Continuing from my deep dive of the first Mega Man game, we have the iconic Mega Man 2. I haven't made it much of a secret that I'm not a huge fan of this one, but I also do't think it's a bad game, no classic Mega Man is. Mega Man 2 is fun... if you play on the US Normal Mode and stop before the Wily Castle.
Seriously, though, I do want to be as fair as I can be for this Deep Dive. That means I'll be praising a good amount of stuff that I think MM2 does genuinely really well, but that also means I'll absolutely be tearing parts of it to shreds. I'll also be playing in the Difficult Mode because that's how Capcom intended for people to play the game. It lines up with the other Mega Man games a lot better this way.
A Solid Presentation Boost
Mega Man 2 makes a great first impression. Compared to the previous game which just put you onto the title screen with zero fanfare, MM2 actually has a short opening cutscene setting the stage, complete with music and everything. You get a very pretty backdrop of a futuristic city, a badass shot of Mega Man on a tall building, and an energetic title track that establishes the game's central motif. Even the menus have a lot more detail to them, the Password screen has actual music, and the icons for the Robot Masters are more colorful and expressive. The actual story set-up is pretty basic though, all we really get is that Wily made eight more robots and Mega Man has to stop them, but I can forgive it since it's obviously meant to introduce Mega Man to people who didn't get the first game.
Speaking of which, the US version of the game also came with two difficulty options: Normal and Difficult. This addition is stupid. It was an attempt by Capcom to respond to the difficulty concerns with the first game by making an easier "Normal" mode for US audiences while keeping the harder JP original as a "Difficult" mode, and an argument can be made that it helped Mega Man 2 sell well. However, the implementation of these difficulties is flawed, to say the least. Most of the changes between Normal and Difficult mostly boil down to halving the damage values of every enemy and boss, which only exacerbates MM2's already problematic balancing issues. I also think a big reason why MM2 is still held up as the best game is because of how comically easy its Normal mode is so it's the only one a lot of people can reasonably beat, but I don't want to get into that. Either way, that's why I like to stick with the Difficult Mode for Mega Man 2, the game sticks out like a sore thumb on Normal.
Mega Man 2's New Features
As far as order goes, Mega Man 2 and its sequel are pretty interesting beasts. From Mega Man 4 onwards, each Robot Master has a single main weakness and there's a single ideal order to figure out. In MM2 and MM3, Robot Masters have multiple weaknesses which means there's a bunch of potential weakness orders you can pick from. I don't think the way the later games do this is necessarily bad, but I do really like the increased replayability that having multiple weakness orders can offer. However, for this playthrough, I'm going to go with the most common order that everyone tends to gravitate towards, and that starts with Metal Man. But before I hop into the stage, I do want to quickly go over the few tweaks that have been made with Mega Man 2 over the first game.
Mega Man isn't nearly as slippery in MM2. He still doesn't control as tightly as he will in 3 onwards, but it's still a massive improvement. The gravity issues that the first game had are also completely gone. There's multiple side weapons compared to MM1's singular Magnet Beam and you get them upon beating specific bosses rather than collecting it in a level. Not only does this completely remove the beginner's trap backtracking the first game had, but it gives the game even more replay value since you can strategize to get specific items early to make platforming sections easier, as you'll see when I get to Heat Man's stage. Score is gone, thank goodness, and you now have E-Tanks, though you can only carry four of them this time and they disappear upon Game Over. This is indicative of a larger issue in this game regarding resource management, but I'll get to that later. Otherwise, these are all pretty much objective improvements over the first game that shows Capcom tried to learn from their earlier missteps.
