Fight, Megaman! (Mega Man 7, 1995)

When Mega Man 6 was released on the NES, Mega Man X was already available on the SNES. Sure, it was only a difference of two months, but, as we discussed last time, the classic Mega Man series already felt quaint by comparison. If there was a compelling reason for it to continue alongside its new baby brother, Mega Man 6 didn’t seem to know what it was.

And so we had a gap. For the first time since the first sequel, more than one year passed without a new release in the classic Mega Man series. At the time, it probably felt like Mega Man was dead, with Mega Man X taking its place. It was probably a surprise, therefore, when Mega Man 7–another classic series entry–was released on the SNES, the home of its own successor.

I say “was probably a surprise” because I sure as heck didn’t know it existed. As much as I loved the series, and as much as I was still following video games, my attention was elsewhere. Mega Man 7 came and went without even making its presence known, much less piquing my interest.

If Mega Man 6 felt a bit late to the game because Mega Man X was already on shelves, Mega Man 7 must have felt downright ancient; by the time it came out the SNES already had Mega Man X2 and Mega Man X3. (If there was one tradition Capcom wanted to keep alive, it was series fatigue.) To ask us to take up arms against Dr. Wily again after three games in which we were fighting Sigma was to ask us to regress. To grow backward. To become, again, something we’ve already moved on from being.

It’s safe to say that Mega Man 7 failed in whatever halfhearted overture it might have been making to departed fans. I don’t doubt that people played it. I don’t doubt that some of them liked it. But I do doubt — conclusively so — that it made any kind of widespread impact the way earlier Mega Man games did, or the way Mega Man X games were making now. Mega Man 7 was orphaned before it was even born.

But I think that’s rather sad. Mega Man 7 is far from perfect, but I actually think it does a great job of evolving the classic formula for new hardware, it’s positively gorgeous to look at, and it’s one of the most fun games in the series. In fact, it’s one of my favorites.

There’s a charm to Mega Man 7 that doesn’t exist in many games. There’s the sense that, whatever it’s doing, it’s having fun…a sense that was entirely absent from the previous game. There’s the sense that it knows it’s a relic and that there’s nothing it can do to catch up, so it might as well enjoy itself.

Mega Man 7, I’m sure, was greenlit because it might as well have been. It was a relatively low investment of finances and resources to crank out a game with a proven formula. If it flopped, it wouldn’t flop terribly, and if it soared Capcom would be able to milk two series concurrently on the same system. The risk was low, and the bet was safe. I’m sure of that.

And so I’m under no misapprehension that Mega Man 7 was a labor of love, or even a game the developers especially believed in.

It was another installment, making its begrudging transition to the next console generation.

It was a decision born entirely of commercial greed, and not at all of artistic integrity.

And yet, the result was still pretty great, and one deserving of more celebration than I’ve ever actually seen it get.

The story is nothing unique, aside from an unexpectedly tight bit of continuity at the beginning: the newspaper reporting Wily’s arrest at the end of Mega Man 6 is shown here in a 16-bit upgrade, and his next batch of slumbering Robot Masters busts him out of prison. I don’t know if it was the X series’ stronger focus on narrative that inspired the developers to suddenly care about anything that happened before, but it’s a pretty nice and unexpected touch to see a deliberate bridge between the events of these two games.

Beyond that, though: eight Robot Masters, new special weapons, fortress stages, refights, Wily. The story is everything we expected, and nothing more.

In fact, it could be argued that it’s a bit less. The absence of a pre-Wily fortress leaves no room for the false-villain feint we’ve now come to expect. There’s no attempt to convince us that Dr. Cossack, Proto Man, or Mr. X is behind this mess; it’s Wily from the start, for the first time since Mega Man 2.

Is that a step backward, or a welcome return to simplicity? It’s hard to say, but since only one of these false-villain twists was interesting or any good (hello, Mega Man 4) I’d say we’re not losing much by cutting out the fluff.

Okay, yes, I know, nobody plays Mega Man for the story, so what I should really be taking into account is less the fact that we’re spared a false villain and more the fact that we’re losing an entire fortress worth of stages.

And that’s fair.

But, here’s the thing: I’m a quality over quantity kind of guy every time. I’d rather have a shorter game that’s tightly designed and rewarding to play than one that pads itself meaninglessly. Ideally, yes, we’d have a longer game that’s just as good or better than the shorter one, but we all know that a) that’s not the rule and b) Mega Man specifically struggles with that.

The “extra” stages between the Robot Masters and Dr. Wily’s fortress were never really all that great. A grand total of once (again, hey, good job, Mega Man 4!) were they fun to play, and the rest of the time they ranged from forgettable (Mega Man 5) to atrociously designed (Mega Man 3). And I’m not a fan of the fortress stages anyway; the more of them you have, the more the game’s balance shifts away from what should be its main attraction: the new Robot Masters.

For those reasons, I’m not just okay with losing an unwelcome batch of fortress stages; I encourage it. In theory. Because what I’d really hope for in exchange is a better batch of the fortress stages we do get. Ones that can be a little better honed and designed and refined because we just took a good chunk of levels off the designers’ plates.

And Mega Man 7 does not have very good fortress stages. But we’ll come back to that.

