LogFAQs > #952629218

100. Ice Man (Mega Man 1)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUZlDht8iro

Finally starting to crack open some of these classic themes. And this one is a classic! It's VERY minimalist compared to more contemporary offerings - the percussion and bass lines are more of a vague suggestion than something that actually exists - but I think it works nontheless, I find this one surprisingly hummable. I do think it is hampered somewhat by the fact that the song never returns back to its introductory segment, which is both the best and most lively part of the song. (There's another song in the franchise were a similar thing happens but I'll get to that later.)

99. Dr. Wily (Mega Man 6)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsQ8dpS-RJY

Gasp, it's a Mega Man 6 elimination! As you can probably grasp by now, the NES games are the ones that I hold in particularly high regard, so even a lesser offering from one of those stands in the top half of this list - but it's separating the wheat from the chaff time, and this is ultimately Mega Man 6's chaff. It's competent and it works as a melancholy finale to the NES games, but it sounds a little bit like someone took every other song from MM6 and put it into a blender to arrive at this conclusion - all of the ingredients are perfectly edible but the result is indistinct. Hey, if I'm gonna knock Marika Suzuki for it I also have to dock Yuko Takehara when she does it.

98. Mr. X (Mega Man 6)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yERlXLbNq70

Maybe a little bit of a spicy elimination? It's good! I think it's pretty memorable! But at the same time, I can't really separate it in my head from the Wily theme that much - it's a little on the generic side. Again, it's well written, it's just not among the standouts for me. The competition here is tight. Sorry Mr. X, your plans for list domination have FAILD.

97. Search Man (Mega Man 8)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUC4oOXiB1I

I do want to stress that the top 100 is a pretty good cutoff point for the songs that I actually think are super rad so anything going out at this point isn't really meant to be a diss, I just REALLY like Mega Man music a lot. Like, there's just straight up like 100 stage themes that I really like. Search Man is I think one of the much better applications of Mega Man 8's aesthetic, I've always liked this chill, trippy track quite a bit. It's a weird little smorgasbord of synthy things that are all kinda doing their own thing but I think form a pretty coherent whole and I'm kind of a sucker for the claps in the percussion. I think I sort of unwittingly stole that synth melody at :32 that just kind of lazily slides up and down an octave for a song I wrote once:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBDCKPclEaU

Oh god I really hate that this is almost 10 years old, I feel like I wrote this yesterday. Youtube wasn't even that old in 2011. I wrote this for a friend's thing and it's probably the best thing I've written and I stole from Search Man to do it. Thanks Search Man.

96. Elec Man (Mega Man 1)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJdFxTOysjo

I've always had this sort of weird, longstanding vendetta against this theme, and I don't know why, but I've decided to rethink it as I made this list. Maybe it was because of the whole thing where it sounds like that one Journey song, and I really hate Journey (fun fact: Manami Matsumae says she hadn't heard the song before she wrote this. I believe her - it seems pretty likely to me that two different musicians would discover that particular melody hook). Maybe it's because I truly detest this stage - the upward climb is a novel idea but it's so slow and filled with a lot of frustration. Maybe it's just the fact that, as a dumb kid, I really liked all the themes that were EXCITING and BADASS and this theme, being in a major key and all, was just not edgy enough for me. In reality, this theme's iconic, and I apologize to Elec Man for not having seen it before. I also apologize for the fact that, yes, I once again ranked something below its Soccer counterpart.