From the Memory Bank: My History with Video Games

Mega Man II - The Serviceable Road Companion
Mega Man's second portable offering was far from a great game, but still it performed very well in its designated role.

If you've been following this blog for any amount of time, you've probably come under the impression that I'm a little too easy to please when it comes to video games. You might even be ready to accuse me of being an advocate for the enabling practice of being too kind to mediocre games.

And while I wouldn't disagree with you that some of the games that I've lovingly chronicled on this blog are undeniably middling in quality, I would reject the notion that my fondness for them is driven by apologism or a lack of discernment. Rather, I like them because they're good at performing small jobs that I consider to be very important.

What I mean to say is that games don't have to be great to have value to you.

I like to compare them to movies, which for me have always filled specific roles and been best appreciated on certain occasions and in settings in which viewing them makes the most sense. I started thinking about movies in those terms when I was a kid. I placed them into special categories.

There were the big summer movies that my friends and I would watch at the corner theater. We'd count on them to provide us the types of fun, feel-good experiences that we could enthusiastically talk about as we dined in the next-door pizzeria and engaged in our daily summer activities (hanging out in the park, swimming in the pool, playing video games, and such).

There were the action flicks to which I'd turn during the boring parts of weekend family get-togethers. I'd rely on Arnold and Sly to provide me a temporary escape from the adults' uninteresting, ceaseless chattering and keep me entertained for a few hours.

There were the spoof movies (like Airplane, Spaceballs and UHF) whose job was to make my friends and I laugh in the hours following any tough, wearisome school day and provide us funny quotes that we could continuously repeat back to each other (and inevitably run into the ground).

There were the holiday-themed specials that I'd watch traditionally. I trusted that they'd help me to get into the holiday spirit.

And then there were all of those merely fun, "watchable" movies that never rated high on critics' scales but were nonetheless capable of providing a very valuable form of entertainment. I'm talking about unapologetically-'80s films like The Golden Child, The Principal and Collision Course, any of which could reliably do two important jobs for me: help me to fill the hours of a quiet, relaxing Sunday afternoon, and inspirit me with its power to capture the essence of the bygone era and thus permeate our sun-drenched den with desirable nostalgic vibes.

And I put a strong focus on that last category because it's the one that's most relevant to Mega Man II for Game Boy, which I consider to be the perfect gaming equivalent to the "watchable" Sunday-afternoon 80s movie.

Now, I don't recall when, exactly, I bought Mega Man II (my guess is that it was sometime close to its February '92 release date, at a time when I still had some Christmas money left over), but I do have a very clear memory of the moment when I decided that I needed to own it.

It happened as I was reading through Nintendo Power Volume 34's Mega Man II preview.

As I was looking over the piece's final two pages, I became aware of a very interesting fact: The game's Mega Man 3 representation was not, as I expected it to be, limited to a couple of quick Robot Master cameos (before then, I assumed that Mega Man II would closely follow Wily's Revenge's blueprint and consequently relegate the later game's Robot Masters to capsule duty)! This time, rather, the later game's Robot Masters would have their very own stages!

And this fact was exciting to me because of what it promised: the very appealing convergence of Mega Man 2 and Mega Man 3 design elements! I was absolutely crazy about both games, and the idea of their worlds combining and intermixing was a dream to me.

"Mega Man 2 and Mega Man 3 together in a single game?" I thought to myself. "Sign me up for that!"

I had a few concerns, sure. I was worried that Mega Man II might suffer from two of the issues that plagued Wily's Revenge: cramped-feeling level design and extreme difficulty (at this point, I hadn't yet beaten Wily's Revenge, and I was still of the opinion that its difficulty was excessive). Those, I thought, were the types of issues that could potentially work to prevent Mega Man II from being an NES-quality Mega Man game. They were, after all, the issues that stopped Wily's Revenge from meeting that standard.

But still, I was so excited about what Mega Man II represented--the convergence of two of my all-time-favorite action games--that my fears and doubts had no chance of impacting my decision-making. I knew, as soon as I finished reading the preview, that I was going to buy the game as soon as I came across it (I assumed that it was already in stores at that point).