What really won me over about Mega Man 7 is the way it looks. In fact, the SNES is my favorite console from a visual standpoint. It offered a richer palette than the NES, leading to greater vibrancy and detail, as well as more expressive animations, but it was also still technically limited. Photorealism was so far out of its grasp that relatively few games tried to look realistic at all…which, happily, meant that video game artists actually had to develop an artistic direction.

Nowadays there are still, of course, visually striking games, but there’s no denying the fact that many of them, particularly those with larger budgets, just try to make things look real and move on. And that’s not art. That’s not style. That’s not creativity. Realism has its place and it has its merit, but it’s not interesting. When an artist instead chooses to create an entire visual universe, it gives the game more personality. More of an identity. And more, in my eyes, appeal.

When I think about the SNES (or the Super Nintendo, as we always knew it), I think first about the sharp, bright colors that brought familiar worlds and characters to life in such a new and unforgettable way. I loved Mario, but never in my wildest dreams could I have expected the visual feast that was Super Mario World. I loved Link, but how on Earth do you go back to The Legend of Zelda after seeing Hyrule in A Link to the Past? I loved Punch-Out!!, but Super Punch-Out!! made the cartoon boxers feel alive.

Turtles in Time, Super Metroid, Super Castlevania IV…the list goes on, and I’m just naming series that found new life after moving on from the NES. Open it up to SNES originals and, of course, the list gets even longer.

SNES games were beautiful. Video games had never looked better, and, to this day, I think they’ve only rarely looked better. There’s little as appealing (or nostalgic) to me as the animated comic strips that were SNES games. And while I didn’t play Mega Man 7 at the peak of my love for the system, I sure appreciate it today.

Everything in this game just looks…beautiful. The sprites, the animations, the backgrounds…it feels very Saturday morning, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment. For a series that always took itself with passive seriousness, the fact that it leans into cartooniness for this outing feels both refreshing and overdue. This is the first Mega Man game that asked, “Isn’t this eight-evil-robots premise just a little bit silly?” And then it responded in exactly the right way: “Yes, it sure is. Let’s have fun with it.”

As a result, the game is full of wonderful, charming flourishes. There are obvious ones, like the opening gag with Mega Man putting on the wrong helmet (emphasized by the boss select tune, which audibly gives up). But there are so many smaller things that are easy to overlook, too. There’s the way the walking-eye enemies reach the end of a platform and extend a leg just beyond where you think they should stop, feeling for solid ground. There’s Treble, Bass’ dog, growling at you at the end of the intro stage. There’s the Game Boy you can have Rush dig up at the beginning of Junk Man’s lair.

There’s the way Freeze Man will stand still as long as necessary, taunting you to make the first move. There’s the way Shade Man bows to show his respect. There’s the way you can hit Spring Man with the Thunder Bolt to turn him into a powerful electromagnet.

There’s just so much love here. So many unnecessary little details and moments that lend the game an air of specific significance, and make it feel like more than the seventh entry in a series that’s overstayed its welcome.

The move to 16-bit hardware, though, was bound to bring with it a visual upgrade. So, yes, as much as I truly adore the way Mega Man 7 looks, I have to admit that that was kind of a given. What impresses me is that the series — admittedly dragging its feet through the past couple of games — didn’t allow the new coat of paint to be the primary selling point.

The visual refresh must have triggered a surge of developmental creativity as well, because Mega Man 7 is the most innovative game in the series since Mega Man 3 in terms of how much new it does. Whether or not you like the things Mega Man 7 brings to the table is down to personal preference, but there’s no denying that it did innovate, and that its innovations stuck around.

We listed most of this game’s innovations in the last installment (Bass, Auto, two sets of four Robot Masters, intro and midpoint stages, screws as currency, shop) but what’s really interesting is that a number of these stuck around right through the NES-style rebirth games Mega Man 9 and Mega Man 10. Those, as you’ll remember, hit a deliberate reset to restore the series to its simple, accessible roots, most notably stripping Mega Man of his slide and chargeable Buster. And yet the screws, shop, Bass, and Auto all remained part of the formula as so much else was taken away.

In fact, in terms of game mechanics, the shop is Mega Man 7‘s most lasting impression on the series, and it’s an important one. I honestly don’t think many players would have beaten Mega Man 9 without it.

On the whole, Mega Man controls as tightly here as ever. It sometimes feels to me as though he’s moving more slowly, but that might be an illusion caused by the additional frames of animation, all of which are gorgeous and smooth, and the tradeoff for which — if, indeed, there’s any tradeoff at all — is very much worth it.

One common complaint I’ve heard is about Mega Man’s increased sprite size, but that’s something I’ve never been able to understand. People speak about this change as though the levels and enemy placements aren’t designed around his larger size, but they clearly are, as any given screenshot will illustrate.

Sure, he takes up more space than he did in his NES days, but that’s not inherently a bad thing. It’s only bad if the levels are packed as full of obstacles, baddies, and projectiles as they used to be. Which they clearly are not.

