Today, I beat a game that’s probably more (in)famous for its troubled production history than the game itself (I’ll try to keep my post about the game, though):
If any of you read my posts about the Zook bootlegs, you’d know that I’m a pretty big fan of the Mega Man games, so it was only a matter of time before I played this one.
Anyway, for those who didn’t know, this is a platformer in the vain of Mega Man 3: you have a buster attack (but you can’t charge it), you have eight robot masters (or “Mighties,” as this game calls them) you have to defeat to progress, and you get a new weapon when you defeat one of them. What makes this game different from the Mega Man games, however, is that your dash attack can absorb enemies after they’ve been weakened (when they turn dark and start exuding voxels “Xels”), and depending on the color, they give you certain power-ups like extra speed, piercing bullets, or AcXel Recovery (the game’s equivalent of an E-tank). It’s an interesting concept, and I think it was pulled off quite well with one exception: bosses (and mini-bosses). You see, bosses will start exuding Xels before their health bar is fully depleted, and if you don’t dash into them quick enough, they’ll start to regenerate health. This is especially annoying when the boss has invulnerable periods or is simply out of range for you to dash into it during that state (looking at you, final boss). Oh, and don’t forget that, if you’re not careful, you can get hurt when the boss goes back into its pattern, so once you seen that you’ve hit it, you’ll have to shift your trajectory away. Once you dash into the boss, the point at which it stops regenerating health is lowered (to the point where its health is), and the fight continues.
Oh, you can also hang on ledges, except the ones in the ice stage that are frozen.
Upon booting up the game, I was greeted with, like, six logos that all needed their own fade-in sequence for some reason. When the title screen finally came up, I realized there was no sound, and I had to restart the game. There was also one time when the game immediately closed on boot. Every other time I started the game, the title music and stage select music always had a delay before they started playing (along with a surprisingly long loading screen just to display the file select screen; seriously, entire stages loaded faster).
By the way, the game won’t let you select difficulty when it’s your first time playing. I know the early Mega Man games didn’t even have multiple difficulties (and Mega Man 9 had it as freaking DLC), but locking out difficulty options until the game is beaten has always been a pet-peeve of mine. Why even have it if you’re not going to let the player select it? After all, shouldn’t “hard mode” be for the players who, say, grew up with Mega Man and are already experienced with how the game plays?
Moving on: the game starts with a cut-scene letting us know that it’s “the present year” (which is incredibly useful information and not an awkward line at all) and that everything is peaceful “when suddenly”–and then it cuts to Mighty No. 9 as if he was the antagonist (he isn’t). The first couple rooms of the intro stage are empty, and after a bit more world-establishment, you start to fight enemies and it turns into a proper level.
What might be the most notable thing about the game is all the bottomless pits and instant-kill spikes it has. I don’t remember any of the Mega Man games having this many spikes (except Sigma’s palace in X8, and maybe Bubble Man’s stage), maybe I should go back and play them? Seriously, I almost never died from enemy attacks; it was always either spikes, a pit, or a boss. This hits its peak in the prison stage since you have to dash over a floor of spikes, then fall down a corridor and perform a near-precise dash in-between a floor and ceiling of spikes. Honestly, aside from the final boss, Mighty No. 6 gave me the most trouble since his arena has bottomless pits in it, and I’d get knocked into them at times (oh, and if you don’t hit the ground, you can get knocked back pretty far). It gets repetitive, to say the least (it almost makes you forget the times the game makes you wait for moving platforms). In fact, the final stage is one of the easiest since it doesn’t have as many instant-death traps as the other levels. At least the levels have plenty of checkpoints (except Mighty No. 8’s stage, which only has one, for some reason).
Something else to note: even though bosses have “weaknesses,” they sometimes aren’t optimal to use on them given the way boss combat works, so you’ll be sticking to the normal buster for most battles. It’s reminiscent of the Zook games in that regard. However, if you have the boss’s weakness, the corresponding Mighty number will occasionally help you out in the stage, which was a neat touch (you can tell if you have the boss’s weakness if you see “advice” appear as an option).
