Mega Man II (Game Boy)

Oh boy... where to get started on this one. I think in general it's safe to say that buying a Mega Man game is a low risk investment. You don't always get a spectacular game, but you generally get a decent, or at least, a game where your familiar setup and gameplay satisfies you.

Then come along the games like this one, the few and far between, terrible Mega Man games. Mega Man II is a god awful piece of shit. It's terrible, it's ugly, and it feels unfinished. So which company is responsible for this abomination in the series? Surely Capcom just got lazy and sent of the license again to some smaller less experienced company where... good god it's in house development!?

Did they not just release Mega Man I for Game Boy or did I imagine it? How do you go a step backwards when you use literally the same engine to make the next game? Mega Man I wasn't perfect but it was a hundred times better than this and let me show you why!

New Features

• Coming to the Game Boy Series, E-Tanks, Rush and Sliding from the NES games.
• New character Quint! You have no idea how insane this will be...

Story
Dr. Wily, pissed off from having a rock fall on him in Mega Man 3, decides to take over the world by stealing a time machine, and going some 40 years into the future.

Wait a second... what?

You didn't just go there game, you did not just open the Pandora's Box that is time travel, did you? Oh but it gets better. Dr. Wily ends up finding Mega Man in the future, and manages to capture him. He reprograms him to work for him, renames him Quint and heads back to the present with his brand new Mega Man killer.

Oh there is so many things wrong with this, but where to start? First off, Dr. Wily steals a time machine and this is his plan? Why doesn't he go back in time and just kill Dr. Light or something so Mega Man never gets built? Not only that, why is it so damn easy to capture Mega Man in the future and not the present?

Finally he goes back to the present to battle Mega Man again, and time travel from that point is completely absent in this game, or at least you wouldn't notice it at first. You would think the entire level designs and gameplay would focus on time travel, but they really don't.

Another problem is future Mega Man, Mega Man Killer number 2, Quint. Just look at him! His weapon is a Pogo-Stick/Jackhammer... is Wily smoking crack? Why the hell did he get rid of his arm cannon? Quint's strategy is to try and "hop" on you and hit you with the flying debris of rocks. Not only is he stupidly easy to fight, the weapon you get from him sucks.

This next tangent is long and mostly irrelevant to the story so I block quoted it so you can skip it if you like.

Ok, time to get really nerdy and point out some discrepancies involving Quint being Mega Man. I make no apologies for sperged out nature of this tangent. Alright, in the actual manual for this game and in the game itself there is no mention that Quint is actually Mega Man from the future.

The first time this comes up is in the game Rockman & Forte: Challenger from the Future made by Bandai. Whether this game is canon or not is debatable, but in this game Quint is explained to be Mega Man from the future. Later this is confirmed by Mega Man & Bass for Game Boy Advanced where the description for Quint in the CD Database says this.

Except the original Mega Man and Bass (called Rockman and Forte) that was released for the Super Famicom says nothing about Quint being Mega Man. The translation implies he is actually a new robot, although it isn't specific.

So what's the truth? Well Rockman and Forte is canon because it is by Capcom, and referenced briefly in Mega Man 9. Mega Man and Bass could be taken as canon in a localized sense, except it's not uncommon for the US releases to change things which are never referenced again because they didn't happen in the Japanese release.

It could be this change in localization happened because it does make the Quint character more interesting this way, and it could be that Challenger from the Future is seen as canon by Capcom. If that's true, it's Mega Man. If it's not canon... well it could still be Mega Man, but it also could be a new robot.

The real answer... it's unimportant. Quint is a retarded character made interesting by Bandai. Take that away and what you're left with isn't much.

Anyway Mega Man confronts Dr. Wily in his outer space/time skull fortress and as he's making his escape. Mega Man blasts a missile at him causing Dr. Wily to crash down back to earth in an explosion the size of the United States, undoubtedly killing millions of people, among them Dr. Wily... OR DID IT!?

Well seeing as he comes back for Mega Man 4, no it didn't.

Aesthetics
Crap crap crap! This is a Mega Man game?! I don't expect much from Game Boy, but I expect Capcom to at least meet the standards they set with the last game.

