Did the Blue Bomber successfully jump and slide his way over to the greener pastures of Sony's 32-bit realm? Dat's a good kreshun.
So after spending weeks extracting maximum value out of the supremely excellent Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, I decided that it was time for me to start buying some new games for my recently purchased PlayStation console.
Luckily I hadn't entered the PlayStation space blind. Even before I took the plunge, I had my eyes on a handful of games that piqued my interest because they belonged to genres and franchises that I loved. Among them were the console's three exclusive Mega Man games.
Now, I'd be lying if I told you that the three games had garnered my interest because I was still genuinely enthusiastic about the Mega Man series. I wasn't. I was drawn to them, rather, because I had an inclination to play it safe and seek out know properties and point to them as the justification for buying new systems. "Spending hundreds of dollars on this new console can't be a mistake," I reasoned, "if I'm doing so for the sake of gaining access to series that I've been following my whole life!"
That was the only reason why the Mega Man games found placement on my mental wishlist.
They certainly didn't find their way there because I had faith in Capcom's ability to produce a truly transformative Mega Man sequel. I didn't. Not anymore, no. I'd been skeptical of the company's efforts going back to 1996, in the time following the releases of the disappointingly derivative Mega Man 7 and the uninspired Mega Man X sequels. And I had no reason to believe that the company had rediscovered its creative genius since then.
Also, I couldn't deny that my lukewarm feelings for the PlayStation Mega Man games were partly derived from the sense of resentment that stirred up within me years earlier when I learned that Mega Man had jumped over to PlayStation. It was the same way that I felt about the Castlevania situation: I was greatly annoyed by the fact that the Mega Man series, which was one of my all-time favorites, had inexplicably ditched Nintendo systems, on which it had an established root, and was now marrying itself to a rival brand whose marketers were all too keen on denigrating the types of games that Mega Man represented.
I knew for certain that Mega Man games sold well on Nintendo systems, so I couldn't understand why Capcom was so willing to spurn the N64, to which the series' fans would be more likely to migrate. "At the very least, Capcom should make these games available for both systems!" I passionately argued. "It has nothing to lose by doing so!"
Instead the company seemed intent on locking me out.
It just didn't make any sense to me.
But that was all in the past, where bitter feelings were, I felt, best left buried. My thinking had since changed: Now that I was a PlayStation-owner, I was kinda glad that its Mega Man games had remained (somewhat) exclusive. Because I believed that gaining access to exclusives was the best excuse for owning a second console, which would consequently function as a portal to undiscovered lands that I could excitedly travel to and explore!
That was how I'd grown as an enthusiast.
Also, right around the time I purchased the PlayStation, my interest in the Mega Man series was in the process of being renewed as a result of two developments: The first was the proliferation of NES emulation, which granted me convenient access to the Mega Man games. When I replayed them for the first time in half a decade, I fell in love with them all over again.
The second was the project that was inspired by my reignited feelings of passion for the NES Mega Man games: my newly created Mega Man fan site, which I was zealously updating on a daily basis.
Suddenly I had genuine interest in finding out what the Blue Bomber had been up to all those years. So I clicked my way over to Amazon.com and ordered myself copies of Mega Man 8 and Mega Man X4 (for financial reasons, I had to wait a few months before ordering Mega Man Legends).
Four or five days later, the games arrived in my mailbox!
Now, I hadn't done much research on Mega Man 8 prior to buying it. That was a tactical decision. I did it because I preferred to be surprised by a game's content.
So I really didn't know what Mega Man 8 was.
I kept my mind open to the possibility that Capcom had found enough inspiration to push new boundaries and shatter the existing mold, though I suspected that my optimism was probably misplaced and that Mega Man 8 was more likely to adhere closely to the series' established formula. Still, I tried my best to put aside preconceived notions and give the game a blank canvas to work with.
