From the Memory Bank: My History with Video Games

Reflections: "Rockman & Forte: Mirai Kara no Chosensha" (WonderSwan)

I have to admit, my friends, that I've been a bad Mega Man fan. I'm always going on about how much I love the Mega Man series and how devoutly I've been following it over the decades, but the truth is that I really haven't been following it that closely. When I tell you that I love the series, I'm mostly expressing my fondness for the original Mega Man series and Mega Man X. That's it. That's the limit of my connection to Mega Man.

The fact is that I don't know much about the other Mega Man series. I've never played a Mega Man Battle Network game (save for a brief sampling of Mega Man Network Transition), a Mega Man Zero game, a Mega Man ZX game or a Mega Man Star Force game. I didn't play Mega Mans X6-8 until very recently, and the only reason I went near them was because I impulse-purchased Mega Man X Legacy Collection 2 when it went on sale and thus put myself in a position in which I was obligated to play them. And I played and enjoyed Mega Man Legends but chose to ignore its sequel.

And for the longest time, I didn't get around to playing Rockman & Forte: Mirai Kara no Chousensha even though I'd been meaning to do so for more than a decade. This is a sad fact because Mirai Kara no Chousensha is (a) part of the original Mega Man series, for which I have a ravenous appetite, and (b) a direct sequel to the Super Famicom's Rockman & Forte, which I adore (I'd rank it as high as fourth on my list of Mega Man favorites). I could never find the motivation to play it. Every time I'd get the impulse to seek it out, I'd remember all of the bad things I'd heard about it and promptly lose interest.

That's how it went until I remembered something important: That's not who I am. I'm not the kind of person who forms an opinion on a game (or anything, for that matter) based on what I'd heard about it from others, no. I think for myself. I form my own opinions. I give every game a fair chance, even if it's unpopular with the vast majority of gamers. And once I remembered that, I quit procrastinating and eagerly sought out Rockman & Forte: Mirai Kara no Chousensha and played it for myself.

And now, a few weeks later, I'm ready to tell you what I think about the game!

At the same time, I was desiring to become familiar with the game's host platform: the Bandai WonderSwan, which for the longest time had existed only in my periphery. Though, I'd always been curious about it--about what it was and how it functioned. And my needing to play Rockman & Forte: Mirai Kara no Chousensha gave me the perfect excuse to finally seek it out and play around with it!

And I have to say: I'm really happy to have gotten the chance to get to know the WonderSwan. It's a cool little portable! I look forward to returning to it and further exploring its game library.

Now, for those of you who don't know, the WonderSwan was created by Gunpei Yokoi, the legendary game designer who brought us the beloved Game Boy (Yokoi left Nintendo for Bandai following the fallout from the Virtual Boy's failure). It was released in 1999 exclusively in Japan, and it was positioned as a direct competitor to the Game Boy and the Game Boy Color.

Aesthetically, the WonderSwan is very reminiscent of the original Game Boy (which is not surprising considering who created it): It has a toy-like appearance, a monochromatic screen, and six inputs. From a technical perspective, though, it's much more advanced than the Game Boy and its more-powerful successor, the Game Boy Color. It has a 16-bit CPU and 512KB of RAM; it has a 4,096-color palette and can display 241 colors at a time; and it can render 28 sprites per line. The Game Boy Color, in comparison, has an 8-bit CPU and a measly 32KB of RAM; it can only display 56 colors at a time (though, it does boast a larger palette: 32,758 colors compared to the WonderSwan's 4,096); and it can only render 10 sprites per line. The WonderSwan, also, has a wider screen (224 pixels compared to the Game Boys' 160), which allows it to display more action.

And the WonderSwan also has a distinguishing feature: vertical-mode support! Some of its games (or some sections of its games) are instead designed in 144x224 resolution and thus require you to turn the WonderSwan 90 degrees! When you play in vertical mode, you control the action with the portable's pair of left-positioned d-pads (the top one normally exists to support the WonderSwan's left-handed mode, which allows lefties to play games by holding the portable in an upside-down position).

It's not surprising that the WonderSwan does such innovative things, no. I mean, it was made by Gunpei Yokoi, of whom innovation was a hallmark! It wouldn't be a Yokoi device if it didn't use its hardware in some fun new way!

Oh, and I should mention that the WonderSwan, much like the Game Boy, has a color-capable successor that's fully backward-compatible! (Yokoi, it seems, was intent on having his new product line follow along the same evolutionary path as the Game Boy's and using this new opportunity to work toward the fulfillment of his original vision.)

The other thing you should keep in mind is that Mirai Kara no Chousensha is an outsourced game. It was developed by a company called Lay-Up (about which little is known) and published by Bandai, the WonderSwan's manufacturer (Bandai was a lot like Sega in how it often took on publishing duties for third-party games because of its partners' reluctance to offer full support to non-Nintendo platforms). Capcom had little involvement in the game's development. At most, it played an advisory role.

So what's the deal with Rockman & Forte: Mirai Kara no Chousensha? Is it the original series' black sheep? Is it a criminally underrated and sadly overlooked gem? Or is it something in between?