Mega Man 2 At Its Best
Metal Man's stage is easily one of the best in the game, and not just because it's the only one you play on a standard route without the most powerful weapon in the game. Taking place in a factory, it's a far more dynamic stage than anything in the first game. You're hopping across conveyor belts, dodging crushers, drills, and gears rolling towards you. It's visually busy with gears spinning in the background, though the game starts to flicker a lot when there's too many crushers on screen. For the most part, I think Metal Man's stage is very well-crafted, slowly amping up the difficulty for all of its mechanics. The boss fight is also really good. You fight Metal Man on a conveyor belt while he tosses blades at you, it's fast-paced but the attacks are clear and manageable to dodge. There are a few iffy bits, I don't love how fast and abruptly the drills can spawn and one of the E-Tanks is a beginner's death trap if you don't have Item-2 to get out of it, but otherwise, I have no complaints.
The Cracks Start To Show
However, Metal Man's stage also has a pretty perfect example of why I think Difficult Mode is better. One enemy is this totem pole called Blocky that splits itself apart and launches itself at you whenever you hit it. It can catch you off guard at first, but it's a fun enemy type to learn. However, while Blocky goes down in two hits in Difficult Mode, since its health gets halved in Normal Mode, it'll go down in a single hit there. See the problem? If you take out Blocky with one hit, it won't get the chance to attack you. This isn't the only enemy to have this issue either, the crab bot in Bubble Man's stage has it too. It's hard to shake the impression that Normal Mode was never properly tested, and that Capcom put little thought in the ripple effect that halving all the health in the game would have.
But even in Difficult Mode, Mega Man 2's balancing starts to take a turn for the worse as you unlock Metal Man's weapon, the Metal Blades. The Metal Blades let you toss sawblades at a fast pace in eight directions, with minimal ammo consumption. It can take out most enemies in 1-2 hits even on Difficult Mode, almost half the bosses are weak to it, and Metal Man is easy enough that most players will try to get it early on in the game. It's very good and very fun to use... but it's also way too good. The Metal Blades have no weaknesses, it covers nearly all of your bases outside of a few bosses. It can hit anything from anywhere, and you can spam them with little concern of running out of ammo, especially in Normal where energy refills are more plentiful. This is the first of Mega Man 2's two crippling flaws, the Metal Blades are so good that they mess up the game's balancing severely. Compared to MM1 which did an incredible job at encouraging me to use every weapon in my arsenal, I rarely ever felt encouraged to use anything but the Metal Blades. You could say that I could just not use them, but if a game offers you an easy out, I think it's still fair to criticize that.
Mega Man Masters Underwater Stage Design
That being said, poor balancing alone isn't enough to tank Mega Man 2, at least in its first half. Even when the combat suffers, Mega Man is a platformer at its core, and the platforming in MM2 is still really good. The next stage, Bubble Man, is a great example of this. Bubble Man is an underwater stage, but it's underwater done right. While Mega Man moved slowly underwater in the first game, MM2 introduces a new system where holding A will make Mega Man float to the top. This means that instead of water handicapping your movement, it augments it in a way that allows for unique and fun platforming challenges. In this case, there are spikes on the ceiling, so you have to carefully platform around without jumping too high. The stage is also bookended by some fun platforming sequences across a waterfall, and even has some of that MM1-esque design with enemies that are too low to the ground to take out with the Mega Buster, but die easily to the larger Metal Blade. The presentation is a bit weaker than Metal Man's stage, though. The music is incredible and the foreground still looks decently-detailed, but the background is either blank blue or an overly-detailed waterfall that hurts my eyes looking at it.
Bubble Man is also quite the tough fight, even with the Metal Blades. He swims around, shoots torpedos that are tightly-packed together, and tosses bubbles that bounce along the ground, and there's spikes on the ceiling like in the rest of the stage. On their own, these attacks may not seem like much, but combined, they can make for a fight built around chaotic underwater dodging. Sadly, his weapon, the Bubble Lead, is pretty weaksauce. It drops to the ground making it only ideal for enemies that are on the ground (at least if it didn't bounce off most of them), but since the Metal Blade can easily cover that at less of a cost, it renders the Bubble Lead null outside of a few very specific cases (one of which requires you hit an aerial boss with it which isn't fun). I think an easy fix could've been to take from Bubble Man's fight and have the Bubble Lead bounce on the ground, that would give it an entire unique use case from the Metal Blades with more versatility while still being affected by gravity. Weapon aside, though, Bubble Man's stage is another really well-executed one, definitely one of the game's best.
