088 · MEGA MAN
Ranked #4 in our Top 10 NES Games of 1987 →
It's MEGA MAN versus the powerful leaders and fighting forces of Monsteropolis - that strange multi-layered land of robot-like Humanoids created by the wrongly-performed experiments with human beings by Dr. Wily. FOR MORE NESTALGIA as well as show notes and links check out www.NEStalgiacast.com
Mega Man is the first game in this run that felt like it came out of nowhere with a formula already figured out. You pick your own level, steal your enemies' weapons, and use them against the next boss, and none of the games before it had anything like that. It's frustrating in places, and it made all four of us question our skills, but all four of us voted it onto the Essential Games List.
What makes it essential
- Pick your own route. You choose any of six Robot Masters to start with, and the order matters. Each boss gives you a weapon, and each weapon changes how the other stages play. The game only starts you on Cut Man because the cursor is there. We each started in a different place, which gave us the kind of word-of-mouth stories we liked in Zelda.
- Levels built like combat puzzles. Enemies sit in fixed places, so every screen has a solution, and you can learn it. Series programmer Akira Kitamura said he set rules for placing enemies: waves of the same kind, one attack type at a time, difficulty shaped by the terrain. We compared it to the difference between Castlevania and Karate Kid. When we died in Mega Man, we could see what we'd do differently next time.
- Nintendo hard, in a good way. It's difficult but mostly fair, and the more time you spend with it, the easier it gets. A lot of what we said about it came back to that.
- Weapons you actually want to use. The Elec Beam fires in three directions, hits hard and makes the game slow down in a way that feels crunchy and good. Cut Man's cutter is a boomerang-like arc that works well on ladders, and Guts Man's boulders can kill Cut Man in two hits. Ice freezes the fire in Fire Man's stage, and having it makes that level a different level.
- Controls. The jump is serviceable, not as expressive as Mario's, but it's the purest run-and-gun we've played so far. Mario with a gun, essentially.
- Presentation. Boss portraits on the select screen, the warp-in at the start of each stage, the tunnel with a door before every boss, the freeze-frame as you cross it. After a lot of bare-bones menus, it was good to see design coming out of the janky ooze.
- The music. Every track is a proper track with real length, and it's among our favorite NES soundtracks so far.
Where it's rough
- The Magnet Beam. You can only get it by going back to Elec Man's stage after beating Guts Man, and the game never tells you. It's in the manual, on page one, under the "helpful game playing hints". We all missed it on our own, and once we found it, it turned out to be so strong it can skip half the game.
- Ladders and cheap spots. Getting hit on a ladder drops you back down, and the enemies on the sides keep coming. Disappearing-platform sections punish you for a single frame. Enemies respawn the moment you scroll slightly off screen, which undercuts the whole idea of careful placement.
- Pause and weapon switching. Swapping weapons goes through the Start menu, which stops the action and discourages you from using more than a couple. We also hoarded weapons for bosses, which is the wrong instinct.
- A cheat anyone can find. Hit Select to pause on the frame a hit lands and you can tap it to register extra hits, so a boss can fall in a single blow. Once you know, it's hard to stop.
- The Wily Fortress. It's four hard stages in a row with no way back to level select, and the game has a few too many repeat bosses. Cut Man and Elec Man show up again in plain square rooms, with a trap door and no ceremony. The Yellow Devil takes about seven dodges of a dozen pieces, and you restart the whole level after you lose.
- Weapon balance. We rarely used Bomb Man's or Guts Man's weapons, and the bomb is only good against big enemies.
Beyond the game
The North American box art became a joke of its own: a man in a costume holding a regular gun, in a pose that looks like he's riding an invisible horse. We heard the designer had one day to make it. The Japanese game is Rockman and the story was changed to take place in "Monsteropolis", with Dr. Light renamed Dr. Wright. Kitamura said Cut Man was the first thing designed, and that he was meant to be the hero, with scissors on his head. The first Mega Man game also helped lead to Mega Man 2 through 6 on the NES, the Game Boy games, Mega Man X, Powered Up on the PSP and Wily Wars on the Genesis.
The bottom line
Essential. It's a flawed first draft of a great series, but the structure is clear from the first stage, the controls and music are strong, and the challenge keeps pulling you back. Mike said he fully expects to revisit the vote once Mega Man 2 arrives. All four of us voted it onto the Essential Games List.
Written from our conversation in this episode.
- Introductions
- Mega Man Franchise
- First Impressions
- Just need to take my time
- Objective
- Work your xway through 6 stages in any order. Defeating each stage’s Robot Master unlocks a new weapon for Mega Man. Defeat all 6 to take on the evil Dr. Wily
- Tales from the Manual
- Terrible Box art
- “Thermometer Shaped Meter”
- Magnet Beam...
- Gameplay
- Jumping and Shooting
- Difficulty
- Stages
- Robot Master Fights
- Power Ups
- Wily
- Yellow Devil
- Old foes
- Imposter Mega Man
- Only able to use power-up ONCE
- Ending
- Mega Man without gear!
- Music
- Development
- Akira “A.K” Kitamura
- After a period of study and working on various projects, the Mega Man development began. But as I thought about game design then, I started to wonder if designers had really thought deeply about enemy placement and behavior.
- I decided to play a bunch of different games and study just those difficult sections, replaying them over and over.
- Two of my personal goals for Mega Man were to create a game where all the stages could be cleared in an hour, and to make something that players would want to come back to again and again. To that end, I actually calculated the total number of stages by measuring Mega Man’s walking speed and seeing how long it would take to get through each stage. I then split that up so that the first half of the game would be the robot master stages, and the second would be the Wily stages.
- On Enemy Placement
- #1: Single, weak little enemies would appear in “waves” of 3 or 4 individuals (and to the extent possible, I’d avoid mixing up multiple enemies);
- #2: they would all use the same attacks;
- #3: I would use differences in terrain and enemy placement to adjust the difficulty of a given section;
- #4: The difficulty of each enemy in the wave would gradually rise, but the last enemy to appear would be easier.
- After a period of study and working on various projects, the Mega Man development began. But as I thought about game design then, I started to wonder if designers had really thought deeply about enemy placement and behavior.
- Akira “A.K” Kitamura
- Sequels and Spinoffs
- Mega Man 2-6 on NES
- Now goes all the way to 11
- Game Boy versions of each too
- Mega Man X starts on SNES
- Goes up to X8 on PS2
- So many other games, let’s just talk about Mega Man 1
- Mega Man: Wily Wars (Genesis version of the first 3 games)
- Not great
- Mega Man Powered Up on PSP
- Parish says it’s the best
- Chibi look
- Adds Oil Man and Time Man
- Mega Man: Wily Wars (Genesis version of the first 3 games)
- Mega Man 2-6 on NES
- EGL (Mike, Sean, Joe, Sam)
Found automatically from the transcript and checked, but it can miss things or pick the wrong page. Spot a mistake? Tell us.
Games
- Mega Man (1987) mentioned at
The episode's game: Mega Man fights six Robot Masters, then Dr. Wily's fortress, in Capcom's NES platformer.
- Mega Man 8 mentioned at
The PlayStation entry known for its anime cutscenes and voice acting.
- Mega Man X mentioned at
The Super NES spin-off series that starts a new line of Mega Man games.
- Super Smash Bros. mentioned at
Where several hosts know Mega Man as a playable fighter, in Smash 4 and Ultimate.
- Sonic Mega Collection mentioned at
GameCube compilation of classic Sonic games that a host played as a kid.
- Sonic Adventure 2 Battle mentioned at
GameCube Sonic game a host had just finished before the Sonic collection.
- Mega Man Anniversary Collection mentioned at
GameCube compilation of the first six Mega Man games a host found brutally hard.
- Mega Man 2 mentioned at
The NES sequel the hosts will cover later; one host calls it fantastic.
- Mega Man 4 mentioned at
The NES sequel that added the controversial charge shot.
- Mega Man 11 mentioned at
The 2018 core entry with a slowdown ability and a double gear system.
- Super Mario Bros. mentioned at
Used as the benchmark for tutorial design, jumping and enemy placement.
- Trojan mentioned at
Earlier NES game criticized for having no planned enemy placement.
- Rush'n Attack mentioned at
Called Russian Attack in the transcript; another earlier game where enemies simply spawn.
- Kid Icarus mentioned at
Cited for localization changes that altered small story details, such as Cupid and Chubby Cherub.
- OutRun mentioned at
Sega racing game whose checkerboard look the box art background recalls.
- Mighty No. 9 mentioned at
Inafune's recent spiritual successor to Mega Man.
- Paperboy mentioned at
Joked about as where Paper Man ended up, in a rock-paper-scissors gag.
- Mega Man Powered Up mentioned at
The PSP remake with chibi looks and added Oil Man and Time Man.
- Metroid mentioned at
Compared with Mega Man for running and jumping feel.
- The Karate Kid mentioned at
NES game criticized for unfair difficulty compared with Mega Man.
- Castlevania mentioned at
Compared with Mega Man for how its feel differs from Karate Kid's.
- Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy mentioned at
Recalled for its final boss being easier than the one before it.
- Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! mentioned at
Last episode's game, compared for its credits and music.
- Mega Man: The Wily Wars mentioned at
The Sega Genesis collection of the first three games with new arrangements and Wily Tower.
- Mega Man 9 mentioned at
The 2008 WiiWare entry that went back to the NES look.
- Super Mario Land mentioned at
Game Boy game used as an example of a separate game rather than a port.
- Super Mario Maker mentioned at
Example of Mario still getting new versions.
- Wizards & Warriors mentioned at
Next week's NES game.
- Excitebike mentioned at
Episode 5's game, compared with the Mega Man essential vote.
Hardware
- Game Genie mentioned at
Cheat device the hosts compare to the Select-button pause glitch.
Companies
- Polygon mentioned at
The site where Parish's ranking series of game franchises ran.
People
- Akira Kitamura mentioned at
Capcom programmer and designer of the original Mega Man, interviewed about Cut Man and enemy placement.
- Keiji Inafune mentioned at
Longtime Capcom artist and producer best known as the face of Mega Man.
Film, TV and music
- Monsters, Inc. mentioned at
Pixar film set in Monstropolis, joked about because the NES version names Mega Man's city Monsteropolis.
- Planet of the Apes mentioned at
Film franchise the hosts joke the North American Mega Man box art resembles.
- Spider-Man 3 mentioned at
2007 film with the dance scene the hosts compare to Mega Man's box art pose.
- Astro Boy mentioned at
Japanese character the hosts say Mega Man resembles in the ending.
- Ultraman mentioned at
Japanese Kaiju hero with a Super Nintendo game mentioned in post-show chat.
Articles, videos and sites
- NEStalgia Essential Games List mentioned at
The show's list of essential NES games; Mega Man was voted in.
Other
- Mega Man series mentioned at
The long-running Capcom franchise, with core numbered games plus X, Legends, Zero and more.
- Dr. Wily mentioned at
Mega Man's villain, whose fortress is the final set of stages.
Auto-generated transcript. Each paragraph starts with its timestamp. Speakers are not identified.
Mega Man! Will you and Mega Man penetrate the seven separate societies of Dr. Wily and preserve the human race? You're in control!
Nostalgia! And welcome to NEStalgia, a chronological exploration of every NES game released in North America. I'm Mike. I'm Joe. I'm Sean. I'm Sam. Guys, how are we doing? I'm alright. Excellent. Alright. Welcome to Monsteropolis. Population? Not to be confused with Monstropolis. Five. Well, what's weird is that's the Monsters, Inc. world. And then Mega Man gets away with it here. That's actually the name of the place where Mega Man 1 takes place. We're talking about Mega Man 1. Welcome. Welcome.
What do you guys know about Mega Man? Mega Man? Is it a robot? Not the guy himself. The franchise. About the franchise. Like, you know, Mega Man is a franchise that is just as big as, like, you know, some of the other... Some of the other franchises that we've been covering, like Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Brothers. Mega Man's been going on for a long time.
And the direction of Mega Man has changed a lot since, like, the beginning of the games. Of the games, like, it started off as one thing, and now it's like there's, like, five different Mega Man franchises. And people are just clamoring for, like, more of the old. So, I'm just curious what you guys know. Joe, you want to tell us what you know? Yeah, I mean, honestly, I'm aware of Mega Man in, like, my peripherals. Like, I know it's out there. I've seen it. I've definitely played one of the NES games when I was a kid. Not this one. I have played it before. But when I was a kid, I had one I would pick up once in a while, but never got very far.
Otherwise, though, it's just kind of been in the background of my life. Okay. Until now. Yeah, it's hard to be a video gamer and not be aware of its existence. Sean, what do you got for us? I was introduced to Mega Man with Mega Man 8 on the PlayStation. My stepbrothers were really into it. That was the one that had all of the terrible voiceover work in the anime sections.
And I didn't really like it. It was way too hard. And, I mean, it looked beautiful, but I was totally for like, no, I want 3D. I want 3D action. And then, you know, that sort of wore off, and then I started playing Mega Man X on Super NES.
And, you know, yeah, it's been there. I like playing as him in Smash. I mean, it's here and there. Not as peripheral as Joe, but I'm not a huge fan. Okay. Sam? I'm kind of the same as Joe. I, you know, obviously knew about Mega Man, just for being a video game fan in general. But I feel like I may have played the first one or one of the NES ones in some kind of, you know, as like some mini game and some other game or somehow, but never more than just a couple minutes of it. And I really just know him mostly from Smash 4 and Smash Ultimate. Okay. And I know that people say he like shoots lemons, which is like a joke.
I see it. But besides that, I don't really, I didn't really know anything going into it. All right. And for me, I was playing, as a kid, I was playing the Sonic Mega Collection on GameCube in like 2002, I want to say. I had just finished Sonic Adventure 2 Battle for GameCube. And I was like, oh, I would like to play more Sonic games. So they had the Sonic Mega Collection, which takes you through that whole history.
And I love those games. It made me fall in love with Sonic because I never had Sega consoles growing up. And then I heard about the Mega Man Anniversary Collection. And I was like, oh, well, I like the Sonic Collection so much. I'm sure I'll love the Mega Man version of this whole thing. And I got that for GameCube as well. And I just remember thinking like, wow, this is sadistic. Like, you know, I was young, but like I'm used to like playing a certain kind of game. And Mega Man is the kind of game that you need like, you need to think about what you're going to do. You can't really run through this game.
Yeah, exactly. You need to think about how you're going to deal with the enemies on the current screen. And then what's your plan of attack when you enter the new screen. It's kind of like the complete opposite of Sonic where you're just, you're always on a new screen. And so you're just going in guns blazing all the time. Right, right. Yeah. And so it was just so different to me that I was like, this is really hard. I don't enjoy this at all. I'm done with Mega Man. And I was done for a very long time. And then I started collecting NES games. And I had Mega Man 1 and 2. And I think I also played 4, which is the one that adds like the sliding mechanic. No, no. It adds the charge shot. The charge shot. That's very controversial.
We'll get to that. We'll cross that bridge when we get there. Okay. But right now, since we're talking about Mega Man 1, let's do some first impressions. Sam? I honestly just kind of felt like I thought it would.