Instead, the enemy placement in Mega Man 7 feels more considered and deliberate. While previous games would throw waves of enemies at you — sometimes respawning ones — and attempt to catch you off guard with quick intrusions from off screen, Mega Man 7 usually gives you just one or two to deal with at a time. Rarely do they come in waves, and when they do, they’re part of a well-considered setpiece. (See the elevator rides in the Junk Man and Shade Man stages, or the flatbed miniboss in Turbo Man’s.) In short, as much as I love the earlier games, they sometimes tossed you into hectic situations for the sake of causing carelessness through panic.

That’s not a complaint; that’s part of their design. But, here, the philosophy is much different: a smaller number of enemies, used to a more considered effect. No longer does the game want to overwhelm you; it wants to outwit out. And Mega Man’s increased sprite size facilitates that. It makes the levels feel less empty than they actually are, because you see less of the screen at once. All you really need to be aware of is Mega Man himself and the most immediate hazard. The design of the game allows that, and I honestly believe that if you disagree, you’re not engaging with the game properly. If you really feel as though there’s too little room to accomplish what you need to accomplish, you’re trying to accomplish it the wrong way.

What’s more, the larger sprites make for, I feel, more compelling boss fights. We’ve spoken before about the central idea of the series being that of the duel…the one-on-one battle that takes place at the end of each main level, when you square off against a Robot Master and pit your reflexes and cunning against his. (Or, in one case, hers.)

The larger sprites enhance this experience, making it feel more like a genuine clash between powerhouses than two sets of pixels shooting at each other. The Robot Masters here aren’t the best in the series — which is a shame, because I really wish they were — but the fights with each of them feel significant in a way that they rarely did in the previous games.

There, they were bosses. Here, they are opponents, and I honestly feel that’s due to the increase in sprite size. It makes the boss rooms feel more tensely claustrophobic, and makes the bosses feel unique since they dwarf almost any of the enemies you had to fight on your way to them. (To choose an example at random, Wood Man was about the same size or smaller than most of the enemies in his stage. Even the wimpy Spring Man here, though, is bigger than anything that got in your way before.)

As a bigger sprite you are a bigger target, but that goes for your enemy as well, and no Robot Master in Mega Man 7 feels unfairly quick or difficult to avoid. The closest violation would be Slash Man, but even he isn’t anywhere near as unfair as Quick Man or Shadow Man from the previous games.

I won’t lie; I’m terrible against Slash Man. But I’m also aware that most of the damage I take is down to my own poor (or slow) choices. He rains pods of adhesive down upon you, and if one connects, you’ll find your mobility compromised, giving him a clearer shot at you. But you can nearly always dodge these pods if you’re quick enough, which keeps you on a fairly even footing with him. The rest of the time, you can just jump, shoot, and react to him as you would any other boss. Quick Man and Shadow Man, by contrast, begin their assaults the moment you walk through the boss doors and don’t ever let up.

Slash Man is also one of the few Robot Masters here that isn’t absolutely crippled by his weakness. And, overall, that’s one of Mega Man 7‘s problems.

In previous games, weaknesses were handled pretty well. Fighting a boss with the Buster was some degree of difficult, and fighting them with their weakness reduced that degree*, but usually not by much. They’d still put up a fight, and you couldn’t afford to get totally careless. All the weakness would do is deal a bit more damage than usual.

Mega Man 7, though, pushes it too far. Instead of an option between a normal fight and a slightly easier one, you get the option between a normal fight and no fight at all. The Robot Masters are so overcome by their weaknesses that they become immobilized, trapped in an easily exploitable pattern, or both. In short, once you know a Robot Master’s weakness, you can afford to get totally careless.

At least, usually. There are two exceptions, which is a relief. One of them, again, is Slash Man, who is probably the best handling of a weakness in this game. Not only is he often out of range of the Freeze Cracker, but if you hit him with it he’ll slide around on the ground, and can cause contact damage that way. This is nice, because it adds a small element of alternate risk to the fight. Yes, you can use his weakness, but if you do you’ll have to deal with an additional obstacle.

The other exception is Freeze Man, who is necessarily risky to fight with his weakness as it’s a shield weapon.** Hitting him with the Junk Shield briefly locks him in place, but it also leaves you with very little room to avoid colliding with him. This is a blessing in disguise, though, as this encourages you to use the Buster against him, and Freeze Man is legitimately one of the most satisfying Robot Masters to fight that way.

At first, he seems to be a bit more frantic than fair, and his ability to freeze you to the spot and knock on you helplessly makes him feel like a frustrating bully. But if you spend a few rounds focusing not on attacking but on responding, you’ll learn how he moves. You’ll learn that his attacks come in a predictable cycle. You’ll learn that he jumps high enough when you fire at him that you can slide harmlessly underneath. You’ll learn, in other words, that this is a dance, and you have to let him lead.

Once you learn the proper way to deal with each of his actions, it’s an extraordinarily graceful fight, and one of the highlights of the entire series for me. It’s surprisingly beautiful in motion, and it’s clear that the programmers spent a lot of time honing the choreography of that fight into something complex and layered.

The developers also seem to have had their creative juices refreshed when it came to the stages. Granted, you had relatively standard air (Cloud Man) and ice (Freeze Man) stages, and we have an upgraded version of the junkyard we saw back in Mega Man 4 (Junk Man), but those each have their unique quirks and the remaining stages are like nothing we’ve seen before.

