We need to study Mega Man: Dr. Wily’s Revenge and Mega Man II. How can two games from the same excellent franchise be terrible, but different kinds of terrible?
We will start at the beginning. In 1987, Capcom gave the world Mega Man. Compared to the rest of the franchise, Mega Man (1) could be considered a “proof of concept”. All the elements are there: running, jumping, gunning down androids that were built for peaceful purposes despite having flamethrowers for arms; but the basic Mega Man gameplay had to iron out a few wrinkles. There were only six Robot Masters. There was a scoring system. Terminal velocity could be reached with murderous speed. None of these issues would have repelled a player in 1987, but they do standout to someone who may have played the following Mega Man titles. You know, the good ones. We got Mega Man 2 a year later, and that is considered one of the greatest games of all time to this very day. It is rivaled only by… Mega Man 3, released in 1990. And then there were three other Mega Man titles on the Nintendo Entertainment System. They’re all good games, Brent, though there is the tiniest variation amongst them. Sometimes there are charging blasters or auto-scrolling octopi or an inexplicable centaur, but they are all Mega Man games. Mega Man 1-6 were released over the course of about seven years, and you could not go wrong with a single rockin’ adventure.
However, powering up Mega Man: Dr. Wily’s Revenge allows for ample opportunities to go wrong.
Mega Man: Dr. Wily’s Revenge aka Mega Man I (that’s a roman numeral, not “l” for “loser”) was released in 1991. To be clear on our timeline, that means MM:DWR dropped after Mega Man 3, but before Mega Man 4 made its own debut later that year. This is significant, as it means our humble Gameboy title was released after the best ones. And Mega Man: Dr. Wily’s Revenge could be a thing of beauty! It features four (of six) Robot Masters from Mega Man (1). Cut Man, Elec Man, Ice Man, and Fire Man all return, and this is a golden opportunity to transform their “primitive” debuts into something more modern! And we have a handful of Mega Man 2 baddies, too! Heat Man, Bubble Man, Quick Man, and Flash Man are all available, and… Well… uh… That could be neat! Nobody expects the Gameboy to replicate the breakneck speed of the Quick Lasers, so someone could create new challenges based on the abstract concept of “quick”. And Flash Man! His stage was always just kind of a weird ice stage that had nothing to do with Flash Man’s apparent time powers, so a Flash Man redux could be fascinating. There is potential!
And… well… Minakuchi Engineering, who handled the outsourced production on Capcom’s behalf… They tried. As expected, there are more situational, “customized” traps for the Light Gray Bomber. Ice Man’s stage contains scalable icicles, and melting ice blocks. Cut Man gets telekinetic scissors with recognizable patterns. Fire Man and Elec Man both borrow minions from later games, so there are fiery and electrical buddies that feel like they always could have been part of Mega’s first outing. Of course, the tradeoff there is that the Mega Man 2 villains do not get stages of their own… unless you count the Dr. Wily stage heavily biting on Metal Man design decisions… but Metal Man isn’t in this game… Ugh! Okay! It’s not great! But you can forgive it, because this was an era when a Gameboy title had equal odds on looking like Final Fantasy Adventure or Home Alone.
But maybe that familiar Mega Man sprite is the problem. A bigger Mega Man relative to the screen area means less room to actually play, and all of Mega Man’s opponents were designed for the higher resolution of the Nintendo Entertainment System. This leads to a lot of constrained hallways, enemy-filled corridors, and limited possible reaction times. In fact, this creates a very odd glitch in Mega Man’s programming: our little metal boy must kill everybody. Thanks to the confined quarters, there are continual situations where Mega Man must destroy his opponents to proceed. Whether it is a trap taking up the entirety of the only foothold available, or a room that is just big enough for Mega Man and one Sniper Joe, you are forced into combat significantly more often than in “normal” Mega Man titles. And it is exhausting! By about the third time you must exterminate a scworm with carefully measured pellet power, you will be ready to jump to the everlasting peace of a different game.
And while most of the bosses are similar enough to their NES counterparts (Quick Man seems to have been neutered out of his signature ability), the newbies acknowledge that you’= have been fighting enough, so they are predominantly “puzzle bosses”. Enker, the Mega Man Killer with a sword, is just a matter of identifying that “more shots = bigger counter”. Once you have that figured out, he is barely a speedbump. And the final boss? Dr. Wily’s grand revenge? You just use that Enker Shield, and call it a day. Maybe this was new and novel in 1991, but the ol’ “beat the boss with their own shots” is obvious from the moment you gain a shield “attack” one stage earlier. It is not as bad as having to skulk through hallways of mole drills, but it is an anticlimactic end to a game in a franchise that once tossed off a holographic alien.
And it is not anywhere near as bad as what we see in Mega Man II.
Whether we are talking about Japan or America, Mega Man II was released a scant few months after Mega Man: Dr. Wily’s Revenge. There must have been some communication between Gameboy Mega Man teams, as this title follows a similar template to the previous title: first Mega Man battles some Robot Masters from the title game (Mega Man 2’s Crash Man, Metal Man, Air Man, and Wood Man), and then moves on to a Wily Base that includes four foes from the next game (Mega Man 3’s Magnet Man, Needle Man, Top Man, and Hard Man). Like in the previous game, you are facing these opponents blind (no labeled teleporters for you), but we do see the upgrade here that the sequel masters have their own stages. And on the subject of upgrades, Mega Man also has his slide from Mega Man 3. Going to launch whirlwinds at neck level, Air Man? Not a problem now!