And that's what I did.

The experience started out in promising fashion: Right away, Mega Man II hit me with one of the most spirited, rockin' title-screen themes I'd ever heard! It immediately captured my imagination and inspired me to wonder about its message.

I listened to the theme intently and let it shape my visualizations, and consequently my mind became filled with images of heroic deeds and thoughts of relentless pursuit and the inevitably of victory. That's the kind of story it told. And I loved what it was saying.

It was a great title-screen theme. It had a number of appealing qualities: It had the power to immerse. It was able to evoke strong emotions. It was inspiring and uplifting. And it was simply fun to listen to!

And its strong energy conveyed to me that an ambitious, realized Mega Man game lied just beyond the title screen!

Normally I wouldn't listen to the entirety of a title-screen theme. I was the impatient sort, and usually I'd listen to a theme for only about 10-15 seconds (I'd listen to only as much as I thought I needed to hear). Then I'd grow bored and begin to hyperactively mash the Start button.

But that didn't happen this time. Mega Man II's title-screen was too powerful to ignore. I couldn't help but surrender myself to it and let it work its magic on me. And I did that for a while. In fact, I let the theme play to completion an additional two or three times! It was that captivating.

I was so deeply under the theme's influence that I could hardly focus on what was happening on the Robot Master-selection screen. In particular, I couldn't objectively gauge the screen's accompanying tune. I determined that it was an intensified extension of the title-screen theme and immediately liked it for that reason, which is to say that I didn't recognize it for what it obviously was: the first warning sign. In my first few play-throughs of the game, I considered this tune to be an appropriately invigorating ditty and certainly not a 10-second loop of horribly screechy, inharmonious noises that would inevitably come to serve as my motivation to quickly make a selection and do so in the interest of preventing the total destruction of my auditory functions.

I chose to start on Air Man's stage because, well, his was the stage on which I always started when I played Mega Man 2! It seemed like the safe thing to do. "If history is any indication," I thought, "then Air Man's will be the easy-to-complete 'novice' stage."

And in the first minute of action, I did what was customary: I acclimated myself to the controls and observed what the game was doing visually and aurally. I made assessments. And as I was doing that, I couldn't help but notice that some things weren't quite right. A number of the game's mechanical and presentational elements, I was finding, had strangely unbecoming qualities: The sound effects were squeaky- and scratchy-sounding. Mega Man's connecting pellet shots lacked their sharp punch and sounded more like soft, ineffective water-splashes. The egg-dropping Pipis were only half as fast as they were in Mega Man 2, and thus it was now way too easy to get the drop on them and preempt their attacks. And the Air Tikis, whose large and imposing size was their defining quality, had been shrunken down considerably, and they were now disappointingly unthreatening in appearance.

Also, the game's backgrounds and textures were sterile- and soft-looking, and resultantly, they didn't compare very favorably to Wily's Revenge's, which were sharper, bolder and more toned. It was as if the designers turned the contrast-level down to 1 or 2.

As I was playing through the game, I kept observing its unbecoming qualities and wondering to myself, "Why do so many of this game's visual, aural and mechanical elements feel so off? Why did Capcom decide to make all of these weird changes?"

I spent most of my first play-through in a state of puzzlement.

I mean, I didn't dislike the game. I didn't think that it was bad. It's just that I recognized that it wasn't as high in quality as Wily's Revenge or any of the NES games. It was, in my determination, a couple of notches below them.

The game's issues were just too numerous and too hard to ignore. That's why my first play-through of it felt less like a gaming experience and more like my own personal quality-assurance test. It's why I remembered not the best, most notable platforming challenges, boss fights or music tracks but instead all of my puzzled observances and all of the moments in which I stopped to question the game's design choices.

I spent the reflection period wondering about the oddities: why the minor enemies inflicted so little damage (they almost never depleted more than one bar of health); why the Robot Masters' weaknesses were so unbalanced (you could take out Wood Man with a mere three Metal Blade shots, whereas you had to deplete your entire stock of Air Shooters to take out Crash Man); why the camera transitioned so awkwardly into the pre-Robot Master rooms; and why the disappearing-reappearing blocks were placed in rooms in which their presence was completely unnecessary--rooms in which you could just as easily reach higher-up platforms with normal jumps.