Also, I should mention that the game can get quite resource-intensive at times, despite the simplistic graphics. I know my 2.7Ghz, 8GB RAM Laptop isn’t the most powerful machine, but this game would occasionally drop its framerate into the single digits. I had to lower the graphics setting to prevent this.
By the way, the game has DLC that lets you play an extra stage, and if you win, you unlock Zero Mighty No. 7 Ray as a playable character. If you get the DLC, I recommend going after this stage first since there aren’t any insta-kill traps in it, making it one of the easiest levels.
When you defeat all of the Mighties, you unlock two more stages, one where you play as the female counterpart to the protagonist. It’s meant to be more of a stealth level, but it’s more annoying than anything since you can only have one bullet on screen at a time (gotta prevent that sprite flickering!) and most enemies are immune to bullets anyway. Plus, this is the level with that precise spike dash I mentioned earlier, so it’s safe to say this is the worst level in the game.
The second of these two levels expects you to know how the Mighties’ weapons work, but since the game doesn’t, say, show you how they work á la Mega Man 6, Mega Man X, or Zook Hero Z (the game just shows static, monochrome images for a brief moment), you have to experiment and use up some weapon energy in the process. It’s not too big a deal, but it’s quite annoying.
The final level doesn’t have much noteworthy about it, just some “Xel prototypes” that reform super-quickly after getting destroyed (if you can’t get in front of their hit-box before they reform, you get knocked back). The final boss is a bit of a difficulty spike, but for the wrong reasons. You see, it’s pattern isn’t too hard to figure out (pretty much a variation of the Yellow Devil), but it’s purple when it’s vulnerable, light-purple when it’s invulnerable, and dark-purple when you need to dash into it to absorb its Xels and prevent it from regenerating health. You can see how that can be confusing for first-time players. The Xels it exudes are also purple, so no help there.
Its second form (which has the same issues) will straight up ram you when it spawns, so if you don’t figure out that you need to focus fire on one of the segments holding it up and dash into that within the first three seconds of the fight, you’ll take damage. Another of its patterns has it spewing bullet-blocking projectiles, and if it goes into its Xel-exuding state during this part, you pretty much won’t be able to dash into it without taking damage, but if you don’t dash into it, it will go away and heal all of that health back. Its final pattern has it shooting out a giant laser beam, but unlike other times a giant laser beam is shot at you during video games, the gap will be in the center, not the edge, so I got hit a few times when it first did that. Also, this is the only boss in the game that has a desperation attack, so if you’re low on HP and don’t have an AcXel Recovery in reserve, you might have to do the entire two battles all over again.
When you beat the game, you see the epilogue in slideshow form (peace is restored, Mighty No. 9 decides to heck with all that peaceful life nonsense and joins the Battle Coliseum, etc.) and the credits roll. The credits theme starts off pretty good, but then it turns into a rap. No, really, I’m not kidding. What do they think this is, Sonic the Hedgehog? Actually, at least the Sonic raps had melodies in their choruses; this is just a pure rap. Even if we set aside that rap is one of my least favorite music genres, the genre-defining genre of music in the Mega Man games was Rock and Roll, so if nostalgia was the biggest selling point (which it kinda was), they should’ve went with a rock song instead. Maybe they did it so the transition from the song to the Kickstarter backers talking about how mighty they are was less jarring. Also, the credits include all the Kickstarter backers, so even though it has them in pairs, it takes a while to scroll through all of them. It gets to the point where the ending song gives up and it starts looping the title theme again. Luckily, you can skip it without missing the after-credits cut-scene.
Overall, I say that this game is just okay. Not that great, but maybe not as bad as people might make it seem (probably not worth $20, though). If you’re a Mega Man fan (or a simple platforming fan who has gotten your backlog low), I say pick it up on sale (at least 75%). Otherwise, give it a pass.