games since it could've really helped with the resource management issues Wily Castles tend to have (especially the second one).
The End
Mega Man's ending is quaint and simple. Mega Man defeats Dr Wily, who begs for mercy but doesn't escape like he would in later games, and he proceeds to take a lot journey home where he's greeted by Dr Light and... Roll? Huh, I'm surprised Roll was introduced so early on. But yeah, that's Mega Man 1. It's very much a flawed game with a lot of dated mechanics and strange quirks that would be quickly phased out of the series, but it's also a game that I enjoy and have played countless times. It's charming in its simplicity, immensely replayable, and makes the most out of its weapons in ways that its later, better sequels often struggle to do.
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