And immediately Mega Man 8 started shaping my perception of it. It did so with an unexpected animated intro that nicely summarized the classic series' 10-year history. I'd always found FMV scenes to be off-putting, because they often misrepresented the game's actual art direction and had the propensity to feel detached from the simple side-scrolling action that they were attempting to contextualize, but I liked how they were used here. Capcom's animators rendered a scene that did well to pay homage to past games and simultaneously provide new players a glimpse into Mega Man's richly populated universe.
Really, I just thought that it was cool to see all of the old Robot Masters and Wily boss (like the Yellow Devil!) congregated into one space!
If only I'd known then what I was actually embracing.
Because after I selected "Game Start" on the title screen, my tone began to change, and before long, I was absolutely confounded by what I was witnessing.
"Why are there minutes-long anime-style cut-scenes in my Mega Man game?!" I shouted in horror at around the two-minute mark. "And why does Mega Man talk like a 5-year-old girl?!"
And it didn't get any better as the game progressed.
More than anything, I couldn't believe what they did to Dr. Light. "Why is the god doctor being voiced as though he were an aged Elmer Fudd?!" I questioned in a scathing manner, my every facial expression replete with puzzlement. "What's a 'meaty oar'? Who the hell is 'Dr. Wah-wee'? And why is this 'voice actor' tripping over his words? Did they accidentally pull this guy off the street? And did the director not know that he could yell 'Cut!'?!"
I mean, these cut-scenes were hilarious in their ridiculousness, sure, but they had the unfortunate effect of making the game look silly. Capcom of America's allowing them to be included as is told me that the company simply didn't care about how its game was going to be perceived. And that just wasn't how you were supposed to treat a respected series like Mega Man.
We've since come to consider the game's inexplicable voice acting to be an "essential" part of its legacy--a memorable aspect that enthusiasts everywhere enjoy mocking and laughing at--but, really, it probably shouldn't be. Its presence ensures that Mega Man 8 will remain one of most quotable video games for all of the wrong reasons.
And to me, it's kinda sad that game will be remembered more for its characters' inability to pronounce simple words.
And it was right about then that I grew to appreciate how the limitations of older hardware worked to keep developers in check. After seeing Inafune and his pals' true conception of the Mega Man universe, I began to long for the days when the modest capabilities of systems like the NES and the SNES forced them to temper their artistic vision and instead invite us to imagine what Mega Man's world might look like.
For certain, what I was being shown here was not what I wanted his world to be.
Furthermore, I felt that the interplanetary struggle over "evil energy" was a completely unnecessary plot element. Mega Man and his friends' standard plight (needing to engage in war to achieve peace) was interesting enough on its own, and we simply didn't need some eclipsing tale of warring celestial beings whose very existence minimized the Mega Man characters and the scope of their struggle.
Mega Man stories were best kept simple. Widening their compasses to include extraterrestrial invasions and intergalactic warfare only served to needlessly complicate them and weigh them down with excess.
This is to say that I wasn't terribly interested in following the story of the space-faring hunter Duo, whose participation didn't seem to mean much to the actual game. I spent the whole time wishing that Inafune and his team would have instead focused their energy on further developing Mega Man's character and the wonderful world that he and his Robot Master adversaries inhabited.
Because those were the things that I cared about most.
I had mixed feelings about the game itself.
In the early going, I found some of its immediately observable changes to be quite jarring, and often I had to stop for a moment and consider how they would affect the action going forward.
Mega Man was suddenly able to swim, which made me think that the game wasn't going to have any of the traditional buoyancy-based platforming challenges.
There were sloped surfaces and wide-open spaces, which were historically differentiating gameplay elements of the Mega Man X series, so I wondered if Mega Man 8's stages were going to be more like the Mega Man X games' stages and invite the same type of exploration.
Mega Man could now fire Mega Buster shots while he had another weapon equipped, and I felt that this was a highly desirable ability because it helped to cut out a lot of the weapon-switching (I wished that this ability had been available in previous series games, and I hoped that it would carry over to future entries).
And Dr. Light provided me a new Mega Ball weapon ... for some reason. All I could think after playing around with it for a bit was "Whatever, man." Because I couldn't imagine that I'd ever find any useful application for it.