Breaking The Chain
The next stage is an interesting one. Air Man isn't weak to Bubble Lead nor is he weak to the Metal Blades. In the weakness chain, the next stage would be Heat Man's, but his stage has a particularly grueling segment that we want Item-2 for. And who gives you Item-2? Air Man. This is a perfect example of what I love about Mega Man 2's weakness system, it gives you so much freedom of strategy and you can hop between different weakness chains for an easier or harder playthrough. Air Man's stage is alright. It's pretty platforming-heavy and has a bunch of really strange gimmicks like totems with spiky horns that pop out of the sides, clouds that obscure important parts of the level, and floating propeller clouds with robotic Zeuses riding atop them. Most of it is fairly fun, though there is a lot of wait-time between waiting for the totems and waiting on the moving platformers. Also, Air Man's stage introduces one of the most infamous Mega Man enemy, a bird that flies above you and drops an egg. If you don't shoot the egg before it hits the ground, a half-dozen tiny birds will pop out and start swarming you. Once again, there's really no reason to use anything but the Metal Blade to deal with them, but they can be annoying if you miss regardless.
Air Man's fight itself is pretty mixed as well. Air Man creates a pattern of wind gusts that he proceeds to shoot towards you, it's like a miniature Yellow Devil and it's quite fun. Because he's weak to the Mega Buster, he also doesn't overstay his welcome like the Yellow Devil could. However, sometimes Air Man can create a pattern that's just literally impossible to dodge without tanking a hit? If it wasn't for the RNG, this would probably be my favorite fight in the game. On the bright side, though, his weapon is actually not that bad. The Air Shooter is probably the second best MM2 weapon. You toss out three small tornados that float up in a parabolic arc. They're great for hitting targets above you, can disable Sniper Joe mechs in a single hit, takes out several enemies in a single hit, and can deal triple damage if they all hit an enemy, overall fulfilling a need that the Metal Blades can't offer. Their ammo isn't as plentiful as the Metal Blades and not many bosses are weak to it, but they serve as a good option for whenever I want something a bit more powerful in the stages.
Two Weaker Stages
Crash Man's stage is up next and it's basically the followup to Elec Man's stage: It's a long, vertical climb (perfect for the Air Shooter). It's not as painful, though. Mega Man climbs up ladders faster, the stage itself is shorter, and the scenery is prettier. I like how by the time you reach the top, you can see space in the background. Crash Man's stage really has two major issues holding it back for me. First off, there's a bit early on where you have to wait on moving platforms while fending off enemies. It's very slow and it's not all that fun. But even worse, there's a part where you're climbing up a ladder all the while those aforementioned birds show up to drop eggs the moment you go on screen. From what I can tell, there's no way to break the eggs yourself, so you're guaranteed to be swarmed by the tiny birds on a ladder where you can't easily defend yourself. There is one weapon that can help you navigate this part unscathed, but we don't have it yet. Crash Man's fight is either super easy or super hard. Whenever you shoot, he leaps super high into the air making him tough to hit with the Mega Buster. However, this does put him in Air Shooter range which can take him out in a mere three hits. While I wish Crash Man's weakness didn't take him out this easily, I do like it when Mega Man bosses have movesets that are specifically countered by their weaknesses.
Crash Man's weapon, the Crash Bomber, is absolute garbage, especially for combat. The Crash Bomber will attach itself to walls and explode after a bit, so it's basically the Hyper Bomb but even more situational. The only real application this weapon has aside from a few bosses is the fact that it can break specific walls, often hiding shortcuts and collectibles. However, I rarely bother since the Crash Bomber's ammo is ridiculously small and you can only use seven before running out. It's just a poorly-conceived weapon on every level, and it gets even worse later on. Flash Man's stage isn't too great either though. It's a slippery "ice" stage with a lot of multiple paths, some of which are blocked off by Crash Bomber walls but rarely ever lead to anything actually useful. There's also a lot of Sniper Joe mechs, borderline spam near the end, so you'd better have that Air Shooter with you. It's just such a nothing stage, it's incredibly short, it's thematically confused as the stage has nothing to do with the boss that inhabits it, and there aren't any memorable gimmicks aside from a particularly annoying roster of enemies.