You know, you jump, you shoot, you shoot enemies. It's colorful. The music was nice. But Mega Man had always been in your peripheral, right? Like you said, you haven't really played one. So going in and having the very first idea of Mega Man being your first experience to do it too, did you feel like, did it meet the hype of a franchise that's been going on for 30 years?
Yeah, I think so. I think it kind of, you know, it felt a little bit stiff, but kind of like NES stiff, if that makes sense. Not like it wasn't bad or anything. Just that it was, you know, it just kind of, it has just aged a little bit and you can tell. But for what it is, it was pretty much what I expected. Cool. Sean? When I first started playing it, because I had Mega Man 8 and X in my, you know, mental backlog,
it just sort of surprised me how much of the game has sort of stayed the same. Like the feeling of the game, I mean, every single one of them is just run, jump, and shoot with a couple variations. But like, you warp in, like every game is just like, you warp in, that's got like a feel to it.
The shooting still feels the same. It's just like, it has like the essentials ever since the first one. 8 feels like 1, which feels like X, which feels like X4. Everything has this very Mega Man quality to it, whether it's one game or the other. So I just found that interesting. That was my first impression was, this is Mega Man.
Alright, Joe? The first thing that like really stood out to me was that this is what I imagine when I think Nintendo hard. This is my maybe not always true idea of what Nintendo hard is, where it's like, it's hard, but not like super, super cheap hard. Like hard where I can feel like I can learn it. So even for, no matter which level you start from, I feel like I, you have to learn the level. And it's really, it presents more of a challenge, more of a fair challenge than I think we've had in a lot of games. I agree with that. I had a similar, similar thought about it being Nintendo hard. Right, and I think it's like the, our like idealistic memories of what Nintendo hard is, where it's like not really annoying.
Like very challenging, but doable as well. Right, right. And not like cheap doable. Exactly. Yeah, and so I played the game before, but I didn't want to think about the future of Mega Man games. I just wanted to focus on like, okay, this is my first time playing Mega Man 1, 4, Nostalgia. Like, how do I feel about it right now? Um, and I, you know, we talked about how you need a lot of focus and direction in this game. And I learned that like a lot by restarting my game very often.
There's a lot of times where I'd be like two bosses in or maybe something like that. Like I'd have two of the power-ups and I got to another one and then I died there. And I was just like, you know, maybe I just need to start from scratch again. And I can't tell you how many times I did that just because I felt like I wasn't, I wasn't getting how to play the game properly. There was a moment for me where this game finally clicked for me and I was like, oh, that's how you play a Mega Man game.
You can't just like accept the damage and move on. Like there is a way, and it's designed by the programmers. Like there is a way to navigate your way through this. It's not like an enemy was placed somewhere and you're just supposed to accept. Yeah, you're supposed to get hit or supposed to like deal with it. It's like, you know. It's a lot of learning. Yeah, a lot of learning. So I think like my first impression was just that I really need to like take my time and not think about like, okay, I'm on this screen right now and I need to get to the next screen immediately. Well, were there any actual long-term repercussions for losing all your lives? Because I feel like it just wasn't.
So this is completely psychological. Psychological for me. The score resets, right? Starting over and just like being like, you know what, let's just start from the beginning and maybe try a different order of bosses. You know, there is a weakness pattern that we'll talk about, but just getting around that and almost like you said, psychologically, like learning how to play this game. Yeah. Because the first thing that we'll mention about this game is that enemies are placed.
Yes. In a very specific way. Finally. Yeah, but so it's like there is a specific way to play that the programmers have in mind too. It's very similar to Super Mario Brothers where there are times where you need to hold down the run button and jump accordingly to make a reach because they planned it to be that way. In other games that we've played, I just think about like games like Trojan or Russian Attack.
Like those games, they've created the combat system. They've created the platforming idea, but then it's just like you just deal with it however you want to. There's no real like plan put out there. Enemies just spawn.
It's not like a puzzle or anything. Right, exactly. Yeah, a puzzle is a good way to explain it. That's how I would describe each screen. Like a combat puzzle. Yeah. Right, yeah, which is cool. But before we get there, we should talk about the objective. For those of you that don't know what Mega Man's all about, you have to work your way through six stages in any order you choose. In later games, it'll become eight and that becomes the standard for how many bosses.
But in this one, there's just six robot masters to take on. You go to their stage, you defeat them, you get their weapon or their version of their power up and Mega Man equips that. And now you can take that new power up into all the other stages. You defeat all six to get to the evil Dr. Wily. And then that's where you can now be the fully powered up Mega Man where you have access to all the power ups you need in order to beat the game. Now, there's a lot to unpack there.
Absolutely. Let's unpack it. So, I mean, first I would just like to clarify to anybody that doesn't know what a Mega Man is, it's a side-scrolling platformer. But other than that, I think this is the first game that introduces a choose-your-own-adventure sort of situation where you can go to these levels in any order. And it's not just because there's a hundred levels. They're not even dead. It actually affects, it actually has an impact if you decide to go to the fire level before you go to the ice level.
You're going to get a different weapon added to your arsenal, too. Where it's like, oh, maybe that would be helpful if I went to this level first and got what I needed from there before I go to this level. Yeah, there's strategy involved. Because each of the power ups does do things to the stage themselves. The bosses have a particular weakness. And also it affects the enemies in different ways, too. So I think, yeah, there's definitely an advantage to that kind of thing. But also, you know, with the way that you take down the stages in any particular order, the game doesn't tell you the order. It starts you on Cutman, but he's not necessarily where you want to start.
You can immediately just choose whichever boss you want. And it's interesting that they're just represented by their robot master. It's not like the stages have names or anything like that or places. That's kind of all additional information you can find elsewhere.
But it's just like, which of these bosses do you want to take on? And it's almost like if you don't read the manual and you just get greeted with that screen, you have no idea what's about to happen. You're like, am I playing as Cutman? Yeah. Now that I select him? Well, this is another example, not to go off topic, but this is another example of where all the context comes from the manual. Like, there's no story element in this game. It's just you have to go back to the manual to understand what you're even doing.
So I think that if somebody were to play without the manual and you're just greeted by this, yeah, you might not think that you may think you're playing as somebody else. It's very strange. I'm glad you mentioned the manual, Sean, because I think it's time for a little Tales from the Manual section.
So there's two, you know, we always bring up funny things in the manual, and I'm going to do that first. So there's two things I definitely want to talk about here, and the first being that in the helpful game playing hints, which is literally page one after all the information goes through, it's like, before we talk about what enemies are or how to do anything, here's just game playing hints. Let me tell you how the health bar works. Right, right, exactly. So they refer to the Mega Man energy meter as a thermometer.
And I'm like, I never once thought of it like that. You know, they're talking about that thing on the left-hand side of your screen. I know what you mean, but this might be the first time we've seen a vertical health meter. And, like, maybe that's why they would use that analogy. I know that, like, to us, it just sounds like a stupid, like, uh... Mistranslation or something.
Mistranslation or just redundant information. But I guess, yeah, I don't know. But also, like, referring to it as a thermometer, and this is completely, like, just semantics, but, like, referring to it as a thermometer makes me think that you wouldn't want to have a full bar, because that means you have, like, a fever. You're a robot, though, so you want to be, like... Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, you want to have gas. Maximum output. Yeah.
So I just thought that was funny that they describe it as thermometer-shaped, but point taken, Sean. You're correct. And then there is, like, immediately they have to call it out, because they just never planned a way to deal with this otherwise. And it's really silly. But they have to tell you about the magnet beam. Right. Because if you don't find out about it, you won't be able to beat the game.
Yeah. But it's also not, like, mandatory to ever, like, a game. I missed it. I did, too. And then I read the manual, and I did think to myself, they put that right there so they can be, like... It was in the first page of the manual. Yeah. It's good to me. So I was like, okay, fair enough. I just think it's insane that that's the best way that they could think to communicate that. And I get that, like, back then, games were about secrets.
But that's not really a secret. No. That's not really a secret. Like, just make another stage where you fight Magnet Man. You know? You're fighting Cut Man. You're fighting Bomb Man. Might as well fight Magnet Man and get that power. It honestly does feel like afterwards when they playtested it, they were like, you know what? This magnet thing, it kind of sucks the way we have it.
But it's too late to do anything else in the game. Like, just throw it in the manual on the front page so everyone knows they get the magnet beam. Not to mention that magnet beam is, like, practically broken in the game. But we'll talk about that in the power-up section. But I appreciate Magnum Beam's inclusion in this game. Me too. I think the more power-ups, the merrier in these Mega Man games. Like, once you become the full Mega Man. Yeah. Once you become the full Mega Man, there's, like, no feeling like that in a game so far on the NES. But we'll get into that later. The full Mega Man.
What would you call that Mega Man? The Micro Mag... The Essential Mega Man. Macho Man. The Essential Mega Man. Macho Man. I like that better. Okay, let's call him Macho Man during that phase.
Anything else from the manual section anybody wants to talk about? Well, we could... I mean, we have to talk about the change in... The complete change in what the story is. Okay. You want to walk us through it? Well, I mean, it's like... It's just supposed to take place on Earth in the, like, Japanese game. And I don't know if it's just because, like, oh, we can't have... We can't have... There'd be violence in the real world. So we have to make up this place called Monsteropolis, like we were talking about. And I don't know why that was a pertinent detail that needed to be addressed. And then they changed the name of the Dr. Light to Dr. Wright. And they kept Wiley.
I don't know. Yeah. It's a bunch of weird anachronisms. And it just doesn't make any sense to me. Yes. No, I completely agree. And also, the only story you're getting from this game isn't even in the manual. It's on the back of the box. So I feel like that's just something that, like... You know, I don't pick up the back of the box, read through that, and say...
Well, there's a story section in the manual, right? Oh, right. There's the Mega Man story thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I actually thought, not knowing that it was different from the Japanese version, I actually thought, like, oh, that's a pretty solid explanation of, like, a short description of what's going on here. Yeah. Say what you will, but Monsteropolis is pretty clever. Is it? It's a pretty clever meaning. Oh, because monster. Yeah. Oh, and Manopolis. Like a city.
Even though, forget that nobody is ever referred to as a monster in this game. Yeah, that's why I was confused. I was like, are you the monster? They don't collect children's screams. Do they know the citizens monsters? The citizens are monsters. The citizens name their city Monsteropolis. For those of you that don't know the Mega Man story, here's how I imagine it. I'm not reading the manual. I'm just saying, I always thought of it as, like, the human race is basically under threat by Dr. Wily, who's turned all the good robots that were supposed to, like, you know, like,
Cutman doesn't, yeah. He's a worker bot guy. He's just cutting stuff. And then all of a sudden, he's, like, reprogrammed to be evil. And now Dr. Wily's using all those robot masters to take over the Earth. That's what it says in the manual. Okay, good. Well, except Earth. But otherwise, that's what it says. Yeah, and then, like, you know, it's up to Mega Man, the only Android left, I guess, to save the day. Right? Well, roll. Yeah, wait, how is that different than... No, I'm saying I don't... I'm saying that... I think I got that. Mike wrote the manual. There were just a bunch of seemingly insignificant details changed that I just found weird because it's not, like, in Kid Icarus...
Cupid. The game with the... Oh, yeah. Like, where it used to be a dog. Oh, yeah, I know what you're talking about. Well, I hear that. I'm speaking of... Chubby Cherub. It's not like, well, this doesn't make any sense without the manga or something like that. Right. It's just, let's just change these details just because.
And I got why they changed Rockman to Mega Man, but I don't understand why they changed the world to Monsteropolis. Yes. Everyone here is surely familiar with the box art, though, for the Mega Man North American version, right? I feel like it's kind of infamous in terms of... It's part of the video game canon now, I guess. Yeah, yeah. It went beyond just, like, NES collecting and stuff like that. It's just known as, like, the strangest translation of a game into a box art.
So, who wants to try and describe this thing in case people don't know what they're looking at? I think I got this. Okay. All right. So, we got, in the background, kind of like a, you know, like an outrun sort of checkerboard. And then in the foreground, there is what appears to be one of the apes from Planet of the Apes
dressed up in, like, a ridiculous costume that I guess is Mega Man. But it's blue and yellow. Blue and yellow. This costume is blue and yellow. And he's holding a gun. Yeah, he's holding a gun. Which also doesn't happen. Not like the arm cannon thing that he has. It's just a gun. Right. And he's just in such an awkward pose. And he's got, like, a codpiece or something also. He's in the middle of doing squats. His position is, like, you know in Spider-Man 3 when he does that dance? Like, he's doing the Spider-Man 3 dance at the end.
Before Spider-Man 3, he was the first to do it. That's probably where they got it from in Spider-Man 3. His legs just don't look like they're facing the right way. Yeah. The whole piece of artwork has problems with perspective. Yeah. Whether it's on his head, in his arms. I think they just, like, copied. They must have, like, traced a sketch of someone's face from, like, a noir detective novel or something. And just put it under this really weird, like, he's not facing the right direction. He looks like he's riding an invisible horse.
And so the real story here is that Mega Man, they were working on it for a while over at Capcom. And then they weren't sure, like, how it was going to be received or whatever. But it was selling fairly well in Japan. And so they immediately decided, like, we need to get this thing out to North America, like, stat. And they gave the, like, in-house designer one day to make the new box art for Mega Man 1. Which is still terrible. Okay? Knowing that you had a full day and you still brought this. Exactly. This is, I could see this being an okay piece of work if you had maybe, like, a half hour. And you were like, well, I messed up that perspective.
So I gotta run with it. There's so much detail in the city behind him, though. Is there, though? Is there really? Not detail. There's a lot of stuff going on. You know? And none of that happens in the game, though. Yeah. Why is that all there when there's this little monkey man in the foreground? The only thing I really remember, and I don't remember if it, I think it's a Lechman stage. The stage with the yellow globes. Yeah, that's a Lechman. Oh. On the, in the background. Oh, okay. I think that's a Lechman, yeah. And that's what I thought of as, like, oh, that's what people live in. These giant, like, yellow globe towers. Could be. Nowhere to be found in the box office. The box office. The movie never came out.
But speaking of movies, the Mega Man European box art. Now that looks like a movie I would watch. I don't know. It looks like cosplay. Sean, take us through it. So the Mega Man PAL release is a very, a very dramatic movie poster, pretty much, which has a photorealistic Mega Man who has de-aged 30 years since his American version. It's Mega Boy. He's now not wearing metal or anything like that. He's just wearing a jumpsuit with, at least they got the, the power shooter laser glove, right? Yeah, the arm cannon. The arm cannon is the word.
And then they've got really burly versions of the, the, the masters, the robot masters in the background. And then you have like Dr. Wily's castle in the back and then you have like the Darth Vader face in the background of a very pensive Dr. Wily. Yeah, he doesn't even really look evil.
He looks like he's like the mentor of. There's something about like Dr. Wily in that top left, like, you know, and, and how he looks. And then the lightning striking on the top of Wily's tower. It's very Kairoskuro. I was just thinking like maybe even a little bit like Rocky Horror or like Frankenstein's castle, you know? It's very Frankenstein. Yeah, you know, like, like what, what are we trying to get from here? But I will tell you, love the way that, um, Gutman, um, Fireman and, um, Electman look in this box art. Yeah. Like that's pretty cool that they did like, forget, say what you will about the photorealistic versions of Wily and Mega Man. They look really cool. I still think that at least they, at least it looks like it's for the right game.
