After making my post about Mega Man Perfect Harmony I tried once again to find a backup of its Steam successor for download. While I was unsuccessful, I did stumble across a stream of it, where I discovered the real reason it was taken down: the original fangame’s levels had been thrown out in favor of straight-up copying levels from the first Mega Man game! Needless to say, I was very disappointed, but I noticed another detail: the stage select had 8 bosses, while the first Mega Man only had six Robot Masters. Wasn’t there another game that also borrowed heavily from Mega Man 1 while having 8 bosses? A game that I never had the opportunity to play back when it was new?

Platformer. Left/right move, X jumps, ☐ shoots, and L/R cycle between your unlocked weapons.

Those of you who’ve played the original Mega Man may remember that if you let go of forward while walking, you’ll slip forward a bit (even on regular ground), something that was rightfully removed in Mega Man III onward to make the controls more responsive. The slip is even absent from Mega Man: The Wily Wars (the Mega Drive port of the first three games + exclusive postgame levels). This game…brings that slip back. Worse, there’s now a very noticeable 0.2 second delay between when you push forward and when you actually begin walking forward–a flaw the original game DOESN’T HAVE! If you want to move forward instantly, you have to do a little short hop, but that obviously means you can’t jump again until you land, once again hamstringing the responsiveness of the controls. I thought this game was supposed to fix the original’s flaws, not add to them!

In fairness, there are some improvements compared to the original. Wily stage 1 is no longer impossible if you miss the Magnet Beam…because the Magnet Beam was removed entirely (at least in the New Style stages). Certain enemy patterns have been simplified to make them less cheap and unpredictable while still being recognizable. The Hyper Bomb (Bomb Man’s weapon) now explodes immediately upon collision with an enemy, making that power somewhat less clunky and useless than before. Fire Man’s attack was slowed down so it can actually be dodged now. Ice Man can now keep running all the way to the other side of the arena, so you can’t just stand in place and keep shooting him like before. Boss corridors don’t have enemies anymore (though that’s something I feel still could’ve worked). Plus, every single stage was redesigned, so there’s reason to play this game even if you already beat the original. Most bosses were also given an extra attack as well.

Unfortunately, not every addition was for the better. Oil Man’s stage introduces oil-covered tiles, and trying to walk on them causes you to trip and not move at all for a second. This means not only that you need to keep jumping, but that you consciously need to stop moving when you’re about to land to avoid tripping again (and if you’ve played a Mega Man game before, you’ll know there are times where you need to keep moving, making this stop-and-start requirement counterintuitive). Mega Man 6 did oil puddles better since, in that game, all that happened was you walked slower and jumped lower until you got out. Also, when the oil in Mega Man 6 catches fire, it burns forever; in this game, it just seems like it burns forever, but there are parts where you have to wait for it to burn out since the tripping mechanic and surrounding level design means you can’t kill the fire enemy in time.

However, what caught me off guard the most is that almost every Wily stage boss was made more difficult! The Yellow Devil now summons a hazard vortex as soon as a single orb is on that side of the screen, giving you even less room to react to them than before. The game tries to make things easier by having the shot pattern happen slightly above you before the fight starts, but it’s done with the Old Style pattern, meaning you still have to memorize the New Style pattern mid-fight to dodge it. CWU-01P has it even worse because its bubble shield is too large to jump over unless you quickly hit it with its weakness: the Super Arm, aka the one where you need to have a pre-existing block available to use it, even if you have plenty of weapon energy! Plus, this isn’t just a one-time occurrence; each pattern-cycle has it go above the screen and restore its bubble, and it doesn’t drop another Super Arm block until after it sweeps across the floor, so you gotta play damn-near perfectly. Now, if you look up a video of this boss, you’ll see a small gap below it when it crosses the floor, implying you’re supposed to slide under it like Mega Man III…except this game won’t let you slide until AFTER BEATING THE GAME, meaning you have to beat this boss without it! The final boss’s second phase has a similar move, where it quickly charges from one side of the screen to the other, once again having that small gap below that you can’t get under without the slide maneuver that you don’t have yet. I was only able to beat the game because, on my last life, the boss just never did that attack.

Side note: if you beat a Robot Master only using the Mega Buster, you unlock that boss as a playable character as well as the character’s respective Challenge missions (giving a reason for bosses to respawn when replaying beaten levels, a reason the original game didn’t have). Neat in theory, but it does make the optional collectibles unintuitive. For example, some levels have clock blocks, so you’ll think “oh, I can use Time Man’s ability as Mega Man to get past them”…except Time Man’s power merely slows down time, which neither gets rid of the blocks nor lets you get through before they spawn; you can’t even attack without swapping weapons again. Instead, you have to play as Time Man directly, and then you can destroy those blocks by shooting them.

