The best games you never played or the worst you forced yourself through...

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: The best games you never played or the worst you forced yourself through...

Mega Man 2 was the easiest in the series, even with Air Man.

I don't know why people had a hard time beating him.

[Malacite]

Re: The best games you never played or the worst you forced yourself through...

It's part nostalgia, but it also kinda set the bar for the rest of the series. It's still got the best weapons, best music, most memorable levels etc... pretty sure the consensus is it's the best in the series, at least among the original games.

As far as the X series goes, it's a tough call between X and X4 to me. X8 had real potential but the story just go so damned weird... I did like the mix of 2D and 3D action though.

5 6 and 7 were all just terrible (X series I mean).


Of course, if you count the handhelds as well as 9 and 10... Mega Man & Bass was pretty damned awesome.

[Armando]

Re: The best games you never played or the worst you forced yourself through...

It's part nostalgia, but it also kinda set the bar for the rest of the series.

Setting the bar does not make it the best; it makes it the minimum. Mega Man 8 beats it in just about every category you mentioned.

pretty sure the consensus is it's the best in the series, at least among the original games.

This sounds like the same kind of consensus that names FFVII the best RPG of all time and Ocarina of Time the best Zelda bar-none.

[Malacite]

Re: The best games you never played or the worst you forced yourself through...

We'll have to agree to disagree then.

[Icemage]

Re: The best games you never played or the worst you forced yourself through...

This is nostalgia talking. There's nothing wrong with it, but there's nothing in the game mechanics, presentation or (almost non-existent) story that makes it stand above Mega Man X. Even within the classic series, Mega Man 7 and 8 are better games.

EDIT: Hell, Mega Man 2 doesn't even have sliding. Mega Man 3 had sliding, Proto Man and harder versions of all the Mega Man 2 robot masters.

Megaman 2 has better bosses than all of the subsequent sequels, and also the best music. It also has the best stolen robot weapon (Metal Blade). Easily half of the powers you gained in MM2 (metal blade, crash bomb, quick boomerang, leaf shield, flash timestopper) were useful in a variety of situations, which is less than you can say for MM3 or many of the pre-MM9 installments that followed MM2.

Harder isn't necessarily better. I found MM3's robot masters to be rather silly myself, and the special powers you gained from them even more silly and mostly useless (seriously, snakes? And don't get me started on how awful Top Man is as a character and even less useful as a weapon power). It's hard to top MM2's Lead Bubble for most-worthless-if-it-weren't-needed-for-a-boss, but Top Man's Top Spin power qualifies.


Icemage

[Malacite]

Re: The best games you never played or the worst you forced yourself through...

Actually, I'm fairly certain there were parts of MM2 where the lead bubble was useful - rare as they were - because of the pathing of the weapon.

MM2 still had the single best weapon ever though - lots of games have fire-based weapons, but only megaman gets atomic fire :D Because burning stuff just isn't enough - you gotta iradiate 'em too ^_^ (lol MM is a walking war crime...)


As for the bosses in 3, what always pissed me off was 5 of them were connected to each other, while 3 of them had their own little triangle - IIRC it was Snake Needle & Gemini man who all worked against each other but did nothing to the other 5 & vice versa. Not sure why Capcom did it that way.

[Armando]

Re: The best games you never played or the worst you forced yourself through...

Megaman 2 has better bosses than all of the subsequent sequels

Best by what metric? I can't possibly refute that statement if I don't know how you're comparing them.

Easily half of the powers you gained in MM2 (metal blade, crash bomb, quick boomerang, leaf shield, flash timestopper) were useful in a variety of situations, which is less than you can say for MM3 or many of the pre-MM9 installments that followed MM2.

Magnet Man's weapon homes up AND down when it passes an enemy. Shadow Man's weapon is a copy of Metal Man's, though with more limited range if I remember right. Snake Man's weapon slides along the floor and can go up or down walls. What else do you need?

Harder isn't necessarily better.

I think you misunderstand. I didn't mean that MM3's robot masters are metaphorically harder versions of MM2's. I meant that you literally fight harder versions of MM2's Robot Masters after beating the new ones. They appear in harder versions of 4 of the stages you had already beat. I think it's actually the longest classic Mega Man game.