Well, let me tell you! (For the sake of convention, I'll be using the game's translated title and the characters' English names.)

 The first thing you need to know about Mega Man: Challenger from the Future is that it's an original-series game and that it takes place between Rockman & Forte and Mega Man 9 (which I guess would make it Mega Man 8.75). You don't hear much about it because it's super-obscure and generally disregarded by series fans who mistakenly believe it to be a spinoff or a "side story" (mostly because its development was outsourced). But it's neither of those. It's absolutely an official original-series game, and it's been recognized as such by the R20 Rockman & Rockman X Official Complete Works art book and Mega Man ZX Advent, which makes multiple references to it.

The most interesting thing about Challenger is that it occupies a very unique space. It manages to be two things at once: a bridge between Rockman & Forte and Mega Man 9, and, surprisingly, a nexus between the mainline and Game Boy series. It has a stylistic connection to Rockman & Forte, a mainline entry, but it's more so a direct sequel to Mega Man II for Game Boy. Thus it serves to canonize the Game Boy Mega Man games, which were previously thought to take place in a separate universe.

"So how does it all connect?" you ask with a curious look on your face.

Well, allow me to partially spoil that for you!

So Challenger's story is that a group of robots called the "Dimensions" has attacked Symphony City, a place in which humans and robots coexist peacefully, and basically leveled it. Eyewitness reports state that the powerful group's leader was an evil figure who was hellbent on causing destruction. Also, shockingly, they say that he bears a strong resemblance to Mega Man!

After hearing this news, Mega Man rushes out of Dr. Light's lab and starts investigating the matter. At the same time, Dr. Wily sends Bass out into the city with the order to find out what really happened. So now both are on a mission to find out who this "dark Mega Man" really is!

The twist, we learn later on, is that "dark Mega Man" is actually a robot from the future. His name is Mega Man Shadow, and when he's confronted, he reveals that he's a failed prototype of Quint (an alternate-reality version of Mega Man that Dr. Wily captured and reprogrammed). And that's the interesting way in which Challenger connects the two series.

There's a lot more to the story, of course--a lot of intrigue and mystery--but I'll keep quiet about all of that and let you experience it for yourself.

 Predictably, Challenger from the Future contains all of the series elements that were standard during its era: You start by traversing your way through an intro stage, then you take on a number of Robot Masters, and finally you battle your way through the main villain's castle. When you defeat a Robot Master, you acquire its weapon, and then you can use said weapon to more easily defeat minor enemies and the bosses that are weak to it. And between stages, you can visit a shop and buy items and upgrades with the bolts you collected along the way.

Though, Challenger's formula, much like the original Rockman & Forte's, isn't entirely typical of the series, no. It has some differentiating features that help to set it apart from the numbered entries. For one, it uses a branching-path-style stage-select structure rather than the series' standard all-stages-immediately-available structure. But its setup isn't quite as complex as Rockman & Forte's, which had two multi-branching paths. Rather, it uses a more-simplified system: At first, four Robot Masters are available for selection, and after you defeat all of them, a linear three-step path branches out from the main stage-set.

Also, of course, Challenger has two playable characters: Mega Man and Bass, each of whom has disparate abilities (I'll go into depth on this subject later on).

Challenger's action, contrastingly, is very standard. You platform your way through stages that are formed from series of linearly designed horizontal and vertical sections (Challenger's stages, unlike Mega Man 8 and Rockman & Forte's, contain no wide-open spaces). At some point in the stage, you fight a midboss. And at the stage's end, you fight a Robot Master (after passing through a short transitional hallway, of course).

Your health is communicated via a vertical peg-based meter (which has 32 units compared to the usual 28). You start with three lives (and can earn up to 8 in total). And you get unlimited continues. Also, you can save your game into one of three slots after clearing or exiting a stage.

At any time during gameplay, you can access your inventory screen, which contains all of your special weapons and adapters (weirdly, all of the Robot Master weapons are listed in your inventory at the start, though you can't actually select any of them until you defeat the Robot Master that uses it), by pressing the Start button. When you're on this screen, you can select one of your available weapons and get a look at your lives- and bolt-totals (bolts, as usual, function as currency).

Challenger contains all of the usual special items: small and large energy pellets that replenish different portions of health; small and large weapon capsules that replenish different portions of your weapon energy; small and large bolts, which increase your currency-total by 3 and 10, respectively (you can hold up to 999 bolts); and 1ups. These items are dropped by enemies, and they can also be found lying around stages. (There are no energy tanks in this game, if you're wondering.)

And then there are the usual Mega Man mechanics: Every minor enemy and boss is weak to a certain weapon, each Robot Master weapon depletes or drains its associated weapon-energy meter at different rates, you die instantly if you touch spikes (unless you're currently in an invincibility-frame state) or get crushed, and you suffer knockback whenever you get hit (in this game, the knockback state lasts substantially longer than usual, and thus you're pushed pretty far back; this becomes a big problem when you're under attack as you're platforming across series of 1-tile-wide platforms).

There are only two real mechanical differences: Boss' health-meter lengths differ, and, oddly, the game doesn't refill your weapon energy between Robot Master stages (normally Mega Man games only refrain from refilling your weapon energy in castle stages).