Yes, that's true. There's no, there's not a lot of, um, also wait, but who's that arm? I was just going to say that. I just noticed that at the same moment you did. Yeah, I was looking around like, wait, whose arm is that? Yeah, there's an arm underneath behind the Mega Man logo. There's like a, it looks like one of the other henchmen or one of the other robot masters' arms. I mean, it was probably like a bigger piece of artwork that they cropped to fit. Yeah, maybe it was Bomb Man.
Maybe. Who's like, yeah, who just got defeated or something. I don't know. Maybe his arm is like winding up because the other one's even lower with a bomb and he's about to like, heave it up there. Yeah, heave it over his head. You know? But he's just trying to counterbalance the bomb. I think that's it. Yeah. That's gotta be it. What else could there be? And so since we've talked about the American and European box arts, we might as well mention that while the Famicom one is fine, it has the cartoon versions of them from the manual,
that's not Mega Man. That is Rock Man. Yeah, but it is the same guy. No, no, no, but I'm saying it's Rock Man is the name that he's always been. He's never referred to as Mega Man in Japan. They never changed that over. So you just have Rock Man as the series as it's known in Japan. And there's a great reason for that, which I might as well divulge into now since we've talked about it. But the reason why it's called Rock Man is because this whole concept of this game is based off of rock, paper, scissors. The idea that one thing would be able to combat another thing. I agree that that is a concept in the game, but I feel like it has more to do with just like the musical naming conventions that they have.
What do you mean? Like Rock and Roll, later they have Bass and Treble. Yeah, but I think that's all added afterwards. Is it? Yeah, they've stated in their intentions in interviews that. But Roll exists in. Yeah, no, I'm saying I think that that all came after the idea of like this. A game based on power-ups and stuff like that. Oh, okay. Where basically the whole thing is just a giant rock, paper, scissors battle because, you know, if ice can defeat fire, but fire can defeat. Ice. Yeah. No.
I know that Iceman you go to first before you go to Fireman if you're playing in the correct order. But, you know, just saying that each thing has like a weakness to it, but you also have that thing has a different power to the other thing. So it's like this giant game of rock, paper, scissors. It's funny because it sounds weird to compare that because we're living in 2019 where that's like a video game mechanic and a mechanic of a lot of things.
Yeah. But I guess if, you know, this hasn't really been a mechanic in much before this, I'm assuming, then that's like, yeah, rock, paper, scissors. It's like you're picking what's better than the other thing. It's like a better way to describe it, I guess, to people in 1987 than it is to us. So, wait a second. Why isn't Cut Man the first guy that you should fight? Because rock beats scissors.
Well, it's funny you should mention that. I feel like we'll just go into development right now. Cut Man is actually the first design thing for anything Mega Man related and was actually going to be the protagonist. He was just going to have scissors on his head. Weirdly, it was going to be Cut Man, was going to be who you play as, and the idea was that you were going to use his ability to... But then the whole PR department was like, no running scissors, it's a bad look. We'll have kids cosplaying as this guy, running around with razor blades.
What about when they designed Paper Man, then? What happened to him? Paper Boy. New game. Different game. Yeah, he got changed to a different game. So, in an interview with Akira Kitamura, who was the programmer on Mega Man and is, is largely responsible for the creation of Mega Man. This is a great interview. He's no longer, I think, in the video game industry. I think he's just done with that. But a lot of people also know Inafune, who is still in the video game industry and just recently put out Mighty No. 9. And, you know... Yeah, it was there. Right, it happened.
But a lot of people see him as the Mega Man guy, but I think that Akira is just as involved in the original process of creating the Mega Man games. So, when Kitamura was asked about, like, what's the process for making the Robot Masters, he actually talks about that Cut Man was the first thing ever designed. He says, When thinking about Mega Man, I sometimes feel that it's not Mega Man himself, but all the different Robot Masters that are the real treasure of the series.
Mega Man stays the same character from game to game, but the Robot Masters are all unique one-off creations with their own individual design, capabilities, and backstories. It honestly wouldn't be weird at all to make one of them the star of their own games. When I first created the world for Mega Man, but before I knew what the gameplay system would be, originally there was no Mega Man, no role, no Dr. Light. Cut Man was the hero.
I imagined a game where you'd use those scissors on his head to cut down enemies and other obstacles as you progressed through stages. The entire game was just scissors-based. That just tickles me. Yeah, and then basically what he says is that after that, more and more of these Robot Master ideas started to come to him, and he said, okay, if I have a bunch of these guys, which I would think would lead to some team-up game, right, where you use each of theirs independently, but thank goodness he decided instead, what if you defeated these guys to gain their powers? Because that's such a much more compelling system than just being able to, like, okay,
if you picked Cut Man, you have to play through him as this whole stage. Whereas, like, now it's like, okay, cool, you beat Cut Man, like, just use his power-up whenever you want. Yeah. I can see it as, like, you know, let's say Cut Man is evil until you beat him, and he's like, oh, I'm going to join your team now, then you can kind of swap out characters instead of, you know... Well... And you reprogram him. It's a little off-topic going into, like, sequels and spinoffs territory, but there is a, like, remake remaster for the PSP where they include, like, playing as the characters that you eat if you just do it with your arm cannon and not use other power-ups.
So it's... That was thought of. It was interesting. You know, you go... 30 years, you go far enough down the lines that everything's almost been thought of. Right, right. It's actually, like, kind of hard to believe that Mega Man 11 just came out. Yeah. And that's like, you know, what did they do? What did they add? How do you make something different?
And they did. They made something really different. So that's really cool. Never played it. But I think we need to start talking about the game itself. Is everybody cool with that? If we start talking about the game? Were we supposed to play the game? You were supposed to play the game. Joe, I'm kind of upset. You know, we do this... We've been doing this for... I just thought that every week you say play the game. This week you didn't say it. Right. That's true. I forgot to say play the game. I was just saying read up all the developer interviews you can and make sure to eat the manual. Yeah. Bye.
so sean what's it like to be megaman well you you do a lot of running you do a lot of jumping uh you shoot stuff glad you said that uh wait hold on jumping and shooting no no no you're done because that's what all i want to talk about for right now running jumping and shooting we have a lot of complaints as we play many nes games about the way things uh behave with controls and stuff like that a lot of times it's the jump how does megaman jump like how would you describe it
i would i would describe the jump as uh as entirely serviceable okay it is not a annoying it's not an annoying jump like in in prior games but it's also it's not as expressive as a mario jump and then shooting uh you know you shoot the the lemons and it just sort of feels like a pea shooter um but it gets the job done again completely serviceable um i feel like you you're trying to get something out of me and then when you combine them together how does that feel to be jumping and shooting and
running and doing all of this back and forth back and forth how does that feel as a as a as an experience compared to our other nes games that we've been playing it's um it's it's freeing freeing okay it's it's very um no because there are a lot of these side scroller games where you can either do one or the other or um uh if it's a shmup you can't really control where you go or it's not as um this is like the purest form of of run and gun that we've had i feel so far
i i would say as far as the jumping and the movement i would say next to i mean i'd have this is i'm pulling this out of my head right now because i have to go back and play every game again but next to mario i would say this feels maybe the best for the as far as like running and jumping i think for the most part with a few exceptions of things that that are finicky but overall
i'd say maybe metroid beats it out as far as running and jumping that's a good example i'd have to look back at metroid but i do think that the way that the enemies are in this beats out metroid um but one thing that we haven't mentioned is we talked about jumping but we didn't talk about falling which i think is like its own separate thing yeah and i'd like to get to falling in a beat but i think we should stay yeah we should stay on the topic of the jumping and tuning just
because i think in certain ways if you if you forget that they are like two different style of games if you bring up mario this is like mario with a gun you know i think that's so appealing yeah to like the mega man people is like it's it's almost more exciting than a mario game because you you know you actually have to like kill your enemies in creative ways that you you know or get
around their uh their shooting you know you're dodging combat in mario games like the furthest thing we came to in super mario brothers one was like the hammer brothers in terms of like throwing projectiles or like that's just completely dropping like defensive though right exactly you don't have a way to be like well the fireball i guess yeah but like you know mega man being being able to jump
and shoot right from the beginning and having just that be your primary weapon right is serviceable on its own as sean said then stack in all these power-ups that's when it actually starts to feel good yeah okay so john so continue i i think that um as soon as you whatever your first weapon is unless it's the bombs because the bombs kind of suck but that that's going to be what you're going to be
playing with like not in not in terms of like this is what you're going to be using as your bread and butter weapon but you're going to feel the best when you start using these uh these upgrade weapons uh one of my favorite experiences in this game and what finally like enlightened me to this whole like retro aesthetic of slow down feeling good was uh uh the elect man weapon yeah yeah the electric beam
with the electric beam like you get three directions to shoot in it's a huge hit hit box and because there's so many sprites going on at when you shoot this weapon the game slows down it just feels crunchy and just it's one of the best feeling weapons in any game we've played so far and i count that i mean like sometimes we hate slow down but because this doesn't necessarily like hurt you as the player
i count that as more of like a heat of the moment like the man has now slowed down everything he's like fully aware of what's going on like when you uh when you die in this it freezes for a second yeah it's like kind of a similar thing it's like now i'm packing a punch yeah and on top of all the all the power-ups i think one thing that i learned because you were saying like once you get the power up that's going to be your main thing i wasn't playing the game like that for so long and it was only until that clicked with me of like that the power-ups have each other's weaknesses and that you want to be using them throughout the stage that that's when i started doing that i think
if i can fault the game for a second we've been praising it for a little if i can fault it i i think it's kind of a mistake that the select is used for pausing and not for cycling through uh your power-ups because that would be like a much more intuitive way of swapping through that you'd have to actually cycle and you'd have to yeah no totally i guess what i'm saying is that by pressing start is how you
get the menu to pop up with all the different things and they're just represented by a single letter so you still have to know what they're going to do and stuff but it completely halts the gameplay for a minute and then you come back out of it and then you switch like that and then and once you have all the power-ups that can be a very jarring process where if you you know if you
actually are thinking of the best way to get from screen to screen you might do that so i just think that like you know by not interrupting the gameplay at all and cycling through with select at least you get a chance to continue the gameplay and i feel like it's a more freeing thing yeah that i would have explored more power-ups more often had i have done it that way as opposed to both too if you
needed to like you didn't have time to scroll through and like all eight or whatever uh you could also do it through the pause yeah yeah totally fine with that that would be my my solution because i i really liked the idea of like all right this next section i'm going to use the you know the i'm going to use fire for this next section and get that ready and like all right here i go and then like all right pause next section what am i gonna not that i did that a lot where i would pause
but i i prefer that than trying to remember like how many okay it's like three times to get back to the i yeah yeah i totally agree with what you're saying i think i want to make my point more clear i think what i was referring to is that it because it's in the start menu and it requires halting gameplay and choosing your thing that it breaks flow and so i was less inclined to switch between power-ups
throughout the game i was mostly like being like you know oh okay cool this this elect man power is awesome i'm gonna use that or you know there was only like all right now i should use gut man's thing because i know that i can pick up boulders like i'm only gonna use that in this section you know i'm not gonna like i'll try out that power elsewhere i would say another negative uh in the same realm
is uh maybe this is just personal for me um but i think psychologically this game makes you hoard your power your power up weapons like i didn't want to use my uh my other weapons unless like i really needed to like i was trying to save them up for the boss right exactly save them up for the boss is is another early mistake yeah that i feel like i made i was saving them for the boss and if you go
through the level and just play with the power up for the most part you're going to continue to collect uh things that will replenish yeah and if you know who you're facing and what power up is better against it you can always use different ones yeah you can use different ones and when you find that ammo to replenish you can decide what it will replenish right so it doesn't just replenish
everything or just once there's not like one color for one yeah for one power you pick which power you want it to replenish before you grab it yeah if we can talk about the stages for a minute uh we don't have to talk about a specific stage but just the the layout of the first six robot master stages how did you guys feel about that specifically the fact that uh enemies were programmed to be in specific places uh i thought that uh you know i thought it was cool it did feel
i mentioned this before it feels like uh like an action puzzle sort of combat puzzle i think you want to talk more about that i'd love to hear uh like there will be a time where you like in the uh uh what's his name the mining one uh guts man guts man i always want to say like rock man but that's not him uh uh guts man one there are those little guys with the hard hats in the beginning yeah and
uh they like pop their heads up and then they shoot their little things out uh and you have to either like get your timing down exactly to shoot them just as they pop up or like decide which weapon is best for those you know so i i don't know i thought it was interesting uh but then there'd be other moments where i'd be shooting the heck out of some guy and then accidentally back up too much
and then he would respawn in the same spot with full health and yeah yeah so those moments i wasn't crazy about yeah that happened to me a lot particularly with those those hoppy things those like spring loaded yeah the hoppy things one-legged jumping things for me it was the hammer bros oh yeah yeah the pickaxe guys yeah yeah but you know no i know yeah i just don't want anybody to
think there's hammer bros in this game as a cameo i mean there's two of them great so it's actually four i think in that level well there's two sets of them yeah okay sean in the in the macro sense of the level design uh it does a good job of like tutorialization like within like the first few uh screens they will pretty much do the the mario philosophy of they're gonna show you
a thing you have to do in a vacuum where there's like some some semblance of safety whether it's just like here's just one enemy or here's this jump you'll have to make but you you'll land on you'll just land on the platform below and you won't die immediately um and they build on that it's not as elegantly done as it is in mario but the at least the concept is there and this would not
be possible in a game unless the uh they were they were hand placed enemies like i i i hate playing the games where they just run at you randomly and sometimes there'll be something that's programmed to be like the midpoint of the level but other than that it's just mooks running at you it it really shows to me it feels like there wasn't enough thought put into level design whereas this one
definitely is yeah and i hate to think of what this game would be like if it was those same enemies on each screen but they weren't placed specifically they were just like oh the game code will figure out where to spawn them or yeah yeah how they enter the screen and it's like that that would stick because there are specific enemies that do enter screen and an exit screen there's those penguins in
the iceman stage there's those um those little circle guys that then shoot a bomb in all eight directions there's the bullet bills yeah the bullet bills things like yeah this is a mario yeah like there's a big difference between the uh the way that castlevania feels and the way that karate kid feels right all right well i was just going to mention karate kid as well because that's the first thing i'm thinking of when you guys are talking about this and when i do all this game does have things about it that are frustrating there's points where i'm like it's hard to get past certain spots and i'm doing it over and over again i'm getting sent back to the beginning of the level
but what makes that different than the way it works at karate kid if i karate kid i just feel like i'm being cheated i mean karate kid i just feel like it's just not fair and this time i can see my path to victory and it's fun to try it as much as it's still that video game frustrating it's still fun to like and satisfying to like yeah because you have a strategic approach exactly time yeah and you can see that it's doable and it's not just like one of these times i'll mash the buttons the
right way and just happen to work out the right way it's like i can see what i need to do and then you actually like learn to do it yeah and also in a game like karate kid where your health isn't as generous as as a mega man game you know you really have to like take down every single enemy as they continue to spawn on your screen like you don't have the luxury of walking by them i will say that
you know one thing that's nice about the mega man games is that even if there is a section that's like you know oh this is really hard unless it's a boss fight there is a way to cheese through them as well to be like you know what i'm not dealing with this guy right now it's only going to take down two health points out of like the 20 that you probably get i'll take the damage and just buff
through the stage because once you take damage you have an invincibility period yeah so i i definitely did that at certain points that and like reoccurring points like constantly i would uh whenever i'd replay the game and get back to that section i'd be like you know i'm still not worth it yeah i'm still not feeling it right now the lava section the fireman stage had a lot of how do you even get through