Then there were the game aspects with which I took issue.
To start, I was bothered by how the frequent loading screens functioned to interrupt the game's flow. All sense of logical progression was lost, I felt, when Mega Man suddenly teleported off the screen and then, after a ten-second loading time, reappeared in a completely different area with his health and weapon energy fully restored! This type of level design only served to unnecessarily segment stages and rob them of any natural flow.
Most egregiously, the constant replenishing of Mega Man's health and weapon energy worked to trivialize a lot of the game's challenge. "Why bother being tactical when the game will reward me for simply tanking my way through stage sections?" I couldn't help but reason.
What I disliked most, though, was the game's art direction and general visual presentation.
Now, I was never a fan of Mega Man 7's visual design and particularly its large character sprites and resultantly cramped environments, but I could concede that its boldly colored, sharply outlined graphics rendered it at least somewhat visually compatible with its NES predecessors. But I couldn't do that with Mega Man 8. I couldn't reconcile the game's bubbly, chibi visual presentation, which was characterized by its use soft colors and muted brightness, with the NES games'.
It was just the wrong visual tone for a Mega Man world.
Also, I didn't like that Mega Man was portrayed less as a diminutive robot warrior and more as an anemic child. I felt that he was being horribly misrepresented as a character.
In fact, I didn't care for any aspect of the game's new anime style. I was repelled by all of it.
Mega Man 8 was simply too visually distant from the games I grew up with, and I wasn't happy about that.
For that matter, I disliked the new designs for the health and weapon-energy pellets. I felt that the items were now bland and indistinct and pretty much stripped of their character. I felt the same way about the newly designed health meter, which was now generically designed and resultantly so much less distinguishable and visually interesting than the traditional sliver-based meter.
And I wasn't a fan of how chatty Mega Man and the Robot Masters had become. Their endless vocalizing and quipping only served to ruin my mental image of how these characters communicated, which is to say not like a bunch of goofy children exchanging lame one-liners. The inclusion of all of this voice-work struck me as just more unnecessary overproduction.
And then there were the two words that would come to torment me for all of eternity. You probably know what they are.
Merely hearing them triggers traumatic memories. They evoke the most horrific of images. And whenever I think about the snowboarding sections to which they're indelibly linked, I find myself paralyzed with fear.
They haunt me, I tell you.
In fact, I can hear the robot instructor's voice repeating those words in my head right now. It's saying to me...
"JUMP! JUMP! SLIDE! SLIDE!"
I heard them hundreds of times that day.
"What in the mother of a frick is this?!" I exclaimed loudly after wiping out in Frost Man's stage's snowboarding section for the umpteenth time. "Why the hell is this in a Mega Man game?!"
It was almost as if the level designers had deliberately plotted to drive me insane.
I mean, sure: There were always things in Mega Man games that made me angry, be they blind drops onto spikes or pixel-perfect jumps, but these snowboarding sections took the cake. What I experienced in Frost Man's stage was worse than the others by a factor of about a thousand. We're talkin' about the type of inexplicable dreck that was infuriating enough for me to consider never playing the game again.
I was that pissed about the snowboarding challenges.
And believe me: I had to use every ounce of my remaining energy to restrain myself when I realized that the same scene was about to repeat in the opening section of Wily Tower's first stage. "Just stop with this garbage already!" I begged the game. I didn't want to go through it again.
At the time, it was my opinion that the fella who came up with the snowboarding idea should have been made to JUMP! JUMP! and SLIDE! SLIDE! his way over to the unemployment line.
So as you can imagine, I was in a really bad mood as I advanced further into Wily Tower. I wasn't enjoying myself at all, and eventually there came a point when I mentally checked out and entered into a mode in which I was playing through the game simply for the purpose of getting it over with.
And it was too bad that it worked out that way because before then, I was actually starting to appreciate the ways in which Mega Man 8 was attempting to differentiate itself.