Turbo Man’s stage is a fire-tinged car factory. Burst Man’s stage imbues its color-coded water sections with two entirely different sets of physics. Then we get to the really good stuff.

Slash Man’s level is a stage-long tribute to Jurassic Park, a movie that was released two years before the game and loomed very large in the cultural consciousness of the time. It’s crawling with robot dinosaurs, which is cute in itself, and you journey from the electrified perimeter fence all the way to the hatchery and lab at the park’s (presumed) center. We haven’t gotten a dinosaur-themed or movie-themed level since, and that makes Slash Man’s stand out.

Then there’s Spring Man’s stage, my favorite in the game, with its incredibly bouncy and sprightly theme to underscore an incredibly bouncy and sprightly level. The stage is toy-themed, which is something else we hadn’t seen before. (Though Top Man may come close.) Much of the challenge here comes from keeping control of Mega Man, who is sent reeling by springs in the walls, ceilings, and floors, as well as teaching yourself the ins and outs of each new platform type. (Almost as though you’re getting to play with some new toys of your own, hm?) It also contains a surprisingly wide-open room at about its midpoint which scrolls in all directions and offers multiple paths from the entrance to the exit. It’s a nice bit of non-linearity in a series that has never quite embraced the concept, and it makes Spring Man’s stage feel all the more fun for it. It is, quite literally, a playground.

But my favorite stage concept goes to Shade Man, whose horror-themed level is such a perfect fit for the series that one has to wonder why we never got another one. (Skull Man himself may fit the bill, but his stage does not.)

Shade Man’s stage is full of horror cliche to the point that it’s impossible not to have fun there. There are implements of torture, the dead rising from the grave, humanoids transforming by moonlight into wolves, zombies crashing through windows as you blast them and try to keep from getting overwhelmed…it’s wonderful, and the fact that its roots even stretch into literature — the cackling raven tormenting you from above — is evidence of just how committed this level is to its gimmick. There is a secret button combination that lets you hear the graveyard theme from Capcom’s own Super Ghouls ‘N Ghosts as you play, which is nice…but Shade Man’s theme is also the best one in the game, so it’s a shame that this trick tempts players away from listening to it. (Though I’ll put my neck on the line and say that the soundtrack overall is pretty fantastic.)

On the whole the Robot Masters are…pretty lame, I admit. It’s a shame that the series only made the leap to the SNES at this point; a few games sooner and we might have had Robot Masters that really deserved the enhanced presence. The only ones that stand out to me in any substantial way are Cloud Man and Shade Man. The former due to his (at the time) unique legless design, which makes him legitimately look like a climate control robot as opposed to a climate-themed robot, and the latter due to his gentlemanly manner and interesting attack pattern. It’s nowhere near as complex or rewarding as Freeze Man’s, but reacting to Shade Man can be tricky, and his ability to suck life from your health bar into his own lends the fight a whole other kind of stakes.***

But where the Robot Masters fall down, the special weapons pick up. In fact, I’d venture to argue that this was the best batch of weapons in the series so far.

Of our new toys, only one really feels disappointing: the Scorch Wheel. It’s sluggish to fire, awkward to aim, and not especially powerful. It’s pretty lousy, and never worth using outside of the one area in Slash Man’s stage that lets you burn some foliage to find Beat. I think it says a lot that Dr. Wily’s final form is usually weak to the most cumbersome weapon in the game, but Mega Man 7 knew that asking you to hit him with the Scorch Wheel was unconscionable.

The Wild Coil is also pretty crap. It fires two springs at once — one before you and one behind you — and you can vary their bounce height. There’s not much to it and it’s not especially useful, but it works well enough against Shade Man, as you can just launch one as he swoops in to grab you. It’s a good defense that doubles as offense.

Then there a couple of pretty good weapons. The Freeze Cracker is a large projectile that splits into shards when it hits a surface. It can also be aimed slightly up or down, which sounds more useful than it actually is. It’s essentially a slower, larger version of the Shotgun Ice from Mega Man X, but it’s still a decent weapon here. It also freezes cloud platforms, freezes lava, and allows you to trigger a snowstorm in Cloud Man’s stage.

The Danger Wrap is an explosive encased in a bubble, which can absorb enemies and allow you to shove them into other enemies, which makes it pretty fun to play with. You can also encase otherwise invincible enemies and knock them harmlessly out of your way, and you can drop the explosive without a bubble by pressing Down as you launch it. It has a lot of use.

Then we get to the great stuff. The Noise Crush is a sonic weapon that bounces off of walls, allowing you to absorb it and fire it back even stronger. You can’t power the projectile up more than once, and the necessity of having a wall available means it’s not always the best option, but it’s a lot of fun to play with and a great weapon once you’re used to using it. You can also fire it and quickly slide into it to avoid having to rebound it back into yourself, but that’s more of a novelty than any real boon to its usefulness. Great weapon, though, and one of the most fun to experiment with.

Next there’s the Junk Shield, the single best shield weapon in the entire series. Of course, “best shield weapon” just means it’s extremely durable, so I’d be lying if I said it was exciting. But it is nice to finally get a shield worth pulling out.