And Challenger, like all post-Mega Man IV entries, contains an in-game shop that can be accessed from the Robot Master-select screen. Mega Man's is run by Dr. Light, and Bass' is run by roll. The usual shopkeeper, Auto, otherwise appears on the inventory screen and helps you to identify Robot Master weapons and adapters.

Challenger's shop is styled after Rockman & Forte's, but it functions a bit differently: Its selection doesn't change for each character. It's now unified, and if an item isn't compatible with Mega Man or Bass' systems, Dr. Light will simply say, "You can't use this" and block you from buying it. Also, its selection is smaller (it has 17 items compared to Rockman & Forte's 25).

Most of the items will be familiar to anyone who's played Rockman & Forte and the games that preceded it. You'll recognize standard series items like the Energy Balancer and the Exit Module (which is atypically a one-use item) and Rockman & Forte-derived items like the Shock Guard, which protects you from spike damage a single time; the Energy Saver, which decreases the amount of energy that weapons consume; the Super Recover, which increases the amount of health that energy pellets replenish; the Super Armor, which reduces the amount of damage you take; and the Weapon Charge, which restores all of your weapon energy (it's basically a W tank).

And, like I said, the selection also includes individualized items (most of which are taken from Rockman & Forte). Mega Man can buy the Rush Coil adapter, which allows him to spring high up into the air (but only one time); Eddie, who functions as an item-delivery system (he'll provide health refills, weapon energy and 1ups if you have enough weapon energy to afford them); Beat, who when called upon will create a shield to protect Mega Man; and Tango, who, like he does in Mega Man V, targets enemies with a rolling attack and doesn't cease until (a) he falls into a pit or (b) you trigger a screen transition.

Bass can buy two buster upgrades: the Super Booster, which increases the power of his shot, and the Hyper Booster, which allows him to fire wall- and surface-piercing shots; and he can also buy the Treble Booster--a suit adapter that allows him to fuse with his trusty canine sidekick, Treble, and gain the power of flight (which runs out when the adapter's energy meter fully depletes)--and Reggae, his robotic support bird, who is functionally identical to Eddie (you may remember Reggae as being Bass' shopkeeper in Mega Man 10).

Unlike in Rockman & Forte, all upgrade-type items can be equipped at the same time, and such items automatically equip the moment you purchase them (so the inventory's item-upgrade window is mostly a visual list). One-use items, like the Rush Coil and the Weapon Charge, of course have to be manually activated.

Otherwise, you can buy 1ups and do so in bulk (you can hold up to 9 lives).

I'm disappointed that the shop's selection isn't as rich as Rockman & Forte's, sure, but I really like how it incorporates Tango and thus creates an even stronger connection between the mainline and Game Boy series. Also, it's kinda wild to see that Reggae debuted here and not in Mega Man 10. He's not a recently created character, like I originally thought. He has a real history! So now when I see him in Mega Man 10, I'm instantly reminded of the game in which he debuted and how truly connected it is!

 So the big draw is that you can play as two characters: Mega Man and Bass, each of whom has disparate abilities that affect how he's able to traverse stages.

Mega Man is his typical self. He can jump at varying heights and distances depending upon how long the jump button is held down; his maximum vertical range is two tiles, and his maximum horizontal range is three. He fires energy pellets from his Mega Buster arm cannon, and he can fire up to three shots at a time (like in the Game Boy games, his shots are large and round rather than small and oval-shaped, and thus they have a wider hitbox). He can charge up his buster and release a more powerful charge shot, whose damage output is equivalent to four regular energy pellets; and like in other post-8-bit games, he can follow up a charge shot with two normal pellets (and I advise you to always do this because Challenger's version of the charge shot doesn't possess piercing power; the first enemy it hits completely absorbs it). And he can execute a slide move that allows him to speedily charge forward and safely pass beneath head-level projectiles; each slide carries him roughly two tiles forward; and if he jumps out of a slide, he'll get a boost that'll allow him to extend his horizontal jump by roughly one tile.

Bass has been downgraded from Rockman & Forte, in which he was basically the equivalent of a Mega Man X character, yet he's still more physically versatile than Mega Man. His basic walking and jumping movements are the same as Mega Man's, but he has a double jump ability that allows him to more swiftly and effortlessly platform and traverse his way through stages; his double jump substantially increases his jumping range and grants him a vertical range of five tiles and a horizontal range of six tiles.

Bass has a Mega Man X-style dash that allows him to speedily charge forward, but unlike in Rockman & Forte, it doesn't carry momentum and enable him to soar great distances (though, when he jumps out of a dash, he gets a slight boost that allows him to extend his horizontal jump by one tile). Rather, it's simply a speed move. And unlike Mega Man's slide, it doesn't allow him to safely pass beneath head-level projectiles and ceiling spikes that are too close to the ground (the ceiling spikes that are lighter in color).