those things well if you have the ice beam you can get through a ton of them because you can freeze the fire right yeah and it's a puzzle like that though you know like like you were saying is that that's what's really cool is that if you go into the fireman stage without the ice power up it's a completely different level than with it because once you have it with it you can freeze it is still
doable though oh no yeah it is yeah you can definitely time it it would be really i could not time it yeah i mean it's hard because it's mega man but i think that uh if it were just you have to use the ice beam to get through this well that would be bad that would be bad because i i would be like well i don't really feel like i'm i'm getting these power-ups that i can be creative with it's just a
means to an end um and yeah i think that'd be it since there are multiple ways to finish like not multiple ways in that like oh you can you can sneak in or like in in that whole sense but because that there are multiple routes at least that you could take different strategies that is definitely a pro for this game and so since what you know what you just brought up with like if you needed the ice it's like that would be the like antithesis of like this entire game yeah to be like your route
right it's a choose your route thing and you you can choose your own route but i find that the game is best played for for more casual players i understand if you beat mega man often you can do it in whichever order you like and you'll be fine but for me once i finally did cave in and look up the order of the bosses i found the game to be honestly a lot more enjoyable even if it made the boss fights extremely easy i mean some of those guys go down in two hits i think it's um it's gut man no
cut man who goes down in two hits if you have gut man's ability to take the boulders because there's two boulders in the cut man's stage like in his boss fight and you just throw one and then the other and he's dead and it's like okay look that's that's that's like puzzle solving for the first person who did it i cheated by looking it up yeah but i still think it's a very satisfying way to play the game the whole thing is you know like we talked about this rock paper scissors thing being able to do it in your own order is fine but also the fact that there is kind of like an agreed upon order to play the game is perfectly fine too yeah i i kind of enjoy the idea that like
i'm figuring out my way and some levels might be real like i might have a really hard time on cut man and then come in and talk to you and you'll be like oh that was easy for me because i had to like i love the idea that like we might have different experiences where like me playing this level was completely different than you yeah like a zelda situation where a lot of the way that you get right by pages through word of mouth yeah yeah and and and there is a lot of um a word of
mouth here because it's not necessarily that you need a specific ability before a certain point outside of gut man's um ability to pick up the boulders to get the magnet beam yeah otherwise you can just experiment like oh i got the uh elect man beam like now what am i going to do with that like which boss should i face who would be weak to that you know like once you figure out the weakness thing it's like who would be able to be taken down by that and so there some are more clear than others but
there still is some logic to it it's also kind of you know it's it's interesting to go in and like all right i'm gonna try i'm gonna face ice man and i'm gonna try the fire and okay it didn't work i'm gonna try the bombs which you know it doesn't make sense really i don't get how ice beats fire and fire doesn't beat because ice melts into water that puts out the fire right there you go oh you know what
that's absolutely um just doesn't fire melt the ice all right go ahead yeah one quick thing uh uh by akira again talking about enemy placement okay as the program of the game he said that there are four rules to enemy placement in mega man one okay and i'm sure this applies to every other mega man program but here are the four rules you guys give him a grade at the end of how he of how well he
applied the four rules rule number one single weak little enemies would appear in waves of three or four individuals and to the extent possible i didn't i'd avoid mixing up multiple enemies so enemies would come more in like waves so if you have like the penguin who gets shot with one they come three four at a time but if you have like in between that you wouldn't have another enemy you
would deal with those four right to the next set of enemies that makes sense because you'd ideally use the same item or the same power up for each for like the whole league okay right yeah further from that uh rule number two they would all continue to then use the same attack so you wouldn't have in a wave of four enemies four different styles of attack yep rule number three i would use differences in terrain and enemy placement to adjust the difficulty of a given section yeah i think so far this is
not that like who are we to degrade this guy but i think that that's like you're you're not over complicating it you're you you know how to defeat this enemy and it's just little things about the environment that make it different and not like okay now he's throwing all this other stuff at me like what the heck is going on in this game you know yeah it's a lot it's clear and then this last
one i like it i don't know how true it is number four the difficulty of each enemy in the wave would gradually rise but the last enemy to appear would be slightly easier see i i didn't notice yeah i didn't think i knew that was true i didn't notice that either and i think that that's a that's actually like a great idea on paper but how would you enforce that with certain things like is it like would it take slightly one less hit or something no i think it's just the like maybe accessibility
attacking or the like yeah i mean maybe it's not a position of it positioning is more advantageous for you right okay um i think that one of the rules that um he didn't mention that i think should have been is that uh you you should never be in danger the moment you enter the screen because that is something that he would have been he would have broken if that were one of his rules but i think that
that should be a rule in these kinds of games right right is is that and the only time i i can really think of that being enforced in one of his levels is when you're falling uh which which sam was trying to talk about earlier when you're falling you don't know exactly what's gonna be on the next screen when you fall down and a lot of times it spikes but there's also a point that just sticks out to me i think
it's in the cut man level you get to the top of a ladder and there's like a box there as soon as you die once from it or you get hit once from it you know whenever you see that box what to do there's a box there and it shoots out these little like silver pac-man looking things oh yeah and they like arc at you and it just happens immediately so like if you don't know as soon as you get to the top of the ladder to run to the right you're dead it's almost always and now that you mentioned that
i actually thought of a few other instances with those little red spring guys yeah yeah it's almost always though when you're on ladders yeah this game is at its worst when you are on a ladder like many games yeah like life somebody help us with the ladders here you guys know exactly what i'm talking about i hope everybody knows in the elect man stage where those green guys show up on the sides and finally i figured out what you need to do it came to me in a vision and and i'll tell you right now
it didn't make it it made it easier it didn't make it any less like frustrating yeah frustrating because when you get when you get hit on a ladder you fall back down so and those guys just stay on the screen for the most part uh or if you know if enough time happens they'll just come back yeah yeah they'll come back though with enough time so what i wound up doing with them and with most ladder things is that is a perfect opportunity for cut man's ability because you can still use all your
power-ups the same way uh when you're on a ladder shooting from the sides you can't shoot up or down but i get that because you have to use the deep end to go up and down but if you go from the sides it does a great arc that will take out two or three of those guys at a time uh if if you if you aim it properly right i was freezing them and in my head that made a lot of sense because like okay now they can't chase me but like if i could freeze them i could just shoot them and they'd be dead like but uh
i was actually like freezing sounds very valid and then you took me in my in my initial thought was that like if i freeze them and don't kill them they won't return but i don't know why they don't return so i don't know i i basically just took them i took care of them on the ground and then climbed the ladder because i was just not about that yeah and then there's also those guys uh where if you shoot their legs then they then they turn into like helicopter heads and and all
helicopter heads in this game regardless of if they were the ones that walk first and then become helicopter heads whether they're blue or green i hate all those helicopter heads they have like homing attacks yeah yeah the only thing like that in the game the uh the electric power i found was good against them oh yes yes because but that's just because it goes up and out i think i think you know if there's one thing we all recognize that the electric power is just it's true power but didn't
didn't you notice that on the ladders uh if you change power-ups then you fall through the ladder yeah oh i never tried to do that well you have to if you unpause while you're holding up he'll re-grab the ladder immediately i realized that a few times too i was like what the heck is going on yeah yeah i realized that um and we'll get to this when we get to the wily portion i was trying to change between power-ups because you need to kind of use your various power-ups and that wasn't
working out well for me i was like why do i keep falling off this ladder uh but also for falling you fall so fast you fall you just drop sometimes sometimes yes it when you fall off of those uh what do we want to call those those elevator platforms yeah when you fall off of those you that instant taint yeah i know yeah i don't understand why i mean i i understand that like oh we should we should hammer home that you need to have some rhythm if you're going to be on these
moving platforms that drop out from under you um i forgot which level specifically that they were showing up we should we should explain what this is too so basically it's a it's a moving platform like in a mario game uh that at certain points the uh it's on a it's on a track it's on a track and then sometimes the track just goes uh translucent and that means that the platform is going to drop
out down from under you now there's falling there's the fall rate that happens when you jump or you like walk off a ledge and then there's the fall rate if you don't time your jump properly on these platforms and it's just instant death yeah there's no time to react one frame of falling it's like so fast i don't understand why they wanted to punish you that much because i thought that i would have an extra moment to make that jump yeah yeah it's on gut gut man stage and the thing the thing about that that i noticed is that you actually have to jump well before it actually goes into the section where the uh platform would drop you know you have to jump before that because if you try to even jump
like you know right at the minute or something like i don't know why you would but if you try to do that you will fall it will just register it'll pull you down yeah this is one of the things that i thought was a little frustrating in not a good way yeah where i am glad that it showed up at the very beginning of the stage because if this showed up for the first time at the end of the stage and i died from that i would have thrown my controller nobody told me this is how you gotta play this part
so at least like you don't get too punished those little platforms in general were just a real pain like you can only land on the platform part of it and there's the hinge which you actually fall through which you know it's the same color as the rest of the platform right if we're gonna nitpick there's also the uh the idea that sometimes they're not aligned oh and you have to wait forever you have to wait for like the uh uh the harmony not the harmony yeah like the synchronization
to come back and it can take you 30 seconds yeah you might have to stay on one platform that has this pattern of dropping and just keep jumping over and over again until the platform below you gets to a point where you can reach it yeah that was yeah exactly all right uh so i think i think we've we've talked about the stages pretty well let's cover the robot masters
so it's worth mentioning that there is no official like other than speed running there's no like officially agreed upon order for the average player to play through the uh the bosses it's just that once you know like like where you want to start i should say because where you decide to start some people decide to start with ice man some people decide to
start with bomb man some people start with guts man right away you it's up to you i think that those three are the most agreed upon ways to start but i chose bomb man what about you guys who did you go to first i went to cut man only because that's where the cursor that's really good yeah yeah yeah and i just wanted i was just like you know i have no preference on any of these i might as well just start where it's it's the least amount of work
yep yep and so all right but so so cut man i think is uh is a is a good uh robot master fight i think that he's fair enough where like he has one weapon it only fires one projectile it's pretty easy to figure out the arc of the pattern and so that's a fair fight if you just have your blast yeah yeah it's not all you have is the normal blast and i thought i don't know if this is true but i thought maybe they start the cursor on cut man because it's it's like easier than some of the other ones to do with just the blaster yes definitely not fire guy right right and also it's it's interesting that cut man is the first cursor because like i mentioned earlier he has the two boulders in his stage which i don't
think any of the other robot masters do and so that kind of alludes if you did have yeah uh guts man's ability that you would be like oh i need to use these boulders i have this ability here and then you'll find out right away it takes out half his health yeah i didn't even know about that well also then you see it and you go oh you so you see that the first time go to gut man get his power
and then realize what it's for you go back and then you get the magnet um yeah uh yeah the magnet the magnet beam or if you're me you go to guts man and then play four more levels before you realize what his power up does because i was like what it doesn't do anything yeah you didn't watch what he was doing i saw what he was doing but i didn't realize that they were that you thought you were
going to summon a rock yeah well i just didn't see rocks like i didn't know that there were some rocks that were movable yeah i went to walls and tried it i didn't know that there were it's not the most intuitive thing i think like that you know the ability of being like 30 years in the future and watching this stuff on youtube definitely helps like they didn't have that in 80 uh 87 but uh so that that was cut man we we'll cover you know we covered him let's let's cover everybody so who did you guys go to next i went to bomb man bomb man okay joe i did guts man i actually started out going clockwise okay and then it wasn't until i started to realize like okay how much potential there was
right right so uh let's do bomb man then since since sean said it so you have cut man's ability you're fighting bomb man is that a is that a easy fight now is that how do you feel about that i like bomb man because i was able to take him down with just the blaster yeah i mean i i guess i i used the cut man ability but i didn't notice it being all that much better um except the fact that you could
get multiple hits out of it um because i don't think that that's his weakness no it's not yeah it's not uh bomb man's weakness is the fire weapon ah yes yeah which is not something i was not going to save bomb man for later i just didn't feel like it bomb man's ability is less than great uh he's really good for taking care of big enemies yeah because it's a one-hit ko on anything if you can
get that bomb to land correctly but i feel like as a boss fight his is the the most removed from the other ones because he throws a bomb it usually goes across the screen it feels semi-targeted at you i think it's it's targeted at wherever you were at a certain keyframe that makes sense okay so and then it does that and then it's a very big blast range but other than that you're not so much
focusing on the bombs as you are just on his jumps your jumps from side to side and stuff like that i feel like uh cut man bomb man uh they are they are easier uh they are the easier robot masters and it makes sense for why we would have them earlier in our list of who we would take down okay who do you take next i think i went uh electric man electric man okay so you have a man yeah a man okay a
man i think is where things start to get yeah i think he's tough even his level is challenging his whole level is challenging forget that so you're going into this with with very little health and hopefully you'll just die and then start at the screen yeah hopefully you have enough lives left over or whatever and then you just go back in with a full health bar uh who did you guys so if you have just bomb man and cut man here uh elect man is going to be a fairly easy fight because the cut man's ability is the best thing to use right yeah and i wasn't even sure is it is it best to use because of the damage i just used it because of the layout of this level i wanted to hit him while he's below
me right and the cut man's person the cut man's power up it's like a boomerang it goes in like an arc well he's actually weak to it so i think that that's better yeah that matters but yeah to your point it's like the again this is another example of the level design almost encouraging it though saying like you know you used it just out of intuitiveness of being like i want to be on the high ground exactly below but like in a way i wouldn't be surprised to find out that they designed it that way yeah probably so you would make things to try it yeah right because otherwise who else's ability are you going to use that would allow for you to like take advantage of being on the high
ground bomb man i guess yeah i guess that's the other one you know which is something that we also have at this point so we're doing a great order uh but i do feel like elect man is the first one that even if you uh have the the strong power-ups that are required you can't defeat this guy so easily you you it it's it's a bit of a long fight because you have to dodge the elect man it goes all over
since you're coming up a ladder before you get into the screen where you fight him you come up the ladder the little the little scene plays out where he appears and then as soon as the gameplay starts you have like an instant of reaction time before he hits you with like the hardest attack that he does the whole fight it takes down like half your health where the other ones don't take down that much
and i was totally prepared for that like bridge to not form and just to have to like have this gap in the middle of the and i was like that's gonna be weird what happens if i fall down do i have to like restart the fight uh thankfully they closed that gap i did this is this is maybe even more straight thought territory but speaking of those bridges i did even notice that in there's one one i don't remember which one it is one boss where you come from the top and you couldn't possibly get back up there but a bridge still forms and i just thought that was nice yeah it was nice that they kept
it as like a thing that happens no matter what going into the more general thing then we can continue with yeah no worries go for it um i i do like that uh that repetition of as soon as you see that door um from like the regular the regular level you see that door and you get this little tunnel yeah i did like that as a warning and uh as a okay that's over now i can focus on this one anime and and that's a very like big thing in the megaman community is that that um that gate but also a lot
of people love jumping into that gate no it's a great feeling freeze frame yeah scrolls over another another crunchy uh feeling yeah and that that continued unfortunately stopped at megaman 11 megaman 11 and i i feel like they have to add this as like a patch if they haven't already but megaman 11 if you jump it will actually drop you first and then swap the screen over it doesn't do the iconic freeze frame and it's like you knew what you were doing yeah you didn't mistakenly program right the fans are wrong right the fans are always wrong did you notice that they never
