Mega Man, The Wily Wars

A bit of an obscure one here, as it never saw a cartridge release in the US. You could get it if you had the Sega Channel, but hell, that's just as obscure as this game at this point.

Anyway, Wily Wars is a Genesis remake and compilation of the first three Mega Man games, plus a bonus feature called the Wily Tower. Sounds too good to be true for Genesis owners who never got their hands on the NES games? Well it is... to an extent. The keyword here is remake.

Not that Wily Wars is terrible standing on it's own as a game, and if Sega is the only thing you have, it's much better than nothing, but the problem is the remakes aren't as good as the originals, for various reasons. The bonus content is actually fantastic, and by far the best part of the game. If it wasn't for the Wily tower, this game would be completely skip-able to Mega Man fans.

Story
The story is unchanged from the previous games, so we'll ignore that. The bonus content called Wily's Tower takes place after you beat all the games, so probably immediately after Mega Man 3 in the timeline. Wily calls out Mega Man to defeat his three new Robot Masters, and see if he can climb his tower and beat him there. Mega Man does, Wily escapes, end of story. All three robots in this game are mentioned in Mega Man and Bass, so I suppose that makes them canon.

Aesthetics
Mega Man has received an upgrade in graphics, and in general, things are much more colorful like you would expect on a 16-bit system. The stages all look much better, brighter, and have more color. Mega Man 1 especially boosts from this, considering how dull the colors were in that game by comparison.

The sprites however, are a mixed bag. Most of them look ok, but some of them look strange. Mega himself looks like he has a slightly shrunken body, and Proto Man is literally shrunken. See, the game has enlarged all the other sprites to fit the new pallet options, but they left Proto Man alone. He's short and stocky compared to Mega Man, and just looks terrible. Overall though the game looks decent.

Sound
Mega Man has great sound, but this game fucked it up a bit. The whole game plays slower, as if there was a problem in the programming when they ported it over, and this affects the sound as well. Some of the songs actually sound nicer slowed down a bit, but most of them don't, and the midi instruments used could use some work as well. The original is the way to go for sound here.

Design
Let's ignore the main games here. The design is exactly the same for those and any problems to them relate to playability. Wily Tower, on the other hand, has a unique idea and some very cool levels.

What you do is select a level, and then you have the choices of all the weapons from the previous games to take with you. Each level is populated by enemies from all three different games, and it's incredibly fun to see how the weapons from different games work on different enemies. Maybe you'd like to use Ice Slasher against a Hot Dog, or Wood Shield against a Sniper Joe... nah, you'll probably just use Metal Blade against everything.

The bosses are brilliant too! Each one has a unique arena layout, and one of them even has two life bars! They all have multiple weaknesses too, being as it would be unlikely for you to pick a single weakness for any enemy. Chances are when you face the bosses you'll have something that will work. Metal Blade usually doesn't work as a boss weakness, because the developers just knew you were taking it with you. One boss in particular, the Salamander/Dragon boss thing, is exceptionally fun as you fight him from a bouncing platform. Overall the Wily Tower is excellent. Oh yes, and the games all have a save function too.

Playability
But here's where the game falls apart. It has so much slow down, although this is much more noticeable in the remake games than Wily Tower. The slow down just screws the game up on a whole. It either makes it way too easy, such as the Yellow Devil fights, or some how makes it more difficult (Cut Man).

This game would be fine if it...didn't...run...like...ass... If it was just as fast and frantic as the original games, it'd be great. Instead, it suffers from a lack of polish. Like I said, this isn't too noticeable in Wily Tower, but you have to beat all three games first in order to unlock that.

Extras

• For Wily tower, since you start out with all the weapons, there is no real boss order. None of them are particularly tough either even if you don't have their weakness. For the other games, the boss order hasn't changed.
  
• A good strategy for picking weapons is take about one or two game breakers (Metal Blade, Elec Beam), take some positional weapons (Air Shooter, Bubble Lead, Search Snake, Magnet Beam), take a freeze weapon to deal with Big Eyes and jumping enemies (Flash Stopper, Ice Slasher, Spark Shot), a shield of some sort (Fire Storm is much better than Wood Shield though), and a wall breaker if you want some extra items or extra routes (Crash Bomb, Hard Knuckle). Having a versatile set of weapons is better than having all the heavy hitters.
• Try going through the entire levels not using the Plasma Cannon. Your weapons refill every level, including the Wily Stages, so why not have some fun experimenting?
• Item wise, Rush Jet should be a no-brainer. After that, take your preference. I take Rush Coil and Magnet Beam myself.
• The last form of Wily is a million times easier if you have a weapon you can aim up with. His weakness of Elec Beam does wonders.

Overall the game is ok, except for the slow down. Wily's Tower is great and makes the game worth a playthrough, but that alone doesn't make it worth picking up over the other games. For Mega Man coming to Sega though, it could have been worse.

Playthroughs
How Break Man got his groove back: Let's Play Megaman 3! by Oyster (contains Wily Wars)