That is, it was becoming clear to me that Mega Man 8 had a lot going for it. I was able to see that its creators had unquestionably endeavored to introduce and test out a variety of new ideas and mechanics, and I considered most of their efforts to be successful.
Being able to fire Mega Buster shots while employing the use of a Robot Master was proving to be a boon. Swimming opened up the potential for new and interesting types of underwater platforming challenges and combat scenarios. And the Mega Ball turned out to be more useful than I originally thought--not so much as a weapon but as an item that allowed me to execute midair jumps, reach high-up platforms, and generally sequence-break.
And Mega Man 8, much more so than its predecessors, offered a ton of customization options. They were available in Dr. Light's Lab--the game's shop--which introduced a whole new selection of equippable items that could be used to modify Mega Man's abilities. They allowed him to do things like rapidly fire shots and charge his Mega Buster more quickly, and they otherwise endowed him with special qualities like immunity from spike damage, the nullification of damage-recoil and swifter ladder-climbing.
I wasn't eager to utilize many of the upgrades because I preferred to engage in a more bare-bones style of Mega Man play, but still I felt that their very presence played a big role in providing the game a next-level shine.
And even though I wasn't a fan of shooters, I enjoyed the auto-scrolling shoot-'em-up segments in Tengu Man's stage. I liked how they were designed, and I was especially fond of their Gradius-style upgrade system, which allowed for Mega Man to team up with his closest Robot Comrades, each of whom contributed to the aerial assault in his own unique way: Beat would inflict contact-damage, as had long been his modus operandi. Eddie would flip open his top and discharge arcing projectiles. And Auto would fire rockets from his shoulder-mounted rocket launcher.
You could even obtain an ability for Rush (on whom you were riding during these segments): a three-directional spread-fire attack!
All of it was cleverly implemented, I thought. And I was genuinely surprised by how much fun I had with these segments.
I also had to give the level designers credit for trying new things. They introduced ideas like Astro Man's looping mazes, Sword Man's single-chamber solo challenges, and the aforementioned shoot-'em-up and (*shiver*) snowboard sections. They gave you the ability to use the new Rush Cycle to speedily ride your way through stages. They let you use the Thunder Claw weapon to latch onto pegs and epically swing over large gaps. They crammed the long and varied stages with uniquely styled backgrounds and platforming challenges. And their new (and very chatty) Robot Masters were, much more so than previous Robot Masters, versatile and could launch a range of attacks (which is to say more than the usual two).
And, as I'd hoped, they brought back one of my favorite elements of Mega Man 7: explorable Robot Master stages. You could reenter stages and thoroughly search their wide-open spaces for bolts, and I was happy about this because I liked the majority of the stages and wanted to find reasons to return to them and inspect their every nook and cranny.
I was pleased to see that the development team was trying new things, and I continued to feel that way even in times when I didn't like the results.
As I progressed further into the game, I even started to warm up to its aural and visual stylings.
My feelings on its graphics evolved considerably. I still felt that it had a lot of background work that was bland and featureless, but I also felt that it did very well in this area when it focused on depicting skylines, city- and mountainscapes, waterfalls, and lava-filled caverns, all of which I found to be memorably attractive and just plain fun to look at. And I started to admit that its sprite-work and sprite-layer texturing was actually pretty great.
My opinion on the game's music changed significantly, too. At the start, I didn't like what Mega Man 8's soundtrack was doing tonally. It had always been the case that Mega Man music was high in spirit and bursting with strong rhythmic percussion. It was invigorating, energy-raising rock music. That's why I was a bit repulsed when I observed that Mega Man 8's music was instead relaxed-sounding in nature and designed to generate a more "pleasant" ambiance.
But after I took the time to really listen to the music and absorb it, I started to like it. And after a while, I came to appreciate the approach that the composers took. I felt that they had created music that was both charming and distinctive and that each of their works played a strong role in helping the game to carve out its own space and establish a unique personality.
