Mega Man 7, A Destined Confrontation

1995 is not a good year for Mega Man. The competition is fierce with Yoshi's Island, Chrono Trigger and Donkey Kong Country 2 hitting the market. X3 is in development, but it won't be ready until December. To fill the bill, it's time to make a new Mega Man Classic game, and the NES is officially getting shut down for good, so there's no going back. Enter in Mega Man 7, widely regarded as the worst of the classic series, a bad start to the year that's for sure, and it won't get much better.

Mega Man 7 get a lot of flak, rightly deserved for some of the changes to the game play that just don't work so well. This isn't my favorite game, but I actually don't hate it as much as most Mega Man fans. Oh, it definitely isn't as good as 1-6, but I find lots of it enjoyable, despite its flaws. Mega Man 7 gets most of it's influence off the Game Boy series more than the NES series, and despite how good those games are, its influence will hurt this game a little, but that's not the main problem with it.

New Features

• All new graphics for the 16-bit era
• New Character, Mega Man's rival Bass.
• Another new character, the incredibly annoying Auto.
• Beat's new function from now on is to retrieve Mega Man from pits.
• Rush's new ability, Rush search used to find items.

Story
Mega Man 7 actually has an above average story for a Mega Man game. No where near as complicated as the X series, but it does take on new angles we haven't seen with the series before. The game takes place six months after Mega Man 6. Dr. Wily had eight inactive robots lying in wait to break him out of prison, should he not have contacted them after so long. The robots awaken and break out Dr. Wily. Mega Man runs to the inner city to see Dr. Wily escaping.

He pursues but runs into a strange black robot with a fish head helmet (Bass looks weird...). They do battle and Bass tells Mega Man he is not Mega Man's enemy, and that he is trying to stop Dr. Wily. Bass takes off with his robo-dog Treble, and Mega Man heads back to Dr. Light's lab.

Dr. Light sends Mega Man after four Robots out attacking the city. As he returns from defeating the last robot, Dr. Wily breaks into the National Robot museum and steals Guts Man! Four more robots appear and Mega Man goes after them. Eventually Mega Man runs into a damaged Bass. (This has only happened to me on Shade Man's stage, but I'm not sure that's the only place it can happen.) Bass is ready to give up, but Mega Man tells him that they are a team, and to return to Dr. Light for repairs... wait a minute? Mega Man met Bass a total of once and they're a team now???

Anyway, Bass get's repaired and then destroys Dr. Light's lab, and steals the upgrades Dr. Light was working on for Mega Man and Rush. Mega Man arrives too late, and just as he gets there, Wily shows up on the TV to boast about how he created Bass and Treble to infiltrate the lab, so he could finally destroy Mega Man. Mega Man heads after Wily.

Mega Man would face Bass twice through Dr. Wily's fortress, critically damaging him, but Bass would manage to escape. He also fights an upgraded Guts Man, bringing the museum incident full circle. Finally, he takes on Dr. Wily in another machine.

Beating him, Dr. Wily surrenders and offers to go quietly. Mega Man stops him and says, "Not this time Wily! I'm going to do what I should have done a long time ago!" while charging his buster. Actually, what he really says is poorly translated and misspelled, but that's what he was trying to say.

Dr. Wily panics and tells Mega Man that robots can't kill people. Mega Man hesitates then angrily replies, "I AM MORE THAN A ROBOT! DIE WILY!!" Some debris falls from the ceiling on Wily, and Bass quickly drops in to save his master's life. "Too late, Mega Man. He who hesitates is lost! We shall return!" Bass warps out with Wily, as does Mega Man, as the fortress collapses. The credits roll as Mega Man walks away from the exploding fortress.

Wow... besides being the most bad ass scene in Mega Man history, it's also subject to some controversy regarding Asimov's rules of Robotics, and how they apply to Mega Man.

This is another needless tangent. Skip this if you don't care.

The thing we know for sure is that the game intends to have Asimov's rules of robotics acting upon the world. This is clearly cited in the beginning in-game text of Mega Man X, where Dr. Light expresses fear of Mega Man X breaking the first rule, "robots shall not harm humans." X has a sort of free will in the games. Technically, he has the ability to break the first rule, but he is sealed away so he would choose not to break it.