The Thunder Bolt is a powerful electric attack that splits into two projectiles and travels up and down when it hits something. It’s another Mega Man X echo, being very similar to the Electric Spark from that game. Here it can also be used to energize machinery, trigger thunderstorms and lightning, and unintentionally power up two bosses. It’s a really great weapon, but it’s still not my favorite.

No. My favorite weapon is the Slash Claw. Now that is a close-quarters weapon worth using…a first for the series. (And if it weren’t for the Flame Sword, it would be the last as well.)

The Slash Claw is very satisfying to use, and it actually encourages you to play the game a bit differently. It’s extremely powerful, but it requires you to get within arm’s reach of dangerous enemies. Do you trade away distance for power and showmanship? Hell yes I do, and while it predates any substantial role for Wily’s masterpiece, playing Mega Man 7 with the Slash Claw reminds me of playing some of the Mega Man X games as Zero. Sure, you can pick off enemies from a distance…or you can get right up in their face and slash them to bits. There’s a reason Zero is such a popular character, and it’s the exact same reason the Slash Claw feels so good to keep equipped. Its only downside is that we can’t get it until we’re halfway through the game.

In addition to being perhaps the best overall batch of weapons, these are also the most versatile. Nearly all of them allow you to fine tune the attack in some way and serve as a utility. To refer to Mega Man 9 pressing the reset button again, it’s worth noting that the weapons were more in line with what we see in Mega Man 7 than with what we’ve seen in any previous game. Mega Man 9‘s weapons also pulled double duty, functioning as tools just as you see here. They don’t just make fighting easier; they make traversing levels easier.

Another welcome change is the fact that the boss weaknesses feel logical again. Perhaps this is helped along a bit by the additional frames of animation, which make it more clear why a Robot Master is reacting to your weapon the way he is. Additionally, though, you can reason them through fairly easily. Cloud Man is weak to the Danger Wrap because it floats up and encases him, bringing him crashing to the ground. Junk Man’s exposed wiring short circuits when he’s hit with the Thunder Bolt. Slash Man freezes solid when hit with the Freeze Cracker, like a Cro-Magnon man waiting to be thawed and studied. That resonates thematically with his stage, which is brilliant.

The weapons also lend themselves to minor environmental puzzles, none of which are mandatory and few of which, admittedly, are satisfying to figure out. But it encourages experimentation in a way that previous games in the series did not; there, you’d just try to figure out which weapon worked best against which enemy. Here it’s up to you to determine which objects and obstacles can be interacted with, as well as the tool that will allow you to do it.

Of course, the game isn’t perfect. And I can identify more true flaws in it than I can in most games that I love. For instance, there’s the Robot Museum mid-stage, which was clearly abandoned at some early point in its development. The evidence there comes from its lovely music, which mashes up songs from previous Mega Man games and doesn’t nearly get the chance to play fully before you make it to the boss. It’s a song composed for a decent stretch of level, but what we actually get is just a few empty rooms.

The concept of revisiting past Mega Man experiences in museum environment is a solid and interesting one, but evidently the team didn’t have time to make good on it here. The concept would be revisited to far greater effect in Mega Man & Bass.

Oh, and, hey, speaking of Bass…Bass is introduced in this game! He’s a genuinely great character, and one I’m glad has remained with the series since. However, he’s symptomatic, I think, of another problem.

After all, he’s a recurring foil for Mega Man, popping up a handful of times to fight him and hold him back from Dr. Wily. He’s an ethically murky character with allegiance that seems to shift throughout his appearances. He serves as a test of what you’ve learned, and a gate you’ll have to pass several times in order to complete your mission.

Do you have it yet?

That’s right; Bass has taken on the Proto Man role.

Which is a shame, because Proto Man was a rich and intriguing character. After Mega Man 3, however, the series didn’t know what to do with him. In Mega Man 4 and Mega Man 5 he was almost entirely off camera and the player never interacted with him. In Mega Man 6 and some of the Game Boy games he was relegated to Eddie’s role, dropping off an item and beaming out into irrelevance. In this game he’ll drop in to give you some hints.

It’s strange, and while there is an optional Proto Man fight in this game, I’m sad that they had to introduce an entirely different character to fill what was largely the role he originally occupied. In other words, I like Bass but I sure wish we didn’t need him.

Another odd choice is the dialogue section that follows each Robot Master fight. Mega Man and Dr. Light chitchat for a bit about whatever weapon you just got, and that’s nice. I prefer weapon demonstrations to weapon narrations, but since the demonstrations in Mega Man 6 were utterly worthless, I can’t blame them for trying something different.

The problem is that the conversations omit fairly important information. For instance, they don’t mention that the Freeze Cracker can be aimed, that the Danger Wrap can be fired without its bubble, or that the Junk Shield can be launched at will. That may have been purposeful, leaving a bit of room for experimentation and discovery on the part of the player, but in that case I think it would have been better to go with no explanation at all.

When we do get explanation, we assume that’s it; if Dr. Light says that the Freeze Cracker shatters when it hits a wall, we assume that that’s all it does. Why wouldn’t we? He would have said more if it did more, so we don’t experiment with pressing Up and Down while we fire it. On the other hand, had Dr. Light said nothing at all and left us to figure it out, we may well have. I think the solution Mega Man 7 came up with actually hinders rather than encourages that experimentation.