Flash Man is also pretty unremarkable. His main attack is that he freezes time and shoots so you just have to try to not be in his line of fire when that happens, and that's a decent challenge that can be satisfying to figure out. However, while he is weak to the Crash Bomber, he's also weak to the Metal Blade, so you can just use that instead for a much easier time. You don't even have enough Crash Bombers to fully deplete his health, what an awful weapon. Flash Man's weapon is the Time Stopper which stops time until the meter completely depletes. You can't use your Buster while it's active, and you can't change weapons either, which makes it practically useless in certain cases. It's very flawed, but I don't hate it. You can tell Capcom intended this ability to be less of a weapon you regularly use, and more of a one-use type of weapon that you can use when you're in a pinch, but you have to make sure you won't need it for the rest of the stage. And to give Capcom even more credit, the next stage makes some pretty brilliant use of it.
Case 120 Of Me Liking The Hated Stages
The next Robot Master, Quick Man, has my favorite stage in the game. Yes, I know. Quick Man's stage is infamous for its brutal difficulty, but I think it's wonderfully designed. Right from the start, it's clear Capcom wants you to play this stage right after Flash Man. The starting room has a 1-Up on a high-up ledge just begging to be grabbed, and the best way to get it is with Item-3, the upgrade you get from Flash Man's stage. The main gimmick is that Quick Man's stage is a long vertical drop where you need to dodge one-hit kill lasers that come from the sides. It's a bit of a trial-and-error stage requiring a lot of precision, but man, oh man, is it satisfying to get right. There's even a few hidden nooks and crannies hiding 1-ups and E-Tanks for those who know the level. Personally, I've played the stage so much I can get through the lasers easily, but if you're new, you can always use the Time Stopper to get through the lasers...
...but there is a cost. Quick Man is also weak to the Time Stopper, and he's a tough fight without it. He's fast and erratic, so fast in fact that stopping time and freezing him physically hurts him (still one of my favorite bits of Mega Man lore). Since you can only use the Time Stopper once in a stage, Quick Man's stage demands you make the difficult decision between using the Time Stopper to get through the lasers or using it to make Quick Man's fight easier. It's a brilliantly deviously choice that definitely wrings out the most potential out of an otherwise mediocre weapon. Frankly, the entire stage does a good job at feeling like a skill check on most of the weapons you've gotten so far. There's fire-themed enemies and Sniper Joe mechs you can use the Air Shooter on, the second room has Scworms best taken out with downward Metal Blades, and once you take out half of Quick Man's health with the Time Stopper, you can quickly take care of the rest of his health with the Crash Bombers of all things. Hell, even Quick Man's weapon is pretty solid. The Quick Boomerang is basically the Rolling Cutter but way faster, it's still usual pretty redundant to the Metal Blades, but spamming it can absolutely shred through certain enemies. Quick Man's stage is the peak of Mega Man 2, in my eyes. It's the one point where everything clicks and I can see why people hold this game up as the best in the series. Unfortunately it's all downhill from here.