"Maybe it's a good thing that Mega Man 8 doesn't sound and feel like exactly like the twelve games that precede it," I started to think. "Maybe a next-generation Mega Man game should endeavor to meaningfully differentiate itself and make an effort to establish its own distinct vibe."
For certain, Mega Man 8 had one of the best, most-soul-filled Robot Master selection themes in the entire series. I consider it to be my chief source of nostalgia for the game.
I still wasn't enthralled with Mega Man 8's art direction--and particularly with how Mega Man, himself, looked--but I couldn't deny that the game otherwise possessed a uniquely attractive aura. This became more and more apparent to me in my subsequent play-throughs.
And Mega Man 8 certainly wasn't lacking for content, no. It was loaded with it. And quite honestly, it needed every bit of what it got. It needed to flaunt as many bells and whistles as possible to distract from the fact that it was yet another formulaic Mega Man game and specifically an iteration of Mega Man 7 with its intro and intermediate stages and separate sets of Robot Masters. I didn't feel as though it succeeded in doing so (because I had grander hopes, and I was expecting nothing short of a revolutionary shift), but I was at least willing to recognize that it was making a noble effort to give the player a lot of fun things to play around with.
So for the first couple of hours, I mostly enjoyed my Mega Man 8 experience. I found a lot to like about the game.
But by the time I completed this first play-through, I was feeling pretty down on the game. I was aggravated as I went into the final stage, and the obnoxiousness of the Wily fight only served to exacerbate my feelings of irritation.
When my anger finally subsided, I had nothing left. I was completely flat. And as I watched the credits roll, I didn't even feel compelled to reflect upon the experience. All I wanted was for the game to be done. And I wanted to do was quickly eject the game's CD and move on to Mega Man X4, for which I had high hopes.
It took me a few days to clear my head of negative thoughts and find an actual balance.
Thinking about Mega Man 8 more objectively reinforced my notion that the game was abundant with positive qualities, yes, but it also made me feel as though the game contained nothing to which I could point and say, "Now there's something that has the power to convince me that Mega Man 8 wasn't underwhelming!"
I liked much of what it did, sure, but I was expecting so much more from it. Because it was, after all, a "next-generation" Mega Mega game, and to me, that meant that it should have endeavored to shake up the formula in a major way. "It should have done something like, say, take a wholly new approach to level-progression or incorporate some adventure-game elements," I thought. "It should have strove to be an earth-shaking series entry!"
But that simply wasn't what Mega Man 8 wanted to be. It was rife with creative spirit, certainly, yet it resigned to express its ideas strictly within the bounds of the series' established formula and long-standing traditions. It conveyed a sense that it wanted to break free from the shackles of convention, yet it could never muster enough courage to Rush Coil its way over the prison fence.
"That's fine, I guess," I compromised. "It's still a pretty good game."
But I couldn't help but be disappointed that it passed up the opportunity to harness the power of the PlayStation and finally take a big leap forward. You know--like Symphony of the Night did.
Was it possible that I was being unfair to Mega Man 8, much like I was to the similarly formulaic Mega Man 7 in the yeas following its release? Maybe. But at the time, I just couldn't help but feel that Mega Man 8 wasn't the game that it needed to be.
Eventually I arrived at the conclusion that I was, in fact, being unfair in my assessment of Mega Man 8. I didn't develop this sentiment during my subsequent play-throughs, no (in reality, I only played the game three times at most, and all such play-throughs occurred within a proximate period in the early 2000s), but rather when I watched Let's Plays and speedruns of the game on sites like YouTube and Twitch. I recognized its value through the eyes of other series fans.
Watching others enjoy Mega Man 8 and express their nostalgia for it had the effect of making me feel regretful for how I placed the undue burden of meeting unrealistic expectations upon the game's shoulders and judged it through that prism.
"As they did," I felt, "I should have tried to appreciate Mega Man 8 for what it was and not for what I wanted it to be. And I should have eagerly embraced it during a time when I was starving for 2D action games and those like Mega Man 8 were doing their best to remain relevant in a changing world and address the needs of enthusiasts like me."
