to push the company further than they had gone before. Previous titles such as 1942, Gun.Smoke, Bionic Commando and Ghost N' Goblins where all great games but none of them would even compare in success to Keiji Inafune's new idea for a game, Rockman.Keiji Inafune was a new artist hired by Capcom to help come up with the art for Rockman. The game featured a rock-paper-scissors approach in which the enemies the players would face would all have strengths and weaknesses against each other. Players would be allowed to choose their level order and form a strategy as to how to tackle the game based on their own preferences.
Being heavily inspired by old Japanese Animes such as Astroboy and influenced by the musical genre of Rock and Roll, Rockman was finally created.
Story
Rockman was a robot created by Dr. Light, who, with his partner Dr. Wily, revolutionized the world in robotics technology. They would go on to create more robots such as Cut Man, Fire Man, Elec Man, Guts Man, Ice Man, Bomb Man and Roll all who would have various functions to serve mankind.
Dr. Wily, however, jealous of Dr. Light's brilliance and world renown, would steal the robots and use them in an attempt to take over the world. Figuring Roll was too weak, he captured the other robots and reprogrammed them, however, Rock resisted his attempts and managed to return to Dr. Light who rebuilt Rock to become a super fighting robot capable of stopping Dr. Wily.
While far from a brilliant story, the game laid the ground work for many games to come, and is itself a piece of gaming history. When Rockman finally came over to the United States, his name was changed to Mega Man due to a copyright issue with Rockman Amps, a product now most famous for causing Rockman to change his name to Mega Man.
Aesthetics
Visually, the colors in this game are duller than everything that comes after it. Many levels look downright ugly such as Cut Man's vomit green brick stage. Mega Man and all the enemies, however, all look pretty well for the time. Considering Super Mario Brothers had just come out the year before, the graphical looks for it's time were superior to a lot of games. Still, it is definitely the least pleasing of the Mega Man games to look at.
Sound
As one might expect from a game inspired by music, Mega Man has some fantastic tunes. While not as great as games to come, they're still pretty good overall. Elec Man's theme is one of my personal favorites.
The sound effects themselves are a bit staticy sometimes and this leads to many unpleasant sounds outside of the music. Later versions of the game (such as the re-release on the Anniversary Collection) seem to have cleaned these up a bit, but the original can be a bit grating at times.
Design
Mega Man isn't so much a difficult game by design as it is challenging by small bugs at certain points. In the above screenshot, Guts Man's stage is notorious for those platforms in which Mega Man is standing. Due to a bug on the platforms, when Mega Man is standing on those platform his downward acceleration is not reset as it normally would be when standing on normal ground. This means when the platforms slide out from under him, Mega Man is at terminal velocity and falls faster than possible to recover from the gaps in the chains.
The stages on whole are designed well. Offering a variety of locations and environments suited to the robot master you have chosen to fight. The bosses themselves are a lot more unpredictable in patterns to bosses that would follow; seemingly acting a bit more random, making a lot of fights really hard to avoid taking damage in. Fire Man, Elec Man, the Yellow Devil and the Copy Machine in particular are near impossible to dodge effectively. Luckily, each boss has a weakness allowing players to more easily overcome the difficulties if they bring the right weapon.
As for the weapons themselves only a couple of them prove to be completely useless most of the game. Hyper Bomb and Super Arm are complete garbage in terms of utility as Hyper Bomb is too slow to kill anything, and Super Arm is only used in very specific spots. Ice Slasher has a few uses in freezing the Big Eye enemies (the huge jumping Cyclops looking things), but it's usually not worth the effort to freeze an enemy when you can kill them. Firestorm, Elecbeam and Rolling Cutter are all fantastic when applied right and the Magnet Beam is the most useful utility item in the entire franchise with how it allows you to skip some of the more bullshit sections of the game (Ice Man's stage).
This game has some of the hardest stages in Mega Man games though. Ice Man's stage, as mentioned earlier, has floating platforms that move about randomly and also shoot at you, making it such a pain in the ass to get across without the Magnet Beam. The Yellow Devil Stage has these same platforms right before you take the boss on, and he is one of the toughest bosses in the series. You'll die to him quite a bit before you finally get down his pattern and even then it's quite easy to fuck up and lose your composure on him.
This is followed by one of the hardest stages in the franchise where you must fight Cut Man, without his weakness, followed by Elec Man, and then the Copy Machine, which mimics your own movements and attacks as Mega Man. These two stages alone keep me hesitant to recommend this to first time players.
Playability
This is one of the more challenging Mega Man games, and I don't think I would recommend it to someone whose never touched the series. This game is a little more buggy, a little more primitive and a little less polished than the others. Mega Man is a bit more slidey along the surfaces in this game, and this becomes all too apparent in the Copy Machine stage, where the slightest momentum hurls Mega Man off a platform to his doom. It make precision jumping quite a pain in the ass as you'll send Mega Man flying off an edge when you just meant to stop just short of it.
It also lacks a lot of features that make the later games easier such as E-Tanks (health restoring items), sliding and charged shots. This game is tough and not for beginners.
Extras
- My personal order to fight the robot masters is Bomb Man, Guts Man, Cut Man, Elec Man, Ice Man and Fire Man. This order ensures you pick up the magnet beam without having to backtrack, as well as fighting the bosses in the order you will have their weakness. Bomb Man is relatively easy to figure out pattern wise, Elec Man is a bitch to fight without Rolling Cutter, and I don't even like to try Ice Man's stage without the Magnet Beam.
- Mega Man's weakness is the Elec Beam. It will kill you in three shots at full health, so the best way to avoid it is to, believe it or not, run head first into Elec Man.
- You will need to learn to fight Cut Man efficiently enough in order to make it past Wily level 2. He takes more damage from the Plasma Cannon than any other robot though.
- Many people don't know that you can extend the platform the magnet beam creates by holding down the button longer.
- Don't use the Elec Beam on the Copy Machine! It's guaranteed death as he'll shoot it back at you. Stick with something easier to dodge such as firestorm.
- The Magnet Beam allows you to skip the flying platforms in Ice Man's stage. Use it to your advantage.
- This game is infamous for it's Boxart, which looks absolutely nothing like the game. The colors on the guy don't even match Mega Man's blue and cyan color scheme.
- A glitch involving pausing the game when a weapons projectile is in mid air will cause enemies to skip their invulnerability time after taking damage; allowing you to kill any boss quite fast with one or two good shots. Works extremely well with the Elec Beam if you are having trouble.
- Speaking of Invulnerability, take damage to get across hazardous jumps. Let an enemy hit you, then use your blinking time to run past them. You'll waste a lot of good time trying to kill everything on the screen.
- This is the only Mega Man game where touching spikes, even while blinking, will cause instant death. Simply put, don't touch them at all.
Play Throughs
The game that made 8,000 sequels and LP threads: Let's Play Megaman! by Oyster
Speed Demo's Archive run by Trevor Seguin
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