Disappearing Blocks Suck
Well, we finally made it to Heat Man's stage and it's... problematic. First off, the NES Mega Man games are notable for taking in fan submissions for Robot Masters and it really shows in this game. Some of the stages don't fit the boss at all (Flash Man) but nothing is funnier than Heat Man's stage being an obvious sewer stage recolored red to make it feel more hot. The main mechanic in Heat Man's stage is of course the infamous disappearing blocks. In some ways, this stage deals with them better, slowly easing you into the mechanic. The first room has you hop across static single-tile blocks, then you learn about disappearing blocks in a safe and contained area, then you have to use them to hop over walls but suspended over a tiny pit, and it culminates in a lengthy string of disappearing blocks over a bottomless pit. The problem is that disappearing blocks are fundamental an unfun mechanic. They're finicky, very based in trial and error, and require a lot of waiting, so it shows that Heat Man's stage often offers methods to skip them. The "safe" room can be easily broken with Item-3, then walls you're meant to hop over can be broken with the Crash Bomber, and of course, that final gauntlet can be completely skipped with Item-2. I'm not exactly sure if this is a good design choice or not. On one hand, being able to make a level far easier by getting weapons and items from other stages is peak Mega Man strategy. On the other hand, Heat Man's stage is so insufferable when played normally that everyone gravitates towards skip over it all, which I guess is peak Mega Man 2 strategy.
Heat Man as a boss is mostly fine. He tosses fire balls at you and dashes at you whenever you hit him. He goes down relatively quickly with the Bubble Lead, but he's mostly a fun, fair fight with a decent level of strategy to him. His weapon on the other hand is really bad. Atomic Fire is basically a charge shot which is an awesome idea in theory. The Metal Blades are very versatile, but they don't have the punch of a powerful charge shot. The problem is that you can only shoot two Atomic Fires at max charge, which is just completely absurd. You know, really analyzing all of these weapons, I think there's more issues at play than just the Metal Blades being overpowered. In general, the ammo distribution is completely lopsided. Weapons either have way too much ammo (Metal Blade, Quick Boomerang) or way too little (Crash Bomber, Atomic Fire). The only properly balanced weapon in this godforsaken game so far is the Air Shooter, no wonder I enjoy using it so much.
Wood Man... Nice
I don't really have much to say about Wood Man's stage, it's pretty solid all around. The main premise is that it takes place in some sort of forest so each major chunk of the level tosses a unique animal-themed robot at you, from hounds to monkeys to ostriches. Some are more fun to deal with than others, though. The monkey section is very memorable, as you need to deal with monkeys hanging from below and birds flying in from above, a perfect opportunity for the Metal Blades to shine. On the other hand, having to fight the same hound miniboss three times in a row with zero breaks feels very lazy and very repetitive. Wood Man's fight is really good, though. He tosses a ring of leaves at you that can blow any attack, while also shooting down leaves that fall from above. Like with Bubble Man, dealing with both these attacks at the same time is a fun challenge, and it helps that Wood Man has several weaknesses including the Metal Blades, Air Shooter, and the Atomic Fire so there's a decent amount of freedom in taking him out. His weapon is roughly average, though.
Wood Man gets you the Leaf Shield which can block pretty much any projectile as long as you don't move. Once you do move, you'll launch it in the direction you hold. This is obviously very flawed, and you should be able to shoot it whenever you want with B, because now it really only has two uses: Dealing with the eggs that the birds drop and keeping you safe on moving platforms. It's actually a perfect fit for Crash Man's stage, but we did that stage already, and even then, Crash Man isn't weak to the Leaf Shield. Well, at least its ammo consumption is pretty fair all things considered. But anyway, we managed to defeat the Robot Masters and they really aren't that bad. I have my criticisms especially on the balancing front, but I stand by the first half of this game being genuinely quite fun and overall better than Mega Man 1. However, now that we've made it to the Wily Castle, prepare to watch Mega Man 2 completely fall off a cliff.
The Cracks Are Showing Again...