I found MM3's robot masters to be rather silly myself, and the special powers you gained from them even more silly and mostly useless (seriously, snakes? And don't get me started on how awful Top Man is as a character and even less useful as a weapon power). It's hard to top MM2's Lead Bubble for most-worthless-if-it-weren't-needed-for-a-boss, but Top Man's Top Spin power qualifies.

Because a giant lighter and a tree trunk with limbs aren't silly at all. I mean, yeah, shooting snakes is a weird power to have, but he's no more ridiculous than MM2's bosses. I will admit that Top Spin is a pretty sucky weapon and Top Man isn't cool.

MM2's robot master AIs are really dull. Painfully so.

Case in point:

Crash Man's "I'M GOING TO WALK RIGHT INTO YOU" AI isn't very compelling either. This is more an issue in MM2 than other games (save for MM1) because the lack of sliding means you can't do a whole lot, so they need to keep the bosses simpler. Moreover, NES robot masters really couldn't do much other than jump or shoot because of the console's limitations. It wasn't until Mega Man 7 and 8 that you started to see more interesting boss attacks like Shade Man picking you up and dropping you, Turbo Man turning into a car, Sword Man splitting in two, Search Man hiding in foliage or Clown Man turning into an electric cannonball.

Clown Man

Mega Man 2 didn't even have Rush if I remember correctly. The plot was largely forgettable, since it's mostly just "Wily's back." Mega Man 3 introduced sliding (a pretty big deal in my opinion), Proto Man and Rush. 7 and 8 had more interesting boss fights as mentioned earlier, and 7 shook up the status quo again by introducing Bass. Oh yeah, and...

Mega Man 7 spoilers, if anyone cares

Mega Man almost murdered Wily.

8 made even greater efforts towards exposition and Duo was a pretty cool sidekick.

So, again, what does Mega Man 2 have over 3, 7, and 8? A rock/paper/scissors system that makes sense? That's about it. We could get in a pissing contest over which game had the best music but it's not a deciding factor in which game you'd recommend if someone told you he was going to play one, and only one Mega Man game.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: The best games you never played or the worst you forced yourself through...

I see MM2 like Ninja Gaiden 2: The Dark Sword of Chaos. The sequel everyone loved because they could actually beat it.

THe original Mega Man and Ninja Gaiden games were brutal and unforgiving, NG more so than MM due to it being modeled after Castlevania and having the freaking hopping midgits and medusa-like birds. I remember it taking me almost a year of trying to actually beat Ninja Gaiden. I beat NG II in two days. Mega Man took a few weeks of trying. MM2 two days .

I think those were some of the most anti-climactic purchases my parents ever made for me. Usually was that if they bought me a game I could be occupied for weeks or even months. MM2 and NG2 blew that idea.

Oh well, at least Megaman hasn't begun to rot like Resident Evil has.

[Armando]

Re: The best games you never played or the worst you forced yourself through...

To be fair, Ninja Gaiden 1's difficulty is highly artificial.

[Icemage]

Re: The best games you never played or the worst you forced yourself through...

Best by what metric? I can't possibly refute that statement if I don't know how you're comparing them.

Sometimes complexity isn't the end-all-and-be-all. To me, one of the cornerstone elements of the Mega Man series is knowing what to use, and when to use it, and MM2's bosses strike more or less the right balance of "You can probably beat this guy without the right weapon, but it's a lot simpler if you do have it - and here's a cookie for doing so." The associations made sense, so you're rewarded for using your intuition instead of randomly guessing that Needle Man is weak to the Gemini Laser (seriously how the F are you supposed to figure this out without trial and error and memorization?). I had to look up that MM3 weapon weakness because I honestly had no recollection of it (or most of the post-MM2 boss/weapon relationships), despite having played most of the MM series on the original NES and owning the PS2 Mega Man Collection (playing through the games again several years back).

Magnet Man's weapon homes up AND down when it passes an enemy. Shadow Man's weapon is a copy of Metal Man's, though with more limited range if I remember right. Snake Man's weapon slides along the floor and can go up or down walls. What else do you need?