Bass' buster ability is also significantly different. He can fire in seven directions (every which way but straight downward)--while on the ground and in the air and while climbing ladders--and do so rapidly (for him, there's no three-pellet limit). Thus he's able to attack enemies from basically any angle and more easily deal with enemies that are positioned directly above and below him. Though, this advanced firing ability comes with three downsides: The first is that he can't move while firing on the ground--a limitation that prevents him from engaging in run-and-gun-style action. The second is a major decrease in shot strength; his energy pellets are very weak (even more so than they are in Rockman & Forte), and thus it takes him a lot longer to destroy minor enemies and bosses (too long, I'd say). And the third is that his shots can't travel through walls and surfaces.

If you want to effectively deal with enemies as Bass, you'll necessarily have to spend the early portion of the game farming bolts so that you can purchase the shot-power-upgrading Super Booster. If you choose not to do this, you'll likely struggle mightily and have a miserable experience. (The Super Booster doesn't solve the can't-fire-through-walls issue, no, but it does make said issue easy to ignore.)

Once you purchase the Super Shot, though, Bass becomes significantly stronger. His strength increases so much, in fact, that he becomes more offensively capable than Mega Man and easily the superior option. He'll now be able to capably take down enemies and speed through stages in ways that Mega Man simply can't; he'll be able to plow through enemies and use his double jump ability to trivialize most platforming challenges and even bypass most of them completely.

As a result, Mega Man's gameplay takes on the quality of a challenge mode. When you play as him, you have to be more cautious and a lot more precise in your movements.

Mega Man being outranked in games from his own series is still pretty strange to me. I mean, it's not as bad here as it is in the original Rockman & Forte, in which Mega Man was so comparatively limited that he needed the benefit of extra platforms (he "needed a stool to access the kitchen counter," as I said in my Rockman & Forte piece), but it's still very noticeable.

Also, Mega Man and Bass each get unique variations of the Robot Masters' weapons. It's cool that they do, yeah, but it winds up not mattering much because of how lame the majority of the weapons are (I'll talk more about this later on).

 I'm not going to tell you that Challenger has bad controls because it really doesn't. Rather, it has what I'd call "modified-feeling controls"--controls that are close to what you get in the average original-series game but not quite the same. Each aspect of the controls is off just a bit.

To start, Mega Man and Bass move more slowly than their console counterparts. They walk, fall and climb at a slower rate, and thus Challenger's pace feels a bit more sluggish than the average Mega Man game's. Also, Mega Man and Bass' jumps are more floaty; there's benefit to this in that their movements resultantly feel tighter and their jumps become more modular, but the tradeoff is that they lose some of their speed and zippiness.

I'd say, if I were trying to be precise, that Challenger's game speed is closer to the Game Boy games' than it is to the mainline games' (though, its action is slower as a result of the designers' choice rather than because its host system's processor is so severely limited).

Challenger's Mega Buster speed, however, leans more toward the former's. Mega Man and Bass' shots slowly travel across the screen, and Mega Man's shots travel so slowly, in fact, that he can almost keep pace with them! This lack of rapidity changes the normal timing for shots and makes it difficult to run and gun in the same way you would if you were playing a mainline Mega Man game. It's just not possible to spray enemies with shots. Rather, you now have to be more deliberate and more tactical in your offense.

The slower buster speed is a bigger problem for Mega Man because he can only fire off three shots at a time, and he can't fire again until at least one of the pellets has left the screen. This isn't a big issue in the mainline games because his pellets leave the screen so quickly, but in this game, it's a rather troublesome issue because his shots linger onscreen for a long period. After firing off three shots, he'll remain offensively impotent for up to two and half seconds (assuming that all of the shots miss their target) and even longer if he runs or slides along with the pellets and thus causes the screen to scroll forward. This leads to scenarios in which he's defenseless against enemies that enter the picture after the three shots are fired.

The slide and dash moves, conversely, execute quickly and cleanly, and it's easy to string together multiple slides and dashes. Stringing together such moves is the best way to speed up the action. Note that you can jump out of a slide or a dash at any time.

 Challenger's most disappointing aspect is its Robot Master cast. So much about it is poorly considered.

To start, the Dimensions have seven members, but, oddly, only six of them are considered "Robot Masters" (the group's leader, Mega Man Shadow, carries a standard "boss" label), and only five of them provide you weapons! As a consequence, you get fewer Robot Master stages and weapons in a game that is already light in content compared to the average Mega Man entry (and to compound the issue, the final area--Mega Man Shadow's domain--is comprised of a mere single stage, so you wind up getting only eight stages in total!).

Challenger's having a non-standard number of Robot Masters would be fine if those included were interesting or cool-looking in some way, but unfortunately the Dimensions' members are neither. They sorely lack for alluring qualities. They have no flair or personality. They're stylistically bland and thematically boring.

I mean, how in the world can you get excited about fighting Robot Masters who carry names like "Stove Man," "Aircon Man" (or "Air Conditioner Man") and "Compass Man"--names that evoke images of some of the most mundane household items you can think of? When you see these names, you get the sense that the game's designers were so creatively bankrupt that they resorted to basing Robot Masters on the first objects they saw when they looked around their offices. The only thing these names serve to do is give Challenger the flavor of an outsourced game--a game whose development was, like the Mega Man DOS games', a complete afterthought.