Sadly, any other upgrades are illusions. One nice thing that can be said for Mega Man II is that it feels faster than its monochrome ancestor. You are not constantly confronting contraptions in cramped corridors, so Mega Man does pick up speed while sliding along. Sorry to say that that is mostly because enemy and… uh… anything placement is sparse. There are stages where it is clear they are borrowing heavily from the source material (like a gauntlet of Pierrobot in Metal Man’s stage), but when there is an incidental room, like a few connecting areas of conjoined ladders, it looks like the “extra” space was designed for an early 2000’s sprite comic. And not one of the good ones! Something that stopped updating after a weekend of content! And even worse than that, they somehow incorrectly coded Mega Man’s trademark physics, so steering this bot just plain feels wrong. Yes, you are likely making progress faster in Mega Man II, but at far too high a cost!
In fact, with the random assortment of Mega Man generic baddies, weird terrain graphics, and water arbitrarily added to a few stages (never try to justify the Rush Marine), Mega Man II feels like a half-baked fan game. Or something someone made in Super Mega Man Maker. And don’t get me wrong: there are some amazing fan-made Mega Man stages out there! Just this ain’t one of ‘em. This was slapped together with all the care of refrigerator magnet poetry, and includes final bosses to match. Quint, the pogo-equipped Mega Man from the future (?), barely moves, and is only challenging insomuch as you spend the whole fight waiting for him to do something. And the final Wily boss can be difficult with its multiple forms… but did you see that sprite? That is the worst approximation of a Wily I have ever seen. And I read those previously mentioned sprite comics! If it wasn’t for the premiere of Space Rush: Dog of the Stars, there would be absolutely no reason to ever even see Mega Man II.
Or… You know what? Let me close this one out with a story from an old man.
A long time ago in a console war far, far away, there was the Mega Man Anniversary Collection. This was back on the Nintendo GameCube/Playstation 2, when digital games were scarce, and an official collection of six NES roms (and a handful of other Mega titles) was the most exciting thing a nostalgic 20-something could hope for. I purchased Mega Man Anniversary Collection on day one, and eagerly awaited what should have been its sister release: Mega Man Mania for the Gameboy Advance. That was supposed to be a collection of the five Mega Man games for the Gameboy, now colorized and available for the latest in portable technology. It was advertised in Nintendo Power! Mega Man Mania was coming! Except… it was not to be. Mega Man Mania was never released, and we did not get the tiniest taste of mania, the collective return of these Gameboy Mega Man titles, until June of 2024, almost exactly twenty years later.
And you know what we know now, a year after the Mania has died down? You do not need to play Mega Man: Dr. Wily’s Revenge or Mega Man II. You can play literally any other game. You can play any other Mega Man game. They are both bad in unique, inexplicable ways. You only have so much time on this Earth before you become some pogo-wielding dork! Don’t waste it! Don’t waste your life on bad Gameboy games! The real Mega Man games are right there!
Mega Man III is alright, though.
FGC #720 Mega Man: Dr. Wily’s Revenge & Mega Man II
System: Gameboy initially, and eventually Nintendo Switch. There was also a 3DS release like ten years before the Switch, but mentioning that during the article would have totally broken my flow.- Number of players: Could you imagine trying to do anything in these games with a link cable attached? Like puke on top of vomit.
- What did they do wrong? Guts Man and Bomb Man never got to be in a Gameboy game. I understand Guts Man being left on the Cut Manning room floor, as his power was always extremely situational, but Bomb Man is so iconic! Or at least his weapon is…
- Have Your Pets Spayed or Neutered: Thanks to Mega Man II borrowing from their two games, we do have one adventure where you can fight both Hot Dog of Wood Man’s stage, and Tama the Cat of Top Man’s stage. They are the most important minions Dr. Wily ever devised.
- An End: A lot of the Gameboy titles wind up in space. Since Rush did not show up until Mega Man II, Mega Man just hitches a ride back on a space shuttle during the credits of Mega Man: Dr. Wily’s Revenge. I guess that is all that would be available for public transportation in that neck of the galaxy, but it feels weirdly mundane for our future bot.
- Goggle Bob Fact: I played a lot of Mega Man: Dr. Wily’s Revenge as a kid, as it was one of my friend’s few videogames, and I was damned sure I was going to get as much fun out of his Gameboy as possible. Don’t worry, he played my NES while I was playing his Gameboy. And, yes, I can say as an adult that he got the better part of that deal.
Did you know? Those disappearing blocks are occasionally called “Bun Blocks”, and their patterns are supposed to line up with the background of any given stage. And both Mega Man Gameboy titles get them wrong in different ways! They disappear and make their happy little sound, but the graphics are all wrong. My dudes, don’t include the trap if you don’t understand how it works!- Did you know II? Quint is supposed to be Mega Man from the future. Specifically, he is Mega Man from a future where Wily has been defeated, and Mega Man has “reverted” back to being a housekeeping robot, and is thus eminently vulnerable to a time-traveling Wily’s kidnapping/reprogramming. And if that seems like some bit of continuity that should be ignored forever, everyone agrees, save whoever made that damned WonderSwan game.
- Would I play again: I should not have played this the first time.
What’s next? Random ROB has chosen… Marvel Cosmic Invasion! Wow! How convenient! I was just playing that, and now I’m going to talk about it. Please look forward to it!
That could have gone better