And I couldn't understand why the game was so damn easy! Every Mega Man game I'd played to that point had at least one challenge that really put my skills to the test. Each game had something to akin to a Yellow Devil fight or an instant-death laser segment (like the one in Quick Man's stage). But Mega Man II didn't have anything like that! It almost never challenged me. In fact, I couldn't recall a single instance in which I felt threatened or lost more than one life while trying to negotiate my way around an obstacle.

I mean, Mega Man 2 wasn't exactly the most difficult game, either, but it least it had a "Difficult" mode for those who desired a more-challenging experience. Mega Man II had nothing of the sort. There wasn't, as far as I could tell, any way to meaningfully boost its difficulty.

After I thought about the game's issues for a while, I came to the conclusion that one of two things had happened: It was either that (a) Capcom's developers forgot what made the previous Mega Man games so great and wound up producing a game that merely resembled them or (b) they did a second-rate job because they were under a strict deadline or short on funding.

I wanted to believe that the latter explanation was correct. I wanted to give Capcom the benefit of doubt. But I couldn't do that because there was simply too much evidence to suggest that the former, instead, was the true explanation. The company, from what the facts were conveying to me, had simply lost its way.

And I wasn't making my judgment in isolation, no. I felt the same way about Mega Man 4, which had released only one month prior. Both games told me the same story: Capcom was no longer interested in pushing boundaries and making top-of-the-line Mega Man games. It was content to be average.

I tried to talk myself out of believing such a thing. I tried to convince myself that the game's issues were instead an unfortunate byproduct of an honest miscalculation. What had happened, I reasoned, was that the developers had simply overreacted to complaints about Wily's Revenge! "Their decision to make the action slower, simplify the level design, and tone down the difficulty could just be a sincere, unintentionally-misguided response to those complaints!" I told myself.

But the whole time, I knew in my heart that my rationalizations were faulty because they didn't explain why so many of the game's other design aspects were also haphazard.

The truth, I was sad to admit, was that the game's designers were simply out of sync with the audience. They didn't know what it was, exactly, that the fans loved about the previous Mega Man games.

So what happened is that they attempted to replicate the NES games' level design without having a solid understanding of how and why it worked so well and consequently crafted not faithful recreations of the games' iconic stages but instead overly cramped, oddly structured versions of them.

Some of their design decisions were completely inexplicable: There was no point to the moving-lift rooms in Crash Man's stage; the rooms were so compressed vertically that you could reach the topmost ladders without having to use the lifts. The underwater section of Top Man's stage contained a lengthy, intricately designed disappearing-reappearing-block segment, but you could easily bypass the entirety of it with Rush Marine, which was, by that point in the game, a standard inventory item. The game's other underwater sections had no obstacles at all. And then there were those aforementioned rooms that had disappearing-reappearing blocks whose existence was pointless.

At times, also, the designers failed to take into account the Game Boy's smaller screen resolution when they were crafting certain challenges. In some instances, 1ups and energy tanks were placed on platforms that were supposed to be out of reach, but because even the highest platforms were usually only three to four tiles above the ground, you could reach them with little effort. You didn't even need Rush Coil!

Also, some passageways were so cramped that it was impossible to avoid projectiles while you were traversing them. And there was so little distance between rooms' floors and ceilings that you had absolutely no time to read the situation and adjust Mega Man's directional movement accordingly when you dropped down into a room that was filled with spike traps.

Otherwise, the designers didn't even bother to address one of Mega Man 3's most notable design issues: the broken Rush Jet! They didn't modify Rush Jet at all; rather, they simply left it in a fully-controllable state! And this allowed you to basically trivialize every platforming challenge in the game's second half! Also, it made Rush Coil completely redundant!

One of the biggest disappointments was the game's Mega Man Killer: Quint. He was a total joke!