By this logic, Mega Man should not be able to break this rule, as he should have lesser advanced programming than X. Yet here, we see a contradiction as Mega Man is ready to kill Dr. Wily.

There's several things going on here. Mega Man is questioning his programing if killing Dr. Wily is an option. Dr. Wily reminds him that it isn't. Mega Man then makes it clear that his intentions are to kill Wily still, because he is "more than a robot!"

We should note that in the Japanese version of the game, Mega Man does not say this. Actually he says nothing as he lowers his buster and hesitates on what action to take. This is important because in the US release, Mega Man still lowers his buster and quits charging it to attack, despite what he says.

Let's ignore the easy answer that this is an over sight by localization, or even the original writers. If Mega Man X is, by canon, a superior model to Mega Man by Dr. Light's implied writing, then we can assume that, despite what Mega Man said, he would not have carried out the action as his programing would not have allowed it. You can even make the argument that Mega Man cannot resist his programing because it stopped him from actually attacking Dr. Wily. This happens in the US version as well as the Japanese version.

But why was Mega Man ever able to charge in the first place without Dr. Wily reminding him about not being able to harm humans? All we know for sure is that Mega Man did not attack him, and it remains a possibility that he could not have attacked him. This makes sense until you hit the series with the end of Mega Man II for Game Boy (You just gotta ruin everything, don't you Mega Man II?). In that game, Mega Man fires a missile at Dr. Wily in space, which causes him to crash land in to Earth in a giant skull shaped Mushroom cloud. If Mega Man expected him to survive that, his CPU must be severely under-clocked.

Ultimately though, Wily did survive and Mega Man didn't directly fire upon Wily's human flesh, so maybe this incident can be weaseled out of with a "Disney style make believe way" so the plot can be held together. If we take this incident as "Mega Man is attempting to defy his programing here and fails," this sets up the X series quite nicely, as it provides extra motivation for Dr. Light sealing X away, because he is using past experience in his decision. If on the other hand, we are saying that Mega Man was just delayed in killing Wily, X doesn't seem all that special, as the Blue Bomber had just as much sophistication in programing as he did, so it would seem.

And what about Wily's bots? They don't seemed as concerned with human life. On that, all I can say is we never see any of his robots actually kill anyone. Sure, they destroy buildings, which would surely kill someone inside a building, but once again we can use the power of "Disney fantasy" to assume no one actually died in the collapse, or even got injured. Also, Bass doesn't kill Dr. Light when he clearly had the chance in his lab. This supports that Dr. Wily's bots also follow Asimov's rules.

Analyzing all of this together though, I believe the intention of the writing is to bolster the X series a little bit more, as after all, this game did come out after X2. You can analyze and nit pick details to see the flaws in these arguments, but there is no definitive proof that any of the laws were broken until X. Attribute all of this nonsense to bad writing, and assume that weaving Mega Man into the X series was what they were going for. That's what I do.

In conclusion, don't worry about it. Mega Man 8 and 9 sure as hell didn't.

Aesthetics
Mega Man 7 is my personal favorite in terms of how the game looks. It got quite an upgrade from the original series as you'd expect, and it maintains its original look and feel, without playing upon the X series, which Capcom obviously had more experience with at the time. Both series look completely different from each other, despite coming from the same origin. Mega Man being your "Saturday morning cartoon flavor," and Mega Man X being the more serious older brother the the series.

The sprites are more expressive and colorful, more so than the X series, but not without problems. Mega Man's animations are a bit... strange, such as his ability to float above the ground while running. Some characters don't even have much animation, such as Roll who is always coughing or something. The bosses are nicely detailed, although half of them look incredibly stupid. What the hell was Spring Man made to do?

The levels are mostly pretty bland though, especially Wily's stages. The majority of them lack a lot of creativity, and most of them seem to be some variation of a factory or something. Shade Man's stage is awesome though, easily the highlight of the game. Aside from the mostly bland levels, the bigger sprites make the game look pretty good. This comes at a price though in playability.

Sound
The soundtrack is on par with other games in the series, although some songs really stand out and kick ass. The museum medley of some of the previous game's music is one of the best, it's just too bad that you only get to hear like three seconds of it, because the extended mix is fantastic!