My first experience with Mega Man was with MM2's Wily Castle 1. Super Smash Bros for Wii U had a mode called Masterpieces where you could play snippets of games all the characters are from, one of which was Mega Man 2. However, its snippet started you off in Wily Castle 1, and not knowing what any of the weapons did, I immediately got stuck. There isn't a segue to anything, but I thought it was a funny anecdote. In reality, Wily Castle 1 is a mixed bag. It's great on a presentation level. Storming the castle and climbing in through the side all the while one of the most iconic tracks in the game plays is a great feeling. The actual level design though is kind of meh. This is a stage pretty heavily built around your items. You need to use three Item-3s and three Item-1s to get to the end of the stage, the former of which only has an capacity of four uses. This is the start of a trend of MM2's Wily Castle depriving you of resources, but it's not as bad here. The enemy encounters are mostly fine barring a Sniper Joe placed in a tight hallway, but I've never been a fan of the boss fight against the MechaDragon. It's ambitious, sure, and a very iconic image too, but the dragon causes the game to flicker to a near unplayable degree at times, and the screen flashes every time you hit him. It's an epileptic's nightmare and even as someone who isn't, this fight just hurts to look at.
Wily Castle 2 is also mostly fine. Some of Metal Man's gimmicks like the drills and crushers are back, which is nice, and a curious player can discover that the Leaf Shield can be used to take out the drills in a single hit which is nice. There's also a decent amount of branching paths and collectibles hidden behind Crash Bomber walls, but it's a trap. Don't use it, it's in your best interest that you conserve your Crash Bomber because energy refills are very limited. While I was still willing to play around with the other weapons in the Robot Master stages, the Wily Castle actively disincentivizes you from using anything but the Metal Blade so as to not risk putting yourself in a bad situation later down the line. Speaking of which, there's also another wall you need Item-3 for. You'd better hope you have enough to use it. The boss fight is one of the stranger Wily Castle bosses, as the floor around you disassembles itself around you and creates tiny robots that move towards you. You can take most of them out super easily with a somewhat awkwardly placed Bubble Lead so it's probably the easiest fight in the game. So far, the Wily Castle is alright, though cracks are starting to show with the resource management that'll only get worse down the line.
The Best Wily Castle Stage
Wily Castle 3 is easily the best Wily stage in the game, it's just a damn solid platforming challenge. After hopping down a gap with a few energy refills if you need them, you fall into a gross-looking pool of sewer water. You need to use the water mechanics to leap over large gaps of spikes all the while dodging fish that leap out of the water to try and eat you, it's not hard at all, but it's a fun and memorable setpiece. The stage ends with a drop through a tight tunnel of spikes, it's a nice twitch reaction challenge that doesn't go on too long. The boss is also easily the best one in the Wily Castle. The Guts Tank is a very silly looking boss that moves around, shoots out bullets, and tosses out Mets at you. You need to hop onto its treads and hit its face, which is a tough challenge, and despite its massive scale, it's nowhere near as much of a flickerfest as the MechaDragon was. This will be the last good boss fight in the game, and the last good stage in the game too.
The Worst Mega Man Stage Period
Wily Castle 4 is a freaking mess. I've ranted about it before, but I'm really going to dig into it here. The stage starts by pitting you against a Met in a cramped hallway. He pops out the moment you get near him and shoots a three-way shot almost immediately that you can't dodge. The timing to not get hit is ridiculously precise and this whole set-up starts the stage on a dour note. Climb up a bit and you'll hit some fake floors that you can only expose with Bubble Lead. On one hand, this is kind of a neat puzzle since the Bubble Lead is the only weapon that's affected by gravity. On the other hand, I think fake floors in general are a stupid gimmick and the introduction of them risks the player expending all their Bubble Lead trying to make sure they don't fall for any. After this bit, you reach another set of moving platforms you need to tediously wait for, using ladders to climb downwards to the next room. Don't drop off the ladders though because there won't be anything to catch you. The stage ends with a long hallway filled with Sniper Joes, one of which is placed in a tiny hallway where you can't jump over his shots. While you can dodge the Met with good timing, I have no idea how one would take out this Sniper Joe without taking damage.