they're never right there's never a moment where the creators have been like yes that's why we gotta tunnels though i thought are really fun because it kind of trains you for the for the boss because they're always the enemies in there are always just like those old like you know smoke detectors or the little sprinklers that come out of you sprinkler is a better idea yeah i think sprinkler is closer um and it's more about i feel like you you don't really have to shoot them you just have to dodge them um which i feel like prepares you to be dodging the boss coming up yeah i don't know if it's like
i don't know how close it is between like what they what they're preparing you for oh no i don't think it's that yeah it's just like for reaction yeah i was gonna say for reaction and to sean's point like motif too of just like every time you're gonna walk through these tunnels you know you're coming up on the boss it would kind of suck if you were just like all of a sudden like in the middle of the stage yeah the boss presented itself you're ready you can prepare yourself all right so we've taken down bomb man cut man and elect man who are you going for next if you're not saying guts man
there's something wrong with you you need that for to get the mag beam anyway right well i don't think you would know that i just organically went guts man because i was going clockwise so luckily i got that but you wouldn't necessarily know until you went through the stage if you skipped guts man wait a second the magnet gun is in the like man stage so you would have already missed it right right you would have already missed it now you know to go back i see what you're saying yeah even if you don't know i'm just saying let's just talk about it let's just talk about it let's just talk
time in the boss fight that we've mentioned that it's frustrating yeah it's it's terrible that um i it took me a while to realize that you could uh dodge the uh the shock yes but how though i couldn't when he lands when he lands not when he starts i was syncing up with him thinking like okay he jumps so now i should jump and that's not gonna work and again not like i think that's the wrong wording you have to you have to make sure you're already in the air when he lands yeah i don't know i feel like i was getting it he lands and then i would land but i would still land at the end of it so i'd
still get knocked over you know it's it's definitely tough but i think that the hardest part from this whole thing comes from the fact that you have to watch his jump know not to jump when he jumps but to know when he's finishing his jump then jump then assuming that you didn't get the shock dodge his his boulder that he throws at you yeah which does a few hits oh uh what you throw you throw the bomb yeah and then you throw the bomb yeah i thought you meant he threw a bomb i was like oh my gosh
you're on hard mode yeah he throws the boulder you throw the bomb it's like you have to do that all like i think at least three to four times for the bomb yeah and the boulder breaks into three three pieces and spreads out like it's hard to dodge it's a light shot closer to you too and you're kind of like it's hard to jump over him and stuff megaman's jump isn't really like a high jump it's more like a leap yeah it's a prince yeah it's a prince though and it is kind of a branch the way he like puts his arms in the air and stuff like that he lands with both legs it's always that one front foot up higher and he's got his arms out it's very majestic yes and no majestic's a good word too sure it
looks like rafiki's holding him up but in the air anyway he's being lifted i i just thought that guns man was a was a surprise here just because there's there's a three-step mechanic here everybody else it's just been dodge their weapon and shoot them instead this is dodge their their first attack dodge their boulder dodge their boulders like scattered parts and then shoot them yeah it's a it's a bit much but at least it's still like it's still creative in a way oh no it's yeah don't get me wrong it's a great fight yeah i just i think i need a little more real estate on the screen exactly yeah at this point you're dealing with like you know five boulders across is like your your max
we're gonna measure in boulders all right so after guts man uh let's see joe would have done ice man and so i would have also done ice man i think that's at this point you got to do ice man so but you also went back and got the magnet beam so let's talk about all right i hadn't either we have to talk about so we're gonna talk about it i'm just saying i know i think it's saying i used the magnet all three of you women all three of you found out about magnet beam only once you got to wiley and figured out
like oh i need i okay so as i was going through a lecman's level i saw it and then i was like oh that must be one of those uh those like bonus weapons that which is interesting that you knew about that that is a thing that happens in megaman yeah just like later yeah um so i just never thought to go back also because i didn't really know that you could go back after you beat them
um so i just went the rest of the way without magnet beam it's also interesting that you brought that up we need to talk about this for a minute not knowing that you could go back when you beat them because there's actually absolutely no reason to ever go back unless it's for the magnet unless it's for the magnet beam and so it's almost like a more intuitive thing would have been to lock off everybody else except for if you didn't get the magnet beam and just put the icon yeah that's your boss in there instead and be like don't forget pick this up i don't know yeah yeah so at that point on electric
man looking but looking back on it i should have figured this out at this point but i still think i didn't know what boulder man's or whatever his name guts man guts man thing did so i was like oh there's a thing i can't get to must be some secret way to get to but i don't care and then i cared never made fun of joe for saying boulder man because that's a much better name than guts guy look there's been like several dozen of these games i'm sure they had a boulder man and wouldn't surprise me i mean they're using pretty basic elements already you just wore a boulder cap
that was just yeah you've already wasted ice man and fire man in your very first game you know it's like now you can't use those again like yeah what did they have snowman flame man probably that'd be really cool snowman with the carrot nose shoots shoots carrots projectile and then it's cold on fire so you're saying in this scenario the weapon you unlock is just carrots well yeah absolutely and you eat them your eyesight is way better yeah you're using the game blurry before you get carrots
uh but also since we're talking about the magnet beam right now i gotta bring up guys that the magnet beam is op it's awesome you guys are you not using it correctly yeah as long as you hold it down it will continue to shoot a very long line you can skip a lot of things for i skipped almost every kind of like falling thing or uh i skipped those uh those platforms yeah i was just skipping everything and anything under the sun you didn't even want to play the game i see i didn't realize that until afterwards and i was watching a video about it i was like what the heck is this guy doing
but i yeah i only use screen hacks i only use the magnet beam in like the one spot that you have to use it and i saw that it could be useful later but i would just also weird there that there's not like a a text box queue yeah like get the magnet beam i was going back up through the level i was like where do i go right or put the magnet beam in the wily stage yeah this is i know they really screwed up you guys like we can't let it is it seems also it could be a kind of deal where you don't need it to
finish the game but it would really help right but instead you do right no that's what i'm saying that's what i'm saying you're making a good point yeah you're making a good point and uh i know in later megaman games you're almost talking about bonus power ups and stuff that that is a thing like in megaman x you can get the hadouken yeah it's pretty cool yeah like yeah that's awesome okay what did you think it was from no like that's that was like yeah that one yeah that exact thing you can do it and you have to do it the same way you do in street fighter to perform that it's crazy
anyway uh actually i don't know how true that last part is so don't come after me no we're always a great source of misinformation yes absolutely uh all right so you ice man we didn't even talk about his fight i think it was kind of bullshit if you don't have um elect man's weapon at that point uh it's it's very precise jumping and dodging yeah i didn't think i had i mean i did have a hard time with this but i had a harder time i don't think it was the hardest one i won't get to the next one yeah it's good it's the hardest one we're saving the hardest one for last yeah it was it was
annoying but but now in the shadow of this unmentioned one it wasn't as bad but ice man i think i you know here's the problem i have with him is like the the way that the shot that they could have just spaced them out a little further if they just would have spaced them out a little further because for those of you that don't know he shoots one high one middle and one low so you might as well just lay low for a while and then you have to kind of figure this perfect jump between the middle and the low one and and then jump right they're staggered a little bit right they're just slightly staggered
they should be staggered more you should okay uh but if you're into this kind of thing this is where i first learned about uh the ultimate cheese in this game which is oh yeah which is uh i think taken out in all future iterations of the game but as we mentioned earlier the reason why select is also a pause is not really explained but it's a pause that pauses the screen like a normal pause screen whereas the start button takes you to a menu so when you pause using select you can
actually frame buffer and sometimes that's just useful in general to like go in a certain direction or dodge a certain attack if you have like if you get hit by something you can increase your invincibility like tech though like it's very like smash brothers wave dashing right right yeah that that part is but this this part of like if you use a like man's beam and shoot it at ice man and hit select exactly where it hits him and then just tap select as fast as possible almost like
like that if you do that terrible noise it is a terrible noise but if you do it like that you'll actually occasionally generate frames where it will register another hit yeah under the same you know attack yeah and thus you can take out ice man in a single blow this is cheating this is not like a technique it's just cheating warning once you know this you can't play the game without it most likely and you will you continue to use it for the rest of the game across all the other bosses as well you can't help yourself what you know about it it's like owning a game genie and not using it you know like if you had a game genie back in the day why weren't you using it
so that said uh i just felt like we needed to talk about that because you need to get it off your chest that's but that's also like one of the first instances i can think of of a glitch that's accessible to everyone anyone under the sun people's glitch yeah you can perform that glitch though there are some glitches in earlier nes games that we played already that are like exclusive to talented speed runners you know like they use a certain glitch and they yeah or task bots and they just beat things automatically you know they execute code in the game that takes them right to the credits
okay that those kind of things happen and they're not performable by normal people this is something where it's like hey you know if you hit the select button as soon as it hits them you could probably hit them again you know i just think that's crazy that it was in there and uh who's testing this like how that that's a tough one that i mean not a tough one but that's like not like one of those one that's one of those things how did they miss this yeah it's like i can understand maybe they didn't notice this until i saw it on youtube i never would have thought to pause or admit attack um i i didn't use it on
ice man but i will i did eventually use it on someone and that's someone being fire no oh well we're still gonna talk about fireman yeah i still don't talk about fireman i'm just saying it wasn't fireman i used it on because ice man has this thing where like he's a hard fight because his dodge window is kind of like it's not great you know like you have to time it well and then as soon as you get over the hump you can shoot him again and get over the next one right fireman is not fun in the sense that no matter what you do you will get hit you will have to just continue to get hit yeah i really can't give away the dodge they show it to you though like they have a point in the level where
the same thing happens there's like those pipes with the fires going through yeah and i'm like what am i supposed to do about this do you know what i don't know that you were supposed to just run in the right at the right moment the right moment is too small like yeah that's what i'm saying yeah yeah the right moment is way too small it can't be done you've done it i think i mean i did i
mostly died on it but i done it by accident yeah definitely okay interesting because in that section people are like oh how do you get past that i i learned if that was the training section right yeah to learn how to combat the fire thing i learned instead oh this is a great time to use the magnet beam and skip that whole thing i went over to the left hand side and just skipped it all i
just kept building little platforms for myself i didn't see that as training you for because i thought it was a whole different method of what what you what i thought you were supposed to do at that moment was different than because i don't think you're supposed to know that this is the training right right but you're talking about where it's like the fire is going in a circle right it's going
through those pipe tubes uh it's going through the pipes and then there's like a gap in the pipes that you can uh that you can walk through as it comes there's no there's nothing else for you to be talking about you're talking about yeah okay it must be yeah so yeah you you you're supposed to like run at least i thought you were supposed to run as like in between now impossible yeah you'll get it
impossible no no i'm not like i'm saying you might have gotten lucky but i'm saying that too i'm not saying i was but what's the lesson i never learned i i thought that that was what it's supposed to be like that like you get these little like here's what the boss might be like like this is a thing right but how do you dodge any of the attacks i don't know it's like it's a it's a problem without a solution and i say that as somebody who watched the youtube video of a guy who did it with no damage and i said well that's just not possible like that guy is injecting toad he just jumped in between he's jumping perfectly in between things and they're so fast and there's the fire when you land
there's three fires and credit he throws three and they're high it's not like it's not easy to jump over either i mean it's a it's a they're like pillars of fire i'm frustrated right now just talking about it i hope the listeners can tell that uh because i'm all over the place right now but just to go over what fireman is actually doing he shoots three like fire arc beam things at you and as each
one like as it passes it forms a little fire on the ground that will also hit you so it's like to add insult to injury it's not that like you can't you know you have to jump over all three of them but then you also have to avoid the new fire that seems to always be placed right under where you're gonna land yeah like you can jump and you have to jump forward you can't jump back because then one
of the later ones will hit you thank goodness that uh he's weak to iceman's weapon and that you probably have to hit him like four times but i think just go into the fight with full health and just try to shoot him to death yeah don't even try to dodge just keep shooting yeah and if it comes down to it cheese it cheese it 420 cheese it uh so that's uh that's the robot masters you take down all six of them and now you're uh the fully powered mega man or macho man macho man as as sean wanted
to call him what do you uh what do you think about all that now that you have all the powers and that you're like going into the dr wiley stage do you feel more complete do you feel like are you really feeling it yeah like i guess what i'm asking is like you've had you've slowly been acquiring the power-ups i didn't feel any more powerful now that i have all six at my disposal i i maybe maybe i felt it like it was really cool that i had this arsenal now i did feel like in a story sense i felt like yeah i'm ready to go take on dr wiley this gets done and this gets done more uh well more better
gets done better it gets done better in in like future releases of the game like when you are x and you end up with this fully decked out suit you can like you can uh do do the uh uh you can go low and then you got like you just got all these like cool powers but that you can use concurrently like that is what i think that they were going for in this game but because they are all separated by
this mode that you have to go into a menu to change like it's not entirely the same right um but no i mean i felt like all right i've i've acquired these skills and i know how to use them now what to watch out for like what they can counter i i just thought it was cool that like this because it's been like a select screen this whole time that there's this new secret that's secret right
but now it's in the middle and it says dr wiley and you see this guy who's bald down the middle but has a parting hair on each of his sides and i think we'll best start this section with another quote from akira okay and uh he says two of my personal goals for megaman were to create a game where all the stages could be cleared in an hour what do we think of that assessment could you now knowing all the information you have could you beat all six stages in an hour yeah probably i think so if you were really good at the game six stages in an hour a piece right an hour all together i think if you're like to sean's point if you're really good in the game if you know if you know what you're doing
yes okay and uh so it was where all the stages could be cleared in an hour and to make something that players would want to come back to again and again to that end i actually calculated the total number of stages by measuring megaman's walking speed and seeing how long it would take to get through each stage i then split that up so that the first half of the game would be the robot master
stages and the second would be the wily stages so akira actually thinks of the game as two separate acts yeah act one is actually you just like you know like it's almost the tutorial for the second half where you're learning how to use each character's power-ups how to deal with different types of enemies uh different different puzzles and stuff like that and then the second act once you
get to the wily thing it's actually four stages like hidden in there yeah so it's four stages and that's where you actually now it's like the mastery test you know you you're doing your mark of mastery where you have to uh show off everything that you've learned in the first six stages in these next four that are pretty brutal nice mark of mastery yeah okay i'm glad that you i took me a second yeah um i see that makes so much sense that he said that because that's what i've been thinking as i was playing it the whole time it felt like i thought i was almost done with the game but then when i got to the dr wily stage
i feel like this is the part that keeps you coming back to the game over and over again like trying to beat it later you know that it probably takes a while when you first start to to play the first six stages but this is the part where i feel like you and your friends or whatever you try and keep coming back to trying to say that you see if you can even beat it yeah like this is the part
where it feels like it's the challenge it's really good pacing i don't think it's perfect pacing i think that the last half being railroaded um is not the best like uh ratio i think if it were you get a little bit more time in this whole uh choose where you want to go um and then maybe like the last third is more like that right it still has that weight to it but i believe that will wound up happening is