Most of the levels have good music. Shade Man's music is really good, although there is an easter egg where holding down B while selecting his stage results in the Ghouls N Ghosts theme from the SNES, also really cool. Bass gets his own theme to accompany him, much like Proto Man has. Bass's theme would get mixed several different ways here and there, but this is where it originates. The music is great, but the sound effects on the other hand...

The Mega Buster sounds incredibly weak, and Mega Man makes some strange noises when he jumps. If you compare this to the X-series, the sounds come off incredibly cheesy. It's only a minor detail, but it could have used some work.

Design
I like the boss fights in this game, Freeze Man being my favorite boss fight. Bass has some entertaining battles as well. The patterns are really fun to dodge around and buster duel, although the game is pretty easy. That is except the very last boss which is stupidly difficult compared to the rest of the game.

Most of the stages are alright, nothing special. A few are designed pretty well though, such as Slash Man's stage which has you riding across dinosaurs and fighting a T-Rex robot. Shade Man's level looks cool, although it isn't too interesting, as it mostly is two elevator rides, sandwiching an annoying mini-boss in between the stage.

The problems with this game come from the influence of the Game Boy games. First, like the Game Boy games, you're limited to choose from four bosses at the start. I think this is done so they can have the intermittent museum level. This is a departure from the normal series that many fans didn't enjoy. Game Boy got a pass, but many players never touched those games. More Mega Man fans have played this game however, and it didn't meet their expectations so well.

Borrowing from the X series, item collection came in to play a lot more than previous games. We got the bolts replacing the P-Chips, and Auto's shop replaces Dr. Lights Lab, the letters to RUSH in each level to build a jet pack for Mega Man, and various other things. Some of the better items to find either costs a shit load of bolts, or you can use Rush's new ability Rush Search to find them. This ability sucks because, unless you know exactly where the items are, you'd be spending hours having Rush search every 4 feet, of every platform, of every level. There are no indications for where Rush should search, so expect to use a guide if you want any of these items, or spend hours farming bolts.

Proto Man shows up a few places to give you pretty useless advice too, but if you find him the third time, you get to fight him. Beat him and he gives you his shield. It's pretty useless, but it looks cool! The design has it's flaws, but isn't the big problem with this game.

Playability
Here's where we get in to problems. The size increase of the sprites limit the real estate of the screen. This not only slows the game play down, it gives the player less room to maneuver. Mega Man himself controls a bit slower than the normal games, and even X. I don't like this change at all, and many players hate this game because of this. When it comes down to it, if playability is affected, the whole game is going to suffer no matter how much better it looks.

Extras

• Boss Order: I go Freeze Man, Burst Man, Cloud Man, Junk Man, Slash Man, Spring Man, Shade Man and Turbo Man. This route does have a bit more backtracking than I like, but I don't find the levels particularly tedious. If you want to get everything your first go round though, go Freeze Man, Burst Man, Cloud Man, Junk Man, Turbo Man, Slash Man, Spring Man and then Shade Man. I will note that Freeze Man is not an easy fight your first time through.
  
• Proto Man is hidden on Cloud Man's stage, then Turbo Man's, then Shade Man. Find him in that order then you can face him for his shield.
• Interesting tidbit, Bass is never a stage boss, always a mid boss. This makes him pretty dangerous, as he's usually more powerful than the stage boss. Bring an E-Tank for him.
• On that same note, Wily's final form is extremely tough, and takes forever to kill. Don't be surprised if you need all 4 e-tanks, and the S-tank, to take him down.
• The Anniversary Collection version of this game screwed up the ending credits sequence, and it isn't honest to the original because the developers were too puzzled by Mode-7. Therefore, if you want to see the original Mega Man 7 credits, check youtube.
• Mega Man 7 also features a hidden multiplayer mode. It's not fantastic, but this is the first instance of multiplayer in the entire series.
  

Mega Man 7 is ok, but flawed. It gets a lot of hate, and it is the weakest of the series, but it's still not bad. Even though the sprites do affect the game play, it's still worth checking out for them, and for Bass.

Playthroughs
100% Speed Run by Nicholas 'Sir VG' Hoppe