But for as bad as the stage is, the boss is infinitely worse. I've talked about the Boobeam Trap several times before, but let's go over it again. There are five cannons placed on walls around the boss arena, along with several Crash Bomber walls blocking them. The five cannons shoot super fast homing bullets at you, and the screen
flickers so much that you can't reasonably dodge the bullets without pausing. You can only take out the cannons with the Crash Bomber, and you only have seven Crash Bombers you can use on them. There are no energy refills, and while there is a way you can take them all out with only six Crash Bombers, most players will need to use all seven which means no misses. If you do miss, you'll need to die and either tediously grind out energy to bring your Crash Bomber ammo back to max, or purposefully get a game over and lose all of your E-Tanks. Beginners are going to bomb the wrong Crash Bomber walls and put themselves in an unwinnable position, but even as someone who's played the fight before and knows what you need to do, it's just not fun. Not only is Boobeam Trap just a crummily design boss all together, it's indicative of all of Mega Man 2's worst attributes. It's a boss whose entire difficulty revolves around unpolished flickering, the Wily Castle's stingy resources, and the game's need to justify every weapon that isn't the Metal Blade by making bosses and enemies that are exclusively weak to them.
Boss Rushes And The Yashichi
I've been singling out the Wily Castle when it comes to Mega Man 2's resource management issues because resources don't carry over between levels, but it gets even more problematic in the second half of the game where weapon refills become near nonexistent. As much as I derided Stage 4 for forcing you to grind for Crash Bomber energy if you didn't have the weapon maxed out, at least it had some grinding spots, albeit very clunky ones. Stages 5 & 6 have nothing, zero energy refills whatsoever. Of course, this means that unless you saved a shot on the Boobeam Trap, you won't have any Crash Bomber for the boss rush or the Wily Machine fight that's weak to it. That's why I liked the Yashichi in the first Mega Man game, it was a way for the developers to guarantee sure the player has just enough energy for where they needed it, and it's a shame it never came back outside of easy difficulties and Rush Search.
Stage 5 of Mega Man 2 is the boss rush, and it pretty much codified the Mega Man boss rush formula. You're played in a room with eight teleporters which take you to the eight bosses, and you can defeat them in whichever order you want. I don't really have any complaints about this that I wouldn't have towards other Mega Man games, it's obviously basic padding but I think it mostly works as a way for the player to use their full arsenal of weapons to wipe the floor with all the bosses. I do with the bosses had some changes in the boss rush to make it feel less like repetition, but I get that this may be a bit too ambitious for an NES game. The one other point of note is the divisive decision to make Metal Man weak to his own weapon. I've heard some people use it as evidence of the Metal Blades being overpowered, but like, it's obviously meant to be a joke, right? It's not an accidental game design flaw or anything, I just think the developers added it because it's funny, and it is! To give Mega Man 2 some credit, the bosses have some very funny weaknesses in this game and it adds a lot of extra charm to the experience.
But while the boss rush is mostly fine, the Wily Machine that directly comes after it is absolutely not. The first phase is pretty standard fare, he shoots energy balls at you from below that are pretty manageable to dodge as you take out his cockpit with one of several potential weapons. However, the second phase is borderline broken. Wily starts to spam out these energy balls that bounce along the ground and they move so slowly and group up so easily that I genuinely have no idea how you can beat this phase without taking damage. If you don't have E-Tanks (which is very much possible if you botched up the Boobeam Trap), you are almost screwed here. But wait, not all hope is lost. It's possible to end this phase with a single well-placed shot... of the Crash Bomber. Screw you, Mega Man 2.
An Bafflingly Bad Finale
Once you defeat Wily Machine 2, you drop into Stage 6 which takes place in a weird-looking cave. There's no music, no enemies, and no pickup items, just drops of gross-looking liquid that you need to dodge. It's decently eerie, but its sparseness is a double-edged sword once you reach the boss. Dr Wily appears to confront you... only to turn into an alien! This is still one of the weirdest and most out-of-left-field twists I've seen in a video game, and it's also yet another awful boss fight. The Alien flies around in a figure-8 and shoots bullets at you, and the only way to defeat it is with Bubble Lead. Using any other weapon will refill its health to max. Remember when I said the Bubble Lead is bad in aerial combat? Well, it really shows here as you need to go right up to the Alien and awkwardly drops bubbles on him, while also not getting too close because contact damage takes over half of your health. And if you happen to miss too much and run out of Bubble Lead, well I guess that means you're screwed because, as I said, there are no energy refills! You'll just have to give yourself a Game Over! What happened here?! Why is everything about this boss so horribly misguided?!
