Mega Man, Game Gear

What the hell Capcom? Didn't you learn your lesson with Hi-Tech!? Sigh... and to top it off, its for the Game Gear, the system where developers are just fucking lazy. Oh and this one is lazy, so fucking lazy.

Luckily, it's no where near as bad as the PC games, and actually, if some effort was put in to it, it could have been a decent game. But Freestyle didn't want to put the effort into converting a NES game in to a Game Gear game.

Story
The manual says that Dr. Wily kidnaps Dr. Cossack and Kalinka, and then uses holograms to make himself look like Dr. Cossack in an effort to frame him. This is never seen anywhere in the game, and Cossack and Kalinka never make an appearance. In fact, only two of Dr. Cossack's robots are even in the game, so what was the point of writing them into the game?

Mega Man blasts through three Mega Man 5 robots and Bright Man, then heads to Dr. Cossack's castle. There he fights Wave Man and Toad Man, and then, somehow, he finds out Wily is responsible, then he goes to his fortress and fights him there. After he defeats him, Dr. Cossack's castle explodes for no disconcerting reason...

Aesthetics
Imagine the original Mega Man graphics, except there's a few extra colored pixels here and there for each sprite. Does it look better? Not particularly although it is more colorful. All of the stages in the game are from previous games, copied nearly exactly. I can't rate the stages because Freesytle didn't create them.

Sound
The music is just staticy versions of the same levels music as all the previous games, except Dive Man has Gravity Man's music for some reason. It's not very good, but no where near as bad as Mega Man II.

Design
The levels are copied directly from the games in which they originated, with few exceptions. Eddie for instance isn't in the stages where he should be in this game, but is instead replaced by a power up -no big deal.

What is confusing, is the game doesn't have a continue system. If you die, you had better written down that password, because it takes you right back to the title screen. If not for the other problems with this game, this might have been acceptable.

I love the designs of these original games, and if this was a straight port, I might have looked past the complete void of creativity this game has. The problem isn't the designs though, it's...

Playability
Every fucking Game Gear I have ever played works like this. Take a game from the Sega Master System or NES and port it over to the Game Gear. The sprites are too big for the screen, so to compensate, instead of resizing the game to fit, they make the fucking thing scroll vertically! Thus, ending up with hundreds of leap of faith situations that would not exist in the original version of the game.

This is especially bad in a spike and pit, instant death happy game like Mega Man. You cannot see where the hell you are going. Take a look at some of these screenshots. It's impossible to see what's under you, and more than one of these sections has spikes or a pit waiting for you to fall in to.

What could be worse than Mega Man 4 and 5 levels with vertical scrolling? Quick Man lasers. Thankfully, THANKFULLY, they did change the lasers to be slower and not instant death, avoiding what would have been the most aggravating section in Mega Man history. Nope, we'll get that in X6.

Extras

• Boss Order: Forget about it. All the bosses are weak to a charged shot, and there are no variations of Rush to get. Try to get whichever level you find most annoying out of the way first because there are no continues.
• This would be Freestyle's second and last game apparently. I can't find anything on this developer, if it was sold or just went away.
• Despite this game's problems, it's a valuable collectible as not only a rare Mega Man game, but a rare Game Gear game in general. Even if it's not a good game, it's worth picking up for this reason.

This game could have not sucked. It could have been an alright port. Instead, Freestyle half assed a Mega Man game, and now they are gone forever. As for Capcom, they seemed to be a bit more careful in their game licensing after this with regard to state side releases. I haven't played any of the Taiwanese PC games, though I understand they aren't terrible, and the Bandai games are alright. Not like this stopped Capcom from milking the hell out of the franchise though. Oh no, we're still just getting started.

Playthroughs
Vprisoner had one on Vimeo, but it's gone now sadly. There are no speedruns either. If you're dying to see this one, dredge up some of the terrible stuff on youtube, but you'll just be disappointed.