is and and you know obviously later megaman games do have more but for the current like understanding of capcom's programmers they ran out of space on megaman one and so that's probably why that wound up happening because they couldn't program any additional stuff uh i'll mention that one more time when we get to it uh there's a funny reason for how i know that but we should just talk about the the wily stage as a as like a whole thing as a whole piece because did you guys see it more as
separate stages or like a boss rush section of the game i thought of it more as a boss rush with platforming sections yes i think that's a fair assessment because i didn't i didn't really have any difficulty with the actual like platforming parts of it it was more of the same yeah that we were seeing there was no like uh unless you don't have that yeah if you don't have the magnet beam yes
but i guess what i mean is that there's no like the wily stages should almost have all six stages elements mixing with each other now right and they don't really do that it's kind of like whatever you know it's just like its own motif and conceit i think it could either be like there there are two reasons why that that could be it could be either they didn't think of it or clarity
again like with his philosophy of these enemies should only be doing one thing at a time and you should only be dealing dealing with one obstacle really at a time so maybe that's why yeah i guess it would be confusing if you have like the platforms from um bomb man stage and then you have the fire from fireman stage and you're dealing with both of them at the same time but i wouldn't have i wouldn't have hated it yeah i would have thought that was pretty neat it probably would have been a lot harder
yeah uh but the actual bosses in the wily section are where like the actual like the real bosses come into play so this first boss this it's like this big orange cyclops guy we call him the yellow devil the yellow devil yellow devil and he's famous in video game history uh for being that freaking hard i think yeah i think he was the heart's boss right and we like this is the one that i cheesed i think
it's up there i mean i i had to play this a different way just to even get to that part right um but uh i i mean i had only seen him uh i had only seen him in the past in smash brothers so i already knew like what he was going to do but i feel like if i were getting to this point in the game i had no prior knowledge i i wouldn't know what to do yeah the problem is is that it's twofold with yellow devil
one is that there is a solution right it's there's a pattern to how the blocks he bait for those of you that don't know the yellow devil is this cyclops like creature that is made of like a goo let's say that breaks off from one end of the stage and goes over to the other side in pieces and you those pieces can hit you and if they do you you take damage so you have to dodge each of them that said a lot of megaman players know that there is a pattern and they've gotten the pattern down after playing this
game for 30 years i don't know how long it takes to actually learn this pattern and also you can't play it's not like you just sit down and say all right i'm just gonna face him over and over again you don't give it all your lives and you start back at the beginning of the level you gotta play through that level again right not that it's a hard level but it it separates yeah you don't get to develop muscle memory exactly exactly right and so i think that yes the yellow devil is best solved
with the cheesing that you did and the only i mean i i i like to think i wouldn't have cheesed earlier bosses but really the only reason i didn't cheese earlier bosses because i didn't know about it until this point but um yeah so i did eventually beat him with the cheese it's very easy with the cheese the thunder beam is the best option it only takes seven hits um the rolling cutter firestorm and even your regular mega buster only take 14 hits and that said don't try bombs yeah because you gotta hit
him in the eye yeah and the thing we didn't mention about this is every time he does he moves from one side of the screen to the other which is a a good at least 10 seconds of needing to dodge he will open his eye for one second and allow one hit then he will close his eye again and do the thing again yeah so you only so you basically have to dodge it seven times exactly if you're playing a normal playthrough of it you have to do at least seven dodges yeah at least seven dodges of like 12 things a lot it yeah it's a lot too it's not i would have accepted maybe like four dodges this is we're talking about like what eight yeah and it's like the timing is very perfect yeah it'd be cool if you
could like jump onto the pieces as they come you know together well you know what that just reminded me too of one section that we didn't really talk about because i kind of eventually solved it with the magnet beam but the the the appearing blocks in the stages not to go back to that but we have to now because we didn't talk about it oh right the blocks that appear in an order and then you have to learn their pattern and stuff there are still some where you just have to just take a blind leap
of faith and yeah but it's after you've seen the cycle that was one thing when i was playing i was thinking in my head like this is going to be one thing i'm going to mention that is frustrating and unfair and it's stupid but then after i was playing it and i was like getting you know i was like at first i was like this is dumb but then like once i was playing i was like as challenging as it is and as hard as it is like i think it works i think it actually like it's satisfying to figure it out and learn the reason i thought it was stupid was because the first one that i that i attacked there's those
little like roomba things on the floor yeah and i didn't know you could kill those things so i was just like it's one thing to figure out this pattern but when this thing below me is just instant death or like and you're you're also slower and then it's also in water yeah yeah so once i realized you can kill those things i was like okay this is actually like a pretty learnable puzzle that i don't have to keep coming back to after dying right right and you wouldn't know that you could kill them if you
weren't experimenting with the power up so again another reason to just always try the power ups on everything and see what works i definitely agree with sean you just have to kind of like learn them uh how the blocks appear and stuff i didn't mean blindly but faith to the next platform like you'll know where the platforms are appearing but i did hate the one specifically where you'd have to wait for the platform you're currently on to disappear for the next one i was stuck there for a while uh because again i didn't have i didn't have the magnet beam um but it yeah it took me like five cycles
to to final understand like oh there is a way over there because there's also some of them that make it seem like you go on one to get out of the little pit and it doesn't so you'll try that over and over but that's at the end of one sequence so you have to keep trying to get to the final one and then you do it and you said oh maybe i just did that one wrong and it turns out that you're just
the wrong way entirely yeah exactly it's it's yeah i think we give this game a lot of credit but there is a lot of frustration mixed in that isn't just like oh this is my fault whether it's your fault or not or not it is still frustrating yeah definitely there's there's a lot of um a lot of learning for mega man to do i definitely don't think that they're coming out of the gate i think they're coming out of the gate here with a very uh successful formula yeah like that we haven't
seen a game play out like this on the nes yet and it's kind of amazing to just have this pop up out of the blue with no like even smaller precursor you know it's like right off the bat like you were talking about in the very beginning of the episode sean the ability to just pick your own adventure and say like i want to go here first and then there and like oh i remember playing fireman he
was really hard so i'm not gonna i'm gonna save him for last you know being able to do that is crazy because in certain games that we played some bosses are harder than others and they come in earlier and you just never get past them yeah you know you never get to see stage four because you die on stage two so it's nice to have that option but you also get to see your old friends again in wiley's uh
fortress two where you get to run into cut man and then elect man thankfully not to together we can't imagine we would be able to take both of them at the same time but they're really not that different right no than their previous encounters they just don't have the um they don't have the layouts the layouts are different they're just square rooms this time and so how did we feel
about them again like fighting them again i i thought it was i mean i don't know if it was just like uh because this is the ultimate test you have to fight them again but because an incomplete roster i i thought it was odd that it's just these two i thought it was well i think it's just strange in general that you've defeated them we saw them explode and then they show up again i i would
have much preferred you know if we can reveal what's left of wiley stage i would have just preferred to keep the original and the original bosses that are unique to these levels because that already feels like enough of a challenge honestly yeah definitely you know i don't think that all six boss robot masters coming back was necessary because yeah in wiley fortress 3 you fight the other um the other bosses oh yeah you're right i mean i guess i just mean that um there is a like it's not a storytelling technique but the the fact that like you are revisiting these uh these enemies that you have triumphed over and and having to face them again it usually ends up like when i've seen this in other games it's
in a different context and not just because it's like square shaped room but either they're more powerful or they have another trick up their sleeve or you have uh more power that you can deal with them a different way yeah so it's it's odd that like they have one part of this formula but not the other right yeah it does feel like it's kind of just a way to like wear you down yeah yeah and not like not as thought out as a lot of the other i wasn't thrilled to see them again let me put it that way yeah i know i know that this happens in other games too like not even just other mega man games just other games in general that's like a thing where it's like oh you want to take on the final boss
prove you can beat all the previous bosses again like in a row i thought of uh kirby yeah me too kirby does that yep absolutely but what's it what's really cool about this uh fortress 2 is that after you take on those two guys you get to fight yourself right that was like a disco room like you got all kinds of like colorful squares squares well okay i know what you're it actually looks like a disco yeah yeah it's it's like it's like these pantone colors like uh you have like pink green and light blue baby like they're all baby colors yeah it's like it's such a fun room compared to like cyan magenta and neon green let's say yeah uh sure cmy k yeah there you go um and you fight the the cop they call
him copy robot i just called him like you know mega man because he looks just like dark macho man dark macho man uh and he switches to whatever power up you're currently using too so if you start using if you're like seeing him as cut man and you're like i should use switch to elect man it's like nope don't worry about it because now he's elect man too i thought that was cool no i love that i think i think it's actually a very challenging interesting boss fight it's just a fun idea in general that said what's interesting about uh copy robot is that another limitation of like that they had run out
of programming space is that they just had to use elect man's data uh yeah like like his behaviors other than like switching part it's his it's his behaviors uh jumping around the room and stuff like that that he performs the same way they couldn't program uh something unique for him okay but copy robot i thought i thought that was a very see that's what i'm saying though if you have yellow devil for fortress one copy robot for fortress two and now on fortress three you get to the boss named cwu dash zero one p which is actually just uh like a like a processor
chip it looks like floating around the screen if those are the only bosses you fight i'm still fine with the wily stages yeah they're fine i don't think you needed the robot masters to come back there's also less like pomp and circumstance to these bosses like to the to the repeat bosses it just feels like they just show up where the other ones it's like feels like a boss battle it feels like you're stopping down and like here we're gonna stop and have a boss battle right i would have liked some like giant statues of that you know and then they come right for something yeah it's also like you know we didn't mention this but you just fall through a trap door and then you're fighting cut man again it's like
there's no the you know forget about the pomp and circumstance there's also no indication that you're about to go to a boss right we love the tunnel now it's just like oops trap door i i that's another part of the whole like there there's a different way to do a boss rush that makes it feel more uh show me what you got yeah exactly like there's that feeling of revenge sometimes even if there isn't text saying that oh i'm here for revenge like the the the whole like slapdash nature of it just takes away from any kind of uh storytelling power it would have had i just realized uh through this is not related to anything you just said but that copy robot should have been called nega man that would have been
great uh i you know ideally say that boy shut your mouth okay okay um so this next boss cwu-01p he's this processor chip that just floats around the screen i didn't care for this uh this is this is like silly you have to defeat him seven times uh and gut gut man's ability finally comes into play again with the boulders that are in this room uh each version of cwu is faster than the one before it's like ideally the whole thing no i don't know what you're talking about oh yeah sorry each version of the television network there's zero one p oh uh each version of him is faster than the one before
it so you want to kill the first three like the normal way and then use gut man's ability of just like throwing the boulder at them for one hit kaos to finish him i think that if anything cwu should have came before all the other ones it feels like yellow devil should actually be the final boss that should be like like a bonus boss yeah like you defeat wiley and then he drinks this thing that turns him into yellow devil you know that would have been interesting but alas we don't have that
instead we get wiley fortress four and you have to fight bomb man fire man ice man and guts man and then it's like okay cool is that the end of the game psych no it's not you got to fight dr wiley himself did anybody get to this part nope i did not no okay uh i i did but i saw it with my own eyes yeah uh i i would just say that i didn't do i did do it the cheesy way uh yeah there came a point where it was
just like i really need to experience the end of this game i'm not good enough to get through these wiley stages so i started using the select thing on almost every single boss i have no shame i'm glad that i completed the game and it's kind of fun to run you know right it's also funny because i feel like dr wiley for as cool as that like spaceship thing he's in is that robotnik thing yeah as cool as that
is it's uh it's a pretty easy boss fight compared to what you've been going up against yeah it looked like it with with with more time it wouldn't have been so hard to beat him without that that's the same philosophy that he said it was one of his rules like the final thing has to be easy that's true i didn't think of that also yeah if you've defeated everything else that dr wiley has done at you this should be a moment of desperation for wiley he shouldn't reveal himself to be like all
powerful because then why didn't he just take it out take you out to begin with it's funny because it reminded me of this is such a non-sequitur but it reminded me of crash bandicoot because they do that the final boss is always a little less hard than the second to last boss oh yeah you told me that yeah when we were playing through uh the trilogy uh ps4 right right thanks for the invite yeah
well we lived together at the time now yeah now everybody knows that sean doesn't get invited to a thing so i don't know if they needed to know that uh speaking of which you were not invited to dr wiley's fiesta where he just shoots projectiles at you you dodge them you shoot them with your own thing usually the the elect beam or the cut man thing cut man's rolling cutters are really good here because they register for like several hits yeah because of the way it goes so you don't even have to cheese it you can just cheese it be a game organic yeah that's grated cheese right there
and uh he doesn't take that many hits and it's nice enough that if you die to dr wiley and still have lives left over you just start in the screen right before him huh so you can just go right back to it so it's almost like in a way they just wanted you to be done with you know they're like get over with can you just beat this old man up please will somebody just beat this old man
and uh doing that causes dr wiley to fall down to the ground and he like begs for forgiveness and honestly based on the fact that we know mega man 2 through 11 are coming it seems like mega man gives it to him which is kind of weird yeah and then he just runs home and then he just runs forever he runs uh all the way do you want to talk about it i feel like sure yeah i feel like you loved the ending i do i do like the ending quite a bit he so first of all first of all we should talk
about the uh the message you get right yes so let me just pull it up here dr wowie no no i'll read it why is um elmer fun in this game okay joe what's the actual ending sequence mega man has ended the evil domination of dr wiley and restored the world to peace i gotta play it it's a video that's a long that's out there however however the never-ending battle continues until all destructive forces are defeated the game gives you a lot of time to read this because i'm reading it and it's still up here
uh here we go fight mega man for everlasting peace i think it's pretty uh fight forever well said like that almost sounds like uh i didn't beat the game yeah like there's more destructive there's more coming like okay then mega man uh you see mega man up here he starts running to the left and he runs for a while it's kind of a cool little what was that parallax scrolling you see as the credits are rolling it's a for an intended for an nes game it's a pretty cool credit it reminds me of
um when you're training in um in mike tyson's punch out you know when you're like on the bike yeah yeah he's on the bike i mean i will actually end up in the city in a minute there isn't a lot of parallax going on there but i know what you mean is that not parallax no it is kind of okay but anyway so he's running and the sunset gets gradually uh darker and darker until it turns green yeah and you're silhouetted behind the sun which i think is cool yeah that's great for the great reveal yeah where he apparently while he was running while you couldn't see he takes off his suit
and he's just a kid or just i don't know he's just astro boy yeah he looks like astro boy uh which is weird because that's also um you know a japanese property and so it's like they just stole directly from that but like also what is this what is the implications that mega man could take off his armor is he like actually just that's what i was confused i thought he was a robot i thought the armor was like part of him he's an android boy you know it's nice to see dr light there he was talked about in the in the manual who the hell is that girl i know she's roll but like we only know that from future games they never mentioned her in the manual she's not on the back of the box she's not on anything it's
just like there's your girlfriend like i don't know who is that i think yeah i know they're really unclear about that but i feel like i wonder what the manual for the japanese version has to say about the backstory because maybe they mentioned it in that yeah it didn't change the game at all right right right i i mean like i like that they're both there it's nice and i also like that mega man it
does like a freeze frame in the air to end the game like he's he's jumping yeah he's like hara yeah hara but also in the same kind of pose that you do when you jump into the boss fights as the ladder opens up and then the sorry the door opens up and then swipes you to the next screen yeah no ladders in this game i don't like that i don't like ladders in this game there's a lot of ladders in this game
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um!! Thank you.