Speaking of the Challenge missions, they’re in sets of 10; one set for Mega Man, 80 for the 8 Robot Masters, and ten more that are just different boss gauntlets (so I didn’t play them). The first few of each set are generally pretty easy, as they try to get you used to each character’s different abilities. The hard ones, however, are a coin toss between decent challenge and tedious frustration. Multiple levels are built around hammer pendulums, which are extremely finnicky to the point where you can land on one, go through your entire landing animation while still being on it and moving with it, then abruptly clip off the platform and fall to your death, all without pushing a button or having anything nearby to interfere with you. Other challenges make you go through a solid 2-3 minutes of tight jumps where a single mistake means death–all without a single checkpoint despite the unforgiving level design–and still have cheap moments where you’d have to do something ahead of time that you wouldn’t be able to know until after it’s too late. I lost count of how many of these require save-states to be made somewhat reasonable. The most telling Challenge is the Time Man one with a 6 second time limit: you have to charge your gun so that it slows down time instead of shoots, then you have to shoot the exploding missiles so you can get through to the exit while avoiding their harmful explosions. Seems simple enough, but no matter what, I’d always end up about one second too short and lose. This is the only Challenge level I had to look up a video to see what I had to do, and it turns out that when you shoot the missiles, they lose collision for the brief moment between being hit and exploding, and you have to abuse that to run through them to reach the goal in time! One of the things Mega Man is known for is introducing new mechanics safely and intuitively, but how was I supposed to figure this out? And sure, plenty of other Challenge levels in this game do a bad job of introducing stuff, but this is esoteric kaizo-hack nonsense! What the actual hell is it doing in an official Mega Man game??

The game also has a level editor, and the optional collectibles in the main game unlock different options here. Although you’re allowed to pick which Robot Master the player has to fight at the end of your level, you’re not allowed to make changes to the arena itself, or even pick which difficulty the boss will be (it’s always New Style Normal difficulty). I also thought you had to end levels with a boss at first because I never unlocked the Party Ball option, and I didn’t know that was an option until I played the DLC levels. Despite having the option not to be repetitive, some of them still end with the same bosses you’ve already beaten, with the only thing preventing them from becoming completely redundant is that they often don’t have a checkpoint by the boss door, so you have to go through a bunch more obstacles each time to reach them.

As for the DLC levels themselves, it’s more of the same coin toss that the Challenge missions had, but now with an added dose of repetitive level design–particularly in the “ultimate” levels. The description for Ultimate Oil Man says to practice on Hard mode if you’re having trouble, but from what I played, Hard mode doesn’t change the game’s levels; it only changes enemy AI, which wouldn’t help when all DLC levels are stuck with Normal mode AI and only differentiate themselves via level design. Plus, Ultimate Oil Man is one of the easy, repetitive ones, making the description even more ironic; the only issue is that it uses dark background objects that make it hard to notice the oil tiles in the final hallway. The GameSpy level is almost fine, but there’s one part where you have to make a tight jump from the edge of a fast conveyor belt, which is way too narrow a window to time it reliably. A few other levels I played have similar fast-conveyor-belt-jumps, and I never got used to it. Ultimate Cut Man is mostly reasonable except one part where you have to jump from a fast conveyor belt moving in the opposite direction you need to jump to, so the only way to reach the ledge is to use Oil Slide: shoot from one edge so the bubble lands on the other edge, then jump forward so you aren’t pushed off but not too high so you don’t jump over your oil, and do it all while being shot at by the constantly-spawning, 8-way-shooting Flying Shell enemies. Oil Mania finally tells you how to exit oil slide in a way that doesn’t involve running into a wall: hold up and push jump…while you’re already in midair, so after already jumping. The level itself already suffers due to being built around this finnicky mechanic, but it gets even worse by having yet another newly-introduced mechanic that I had to look up a lets-play to figure out: Oil-Sliding through downward-shooting water lets you jump again while you’re in the stream.

I’m probably not going to play many of the user-created levels since there’s over 80,000 of them and, as mentioned previously, many of them almost certainly reuse the same 8 bosses from the main game.

Overall, this one’s hard to recommend. It does make some welcome improvements, but it also keeps flaws that should’ve been fixed a long time ago, and then it has the temerity to introduce a slew of brand new problems! If you can’t get it for cheap, just stick with Legacy Collection.