Mega Man Powered Up

It's undeniable that people have their prejudices against certain graphical styles or tones. Some people will never be caught dead playing Final Fantasy X2 because it's extremely feminine... others will buy it exclusively based on this. Others won't judge the game until they play it or hear a review and then will not buy it because it's a bad game... okay, if you like it more power to you, but I'm way off on a tangent here. Mega Man Powered Up is one of those games where the graphical style just very well might put off some gamers right away leaving them missing quite an enjoyable experience.

I don't hate these graphics myself, but I can easily see how a fan of the original NES games might be put off by them. I don't think the game looks as ridiculously cutesy once you get into the game as it does on the cover, but it still does to some degree. To those fans, all I can say is you will be missing out on a hell of a lot of content if you judge this solely on it's graphical style, but I don't think this will bother most of the more hardcore Mega Man fanbase, the ones who played Battle Network, Zero and the original classic and X games, pretty much anyone who bought Mega Man 8. For these fans, this game is a must own.

Story
Powered Up is a retelling of the original 1987 Mega Man game. Dr. Light built several robot masters to help with various functions of the world. One day the evil Dr. Wily kidnaps and reprograms some of Dr. Light's robots but leaves "Mega" and Roll behind because he considers them useless helper robots... Wait a minute? His name is "Mega?" Come on Capcom USA! His name is Rock even in the states! Even the god forsaken Ruby-Spears cartoon got that right! Oh well, why complain about something so minor?

Anyway "Rock" (I'm going to be bitter about it anyway) asks Dr. Light to make him into a Super Fighting Robot so he can stop Dr. Wily. Dr. Light reluctantly agrees and renames "Rock" Mega Man! Mega Man goes out and fights his brothers, Cut Man, Guts Man, Elec Man, Bomb Man, Fire Man, Ice Man, Oil Man and Time Man... wait somethings not right there...

New to this remake, Capcom decided that 6 Robot Masters wasn't enough and gave us two more! Meet Time Man, the precursor to Flash Man and Oil Man a big lipped... uh... black robot... hmmm... interesting that?

Anyway Mega Man tries to reason with each of his brothers but they've all been corrupted to much and he has to fight them. After beating them all Dr. Wily challenges Mega Man to settle this at Wily Castle! There, Mega Man is confronted with some of the first robots made specifically for war "The Yellow Devil" and a copy of himself. Finally he meets Wily in combat who regrets not reprogramming Mega Man when he had the chance. It was "The only mistake" he ever made in his life. I fucking love Dr. Wily in this game! Mega Man defeats Wily and he surrenders and regrets everything he has done and has a change of heart and surely won't ever betray Dr. Light ever again and create 900 sequels!

Well that's the main story... but perhaps you were wondering what happened if say Elec Man was left behind instead... or if Proto Man came back and fought instead of Mega Man? Well consider this the "What If" episode of Mega Man 1 because those questions will be answered as you can play as the bosses and even Roll if you do certain things in the game. You'll even get to fight Mega Man? Pretty cool huh?

Aesthetics
As I said before obviously the style this game is going for could be a turn off to some gamers, but Capcom usually doesn't go out of it's way to widen it's demographics anyway, especially with the Mega Man series and I guess you have to admire that in a way. The graphics for what they are look pretty good with bright colors, good animation and interesting looking levels.

As this is a remake, most of the levels retain their original flavors and most of the enemies are the same guys we fought in the first game... although Capcom did decide to bring over the "Hot Heads" from Mega Man 2 and the Shield Attackers from Mega Man 4. The mettaurs themselves are more varied in appearance then they were in the original game as well.

The game features an "Old Style" mode which essentially copies the levels of the original game but keeps the new graphics.

Sound
These are all the original themes with updated quality on this sound track. Mega Man 1 had great music as it was some of these themes again. There's quite a few new tracks on here as well. After all, Mega Man 1 didn't have a title theme, and Time Man and Oil Man need their own tracks as well. I'm kind of sad this game didn't do so well financially because I would have killed to see Powered Up 2's take on Mega Man 2.

Every piece of dialog in this game is voice acted, and there's surprisingly a hell of a lot of it. First you have Mega Man talking to each boss, then you have the bosses response to Mega Man, then you have the bosses playing through the game speaking to Mega Man and the other bosses. There's a total of 11 playable characters (not counting variations on Roll and Mega Man), each with conversations with each other and the 4 other bosses in this game and each character has their own unique personalities and traits. Ice Man has personality disorder, Elec Man is conceited as all hell, Guts Man is a working He-Man and Fire Man is just fucking insane. You'll love all these characters, and once again the Ocean Group does a fantastic job of doing the voices for this game. No Mark Gatha or Lucas Gilbertson though for the X and Zero fans, but they weren't in this game anyway. Honestly, the sound is just about the best part of this game.