And that's the game in a nutshell. You know, we've really gone over like every single part of it. You know, we've talked kind of how we feel about certain parts, whether it's the Robot Masters or Wily's Fortress or just like inscrutable things. The societies of Monstropolis. Yeah, the seven secret societies of Monstropolis. But how do we feel about the overall difficulty of this game? Is this Nintendo hard? Is this hard in general? Will this be hard for people today? Was it hard compared to games back then? I'm giving you a whole range of things. Just tell me what you're feeling. I'm going to say yes to all.
I think it's hard on its own. I think it's Nintendo hard. But I also think in the way that it's something that can be learned, you know, and I feel like the more time that you spend with it, the easier it gets. But it's still, you know, it's still like little things will make you fail. But those are just things that you kind of get used to.
Or you get used to the frustration you feel when they happen. Yeah. Because this is hard all around the board. I know that we always say that like hard games that are good are hard in a fair way. And yeah, most of the time Mega Man is hard in a fair way. But there are times where it doesn't feel fair.
Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And I think like to bring up the frustration point, there was a point where I said to myself, maybe I'm just not made out for these Mega Man games. Like I remember playing the Anniversary Collection on GameCube and like I sucked at all six of them. I felt like, oh, maybe the sixth one will be easier. You know, like there's been enough time now. Maybe they've understood the mechanics.
They're all just as hard. And it's like maybe that happens. But I also want to like for people who feel like they're just not good at Mega Man games, I do want to say that there's hope for you. It will be less fun than people who are just inherently good at these games. There are people out there who just like master these Mega Man games. And when like a new one comes out, they take everything they've learned from the previous ones and just kind of like roll through.
But they got to just roll through all the games, you know, again and stuff like that. And that's okay too. There's nothing wrong with not being good at a particular genre. Or a particular franchise. And I think it's harder because Mega Man is like, you know, it's such a beloved franchise in video gaming. It has such a story and history that it almost feels like, well, if I want my gamer's license, I need to play the Mega Man games. You're supposed to have played them. Right, you're supposed to have played them. And it's fine either way, I think. I think it's difficult, but it's fun. Would you guys agree? Yeah. Absolutely. Cool.
We've been playing throughout this episode a lot of music. Maybe more so than on any episode we've done otherwise. Like Mega Man music, I think all these tracks are just insane good. Like, I would jam out to them on my headphones without playing the game. Yeah. There's always that in, like, these games. There's always, even in the games with good music, there's always that one where it's just like, is that just noise? Or they're just like sounds, like beeps and sounds. Every single song in this game sounds like a deliberate music track. And they all have, like, length to them. Yeah. A lot of games that we've played are, like, two bars. Yeah. This is like a minute 30 on each track.
Proper tracks. Right. Proper tracks. And also, like, there were certain stages when I was restarting the game or going back to a previous stage to just continue playing it. There are certain things that, like, it's just satisfying when you start up again on that stage and you hear the music and you're like, oh, I'm so glad I get to hear this track again. Yeah. Yeah, the stage kind of sucks.
I hate, like, you know, how difficult this game is. But the music, like, welcomes you back in. It makes you feel good. It, like, fits the experience, too. It feels action-y and cool and awesome. And you're doing awesome things. It keeps your motivation relatively high. Yeah. Yeah, I'd say that the music in this one is just as good as, you know, like a Super Mario Brothers, A Legend of Zelda, Metroid, a... 1942. Yeah.
Mike Tyson's Punch-Out had great music. We liked that music. Like, I'd say this is probably my favorite soundtrack so far on the NES. Wow. Yeah. You are high on a lot of soundtracks. I loved Castlevania. Yeah. Everybody knows how I feel about Castlevania, but I think this music is just slightly better because you don't need to be Dracula to enjoy it.
The Castlevania music is kind of dark and dark and dancey, sure. Like, it has, like, this dance vibe. No, it does have this dance vibe, too. No, I mean, yeah, it definitely has a dance vibe. I just don't know how dark it is. Well, I mean, like, you know, it's as dark as an NES game can get. I just mean, like, there's certain points where it's like, yeah, you probably want to play that music on, like, Halloween and not, like, I'm just walking to work. But it's like, Mega Man, if I'm walking to work, I might accidentally use my power... To throw scissors at someone. Yeah, my power cannon might accidentally turn on my scissor mode
and cut somebody. Music was great, though. Gotta say that. To sum it up, we hate the music. Yes. And one final thought on development from Akira Kitamura. And I know a lot of people are going to be asking, why didn't you grab anything from Inafune?
Well, it's not that I don't like... Inafune's an imposter and you should not like him. It's not that I feel that way. It's that there's so much information available on Mega Man, guys. Guys, there's so much information available that I can't cover it in one podcast. Like, we have to do... We have to start a new podcast. Right, on just Mega Man, right? You could. You could do a whole franchise of, like, here's the Mega Man comics and here's what the Mega Man animes did and here's what the Mega Man... Legends are. Right. Yeah, exactly. There's Mega Man Legends. There's Mega Man X. There's Mega Man Zero. Fan fiction. Mega Man soccer is a thing. Yes, I know you know that.
I know you know that. A weird exchange that just happened. It's true. There's so much to talk about. So I just grabbed this interview because I found it to be, you know, a lot of interviews that we grab are usually terrible.
They're like, well, when we made a game company, we decided that we wanted to make a game and so we made a game and we hoped that people enjoy it. You know, like, that's our usual interview. So I like what Kitamura's bringing to the table here. And so this was just him on the very beginning of Mega Man. After a period of study and working on various projects, the Mega Man development began at Capcom. But as I thought about game design then, I started to wonder if designers had really thought deeply about enemy placement and behavior. I decided to play a bunch of different games and study just those difficult sections,
replaying them over and over. And it was through that that Kitamura learned about specifically placing enemies versus, you know, everything else. Spawning. Yeah, spawning enemies. And I think that there's a very deliberate approach to Mega Man that like, whether it's frustrating or not, it was played through by people who designed them a certain way. This is a guy who also calculated Mega Man's walking speed to figure out if you can beat the whole game in an hour.
All these things kept in mind. I think it's a very polished game in the sense that the designers got what they wanted out of it. You know, given the limitations of the system and their programming knowledge at the time. They definitely felt like they delivered a product to the people. And whether we find that experience frustrating at times, which I certainly did, there's no doubt that like anything that was in this game, they meant to happen outside of like, you know,
glitches and general like errors and stuff like that. You know, I think that for the most part, you might think like, you might disagree with an enemy's placement in this game, but it seems like they really tested that stuff and made sure that it was how they wanted it to spawn into programming. And it's funny because that seems like such a pillar of game design, but it's something that they're like just kind of almost pioneering. I mean, people have done this kind of thing before with enemy placement, but like so many people aren't doing that at this point. Either not thinking of it or not caring to do it,
where it's like makes such a difference in this game. So it's just crazy to me that like, now that seems like a no-brainer, but that they were like thinking, we should plan where the enemy's. Yeah, that's true. It's actually like a breakthrough moment for a game kind of thing. And I appreciate that because if you think about even just the idea of video game programmers at the time playing other people's video games, like how often was that done too? Like how many people that programmed the Karate Kid game, we're picking on it today, how many people that programmed that game played other games around the time that Karate Kid came out and said, ours is a similar experience.
Like who, how many of them did that? I don't know how many of them did that. That's a crap shoot because I feel like it's intellectually disingenuous to say that we think that these programmers did not play video games. Like they had at least, they had to at least know some basics. Sure. To be able to program. I agree. I'm positive they played video games. I'm saying. But as like a study. Yeah. A study is what I'm referring to. I don't know if they were actually thinking of it in a way of like, again, like an intellectual exchange of ideas.
Gleaning concepts from other games and saying like, how can I morph this into something fun and interesting and new? Right. Breaking it down. What about this works and how can we incorporate it into our game? So yeah, I think that that is, that is a good question. I don't know if a lot of the games that we played have gone through that, that process. Right. Any stray thoughts? Oh yeah, I got a stray thought. One thing that I've noticed about a lot of these old games is that there isn't a lot of meta game. And I don't mean that in the actual way that that term is usually used. It's only because I can't really think of the actual, like framing devices, framing devices in a game
where most of these games, you got like the start screen, you just start and it starts the game with maybe a little like quick video. So the idea of like a designed level select and then a designed menu that isn't just like so bare bones. Like there's actual like graphic design put into this game to sort of like guide your, guide your experience. Do you know what I mean? I don't know. I think I'm being a little too.
No, I understand what you're saying. And like also when you select a level, like the boss appears. Yeah. Like this is the guy. You can see the presentation. I don't know why I couldn't just say that. It's like stylized in a very specific way. Stylization of presentation and graphic design. You can sort of see it come out of the primordial ooze of all this really janky utilitarian design.
Like we're just going from, here's the main menu screen and then here's the game. Now there's actual like elements of style coming into how the way it's presenting information. And I'm just glad to finally see some of that stuff. Yeah. It's funny because it's done so well that like I almost, it's almost in the back of my mind. Like I noticed it like subconsciously. It adds to the experience, but I never really thought about that.
Because in the beginning when I said that like, oh, I can see that like this still feels like Mega Man, well like Mega Man 8, like in 97 or 96, still felt very similar to Mega Man, one. And it's a lot, it has a lot to do because of like the, just the stylish elements that they have. Like whether he's just warping into the stage or the way that they announce,
announce the bosses before the level. Like all of those stylistic elements are very like basic, but I think it adds to the experience a lot. Yeah. Like warping into the stage, like you said, that's, we never started a stage without just automatically being there before. It could have been just a big black screen with games A through H on it. Yeah. You know? Yeah. Right. And there's still like a way to go. And the worst version of this is that you hit start and it just automatically starts you and cut main stage and you have no decision over anything. Yeah. It's like, but there's also like,
there's still, there's still things to stride, you know, there's still a lot of strides to take to get to the final like polish of presentation because we don't know who that girl is at the end. Yeah. And we don't know like what exactly, like if you didn't read the back of the box, we don't know like what the stakes are and stuff like that. A nice little like text box or something would have gone a long way. Yeah. But they chose not to include that stuff. Yeah, you're right. I mean, that's, I guess why I mean like this is the primordial version of that. You're totally correct on that. And I just want to say too, my own straight thought,
you know, we were talking about how like they tested this game and they shipped a product that they were proud of. And I definitely think that's true, but I don't want to like frame it as that like the Mega Man development team thought that like Mega Man 1 was perfect. They actually didn't like a lot of their Mega Man, early Mega Man games because the development time was so, was so small. Forget about how much time Mega Man 1 had. Mega Man 2 only had like confirmed. Three months. Wow. To make that game. So like, they definitely felt,
you know, like Mega Man 1 had its weaknesses and that there was things that like they could have polished better. But I do think it's nice that they even just thought about how they would place enemies and test them out like that. So that's really more what I meant. I didn't mean that they thought that they shipped the perfect game. No, I know what you mean. Yeah. But it does explain too why the graphic designer only had one day to make. Yeah, exactly. I mean, Kitamore even goes on to explain like his biggest problem with Mega Man 1 in this interview. He says, the truth is there were a number of flaws in Mega Man 1. The way we thought about weapons and the Robot Masters then was different than how we thought about them in later games.
In the first game, we designed the weapons by thinking about the corresponding Robot Master weakness. This focus on the Robot Masters sometimes caused us to neglect thinking about whether the weapons were fun or how they would actually work in the game or how they could help solve puzzles. So I think that is interesting that, you know, it's strictly designed from a combat perspective, but we found them to work, I found them to work pretty well as solving stage problems. I think so too. I wouldn't, I'd say he's being a little too hard on himself. I think that might be one of the first times I would agree with like a graphic, not a graphic designer, a video game designer being too hard on themselves.
Because yeah, they did have that whole like, you know, one of the, one of the philosophies of game design is like if you're going to create a, you're going to create a mechanic, better have multiple uses or it's going to fall flat. And they just sort of did that by accident, it sounds like. Yeah. Because he doesn't think he did it well enough. Right, right. And I do like that though, he does go on to say that in future Mega Man games they will always plan the power-ups first and then think about what Robot Master could like use them. That seems how game design would work. Right, it seems like at the time it's a very Nintendo way of thinking.
Yeah, you do the action first and then you figure out how it's created around that. Yeah, they even have gone on record saying that they still do that where they come up with the mechanic first and then think about which of their Nintendo franchises it would be good for. Right. You know, so I appreciate that kind of mindset in game making where you think about like what is the gameplay element first before you think about because otherwise you do wind up with like you said, you know, with the Mega Man games that there's so many of them but a lot of them are just like
either the same or there's just not enough different about them. It just gets into this thing where it's like they all just kind of like meld after a while. This is the very first Mega Man game so it feels super unique but how will we feel when we get to like Mega Man 5? Right. Yeah. I wonder.
I have another stray thought but it's really, really small. Oh, I love it. I love the turnaround sound. You know, I don't know it. Oh, yes, yes. I like that that's what triggered your memory. It's true, it's true. I don't even know this.
The turnaround sound when you like skid and you switch directions he makes this very like signature sound. It's funny that you mention that though too because that's something that only I think Mega Man 1 has maybe Mega Man 2 has it as well is that that skid in future Mega Man games they will actually stop that and make him like stop on a dime. The skid I'm not crazy about but the sound is great. Of all the things that were similar between this game and future Mega Man that was one thing I did not remember was how he was sort of like a little slippery. But it adds some weight to him, right? Don't we like that in Mario? I guess like yes it doesn't work as well here because the platforms are tiny.
Yeah. If you were constantly just jumping on like small like coin blocks in Mario as you went through the stage that would get frustrating too I guess. Yeah. It will not arriv arriv will arriv will Thank you.