Another problem is that the Robot Master fights are boring and largely homogenous. Nearly all of the Robot Masters have the same pattern: stand in a corner, unleash some type of multi-projectile attack, shift over to the room's opposite side, repeat. Occasionally one of them will mix things up by stopping during the transition, hovering atop the screen for a few seconds, and unleashing, well, a multi-projectile attack (but at least it travels at a different angle!). The result is that these fights are rudimentary-feeling and thus not terribly engaging; also, they tend to be really slow in pace--mostly because the Robot Masters' health meters have ridiculous length to them (the largest are approximately 80% of the screen's height).

And what's inexplicable is that the weakness chain hardly matters! There's no real optimal order because all of the Robot Masters are weak to every weapon--to varying degrees, yes, but always to at least an adequate degree. Hell--Bass can destroy just about every Robot Master (and most midbosses) with the insanely overpowered Doppler Attack! He doesn't need to use any other weapon. The game doesn't give him any reason to. And it's pretty much the same for Mega Man, who can make short work of most Robot Masters with the Barrier Wind weapon.

And because all of this is true, Challenger's bosses wind up being indistinct and thus completely unmemorable. Even after playing through the game multiple times, I can only remember two or three of its Robot Masters offhand, and even then, I can barely recall how said Robot Masters function.

Though, there is something interesting about the game's weapon system: It has a personalization element to it. Mega Man and Bass each receive a uniquely functioning weapon from a defeated Robot Master (much like X and Zero do in the Mega Man X games). When, for example, Mega Man defeats Bullet Man, he gets the Rock'n Vulcan, which enables him to fire three-directional missiles; Bass, alternatively, gets the Bass Vulcan, which enables him to fire out a single homing missile. When Mega Man defeats Stove Man, he gets the Flame Shower--a Wave Burner-type flame-thrower; Bass instead gets the Flame Mixer--an encircling shield. When Mega Man defeats Komuso Man, he gets a chargeable blade-thrusting dash attack; Bass instead gets the aforementioned Doppler Attack, which allows him to split into a quartet of mini-Basses that can freely fly around the screen and damage enemies through direct contact.

This is a cool idea, and it gives Challenger something unique to its name. The problem, though, is that you won't get much mileage out of the system because most of the weapons aren't very useful. The majority of the time, Mega Man and Bass' buster shots are better options because they fire off more quickly and you can be more accurate with them.

The problem of Robot Master weapons not being very useful certainly isn't unique to Challenger, no, but it's more pronounced in this game because the number of weapons is so limited, and it doesn't help that you don't get much of an opportunity to use some of them. By the time you get Clock Man's weapon, for instance, the game's almost over, and you're only going to get the chance to use his weapon in one stage!

That's the recurring theme with Challenger: cool and interesting ideas that ultimately don't amount to much.

 Challenger's visual design is a mixed bag. Some aspects of it are very solid and even quite impressive while others are unremarkable and disappointingly mundane.

The character design, sadly, is mostly the latter. It just isn't very appealing. The minor enemies are largely nondescript and generic-looking, and most of the Robot Masters are just are just flat-out ugly-looking (they look like they were drawn by a bunch of drunk 8-year-olds). It's as if Lay-Up never moved past the earliest concept-art phase--as if its lead designer took the very first scribbling of each Robot Master and said, "You know what? That's good enough. Just scan it in and move on."

Whenever I look at one of the Robot Masters, the same thing happens: My face scrunches, and I wonder to myself, "Why? Why did they go with this awful designer?" And what's really inexplicable is that Capcom's supervisors didn't demand better.

The minor enemies, like I said, are uninteresting in both concept and design. For some reason, their cast consists mostly of insects: butterflies, ladybugs, wasps, hornets, beetles, worms and such (seriously--what is it with outsourced Mega Man games and bugs?). I'm not even sure that any of them (or any of the bats, slimes or fish) are actually robots; they appear to be just ordinary creatures!

There are some distinctly-robotic enemies, yeah, but many of them, too, are visually uninteresting. What you get are painfully-rudimentary-looking enemies like walking bells, charging bullets, floating cubes, and gears with derpy faces.

It's nice that the iconic hard hats have returned, sure, but unfortunate that they're disproportionally large (the lack of proper proportion is a problem with quite a few of the game's enemies, in fact) and nightmarish to deal with. They're only vulnerable when they jump, but they shoot at the same time that they jump (and do so at lightning-fast speed), and this seriously limits the amount of ways in which you can engage with them. The only thing you can really do against a hard hat is to try to jump at the exact moment it jumps and fire off a shot on the way up. If you try to assail one of them while on the ground, instead, you'll get hit over and over again and likely never land a shot. It doesn't help that their pellets have large hitboxes.

The returning bubble bats look and function like you expect them to, though! So that's nice. I guess.

What I find strange is that the designers chose not to style the heroes and supporting characters after their 8-bit incarnations or use the Game Boy games' ready-made sprites (all of which would translate perfectly to WonderSwan, whose color palette and screen resolution are very close the Game Boy's) but to instead go the custom route and create scaled-down versions of Rockman & Forte's heroes and supporting characters. A fine template already existed.

