LogFAQs > #933304099

#7





Years of release: 2010 (Wii/PS3/360), 2017 (PC, in MMLC2), 2018 (Switch, in MMLC2)
Beaten?: Many times

Mega Man has been, for a very long time now, one of my favorite gaming franchises, if not my favorite, and classic Mega Man in particular is my jam. I've been playing them since I was toddler-age - my mom was a young, hip, video-game playing mom back in the 90's, and she had an NES, and we played video games together all the time. One of our favorites was Mega Man 2. Most kids have a favorite Disney movie or something like that that their parents put on for them. For me, my mom would sit down with me and play Mega Man 2 for me almost every night, from start to finish, and I would follow along, learning every part of the game. By the time I was 4, I could start playing it a little bit myself; when I was 5, I was able to beat the entire game on my own, without my mom's help at all. Mega Man 2 was my video game equivalent of learning to walk; I learned to love both video games and music from playing it. It's one of my most formative experiences and to this day it's one of the most important games to me.

All of the NES Mega Mans were a big deal; I beat them all before I was 8. I remember at the time that there was criticism over the fact that they just kept making a new Mega Man every year and that they all looked the same, but this didn't matter to me - I loved how many different games in the series there were. It was one of my favorites, so why would I not want Mega Man games every year in perpetuity for the rest of my life? Sadly, of course, an endless stream of Mega Man games was not to be - we got a couple more numeric MMs on the SNES and PS1 (which I didn't own) and otherwise the series moved onto the X spinoffs, which I never liked as much.

I longed for the heyday of Mega Man gone by, and one of those fantasies I had in the back of my brain was how cool it would be if Capcom themselves ever decided to put out a brand-new NES-stylized Mega Man game. In the early 00's, there were people who were trying to do this sort of thing in flash and in some of the earliest ROMhacks but they were never very polished (not until Mega Man Unlimited in the early 10's, see earlier part of list), so it was clear to me that the market for this sort of thing existed, but I never imagined that Capcom would do it - but man, what if they did, though? So imagine my shock when the madmen did it and released Mega Man 9 in the late 00's, a perfect followup to the NES stylization of Mega Man 6, as if the past 15 years of development in gaming had never happened - a completely flawless return to the days of 2D sprites and 8-bit music. I said earlier that Cadence of Hyrule was one of the most amazing miracles, but I think Mega Man 9 shocked me even more. Putting out a retro game that didn't feature the latest innovations in graphics technology just wasn't a thing back then. It was unthinkable that anyone would make a new NES game on purpose. And yet, they did it.

Mega Man 9 was great. What if those crazy fuckers did it AGAIN, though? 9 was nice, but it was probably a one time thing, right? Surely they wouldn't be doing a new one every year again. BAM, here's Mega Man 10. Mind blown again.

I really liked MM9 but I adored MM10 to death. It's hard to explain - I know the general take on it is that 9 is the superior game, but I think 10 is just a little more polished and a little more interesting. 10 feels like a more finished product to me - I know this is a seemingly very small thing to harp on, but I never liked how MM9 reused music assets from Mega Man 2, it made it feel like it wasn't trying to have its own identity. 10 doesn't have this problem, making something completely new. It introduces a much-needed hard mode that I've always been hoping for in the series, and it delivers - the boss fights in hard mode are so much more challenging and involved than the boss fights anywhere else in the series. I like the level and boss designs more than 9, overall, and I loved how 10's Wily Castle ends on a big, dramatic reveal, whereas 9's it kind of an anticlimax.

I love the music in 10 more, too. For a diehard fan of the Mega Man series like me, and Mega Man's music in particular, it was an unbelievably awesome treat to see nearly every previous Mega Man composer (2's Takeshi Tateishi nowhere to be found sadly) and have them each compose a track for each stage. I ended up going 8 for 8 on predicting who wrote which one - I've picked apart the franchise's music so thoroughly that I can recognize everyone's styles by this point, and they really stood out here. The fact that every song has a slightly different flavor to it was really fun and made it stand out as one of my favorite soundtracks in the series - and music is something that REALLY matters to me in a Mega Man game. Music is a thing that keeps me coming back to a lot of video games, but this one in particular.

Bringing everyone back for one last go at the soundtrack as well as all the other references to older games in the series, like in the Weapons Archive boss fight and the DLC stages that have you face off against bosses from the game boy games, made Mega Man 10 feel like something of a swan song for the series. When I played it, I sort of got the sense that this might be sort of a farewell to the series, and the most magical thing that Mega Man 10 did for me was make me feel perfectly at ease with that. This is one of my favorite games in the series, and it delivered everything I wanted so well that I felt like I I would be okay if they never made another one of these things again. It's really difficult to put into words how great it is to receive closure on a beloved franchise like that, to be able to say goodbye to it and move on without feeling like there was untapped potential left unexplored. Mega Man 10 did the impossible; it made me feel at ease with the unavoidable march of time.

Then Mega Man 11 came out 8 years later and eh, it was fine I guess