It's just so bizarre, this is the second boss in here that's weak to a single consumable side weapon and nothing else and I just can't comprehend why the devs would do this. Like, it's obvious a bad idea, isn't it? And it's completely at odds with what makes Mega Man so fun. I praised the first half of the game for how the bosses had multiple weaknesses allowing you to try different strategies upon replays, but there's no strategy here. Either you have enough Bubble Lead ammo and don't miss too many shots, or you're screwed. The final bosses of 3 and 4 also aren't weak to the Mega Buster, but at least they're weak to multiple subweapons, and every game after that would never have this issue again. I really don't know how many different ways I can say this, but the balancing in this game is just horrendous. Weapons having either too much ammo or too little ammo, the Metal Blades outclassing most everything else in the game including the Mega Buster, massive resource deprivation in the Wily Castle, bosses that are only immune to a single subweapon, nonsensical immunities on certain enemies and bosses, it's just a mess! Developers at Capcom have been open about how rushed development was for some of the earlier Mega Man games, and yeah, I can see it. This game doesn't feel properly tested, and playing the Wily Castle feels like MM2 is falling apart on me in real-time, culminating in that baffling final boss.
Once you defeat the Alien, you learn that it was fake and Dr Wily was just trying to trick you, which I'll admit is a funny ending. However, despite an incredibly comedic ending, MM2 follows this cutscene up with a somber sequence of Mega Man solemnly walking home as the seasons pass and leaving his helmet behind. It's a scene that pretty much establishes the anti-war ideals that both Classic Mega Man and his successor X would proceed to struggle with, but... why is this here? In this story? Mega Man 2 is a fundamentally silly game where the Robot Masters are blatantly flawed and broken, and Dr Wily's grand plan is to trick Mega Man into thinking he's an alien. This downer ending feels like such a massive and abrupt mood whiplash in comparison to everything else, it just feels like yet another bizarre choice on top of an already messy final act.
The End
On TV Tropes, it says "Mega Man 2's team was only given a meager three months to complete the entire game for a release on Dec. 24 1988, with the staff working 20 hour work days just to meet the deadline, while working on other major titles for Capcom at the same time. The final result was worth it."
But was it, really? Was the final result worth it? Does a game being influential make up for all the pain the developers had to put themselves through while making it, or all the parts that couldn't receive the polish that the devs probably wanted them to have? I'm not all that sure. This isn't the only Mega Man game to have been severely rushed. Hell, it's not even the only Mega Man game to have been made in three months (*cough* Mega Man 7 *cough*), but I don't think any of them wouldn't have been better served with a longer development time. Not only would the developers not have needed to overwork themselves to the bone, but the games themselves would've been all the better for it.
Mega Man 2 is a game that will always frustrate me. It shows so much promise in its first half, and every time I play it I hope I may come to like it more, but it always comes crashing down by the end. This Deep Dive made me appreciate more things about Mega Man 2. The Robot Master stages are even better-made than I originally thought, and I gained a serious respect for the Air Shooter. I think I prefer it to Mega Man 1 now, it has higher highs and lower lows but I found myself enjoying the highs a lot more this time. It also just generally looks and plays better so that's a plus.
However, this Deep Dive also exposed just how deep Mega Man 2's issues lie. It's not just that the Metal Blades are too overpowered and that the last few stages are poorly-made, it's a tangled web of poor balancing that gets increasingly more noticeable as the game goes on. If this game had at least a few months more of development time, just a bit more time to properly test it all, I'd be right up there with everyone else singing Mega Man 2's praises. As it is now, though, it remains one of the weaker Classic Mega Man titles.
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