In truth, though, I don't mind that they chose to design distinct-looking characters. It actually worked out pretty well. I mean, I don't think that Challenger's sprites have as much character as the other 8-bit games', no, but still they look pretty good. And the characters they form are quite attractive. They're nicely drawn and shaded, and they animate very smoothly--much more smoothly than any of the other 8-bit games' characters. The range of animation is so great, in fact, that you can sense the intent of characters' movements. Mega Man and Bass, for instance, look like they're determinedly powerwalking when they're in motion! (Mega Man looks a little too angry for my taste, though; he's supposed to be the wide-eyed optimist type!)

I like, also, how Mega Man and Bass' dash moves kick up smoke, like they do in Rockman & Forte. It's one of those nice little touches that evokes images of the 16-bit Mega Man games and thus makes Challenger feel more advanced than the average 8-bit game.

My only nitpicks are that Mega Man's pellets are, like I said, uncharacteristically large and spherical, which I dislike because I'm a continuity hound, and that the charge shot is small in size and completely lacking for animation (it doesn't even change colors as it flies along!), which serves to greatly diminish its visual appeal and explosiveness.

Challenger's backgrounds, too, are very well-rendered. They're sharp-looking, finely shaded, and highly detailed. The problem, though, is that they're disappointingly generic; they form only your standard cave, desert, forest and futuristic-building settings. They're boring to look at. They contain no interesting features or visual touches, and they lack for any type of animation. Nothing about them stirs the imagination. It's the same deal with the tile and sprite-layer textures: They're sharp-looking and finely detailed, but they're also very standard-looking; none of them stand out in any way.

What's surprisingly cool, though, is that Challenger has parallax scrolling! Many of its stage sections have independently scrolling background layers, and these layers scroll along very smoothly and fluidly and continue doing so even during screen transitions--of both the horizontal and vertical variety. It's an impressive visual effect and something that helps Challenger to distinguish itself from the Game Boy Mega Man games, none of which ever did anything as advanced.

I always approve of parallax scrolling!

There's also another nice little touch: After a stage is cleared, its associated boss image resultantly changes, and when you set the selector on a stage's icon, you instead get an image of the boss in a defeated state! The Gray Devil (the intro stage's boss), for instance, drops to all fours and displays a shell-shocked expression!

From a technical standpoint, Challenger is solid. It runs at a smooth 60 frames per second, and, unlike the Game Boy Mega Man games, it doesn't have any slowdown issues.

 Challenger's level design is, for the most part, fairly pedestrian. The majority of the time, you're traversing largely flat environments and zigzagging your way around similar-looking two-level rooms. Stages, like I said earlier, are formed from series of linearly designed horizontal and vertical sections; they, unlike Rockman & Forte's stages, contain no wide-open spaces, and thus they lack an exploration element. Their action is very straightforward.

The game's platforming is rarely more complex than "jumping over spike pits" and "jumping across series of moving or falling platforms," and that's disappointing because you know that it's capable of doing much more. You're sure of that because you see it do very interesting things a number of times. You know that when it makes a genuine effort, really cool platforming challenges result. You get sequences and segments that entail riding floating, controllable octopi up series of spike-filled passages; platforming your way through rooms by jumping into and off of the blocks that are being spit out by blowfish; reverse gravity; and precision spring-jumping. And each time you do, you wish that the game had more of it; you wish that the level designers could have infused the other 85% of the game with the same type of ambitious-feeling spirit.

The best example of Challenger's disappointingly restrained design decisions is Aircon Man's stage, which uses the WonderSwan's hardware in a cool and interesting way: It utilizes the device's vertical-display mode and thus inverts the screen resolution (from 224x144 to 144x224)! The result is a uniquely structured stage that uses its increased verticality to provide more-substantive falling and climbing challenges (one of the falling sections of course has you blindly dropping down through series of spike-filled rooms, but because the rooms have increased height, you now have an adequate amount of time to view the oncoming spikes and make the proper aerial adjustments!).

Tragically, though, Challenger does this only once. All of its other stages use the standard horizontal setup. And that'll stand out to you as odd. After you finish the game, you'll be probably be left thinking, "What the designers did with Aircon Man's stage is really creative and interesting, and it added some freshness to the experience. So why did they choose to do it only one time?"

The answer is "because they didn't feel like doing it again." That's it. "Once is good enough," they obviously thought.

It's just another missed opportunity.

Challenger's stage structuring is typical of the original Mega Man series and thus uncomplex in nature. Stages are comprised of series of linearly crafted sections, and at the end of each one of them, you fight a boss or a Robot Master. There's only one real notable variance: In Challenger, every Robot Master stage contains a midboss (in past games, only two or three stages had midbosses). These midbosses range from bland to quite inventive. The worst of them are just like the Robot Masters in that they do nothing more than jump back and forth and fire multi-directional or homing projectiles at you. The best ones, though, are surprisingly imaginative.

The biggest standout is the octopus midboss, with which you engage in a very a unique way. The octopus floats high above you and is thus completely out of reach. So if you want to damage it, you have to do so indirectly. The only way to do this is to deflect shots off of the octopus' hard hat minions (deflected shots travel upward at about a 75-degree angle)! But it's not that easy. The octopus has some protection: two impenetrable shield-type platforms that scroll along the screen, on a loop, directly below. So you can't just spam buster shots, no; you have to look for openings and time your shots.

