LogFAQs > #958917292

1. Gemini Man (Mega Man 3)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2LF3YR2dNM

I don't know how the fuck this was possible, and my only explanation for this is that Harumi Fujita must be a witch. She dropped by the series briefly to give us just two themes, and not only did both of them make my overall top 20, but one of them was my favorite Mega Man theme of all time. As incredibly as Yasuaki Fujita did in covering for her once she withdrew from the project, there's always part of me that wonders what the original Fujita's MM3 would have sounded like. Would it have been as beautifully and subversively creative as Gemini Man? I think about this track all the time, and how far ahead of its time it was. There's just nothing from any video game of its era that sounds anything like this. It's uncanny how this distinct salsa vibe of all things, something that you wouldn't expect to be anywhere near a Mega Man game, just sort of perfectly captures the vibe of this colorful, alien, crystal world. As excellent as Mega Man 2 is, Tateishi kind of has one particular style of theme and he mostly colors within its lines - by contrast, this is a breathtakingly strange and exciting expansion of what the musical palette of Mega Man even sounds like in the first place, while still checking all of the boxes. Every little melodic idea in here is so well considered that I'll overlook the fact that there's just a bit of sloppy cross-talk between the two square leads where they kind of overlap each other and create some kind of awkward interference. It's a tiny flaw but really immaterial compared to everything it does well. I'm sort of awestruck that someone could have come up with this in 1990. That one commenter may have thought Mega Man 7 was the future, but the future was already here all along.

Final Mega Man 3 Rankings:

1. Gemini Man (1)
2. Shadow Man (6)
3. Spark Man (16)
4. Needle Man (20)
5. Magnet Man (24)
6. Top Man (34)
7. Dr. Wily 1 (41)
8. Snake Man (42)
9. Hard Man (58)
10. Dr. Wily 2 (84)
11. Dr. Wily 3 (94)

Thoughts: Mega Man 2 may be the A-lister here, but Mega Man 3 has always been very close by, sitting just in its shadow, and by all rights it may be the better game, possibly with the better soundtrack! A lot of memorable themes in this game overall that had stood the test of time, with overall more variety than MM2 has to offer, I think. MM2 and MM3 are one hell of a one-two punch. It's amazing that MM3 was rushed out to market so quickly and yet its soundtrack is so good.

Regrets?: Nah, I actually got this one mostly right.

I'm gonna do one last ranking, and then collect alllll of the lists into one big series of posts at the end, so sit tight.