Also, I’ve heard that the Japanese version has dialogue between Auto and Roll, during which they make jokes about the weapons. I’m a bit surprised that was excised from the Western release, as it would have fit quite well with the cartoony approach of the game and the elevated presence both of those characters have here. It’s a shame we missed out on that.

I’m also not a fan of splitting the Robot Masters into two sets of four. In addition to forcing me to cobble together a decent stage select image for the start of this article (look forward to that tradition vanishing next time…), it makes guessing weaknesses so much easier.

In, say, Mega Man 2, you’d defeat one Robot Master and get a new weapon. Your odds of blindly choosing the Robot Master who is weak to that weapon are 1:7. In Mega Man 7, you’re more than twice as likely; the odds are 1:3. That’s a huge difference, and it’s even more stark when you have two weapons. Mega Man 2 could keep you guessing for hours. Mega Man 7 reduces the fun of correctly identifying your next target, and I’m not sure that the four-and-four arrangement offers any benefits of its own to negate that.

Of course, it could offer a benefit of its own: the fact that the developers can design levels in the second set that hinge on items the player will have acquired in the first set. That would have been a nice twist but, alas, they don’t do it here. That’s one of very few areas in which Mega Man 8 actually improves upon its predecessor, as the stages of Sword Man and Search Man are designed exactly that way.

And then there are the fortress stages, which feel like an enormous step down from the Robot Master stages in terms of fun.

I know I don’t speak much about fortress stages and Dr. Wily fights in these reviews, but that’s because there’s usually very little to say. They’re gauntlets, the bosses are enormous, and Wily is a cheap punk. Here they’re even less fun than usual, especially since Dr. Wily’s final form is extremely powerful and very difficult to avoid. It’s a rare Mega Man fight that’s truly designed terribly, and the only way a reasonable player will complete it is by draining E-Tank after E-Tank. You’ll eventually succeed, sure, but you’ll never feel like you’ve earned it.

Still, though, for all the bad I can say about it, I love Mega Man 7. Anything negative you’ll read above is the result of nitpicking. On the whole, it’s one of the best of the series, and one of the best games in the incredible SNES library. It gets strangely overlooked, and I’m not sure why. It’s clearly of a piece with the rest of the classic series, and yet its visual novelty alone helps it stand apart. It’s an experience worth having in its own right, in all of its colorful, bouncy, addictive glory.

Mega Man 7 doesn’t quite offer a compelling argument for this series and Mega Man X to exist in parallel. In fact, if anything, it reminds us which series is less inventive, which series is more at home in the past than the future, which series the fans have already moved on from.

But I’m still glad it exists. And I’m glad I took the time to engage with it.

And I really, really wish we had two games in this style, rather than two in the style of Mega Man 8.

Speaking of which…well, tune in next time.

Best Robot Master: Shade Man
Best Stage: Spring Man
Best Weapon: Slash Claw
Best Theme: Shade Man
Overall Ranking: 2 > 7 > 5 > 4 > 3 > 1 > 6

(All screenshots courtesy of the excellent Mega Man Network.)

—–
* At least, in theory. I actually think many Robot Masters are easier to fight with the Buster than with their weaknesses. From the games we’ve covered so far alone: Cut Man, Guts Man, Fire Man, Metal Man, Crash Man, Heat Man, Top Man, Toad Man, Ring Man, Dive Man, Wave Man, Stone Man, Tomahawk Man, and Freeze Man.

** Granted, you can fire the Junk Shield, but only at angles that are difficult to predict. I don’t know that I’ve ever successfully hit him that way.

*** Ahem.

My Top 10 Angry Video Game Nerd Episodes

This past Friday, James Rolfe — best known as the Angry Video Game Nerd — published a video featuring his personal top 10 episodes of that series. By this point, I’ve seen every episode…multiple times, in the cases of the ones I liked. Yes, I’d argue that the quality has gone downhill in recent years, but his top 10 video, I think, explains why: the episodes James names as his favorites are actually the ones that I’d probably name as my least favorites.

His desires aren’t in line with mine. He likes story lines and special effects and external zaniness. I like reviews. Sometimes they dovetail well, sometimes they don’t. He seems to like it when they don’t.

Which made me wonder about my top 10 Angry Video Game Nerd episodes. And as I’m moving this week, I figured this might be a fun post to leave you with, in case I lose internet access for a while.

For the purposes of this list, I did consider multi-part episodes (in which a game or series is covered in more than one sequential video) to be one review, but treated sequel episodes as their own entities. Otherwise, this should be pretty straightforward. Oh, and, there’s no Mike Matei to be found in the entire list. Funny how that worked out.

So, here you go. My personal top 10 episodes of a video game review show that’s shockingly been running almost as long as I’ve been online. I hope you enjoy.