It's just such an interesting way to use the old weapon-deflection mechanic, and it makes me wish that more of the fights did cool things like this--that more of the fights used the game's mechanics in such delightfully inventive ways.

Some of the stages have split paths, and in most cases, an alternate path can only be accessed by a certain characters (like in Rockman & Forte, Bass can reach elevated exit points while Mega Man can slide his through one-tile-high exits). Some alternate paths are shortcuts while others are "secret areas" that contain helpful goodies like 1ups and bolts.

At times, Challenger has the same problem the Game Boy Mega Man games had: cramped spaces. Some of the passages in its two-level rooms are so cramped that it's difficult to maneuver around and engage with the enemies that inhabit them. In some instances, it's impossible to avoid taking damage; you necessarily have to absorb a hit from a rebounding beetle or a large flame-spewing robot. And the compact nature of these rooms produces particularly goofy-looking two-rung ladders, whose presence only serves to remind you of how disappointingly compromised these old portable devices' screen resolutions are.

A lot of the enemy-placement is bad, too. Flying-type enemies tend to come at you from impossible angles and force you into positions in which you have no options and thus have to take hits (even Bass, who can fire upward and diagonally downward, can have a lot of trouble with such enemies). In too many instances, enemies are placed right at screens' starting points, and if you don't know that an enemy is waiting for you at a screen's starting point, you're bound to bump into it after transitioning and get knocked back to the previous screen; you have to be prescient enough to know that a grounded enemy is waiting for you and transition via a jump. And, like I said, large enemies often appear in spaces that are narrow or irregularly-shaped, and sometimes their attacks or movements cover so much ground that it becomes extremely difficult to engage them without taking damage.

And one of the team's designers really loved the idea of sliding under ceiling spikes. I'm not kidding: Every stage has at least one room in which you have to slide under a series of ceiling spikes. This challenge is way too overused. After you see it the fifth time, you'll probably start to suspect that Challenger's level designers were light on ideas.

Stages have checkpoints, yes, but not a generous amount of them. So when you die, expect to be sent a long way back. In most cases, dying erases several minutes of work.

I have to say, though, that despite its having all of these level-design issues, Challenger still manages to encourage fast-paced play. It's still pretty easy to smoothly sail through stages (once you know what you're doing, of course).

 What hurts Challenger more than anything else is its mechanical roughness. A lot of what it does feels sloppy and gives you the sense that the developers weren't very thorough in their planning and game-testing. As you play, you'll encounter issues like the following:

• Often, you'll get hit by projectiles that weren't really close to you because hitboxes tend to be 1-and-a-half-times the size of the characters and projectiles to which they're mapped.
• If you pause and then unpause the game when you have a Robot Master weapon equipped, you'll default back to the Mega Buster.
• When a boss is in a vulnerable state, it has no invincibility frames, and in such a moment, you can rapidly drain its health if you get up close to it and unload.
• The Robot Master-select stage-intro will play when you return to a completed stage, which makes no sense because a completed stage's Robot Master has been defeated and thus won't be waiting for you at the stage's endpoint.
• Like I said earlier, Mega Man and Bass can keep pace with their fired pellets.

There are, however, mechanical oddities that wind up working in your favor.

• When enemies die, their fired projectiles disappear with them, and in many instances, this will save you from getting hit.
• In horizontal sections, your shots travel through the screen (you'll see this happen if you trigger a transition right after firing a shot), and this allows you to hit and kill enemies that reside on the following screen.
• Because items' hitboxes are wider than usual, you're able to snag an item when it's resting in a spike pit that's positioned one tile lower (if said item is within range of the upper platform's edge and you're able to extend out far enough to reach it).
• If you have a Robot Master weapon equipped when you die, you'll still have that weapon equipped when you restart at the checkpoint (this will save you a couple of seconds of menu-navigating).

But these mechanical oddities being beneficial doesn't change the fact that their presence, too, serves to make the game feel very unpolished. After you finish the game, your takeaway will surely be that Challenger's production had no real oversight. "Was anyone at Capcom even paying attention to this game's production?" you'll wonder.

My guess is no.

 Another big disappointment is that Challenger doesn't have its own soundtrack. Rather, it recycles almost the entirety of Rockman & Forte's soundtrack. It doesn't have any uniquely composed tunes. From start to finish, all you hear are tunes that were borrowed from Rockman & Forte.

"But weren't we fine with the practice of borrowing music when the Game Boy entries were engaging in it?" you might be asking.

Well, yes--we were. But were OK with it because it made sense for the Game Boy entries to borrow tunes--particularly stage themes. The Game Boy entries did, after all, feature Robot Masters from previous games, and thus it was appropriate for them to use music that was associated with said Robot Masters. (And it's not like these entries didn't contain some original music: They had wholly unique shop, castle-stage, and credits themes!)