Mega Man 2 through 6 will all come out on the NES. Almost like one a year. We have one next year. We have one the year after that. I don't know when they skip, but I think they do miss like a year or two here and there. But for the most part, it's like every single year a Mega Man game comes out. So we have that to look forward to. Mega Man will continue to be in our lives more often than Mario. You know, isn't that kind of weird? Yeah, yeah. For an NES thing.
The Mega Man games now go all the way up to 11. That's just for the regular series, though. Yeah, yeah. For the regular series. So the core series as it's referred to. So Mega Man 7 came out on the Super Nintendo. Mega Man 8 came out on the PlayStation 1.
And the Saturn. Yeah, and the Saturn. 9 and 10 came out on the Wii as downloadable games. And then I think somehow eventually they got re-released as fake cartridges. I don't know if they actually work on your NES or not, but people love them. And they actually are. 9 and 10, just for what it's worth, they're not as good looking as, say, 8 was. They actually went back to the roots of what 1 through 6 looked like. I think 9 also did a shout out to the original Terrible Box, too. I think it did in its design or something like that. I do remember that they released a physical version.
And then after 9 and 10, 11 just came out recently and added like a... It's a mixed reviews. Yeah, it adds like a slowdown ability that you have and also like a constant power thing you have. It's really hard to explain here, but like, you know, it's different. Loot boxes? Yeah. I don't know. It doesn't have loot boxes, but on top of Mega Man 2 through 6 on NES, we also get six Mega Man games on the Game Boy. Oh, wow. Six different versions of Mega Man on the Game Boy. And they're only slightly different from their NES counterparts, but I imagine they're... Are they meant to be like counter to... No, no, no.
They're their own. It's like its own thing. Similar to like how Super Mario Land is its own thing on Game Boy. It's not like Super Mario Land is Super Mario Brothers. Right. It's a different, separate game. Yeah, it's its own thing. And then, of course, you have the Mega Man X games. The X games. I said that earlier. The X series of games that... Whatever. The reason why I bring them up and not all the other franchises that Mega Man has is because they're the most similar... Yes. ...to the Mega Man core franchise. And so you have X, which starts on the SNES, and then it goes all the way up to X8 on the PS2. And that also has now a collection of games.
But, you know, that one kind of gets weird too. Like X1, X2, and X3, I think, are like pretty well regarded. But I think X4 through 8 are considered a mess. So, I don't know. Let me know, Mega Man fans, how those games are. I'm sure I'll get to them eventually. But I have not played anything other than X1, and I really like it. Yeah. I think I played X4, but I must have passed out after because I don't remember anything about it. Yeah. There are so many other games in the Mega Man franchise. But let's just talk about Mega Man 1's remakes. Because there are two that I know of. The one I mentioned. There's the one you mentioned, Mega Man Powered Up on PSP. It takes a chibi look to all of the Mega Man characters and everything, which is very strange.
It also adds Oil Man and Time Man as the additional two bosses. Time? Time Man. I feel like that's so much more powerful than any of the other... Well, I didn't play this one because I don't own a PSP. But apparently, on Polygon, there's an ongoing series of where they rank the franchises of games in order from worst to best. And it's usually done by Jeremy Parrish. He says that Mega Man Powered Up is the best of the entire core franchise. Interesting. Yes.
So I think if that's anything to check out, he says that it's pretty much just Mega Man 1, but everything about it is better and more refined and a true Mega Man experience. And then outside of Mega Man Powered Up, even earlier, Mega Man Wily Wars came out on the Sega Genesis. It was the first time that Mega Man was not on a Nintendo console.
And the Genesis version... The Genesis, not version. The Genesis game is just the first three games. Mega Man 1, 2, and 3. But playable on the Genesis with 16-bit graphics, a new arranged soundtrack, and other things like that. So it's basically just like a plussed-up version, but I gotta say, I played through that one. Not that great. No.
I feel like what they added doesn't really add much more, similar to how Powered Up they were saying, like, oh, all these added things make the game so much stronger than Mega Man 1. This one, it's like the arranged soundtrack, take it or leave it for me. The 16-bit graphics on the Genesis, they look kind of strange. And there's, like, there's, like, this weird introduction of, like, slowdown that I don't like versus the slowdown on the NES.
So overall, I'd say, like, it's interesting to play through them on a Genesis, but I didn't find that they added a whole lot to the Mega Man 1 experience. Not necessary, I think. But if you're looking to play through more Mega Man games, I think, like, it's really interesting that they put the first three as, like, a remastered collection on the Genesis. And then on top of that, after you beat all three of those games, you unlock a new, like, exclusive mode called Wily Tower, where you go through and fight some new enemies and new Wily bosses and stuff like that. At least it's not as milked as some games with their remakes and remasters. That's true, yeah. I mean, sometimes we look at games.
And then other times you have, you know, like, with Castlevania, Castlevania 1 and that kind of game system, like, you don't get that. That franchise doesn't make games, like, in that style anymore. No. Castlevania 1, 2, and 3, and Super Castlevania 4, like, those games are their own line of the Castlevania franchise, and they're done.
Super Mario Bros. is still getting, like, Super Mario Maker or New Super Mario Bros. Like, those things are still happening. Yeah. While they still make other versions, Mega Man is still getting, like, who knows? I don't know how Mega Man 11 did, but there might be a 12. Like, they're still getting versions of their games. Some franchises don't continue to get that love. No. Yeah. Speaking of love, let's find out if we love this game in the Essential Games list.
Okay, we've been talking about this game way too long, but I like it. I like it when the episodes go long. Sam, let us know your definitive answer. Is Mega Man Essential? For me, I think that this game is essential. I think that it's got, you know, combat. It's got platforming. It has a very free way of approaching it, and you can kind of, you have to think about how you want to do it. It's hard. It's got that Nintendo hard that, you know, some people find nostalgic, and some people are looking for when they want to play an NES game, and I think that this has it. I don't know if it will stay essential for me when we play more games like this, or when, you know, we play Mega Man 2.
Like, if there's one to play, I don't know yet, because I've only played this one. But for right now, I'm going to say it's essential. All right. Joe? So, I went into the game. I actually did have, like, a preconceived notion of things that I heard about this game being, like, not the best Mega Man game. It being the one that, like, doesn't deliver on what Mega Man is, doesn't really get you, you know, it's not, like, you shouldn't play this one first, I've heard.
And so I kind of went into this with a little bit of a negative thought, you know, idea about what the game was going to be, and it really kind of turned my opinion around. Just to run through, I just got a little list of the things that I liked about this game, which is that each level, as challenging and, like, Nintendo hard as they were, rarely felt unfair. Sometimes it did feel unfair, but most of the time it felt fair and, like, doable and achievable. The power-ups were satisfying to collect and use. The controls were better than most of the games that we've played on the NES. I mean, everything that we've been talking about through this game is so much head and shoulders above, like, 90% of the games we've played so far.
The only thing about it that I, at one point, was grappling with whether or not it bothered me was when I got to the Dr. Wily stage, which I didn't really talk about too much how. So I was, at first, a little bothered by this stage being so long and so difficult, and when you die, you have to go back to the beginning of the stage, even though it's kind of like five stages in one.
Made it almost seem, like, a little unfair at first. Until I kind of decided to approach the final level as, like, something else where it's, even if you don't beat it, it's something to keep the challenge going. It's not going to be the same as all the other levels. Is that that's, like, the thing you keep coming back to, trying to beat? That's where the challenge really, that's when you're in the big leagues. And even if you can't beat the game, I think it's definitely worth playing and worth getting to this final level and trying to beat it. But either way, whether you beat it or not, I think this is an essential game. So, according to our current rules, that means that it's essential, as of right now.
I think that rule's going to change. But, Sean, you know, now you're free. You don't have to vote essential if you don't want to. You're free to pick whatever you want, you know? You can let the record state on your side. I had a lot to say, but now that it doesn't matter, I'm just going to abstain. But, no, I'm also going to jump on this bandwagon. I think that aside from the Nintendo royalty games, like the Mario, the Metroid, the Zelda,
this game very quickly and with very little buildup established what a Mega Man game is. I know that, like, right now in 1987, like, yeah, Mega Man is Mega Man because that's the game that we're playing. But decades later, this is still what a Mega Man game is with a couple extra layers of paint on it. It established a bunch of interesting ways to structure a game. And maybe that's wrong, but this is the first time I'm seeing it chronologically. So, I'm going to attribute this, like, choose-your-own thing to Mega Man.
And while it is frustratingly difficult for me, I still did have fun with it. And, like, games like this can really only work if, like, your frustration is balanced with feelings of accomplishment and just, it just feels fun to play. So, I do have, there are a lot of, like, blemishes on this game and it's not perfect, but I think that in the context of the history of side-scrolling shooters, side-scrolling platformer shooters, this is an essential game. All right. Pressure's on me. Better vote this one essential, I guess. No, or do I do a Metroid on you boys?
Because a lot of people want me to live that down, that I voted Metroid not essential. And then there's other people who thank me for that. I get a lot of handshakes when I was walking down the street. You get recognized on the street. Yeah, yeah. A lot of people are just like, here's that guy who stood up to Metroid. And I'm like, I hate Samus. I'm part of the space pirates. No, for real, though, here's the weird thing. It's unfortunate that my vote for whether Mega Man is essential has to come with some caveats, but this vote for me reminds me so much of, like, when we voted Excitebike in Episode 5 Essential. In a very strange way. Here's the thing, okay? I played Mega Man 2. I remember it. It was fantastic.
We haven't gotten up to that yet in nostalgia, and I don't know, you know, how I should. But I don't think that there has to be just one version of a game. I'd be shocked to find out I'm going to say, well, Super Mario Bros. 3 is in, so Super Mario Bros. 1 is out of the Essential games list. It's like, probably won't happen. So is there potential for Mega Man 1 and 2 to both be on the Essential games list? Sure. Is there more potential that I put Mega Man 1 on the Essential games list today,
and then once 2 comes out, I say, guys, we've got to really evaluate that Mega Man 1 pick, because this is what a really Essential game looks like. Like, do we just look at the 80-something, the 86, 87 games that we've played so far, and just say, well, based on these, this is how we look at Essential games? Or do we look at them today, like, you know, in 2019, and say if they're Essential? It's very tough for me to say, and that's why I'm actually going to put it on the Essential games list. First off, I just want to say I do think this game is better than Metroid, hands down.
I agree. I agree, too. If you're asking me, like, is this real, like, you know, would you really vote this one Essential? I think it's in my top five games of the year, no doubt, and probably up there in, like, my total games I've played so far on the NES.
Will there be better games? Sure. But I'm going to just take it in the context of what we have currently, and this game is so unique and special right now in 1987's NES library that I have to put it on the Essential games list, not caring what comes later, because right currently, what we're offering you on the Essential games list, if you're following along with us, there's nothing else like that currently on there, so you need to have this game in there. You need that game right now on the Essential games list, and I fully do expect myself to have this off the Essential games list by the time the podcast is over. You know? So weird.
But I think, as of right now, we need a Mega Man game on there, and I had such a good time with a game that was so difficult and really made me question my video game skills, that just for that alone, a game that is so tough that you still keep coming back to is a good game. You know? Yeah, exactly. You're the problem in this game. The game is not the problem here, and there are some weird things that I didn't like. I called out the respawning of enemies when you move slightly off the screen. I hate that because the game is about enemy placement, and so to just defeat an enemy but walk off the screen and spawn a new one seems cheap.
I also don't like... Ladders. What's that? I'm sorry. You don't like ladders. Ladders. Yeah, I don't like... Well, it's true. I don't like the ladders in the game, and I felt that there might be a better way to deal with that. I also don't feel like the weapons are entirely balanced, the power-ups. I feel like I rarely used Gutsman unless I saw a boulder and said, this seems like a good time to use it. I never really thought about it. I didn't use it sometimes when I did see a boulder. Right, but that's true, too. I didn't use it then either. I also didn't really care for Iceman's ability other than to freeze the lava, which was necessary in that one particular stage.
I didn't care for a lot of the bomb thing. I barely use that other than I'm big guys. But those are when you're supposed to use them. I just think there's a lot of things that Mega Man 2 can hopefully do better and things I'm looking forward to. But I definitely think as of right now, what I've played, this is an essential game and needs to be on our essential games list. There it is. So there you have it.
That's a unanimous. It's a unanimous one. Our last unanimous one was like a while ago. Yeah. Probably Punch-Out. Punch-Out of Legend of Zelda. Oh, Punch-Out. Punch-Out, Punch-Out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We definitely get Punch-Out unanimous. So it wasn't a while ago. We just love Nintendo games.
That's the slogan, the catchphrase. Yeah. Mega Man. How about it, guys? Go Bills. Would you play an Ultraman game? Because that came out on Super Nintendo and isn't nearly as fun. Is that a real thing? Ultraman, yeah. It wasn't Mega Man series. It was Ultraman. You guys don't know Ultraman? Oh, yeah, Ultraman. I know. In the Godzilla Kaiju universe? No. Yeah. Okay. In the Kaiju-verse, Ultraman's around. So that's cool. Hopefully we get an Ultraman movie, though. Yeah. All for that stuff. Ultraman. I've been waiting for that. Sean always talks about Ultraman. I fell asleep 118 times during the original Godzilla 2015 movie. Yeah. That was a sleepy time. But we both slept. You know what's a good thing to do? Thanks for the invite. After a 2014 godly...
All right. We're getting into the post-show territory. Let me finish the show. Thank you so much for listening to Nostalgia. You can join us again next week when we cover Wizards and Warriors.
And two weeks from now, we'll be covering our best of 1987, where we're going to get to the bottom of what an essential game is. And maybe some of these come off. Maybe some of them do not come off. Maybe we rethink how we count the votes. How we count the votes. We're always going to be struggling with what an essential game is. Oh, yeah. It's an essential part of the podcast. Yeah. Our essential games are not mandatory for you to agree with. And we love hearing whether you do or don't agree with them. So tell us how you feel about Mega Man by writing to us at nostalgacast at gmail.com or just talking to us on Twitter at NostalgiaCast. I feel like that's been a very good way to get a hold of people.
A lot of people have written into us on Twitter and let us know thoughts about games, which we're always happy to hear about. We just did that in the previous episode. We just covered a bunch of thoughts on games that you guys had. Or just write down your thoughts on a piece of paper and just let it sit there. Or put them in a bottle and throw them in the ocean and hope that it gets to us. We live relatively near an ocean. Yeah, relatively. So there's a small percentage that one of us would be at a beach and see it.
Yeah. You know? I'm not saying that a pigeon would be better, but if you want to send a pigeon, we live in New York City. So just tell the pigeons to go to New York City. You just speak it. You just say, go to New York City. He'll definitely stand out as the only pigeon carrying mail. You know? I feel like there's got to be carrier pigeons in the city. Sure, there's got to be. But yeah. Yeah, there must be. I don't see them as often. But also, pigeon talk is useless because birds are not real. And everybody should know this. I do not run the birds are not real account, but I agree with their philosophy. Bird watching goes both ways, people. Very good, Sam. I'm Michael Esposito. You can find me on at Esposito Film on Twitter. And I'll talk to you soon. And so will we. I'll talk to you soon.
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