At that point, I very much wanted to give the game a second chance. The only problem was that I lacked a desirable means of access to it. I didn't want to hook up my PS2 to a high-definition television that couldn't properly display its visuals, and I didn't want to play it via emulation using my Microsoft Sidewinder controller, whose round mushy d-pad rendered precision-based 2D action games completely unplayable.
So I decided to wait and hope that Capcom would one day port Mega Man 8 to modern consoles and thus provide me the opportunity to reunite with it and play it with a fresh perspective.
(It would have been great, I thought, if Capcom was somehow able to bring us the Saturn version of Mega Man 8, which had exclusive content and specifically special appearances by Cut Man and Wood Man! Clearly bringing back those two Robot Masters back was the company's way of pandering to older fans, but, really, I didn't have a problem with that! To the contrary: I thought that it was a cool thing to do! If anything, their inclusion, I felt, helped to imbue the largely unobtainable Saturn version with an alluring mystical quality.)
I got my wish a couple of years later when Capcom released Mega Man Legacy Collection 2 on the Nintendo Switch. The collection included what were, at that point, the series' final four games: Mega Man 7, Mega Man 8, Mega Man 9 and Mega Man 10.
Admittedly, I was more eager to reunite with Mega Man 9 and Mega Man 10, neither of which I'd played since the Wii days. My focus was on refamiliarizing myself with them and giving them the attention that I should have give them back then. (I abandoned them mostly because I disliked playing them with the Wii Remote and the Wii Classic Controller, which had terrible ergonomics.)
So I put Mega Man 8 on the backburner.
But when I finally got around to playing Mega Man 8, I had a great time with it. As I played through it, I had a lot of fun reassessing it and viewing it open-mindedly and in a positive light. I didn't even mind the JUMP! JUMP! SLIDE! SLIDE! segments because I was now skilled enough to clear them without any trouble (the stuff that I said about them earlier was mostly exaggeration for humorous effect). I really enjoyed the experience--so much so that I desired to return to the game and play through it again! I did that almost immediately and then several times in the months that followed, and over that period, the game grew on me more and more. And soon I became really fond of it.
Ever since then, I've been returning to it fairly often (I play it once every five or six months) and continuing to derive a lot of fun and enjoyment from it (I always make sure to explore it in full and collect all of the bolts). And it's likely that I'll continue to return to it with the same frequency in the years ahead.
And now I'm happy to say that I consider Mega Man 8 to be a very good action game and solid series entry. I contend that it's seriously underappreciated, and I hope that other Mega Man fans will also decide to give it a second chance and allow it to demonstrate why it's indeed a very worthy original-series game.
So no: Mega Man 8 doesn't reinvent the wheel. It doesn't take the series to new heights, as Mega Man X famously did. And it doesn't utilize every ounce of the PlayStation's power to render visually advanced settings and environments.
"But so what?" I say. Because I no longer believe that it needs to do any of that. Because experience has taught me that it's silly for me to judge a game for its inability to meet my arbitrarily formed expectations. It makes more sense, I've learned, to judge it for how well it succeeds in its stated mission. Mega Man 8 aims to be to a simple, traditional Mega Man game that can provide series fans reliably fun action-game experiences, and it definitely accomplishes that goal.
Really, that's all that it needed to do.
And in truth, it's more ambitious than you think. It takes chances with its level design, it introduces a host of cool new abilities, it hits you with some impressively designed mid-bosses, and it evolves the formula in a few truly notable ways.
It's more than a mere iteration.
And in the present day, it's as viable a choice as any when you're on the hunt for high-quality 2D action games that can provide you great entertainment in an ideal amount of time and store shelves and digital shops are otherwise packed with big-budget 3D shooters and 100-hour-long open-world games. At a time when old-school enthusiasts are desperate to find games that can competently fill that void, Mega Man 8 is right there just waiting to be rediscovered.
May Mega Man 8's next move be to JUMP! JUMP! and SLIDE! SLIDE! its way into the hearts of enthusiasts everywhere.
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