Magnet Man's weapon uses a lot more energy than Metal Blade, and requires zero skill to use. It's basically a limited-use "I WIN" button (or at least against those enemies that weren't immune to it, of which there are a fair number). Metal Blade took some mechanical skill to manipulate, especially on diagonals, but didn't task you to be hyper-precise, and more importantly didn't "bounce" off of the majority of enemies. So does the Quick Boomerang, for that matter. Both of those MM2 weapons were viable and useful replacements for the Mega Buster against a large proportion of regular enemies, and could be used for an extended amount of time without recharging, which lets you mix up your preferred weapon mix to suit your playstyle instead of pigeon-holing you into one or two specific weapons per enemy or just using the mega buster on everything.

More so than anything else, that's my biggest beef with the post-MM2 weaponry: almost all of those weapons were either terrible, weak, bounced off of a majority of enemies, or used so much energy that they had to be saved for special occasions instead of meaningfully expanding your offensive repertoire. MM2 had two general-use options in the Quick Boomerang and Metal Blade (and arguably should have had more... I always thought Atomic Fire was over-costed for the amount of damage inflicted). Leaf Shield was a fantastic addition since it was both offensive and defensive, letting you easily breeze past areas with the dropped eggs which exploded into swarms of tiny enemies. MM8's Tornado Hold and Thunder Claw are other good examples of great weaponry, but I consider both to be slightly over-costed to be truly useful in a generic sense.

This is one of the reasons why Zero is such a great character in the Mega Man X series, because pretty much ALL of his stolen moves become incorporated into his offensive suite, and it's one of the main reasons I dislike most of the post-MM2 games (aside from MM8 which I will agree does have a better weapon balance than its predecessors).

I think you misunderstand. I didn't mean that MM3's robot masters are metaphorically harder versions of MM2's. I meant that you literally fight harder versions of MM2's Robot Masters after beating the new ones. They appear in harder versions of 4 of the stages you had already beat. I think it's actually the longest classic Mega Man game.Because a giant lighter and a tree trunk with limbs aren't silly at all. I mean, yeah, shooting snakes is a weird power to have, but he's no more ridiculous than MM2's bosses. I will admit that Top Spin is a pretty sucky weapon and Top Man isn't cool.

Sorry, I misinterpreted your statement. I didn't find the "revived" MM2 bosses difficult in the least in MM3, once I figured out which nonsensical weapon to use against each one. A few of the weapon weaknesses made sense, but MM3's weaponry is so generic that most of the robot master weaknesses are arbitrary.

Mega Man 2 didn't even have Rush if I remember correctly. The plot was largely forgettable, since it's mostly just "Wily's back." Mega Man 3 introduced sliding (a pretty big deal in my opinion), Proto Man and Rush. 7 and 8 had more interesting boss fights as mentioned earlier, and 7 shook up the status quo again by introducing Bass.

MM2 had 3 items which more or less simulated Rush's various abilities (a wall-crawler, a floating platform, and a hoverboard).

As for story, it's not like Mega Man is Final Fantasy or Mass Effect. The franchise strengths have always been the sharp platforming (which I agree sliding adds a lot of dimensions to), and the interesting additions of new weaponry stolen from each robot master.


Icemage

[Armando]

Re: The best games you never played or the worst you forced yourself through...

I had to look up that MM3 weapon weakness because I honestly had no recollection of it (or most of the post-MM2 boss/weapon relationships), despite having played most of the MM series on the original NES and owning the PS2 Mega Man Collection (playing through the games again several years back).

Agreed. I think the problem is that there's only so many ways to make a "fire man" and a "water man" and an "electric man." X sidestepped that issue completely by using animals. Now you can have a fire stag, or a fire dragon, or a fire mammoth, or a fire moth, and it doesn't get stale.

Magnet Man's weapon uses a lot more energy than Metal Blade, and requires zero skill to use.
...
More so than anything else, that's my biggest beef with the post-MM2 weaponry: almost all of those weapons were either terrible, weak, bounced off of a majority of enemies, or used so much energy that they had to be saved for special occasions instead of meaningfully expanding your offensive repertoire.

Point. There's a flip side to that coin, though, in that knowing when to use a weapon becomes a skill in itself. Classic Castlevania games revolved almost entirely around the concept of having the right sub-weapon at the right times. Sure, Magnet Man's weapon is expensive, but you have other weapons too. Now the trick is knowing when you'd get the most out of using it, and when you should use a different weapon to conserve ammo. I think it boils down to personal preference on this point.

As for story, it's not like Mega Man is Final Fantasy or Mass Effect. The franchise strengths have always been the sharp platforming (which I agree sliding adds a lot of dimensions to), and the interesting additions of new weaponry stolen from each robot master.