First off, the sprites look terrible. Everything is shrunk down to Game Boy standards and no effort at all is made to clean them up a bit, and keep them from looking awkward and shrunk down. Mega Man looks fine, except when he's sliding. They couldn't just copy the sprite from Mega Man 3 and 4? God, it looks like shit. The stages are horrible too. There's so many small things here, like there's no water splash animation. Visually the backgrounds and foregrounds are indistinguishable from each other. It's so confusing to tell what you can jump on and what is just part of the background.

There's other small things here too. Like when the weapons don't work in standard Mega Man games they bounce off the enemies. Here, they just go right through them. What? Another weird thing is the final fight with Wily. Aside from the fact that Wily looks a new neighbor of munchkin land, he has a skull on his body that flickers when you shoot him... in the face. Yes, the skull isn't where you actually shoot him to damage him, his face is, but that doesn't react. What in god's name kind of design choice is that? All that does is confuse the player! Ugh! I can't believe how little effort went into this game!

Sound
This is easily the worst part of this game. I can deal with the game being ugly and uninteresting, but the sound on this game is so ear piercingly static it is the only Mega Man game I've ever wanted to mute!

The soundtrack is original, but horrible! It screeches and is full of so much static that the sound effects just sound like their broken! There is nothing redeeming about the sound of this game. They should have just thrown in the remixes from Mega Man 2 and 3 like the first game did. I mean, how in the hell does the first game have better sound than this one?

Design
It's just so bland. Most of the levels contain no challenge at all. No tricky jumps, no tough boss fights, items, and enemies placed randomly through out the level. Good design in platforming games instill risk versus reward design. Place an E-Tank or an Extra life somewhere difficult to get to, but the player can make a choice if the risk is worth it for him. This game doesn't do that.

The boss fights too are stupidly simple. Every enemy is easy to buster duel because they do so little damage to you. Quint is such an easy boss you can probably beat him on your first try without taking damage. The final boss I already stated the problem with, the wrong parts acting as if they are taking damage, but once you figure out the game is lying to you he's no problem at all.

The weapons are alright, and they at least function like they do in the regular games, except the Sakugarne, which is like a pogo stick. It's almost impossible to avoid taking damage while using it though, so fuck it for the final boss, stick with the Plasma Cannon.

Speaking of, the Plasma Cannon shots travel through enemies instead of disappearing upon contact. Why? I have no idea...

Playability
This game is buggy. One weird glitch is that the game doesn't freeze when refilling health and weapon energy like the other games. You can actually exploit this by filling multiple weapons from a single weapon refill capsule by switching weapons while it's refilling. Another weird thing is that getting hit on ladders won't knock you off of them so long as you are holding up or down to climb on it. Rush marine controls weird too, it slides a bit as if controlling on ice.

There's weird graphical problems too... like when you fall down a pit Mega Man explode as if he was shot. Glitches aside, Mega Man controls just as well as any other Mega Man game, so at least there's that.

Extras

• Boss Order: This should be a no brainier. Metal Blade is such a useful weapon, and getting it first should be your obvious priority. After that just follow the boss weaknesses. Wood Man, Air Man, and Clash Man.
• Wait? Clash Man? They misspelled one of their names!? It is because of this game people argue about which translation is correct as there is no "R" sound in Japanese and in fact they replace the R with an L in most contexts. Regardless being as this game is a piece of shit, I'm going to go with the Crash Man interpretation.
• Boss Order 2: When you get to the teleporter room, the weapon weaknesses goes in order clockwise. The easiest is to start with Top Man in the top right corner, then continue with Needle Man, Magnet Man and Hard Man. Although really, none of these bosses are tough.
• This game has more levels than Mega Man I, but seems a lot shorter. This is probably due to the difficulty difference. In any case you can finish this game in about a half hour.
  

This games goes to show that you can take a game engine and make something good or bad out of it, it all depends on effort. This game had zero effort go into it, and it shows. What went wrong in the development for this game? Did they just not finish it? Did they just not realize what a train wreck they were making at the time? This game needs so much work on it, more than just a little polish. It's not as bad as Mega Man PC, but I expect a hell of a lot better from Capcom.

Playthroughs
Robot Master Mismatches Galore: Let's Play the Mega Man Gameboy Series! by Vprisoner
Speedrun by Patrik 'Cremator' Salonen