Design
The new levels keep the flavor of the originals without directly copying them. You'll get the annoying shooting platforms in Ice Man's stage, the flame jets in Fire Man's stage and the conveyor belt platforms in Guts Man's stage. They also feature alternate paths with hidden unlockable goodies you can pick up with the other boss characters that you can run through with. Of course if you don't like these levels you can always play the classics that are about 90% accurate to the originals.

On the bosses if you beat them with the Plasma Cannon only, Mega Man will take them home and have Dr. Light repair them and you'll be able to play them. Each boss has their own unique abilities ranging from extremely useful such as Elec Man and Fire Man, to harder but tolerable such as Cut Man or Guts Man, to fucking impossible such as Oil Man or Bomb Man. You can also use Roll if you download her from the games online database (she's a melee fighter) or Proto Man if you finish all the challenges.

And the challenges... oh the challenges. These are rom hack level designed dickhead challenges that require the most pixel perfect precision in your controls you've ever had to master some of this shit. They're fun and challenging, but if you wanna save yourself some stress, just download Proto Man too.

Now on top of all this extra content, the game keeps track of everything. Each level has a hard/normal/easy difficulty and the stage and boss fights are affected to take into account what difficulty you are playing as. The game records if you have beaten a stage on every given difficulty, as every character and records your percentage. It literally says somewhere around 460 something levels to beat (every character, every difficulty) to get 100%. Not only that, but it keeps track of high scores and times, even giving you target times to beat. For the truly masochists, the game even keeps track on if you beat a level without getting hit and with each character as well. Fuck, this game could take forever if you truly wanted to complete it.

Even after you do all of that, and complete all the challenges... well, you can make your own levels or download other ones different players have made, and some of these tile sets aren't even used in the normal game. I'm talking Christmas and Halloween themes, a ghouls and ghost theme, a power stone theme! The level creator is pretty advanced, although you won't be able to make anything quite as elaborate as the normal game, but you can make levels that have a stage boss you select or allow for you to play as a certain boss.

As far as hand held games go, this is perfect in the sense that you can always keep this game on hand for your gaming needs for the PSP and always be making some progress with it and never quite finish it. The levels are great for taking a few minutes to bust out a level, then put your PSP away and get on with your life. Speaking as a college student myself, I never leave home without Powered Up anymore.

Playability
No problem with Mega Man. No charging and sliding at first, but you can unlock these abilities. The weapons work just like they do in the original game... and are about as useful meaning Elec Beam kicks ass and everything else sucks. They did go out of their way to make Super Arm slightly better, but not much.

Playing on bosses on the other hand is all over the place. As a general rule you can take down the guy whose weakness you have no problem, but the guy you are weak to is a fucking nightmare to take down. If you've got a character with an extremely weak weapon, such as Oil Man, whose weapon works by firing one shot on the ground and sliding (you can only have one shot on screen at a time and it takes forever to go away), you're going to have to learn how to dodge, there is no way around it.

Generally though when I'm playing as a boss, what I want to see is the dialog between the two bosses, so I don't pull my hair out I play on easy with the more pain in the ass bosses.

I don't want to complain to much about how tough playing as some of these bosses are because the truth of the matter is this is all bonus content and not required to beat the main game, and the truth is this is a fun game.

Extra

• Boss Order: Different this time from the first game unless you are playing on Old Style. I still start with Bomb Man myself but the weakness order is... Bomb Man, Ice Man, Fire Man, Oil Man, Elec Man, Time Man, Guts Man, Cut Man. The game changes a lot depending on who you are playing as though and you don't get different weapons as the boss characters so the boss order might not be so important.
• The boss rush can be really difficult your first time through. Here's a tip, don't take checkpoint flag by the bosses. There is a respawning extra life on the way to the boss rush and it keeps your progress if you die on one of them. Die and get an extra life back and you'll make it through this level just fine.
• Out of all the bosses, Fire Man is just about fucking stupid in how difficult he is and no where else is this more apparent than Old Style in the boss rush. Practice Practice Practice.
• You may be wondering where the Magnet Beam is. It's exclusive to Old style.

Powered Up is a fantastic game and while I don't own many PSP games, this is my favorite out of the library. You can't go wrong in getting this title even if Mega Man isn't your favorite game series like it is mine. Unfortunately though Powered Up wasn't a huge financial success for Capcom, and we probably won't see another one. You can get this one off of PSN very soon so keep a look out for it!

Playthroughs
Speed Run by Chris 'Satoryu' Kirk