Sure, but just because your game isn't story-driven it doesn't mean presentation doesn't matter. I think we can all agree X6 left a sour taste in everyone's mouths. And if you're going to do 8 iterations of the same game, you have to keep things interesting. 4, 5 and 6 were largely unremarkable for that reason. The plot to all three is "Oh no! A new villain! No, wait, it was Dr. Wily all along." If you don't play them, who cares?

[Malacite]

Re: The best games you never played or the worst you forced yourself through...

Hmm, mostly I guess but there was one glaring flaw in the weaknesses making sense, and that would be Metal Man dying in literally one hit from his own weapon.... wtf lol ?

[Armando]

Re: The best games you never played or the worst you forced yourself through...

Hmm, mostly I guess but there was one glaring flaw in the weaknesses making sense, and that would be Metal Man dying in literally one hit from his own weapon.... wtf lol ?

I didn't know that. It's not worse than every Robot Master being weak to the charged Mega Buster in Mega Man 4 though. That was super lame.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: The best games you never played or the worst you forced yourself through...

Armando, Mega Man is artifically difficult for a lot of the same reasons NG was. You take a few steps back and forward again and the enemy you just killed is back, alive and well and in need of killing again. The difference is the attack patterns of enemies in Ninja Gaiden - much like Castlevania and Rygar - were either standard or heat-seeking.

Hawks were heat seeking. A medusa head never respawned and then homed in on exactly where you were, it just waved up in down from a particular height. Ninja Gaiden hawks were like Phantos on steroids. If you didn't have the Spinning Slash subweapon equipped or Fire Wheel activated, you might as well just accept your pit death rather than face a hawk giving it to you. getting a sword slash in on them was a matter of luck mid air and risked killing your jump momentum.

If there was anything more annoying than them, it was Morrowind's Cliff Racers. They swoop down from above and peck you to death, considering it was a first person game that was always annoying.

They were so bad they were written out of the canon. Post Morrowind the prisoner you met in the opening, Jiub, goes on a quest to vanquish all Cliff Racers, which he succeeded in doing. Oddly, this is not the last you hear of him.

[Malacite]

Re: The best games you never played or the worst you forced yourself through...

Uh, the MM games have never really been that hard.

The only parts I will concede to are all in mega man 8 lol, with the bullshit rocket sled (and that damn 1st wily boss you have to use the mega ball against... ugh I HATE that MF'er)


But yeah, if you want to see how stupidly easy MM can be (with practice and memorization) go watch Stone Monk Wisdom's youtube channel.... the dude's done both MM9 and 10 without getting hit. It's actually kinda scary...

I managed to nearly do it for 10. I got to Wily's final form but then took 1 very stupid hit at the last second and then said to hell with it because it's too annoying redoing the 8 robot masters without taking 1 hit and making to wily unscathed AND going through all his forms...


And yes, Metal Man really does die from a single shot of his own weapon... it's silly, lol. Also, what I feel was always the coolest feature of the X series was the ability to charge boss weapons. It added a whole new dynamic to the series (I still miss the helmet in X-4 that gave unlimited ammo for regular shots - Slash Beast's weapon was particularly OP with that upgrade).

Personally I'm still annoyed they never did explain the full connection between each series. I don't even acknowledge X7 and 8 as cannon, since the only ending to the series that made sense was X6's Zero ending - it's the only explanation as to why the hell he was underground in the Zero series and outside of his original body. And they DID say it'd take 100 years so it fits. Still, never found out just what happened with Wily, Blues or Forte (I imagine Zero went berserk after activation and was put down by some emergency switch, only to be reactivated by some unsuspecting shmuck in the future, leading to Sigma finding and battling him). Capcom has a real penchant for plot holes though.


As to going to hell, I'd say the brand started going downhill around the 3rd EXE series game. The Zero series was somewhat refreshing, but the new ZX stuff and the star-whatever shit they have going now.... yeah it's been butchered all to hell. I can only imagine how much it must annoy Inafune that he couldn't retain creative control over the IP. I would LOVE to see him wrestle it away from Capcom (and Kamiya take back DMC for that matter - seriously fuck Capcom).

EDIT: WTF is with the double posts? Also wanted to just say that all this proves that people really do matter in this business.