Quint could hardly be called a boss. He didn't have any of the characteristics of a boss character. He had no threatening moves or attacks. The only thing he could do, rather, was hop in place on his combination power drill-pogo stick (the "Sakugarne," whose name was left untranslated because, I guess, the localization team simply didn't give a damn about what it was doing). The only time I took damage from him was when I had mental lapses and forgot his pattern and thus accidentally walked into the small debris-showers that were being produced by his pogo stick's drilling.

And he didn't even have an energy meter! "Enker had one," I recalled, "so why is it that this guy doesn't? Is he not really a boss?"

I didn't know what to make of this encounter. All I could do was observe how it was playing out and make note of how strangely haphazard and underdeveloped it was. In time, I'd come to think of it as a microcosm of Mega Man II's general design style.

And, as I learned later on, Quint wasn't even a real "Mega Man Killer"! He was instead "a Mega Man from the future who had been reprogrammed to fight the Mega Man from the present." And all I could think was, "What the hell kind of nonsense is that? Since when is that a thing that can happen in the Mega Man universe?!"

I strongly disliked that idea. Time travel was the ultimate continuity-killer, I felt, and I did not want it in my Mega Man games!

The Wily fight, too, was a disappointment. It was mundanely designed and scripted, and there almost no challenge to it. It felt phoned in.

It was a three-phase fight, and in each one, you were fighting an indistinctive mech that could be destroyed with some simple pellet-spray. The mechs were so offensively limited and so weak that you didn't even need to use caution while you were engaging them. You could just heedlessly jump about and fire away at the mechs' cockpits, and that's about all that you needed to do to win. You never had to stop to consider possible weaknesses, and because you likely had four energy tanks at the time, you didn't have to worry about your health situation. You could simply and safely pellet-spam your way to victory.

And what was even more inexplicable to me was what they did to endgame Dr. Wily. They scaled him down and turned him into a pained, squinty munchkin!

"What the hell were they thinking when they did this?" I'd wonder every time I'd look at one of the mech's cockpits and see a disturbingly disproportioned, uncomfortably cramped Wily staring out from it. "Why did they decide to scale down Wily, of all things? Didn't they realize that doing so would diminish the impact of his presence? That's not how you treat an iconic villain!"

It didn't make any sense.

Years later, I discovered that all three Wily forms were weak to the Sakugarne (which was otherwise useless). You could basically pogo them to death. Though, using the Sakugarne on the mechs was risky because their hitboxes remained active during their invincibility-frame periods, and thus it was easy to take heavy contact damage as you were pogoing on them. And there was really no reason to take that risk when you could simply hang back and spam pellet shots and achieve victory just as quickly and in a much-safer fashion.

 

So I had no trouble with the Wily fight. I easily pellet-spammed my way to victory.

And my reward was an unexciting, pedestrian-feeling scene in which Mega Man chased Wily through space and shot down his ship and sent it hurtling toward Earth. The ship crashed into the planet's surface, and the resulting explosion took the form of a giant smoky skull that could be seen from space--the place from which the event was being viewed. And that was the entire ending. There was no follow-up scene in which Mega Man reacted to the event, and there was no closing scene in which he joyfully flew his way home and met with his waiting friends, no. Nothing else happened. The smoky skull appeared, Mega Man looked at it for a couple of seconds, and then credits began to roll.

That was it.

And the credits sequence, too, came off as flat because there was nothing unique about it. It was identical to Wily's Revenge's: Mega Man stood on the screen's right side in profile view and stared off into space as the enemy cast scrolled by. "They simply took Wily's Revenge's credits sequence and pasted it into this game!" I thought to myself as I watched the sequence play out. "How lazy!"

The ending was a letdown because of what it lacked: a closing scene that was as touching as Wily's Revenge's. The latter, I felt, was designed to set a precedent--to send the message that the Game Boy series' games would have emotional, evocative endings that had the power to move you and inspire you to think more deeply about Mega Man's plight. But Mega Man II's ending told me that I was wrong to feel that way. "You misread the situation," it said. "What the previous game's ending did was purely anomalous."

And that's what disappointed me the most. (Note that I made this particular complaint months later, after I finally beat Wily's Revenge.)