10) Indiana Jones Trilogy

Episode 48: Like James, I’m starting my list with what I’d consider to be a “standard” episode. And I’m not really sure why this one keeps coming to mind, so if you’d like to, feel free to sub it out for The Simpsons, Dracula, Spider-Man or something. But the Indiana Jones Trilogy episode does a great job of providing exactly what I want to see when I tune in. The games are reviewed comprehensively, the observations are well made, the jokes are funny, and James has a clear and obvious love for the source material. (Well, the films at least. The odds of him having much love for these particular games are pretty slim.) What’s more, he reviews three related games, which I always love. Videos featuring multiple games will make up a lot of this list. While one-game reviews are often very good, I think I enjoy the variety of hopping around within a singular theme. Also, I enjoy videos about these middle-of-the-road bad games. The ones that aren’t worth playing for laughs on your own, but still provide plenty of fodder for comedy from a distance.

9) Action 52 / Cheetahmen

Episodes 90 and 91: Fruit doesn’t hang any lower than Action 52, but the sheer volume of crap crammed into a single cartridge really does make it worth revisiting over and over. Many game critics got to this one long before James did, but there’s still a lot of entertainment on display here. In fact, his skits and jokes don’t make this one at all; rather, the game humiliates itself by failing to load, throwing up glitch after glitch, and even preventing itself from progressing. Action 52 is an easy target, but a fruitful one. It’s a funny game to watch anyone play, and it’s only right that angry reviewing’s elder statesman got to take his jabs as well. The second part completes the review but it also looks at the Genesis version and Cheetahmen II, so it’s absolutely necessary to see them as halves of a complete whole. For what it’s worth, I actually did play Action 52 as a kid. A friend of mine owned it, and part of the appeal of James’ video, I think, is the marathon plow through game after game that reflects my exact experience of it at my friend’s house. Surely one of these games will have to be good…

8) Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties

Episode 74: Easily one of the out-and-out funniest episodes. Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties is more of a terrible amateur film than it is a game, but that just means James has a wealth of different things to criticize it for. Due to the nature of the game, this feels more like a truncated Let’s Play than a proper review, but it’s absolutely hilarious. This one has been a favorite of mine since it was first uploaded. It doesn’t advance the AVGN formula or do anything especially unique, but it’s one of James’ most successful comic outings in my opinion, and for that reason alone it deserves a place on this list.

7) Street Fighter 2010

Episode 85: There’s a lot to love about this one. It covers multiple games, provides an interesting history of the Street Fighter franchise, and it gives a relatively unknown game (by Capcom NES standards) a spotlight it surprisingly ends up deserving. But I think what I really love about it and what makes it stand out in my mind is that it serves as a perfect illustration of what kept us playing these extremely difficult, often unfair, relentlessly punishing video games. James starts off predictably enough, complaining about the controls, the difficulty, and the absurdly tenuous connection to the Street Fighter name. But then something clicks. Sure, the game in many ways sort of sucks…but it’s overall compelling enough to keep him coming back. He pushes through, gradually. He engages with the game on its own terms, even as he lambastes those terms. He doesn’t just learn how to complete a level, but how to complete it quickly, without taking damage, and while collecting all of the powerups. Why? Because you have to, otherwise you can’t finish the game. Obviously James has (rightly) given up on many games in the past. He reaches a roadblock or finds some reason to call it quits, and you can’t blame him. So for Street Fighter 2010, which certainly seems like one of the most difficult games he’s ever played, it says an awful lot that he actually takes the time to finish it. In doing so, he reminds us of what we’ve all gone through. It likely wasn’t Street Fighter 2010 for most of us. It may have been Mega Man. Or Battletoads. But we all had those moments, when we cursed at a game, hated a game, raged against a game’s refusal to play fair…and yet fell in love anyway. A truly great episode.

6) Back to the Future ReRevisited

Episode 94: The earliest AVGN episodes (or Angry Nintendo Nerd episodes, I should say) were great for what they were. I remember watching them with my friend Mike, who couldn’t believe what he had found. I couldn’t believe it, either. Almost nothing James was saying about those old games was new or even especially insightful, but for the first time it felt like the frustrating experiences we had as kids were actually universal, and somewhere out there, some guy in a white buttondown was profanely articulating them on our behalf. It was a riot, especially because there was nothing else like it at the time. It felt genuinely novel. But, of course, James’ style progressed, and watching those old episodes, it’s easy to see their rough edges and puzzling omissions. James saw it, too, and used this episode to re-review those games, paving over the holes and fleshing out criticisms he’d barely scraped before. The centerpiece is Back to the Future on the NES, which somehow provides even more material than he wrung from it the first time around…and we get proper looks at other Back to the Future games as well. What I really love, though, is the ending. As often as James tries to cram actual narrative into these episodes — and as often as I’d argue it fails — sometimes a real-world twist like what we get here achieves more than careful scripting ever could.

5) Virtual Boy

Episode 42: My absolute favorite kind of AVGN episode. This one looks at something that’s not obscure, exactly, but which relatively few viewers will be personally familiar with. James provides a history lesson, places the product in its proper context, and reviews every single one of the games released for it. (Initially he left out Jack Bros., but I’m linking to a later version of the video that includes it.) The Virtual Boy was a high-profile failure, and probably the first true stumble for Nintendo…a company that in so many young eyes — mine included — could do no wrong. I sensed something was off as a kid, and the Virtual Boy was probably the first thing Nintendo ever made that I didn’t want at all. Watching this video, I see that I didn’t miss out on much. Surprisingly, most of the games turn out to be either fun or inoffensive, leaving the hardware itself to shoulder the blame for the system’s failure. Many of the best AVGN episodes teach me something beyond “the controls in this game are bad.” This one provided a great overview of a gaming curiosity I only ever experienced in the periphery. Eventually I did get to play a Virtual Boy at a convention, and I was actually impressed with how well it handled the 3D effect. But as this episode demonstrates, the gimmick failed to justify the machine’s existence. James’ video provides a perfect eulogy.

