In January of 2020 I decided to start the second marathon of my let’s play channel on YouTube. Since I was in the mood to revisit the classic Mega Man series, I decided to play through all the games in order through to Mega Man 10. Originally I planned to give my thoughts about all the games after I finished the marathon, but I still haven’t finished it. That said, I did want to reflect on my overall experiences with the first six games in the series, particularly.
When I was first introduced to the Mega Man franchise I was always under the impression that it was a series in the same tier as Mario, or Sonic. While I still believe that there is an argument to be had in favor of that claim, I think that there is one thing that could potentially make the Mega Man franchise more of a lesser one compared to those other well-known franchises.
That isn’t to say, of course, that the classic Mega Man series is terrible or anything, but it does fall into a specific trap which most of its AAA counterparts didn’t.
Upon finishing every game I would watch certain specific reviews which gave in-depth analyses on each game in the classic series. These reviews, coupled with my experiences with the games led me to question just how Mega Man series earned its, for lack of a better term, ‘legendary’ status. Apart from the entire Mega Man property as a whole being extremely prolific, what makes it so legendary?
Let me argue as to why I don’t think the classic Mega Man series is so legendary, at least not as much as other franchises.
The NES games are pretty indicative of my claim, the main reason being that while the games are definitely fine in their own right, they don’t offer very much variety. The fact of the matter is that when you play a Mega Man game- any of the classic games at least- the experience you have will be more or less similar to the rest of those experiences. I remember when I first played through all the games, I couldn’t really recall which game had which story or robot masters or Wily castles and would get them routinely mixed up, save for Mega Man 1. On top of that, aside from tweaks in how Mega Man controls and his move set, there isn’t much difference between the way the games handle.
With franchises like Mario or Sonic, each game- while holding true to their core mechanics (we’re talking about the side scrolling games here), each subsequent game offers something a little bit different and as a result each game’s experience ends up being unique to the others. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 doesn’t play the same way as Sonic the Hedgehog 1 and Super Marion Bros. 3 does not really play the same way as Super Mario World. While they aren’t radically different from each other, enough about them is changed between them to provide unique experiences from either of them. With the classic Mega Man games, however, not quite.
Every single classic Mega Man game plays out the same exact way. It doesn’t matter which game it is, the way the games are structured are virtually identical. I think the designers realized this when they made Mega Man 3 because, while the formula for Mega Man 1 and Mega Man 2 were defeat the 6 (Mega Man 1) or 8 (Mega Man 2) robot masters and fight your way through the Wily Castle stages from Mega Man 3 to Mega Man 6, a mid game section was added, presumably, to help make the games feel longer and flesh out the story a bit more.
The thing is that, because the Mega Man games, especially the NES ones, share so many similarities and have such consistency- virtually playing the same with the same stories, it’s difficult for each game to have an identity of its own. The games aren’t individually memorable, save maybe for the first two. The Mega Man games are almost painfully consistent in ways that its counterparts from Nintendo and Sega aren’t. On the one hand it makes each successive game immediately accessible for returning players but one of the downsides to this is that the games lose a sense of individual identity.
One of the criticisms that Super Mario Brothers 2 (Japan) got was that it felt more like an expansion of the first game than a true sequel and that was one of the reasons why it wasn’t brought over into the American market. This is an issue that pretty much dominates the NES Mega Man games. While this doesn’t necessarily make them bad, it does have the issue that the games’ consistency make them feel like expansions of the previous games and not necessarily full games in themselves. They also end up blending in together, especially from Mega Man 3 to Mega Man 6. Robot masters, mid-game sequences and levels end up getting mixed up between all the games in my mind and in the minds of others as well and I think this is all thanks to repetition and the annual schedule that the games were released.
This isn’t to say that they aren’t substantial games. They are still quite an appropriate length for games of their era, however they do suffer from the issues expected to be suffered from when you have a new game released every year. When you choose to play a 2D Mario game, you choose the game based on the experience it offers you. Super Mario Bros. does not play the same as Super Mario Bros. 2 (USA) and Super Mario Bros. 3 does not play the same as the other two, and so on. While the fundamentals of the games are the same, their feel, and the challenges that they offer are unique to the other games.
That isn’t to say that being given more of the same when that ‘same’ thing is perfectly fine is inherently bad, but the Mega Man games end up becoming a bit forgettable because, at the end of the day, every successive game is simply more of the same thing you’ve done already. Mega Man 4 plays, more or less, the same as Mega Man 2- aside from an added charge shot and slide- but those two things don’t change the feel of the game enough to give the game its own identity.
One thing playing through the NES Mega Man games has opened my eyes to is that, while gameplay gimmicks have an inherent negative connotation in many circles of video game criticism, there are some positive merits that they do have. New gameplay gimmicks have the ability to change the player’s approach to how they play the game and, for better or for worse, help to establish that particular game as its own separate entity. That along with new stories, or characters, new gameplay mechanics, updated level design, etc.
The thing is that the Mega Man games, particularly the “classic” series operate on a very particular formula and don’t stray away from it, because of that kind of repetition, other than some notable, and frankly impressive graphical improvements through the series in the first 8 games, nothing much really changes. The NES games, in particular, end up feeling like budget titles as you progress through the latter half of them (4, 5, and 6) and, essentially, that’s what they were. Mega Man 5 and 6 came out after the SNES was released and one of the rationales behind releasing Capcom’s premiere mascot platformer on outdated hardware was because it was easy to produce quickly and cheaply. Despite these games being full-sized games, they are held back by the hardware limitations and, if allowed to be, could have been so much more.
And in full Mega Man form, Mega Man 7 came out for the SNES around the time the Playstation 1 came out, and Mega Man 8’s followup Mega Man and Bass was released, again, on the SNES. I understand, at this time, Mega Man X was the big priority but it seems like such a strange way to treat one’s biggest IP as if it was a second-tier one.
I think it also doesn’t help very much that every time a Mega Man game that was different from others coming out ended up becoming its own subseries, which pigeonholes something like “classic Mega Man” to a certain specific style with little creative flexibility to explore outside the pre-established rules of the series. In essence, each subseries in the Mega Man franchise is essentially a series of extremely similar games and if you want more gameplay variety, you will need to jump to a whole new subseries rather than the next game in the current one you’re playing.
The way Mega Man is treated, I’m not totally convinced that it is Capcom’s most popular IP ever, especially considering when they completely stopped making games due to poor sales and reception. As much as I enjoy the Mega Man games, I can’t help but feel like a lot of the hype that comes from people over the Mega Man series has more to do with nostalgic feelings about childhood experiences with a handful of the colossal collection of games with the Mega Man name printed on it. While there are plenty of fun games in the series, I don’t know if I feel confident enough to say that Mega Man comes quite into the same tier as the Mario franchise, or even the Sonic franchise.
Now that Mega Man has received an influx of interest again thanks to the release of the Mega Man Legacy Collection, the Mega Man X Legacy Collection, Mega Man 11 and the re-release of the Mega Man Zero and ZX series, it’ll be interesting to see which direction the new games are taken in. Despite my critiques of the series, I’ll continue playing the Mega Man games and enjoying them for what they are, but I hope they can take the series into some newer and more creative horizons in the future.