So that's where I was mentally after I completed my first play-through of Mega Man II: I was focused on the negatives. I was trying to make sense of them. And as I was doing that, I couldn't deny that they were rendering an image of an underwhelming Mega Man game.

The sad truth was that Mega Man II didn't come close to meeting to my grand expectations. It wasn't nearly as ambitious as I imagined it would be as I was listening to its rousing, impassioned title-screen theme. It was, rather, merely average.

But here's the crazy part: Even after all of that--even after I'd spent every minute of the reflection period criticizing Mega Man II's every aspect--I couldn't deny, also, that, well, I kinda liked the game. It had some qualities that I found to be very appealing, and my positive feelings for them would surface even in the moments in which I was being exclusively critical. I couldn't ignore the fact that I had derived enjoyment from those game elements and wished to experience them again.

I loved, in particular, the game's music. I thought it was terrific.

The game had a lot of great tunes, I thought. I was very fond of the title-screen theme, as I mentioned, and I was also a big fan of the Robot Masters' stage themes, all of which were wonderfully energetic and highly spirited. They had the power to invigorate me and inspire me charge forward. They made me feel heroic. And they were fun to listen to!

The soundtrack was wholly unique. It didn't borrow a single tune from Mega Man 2 or Mega Man 3. And I appreciated its effort to move in its own direction because its doing so helped Mega Man II to set it itself apart from the NES Mega Man games and establish its own unique personality. That was the way to go, I felt. I hoped that it was a trend and that the future Game Boy Mega Man games would work to differentiate themselves from the NES Mega Man games in meaningful ways.

I mean, sure--the music was a bit screechy and a little too high-pitched, and sometimes it would go overboard with the percussion (which is why I called it "the untamable beast"), but still it was pretty great. It was the game's high point.

Also, I gave Mega Man II a lot of credit for how it evolved the Game Boy Mega Man series' formula: It gave the second-set Robot Masters their own stages and treated them with equal importance. That was a big deal to me because I felt as though the Game Boy Mega Man games needed to have an amount of content that was comparable to the NES Mega Man games' if they hoped to be taken seriously by series fans.

Wily's space-fortress stage was also a highlight. I wasn't keen on certain aspects of its level design (like the pointless disappearing-reappearing blocks and the entirely unchallenging underwater segment), but still I found it to be a very memorable stage overall. I liked, in particular, what it did visually: Its backgrounds were comprised of Salvador Dalí-style imagery and specifically twisted clocks that were taken directly from The Persistence of Memory (the artist's most recognizable work), and they were just really fun to look at and examine. They were interesting and thought-provoking.

The stage was elevated, also, by its musical accompaniment: the amazing title-screen theme, which made a welcome return! Its presence helped to raise the energy-level to the max and imbue the journey's final leg with feelings of intensification and culmination.

So at least one part of the endgame was climactic!

And in the end, that's where Mega Man II stood. It wasn't a great series game, no, but still it had a number of endearing qualities. It had some standout elements that were worth experiencing. And despite its having many flaws, it was still pretty fun to play.

It had value to me, also, because it fit perfectly into my lifestyle. I was always traveling with my parents and riding in the back of my father's Cadillac for two-to-three-hour periods, and Mega Man II was just the type of game that I needed in those situations. It possessed all of the desirable qualities: It was very playable; it had ideal length (it could be finished in about 45 minutes); and it could, unlike Wily's Revenge, actually be beaten!

Mega Man II was--much like Tetris, Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins and Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge--able to do the job of keeping me engaged and entertained during all of those painfully long car trips to New Jersey and Long Island, and that's why I considered it to be a great "road game." The road setting was the place in which it truly shined. It was the place in which it had value. And it was the place in which playing it made the most sense.

Mega Man II, when it was placed in the role of "road game," did some important jobs for me: It gave me something fun to play and listen to. It kept my mind occupied. And it provided me access to a series that I loved in those times when I craved its style of action but was far away from home.

That's all I could have asked for from a backseat companion.

When I needed it to do so, the Blue Bomber's second Game Boy adventure was able to provide me some fun gaming action, imbue the car and road atmosphere with good vibes, and keep me company for a while.

And that's why it was valuable to me.