4) Godzilla

Episode 77: A friend of mine isn’t a huge fan of the AVGN, but he does enjoy James’ other big series: Monster Madness. He says this is because James has a real knowledge of and passion for cinema…and I’d say the same thing about my friend, so I’m willing to believe it. Monster Madness used to be a yearly series that would run every October. It’s been discontinued, but every so often James’ clear love of film bleeds into an AVGN episode. This may be the prime example, as he’s able to identify obscure characters from these Godzilla video games and trace their cinematic histories…including characters who didn’t even originate with that series. The whole “licensed games are garbage” thing is well worn by this point, but I think an episode on garbage Godzilla games is deserved. After all, why wouldn’t Godzilla games be awesome? He’s a giant monster who smashes things. How hard could it be to make a fun game based on that? You’d have to actively try to make them lousy by stripping away the very essence of who Godzilla is and what Godzilla does. Sure enough, every game the AVGN covers here does exactly that in its own way. And James’ frustration and disappointment in that fact feels far more natural here than it does in so many other episodes, as he clearly cares about the franchise…and just wanted one game he could enjoy along with the films.

3) Ghostbusters

Episodes 21, 22, and 23: I remember thinking the very first AVGN episodes were nothing if not exhaustive. Then we got a three part episode about Ghostbusters on the NES and I realized I hadn’t seen anything yet. Ghostbusters, like Godzilla, seems like a can’t-miss video game premise. You have popular and recognizable heroes, awesome gear that every little boy wanted desperately to get his hands on, and an opportunity to create fun and inventive ghosts for players to shoot at. And, like Godzilla, Ghostbusters went out of its way to miss. It’s an extremely strong concept for a game that is botched spectacularly. The three-part nature of this episode may sound like overkill, but it makes sense to me. It implies a “can’t look away” sort of reaction to the game, which mirrors the one I had as a kid. Yes, Ghostbusters was terrible…but I kept renting it. Kept playing it. Kept hating it. All the while, I guess I couldn’t believe my eyes. I returned over and over again to the game, hoping for it to finally click. Hoping it would reveal itself as the great game I knew it should have been. Hoping I’d realize that I was just playing it incorrectly, or looking for the wrong things. With this series of videos, the AVGN lets go of that hope with a comprehensive review, suggestions for improvement, a look at the game’s many ports, and reviews of other Ghostbusters games to cleanse the palate.

2) Bible Games

Episode 17: The AVGN’s first masterpiece, for sure. The videos prior to this were often funny and were absolutely novel for their time, but this is the video that, in my estimation, made it clear that the concept had staying power. Laying into a good portion of the Wisdom Tree catalog, James spotlights exactly what’s wrong with these offensively lazy Christian cash-ins, approaching them almost entirely from a game-design standpoint and leaving the viewer to decide how true or genuine the didactic intentions of the developers were. Did they truly feel they were saving souls? Or were they just counting on parents to throw money their way without knowing better? The answer’s pretty clear to me, but James does a great job of highlighting his own sampling of absurdities, leaving it to you to pick up on the rest. This one is still and will always be an easy favorite. James dipped back into the Bible games well a few times since, but in my estimation, none of the sequel episodes rise quite to the highs of the original. (Bible Games 2 came pretty close, though.) Taken as a relic of a time when “the NES had Bible games” was a genuine and hilarious revelation, this video is great. Familiarity has dulled its edge a bit, but there’s still a great deal of fun to be had from watching. This is one of those “often imitated, never duplicated” situations, and Bible Games is exactly what every angry reviewer to follow (including yours truly) strove to measure up to.

1) Castlevania

Episodes 79, 80, 81, and 82: The very first AVGN episode was about Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, kicking off this surprisingly long-running series with a look back at the archetypal game James wished he could love. 78 episodes later, he returned to that series with a four-part retrospective that isn’t just my favorite AVGN material, but which is easily some of the best stuff I’ve ever seen on YouTube. I end up rewatching this miniseries around Halloween every year, and I enjoy it a little more each time. The jokes and observations are good, of course, but what really pushes it over the top and makes it worth revisiting is James’ profound love for the series, and for classic horror films in general. He makes the most of his shtick, of course, but this is probably the closest we get to hearing from the “real” person beneath the persona, with his memories of the first five Castlevania games, his later experience of the games on other consoles, and a well-earned paean to the series that closes the entire thing off perfectly. I understand that James and I appreciate different things about his output, but the fact that this didn’t make his top 10 is astounding. I don’t know how the AVGN will eventually end his series, but I’m confident he couldn’t possibly go out on a higher note than this.

What are your favorites? Anything you’d especially disagree with above? I’d be curious to know. Enjoy, and I’ll be back soon!