Challenger doesn't reuse Rockman & Forte's Robot Masters. It has its own exclusive cast--one that consists of a set of uniquely themed Robot Masters. So the problem becomes that its stage themes feel mismatched. Tengu Man's relaxingly chill sky theme, for instance, just isn't a good fit for Komuso Man's "trap-filled monastery surrounded by mysterious woods" stage. It doesn't capture the setting. It doesn't properly accentuate the stage's features or evoke the appropriate emotions.

Pirate Man's wonderfully upbeat, nostalgia-inducing ocean theme, likewise, captures nothing about Compass Man's waterless, coldly metallic indoor-and-outdoor fortress. It doesn't evoke any feelings because, well, there's nothing particularly evocative about the stage's visuals!

And Astro Man's mysterious, quizzical theme can't possibly say anything about Clock Men's stage, whose setting, in contrast to the one you explore in Astro Man's stage, is so aggressively sterile and ordinary-looking.

It's like that with all of the game's stage themes. They just don't fit. They're paired with stages that do nothing to welcome them, and thus their presence only serves to create a disconnect and evoke distracting images of Rockman & Forte's much-more-memorable stage environments.

The music's quality is fine. Tunes are a bit too high in pitch and a little shrill-sounding at times, yeah, but otherwise they're solidly composed and even somewhat charming (despite their being mismatched). Challenger's are fine little portable renditions.

The game's sound effects, though, are a mixed bag. Some of them are nicely produced while others are just plain unbecoming.

Jumps and slides emit fairly faithful, appropriately snappy sounds, but the Mega Buster and item-obtention sound effects are uncharacteristically and disappointingly tinny and squeaky.

Minor enemy deaths produce meek little "plips" rather than sharp explosions, but boss deaths, in great contrast, produce the type of satisfyingly violent multi-second explosions that we expect to hear.

That's how it goes in Challenger: For every good sound effect, there's one that's remarkably underwhelming.

So goes the running theme.

 On the Mega Man scale of difficulty, Challenger ranks about a 7. It's a bit more challenging than entries like Mega Man 4, Mega Man 6 and Mega Man 7 but not quite as challenging Mega Mans 9 and 10; and it's certainly nowhere near as challenging as its inspiration--Rockman & Forte, which is easily the series' most difficult game (this surprises me because I thought that "very high difficulty" was supposed to be a quality inherent to Rockman & Forte-titled games).

In truth, Challenger's difficulty is actually pretty manageable. Its platforming challenges aren't that hard to handle, and its bosses are fairly easy to beat once you know their patterns and weaknesses (also, because they lack invincibility frames, it's possible to spray them with buster shots from up close and dispatch of them quickly). It's instead other aspects that cause the game to earn a higher ranking.

One such aspect is its number of troublesome "rough spots" (which I define as segments or platforming challenges that are far more dangerous than the standard fare because they require a level of skill and precision well above what you're asked to exhibit during the other 95% of the game). Challenges like the Octopus-midboss fight and riding floating octopi up spike-filled passages are fraught with peril and will always threaten to drain your entire life-stock--even when you're comfortable with the game and have a great feel for it.

Also, Challenger has two cheap tricks that it likes to pull fairly regularly: having an enemy suddenly spawn at the screen's edge at a time when you're in the middle of a forced jump and hanging over a death pit; and placing an enemy right at a screen's entry point and creating a situation in which you're likely take damage immediately upon completing the screen transition and get knocked back to the previous screen. The latter trick can cripple your health even in instances where you can see it coming; at times, you'll take repeated hits even if you enter the new screen from what you think is a favorable transition spot (because, like I said, hitboxes expand out farther than you think).

And there's also that problem of rough design aspects like long-range-weapon-using enemies being placed in short, narrow passages and other inconvenient locations. In some cases, there's no way to engage with such an enemy without taking damage; if you don't possess a weapon that allows you to it attack from above or below, you're guaranteed to get hit by it at least once.

Expectedly, Challenger's poor design decisions make traversing certain stage sections more of a struggle than it needs to be, and that's not how it should work. Level designers should never rely on poorly developed mechanics to boost a game's difficulty. The series' producers, who had reputations to uphold, should have made that message clear.

So yeah--it's the design problems that work to raise the game's difficulty.

 The only other thing I can say about Challenger is that it's a surprisingly short game. It has only 8 stages (whereas the standard Mega Man game has no less than 12), and none of them are amazingly long. And the game ends very abruptly and in anticlimactic fashion: The moment you defeat Mega Man Shadow, the game's final scene triggers. And that's it. There's no second Mega Man Shadow form, no game-extending storyline twist, and, incredibly, no Wily involvement. Once you beat Mega Man Shadow, the game simply ends.

I mean, it's kinda refreshing to play a Mega Man that doesn't lean on overused cliches like "Wily was secretly behind all of it!", yeah, but still I can't deny that the absence of any type of surprise makes the game's ending fall really flat. It would have been great had Challenger hit you with, say, a Mega Man Shadow-created tower-type final boss that you had to fight in vertical mode! You know--the type of boss you'd have to deftly scale and do so with the intention of reaching its vulnerable point and blasting it!

Something like that, I think, would have made the endgame feel more exciting.

Closing Thoughts

 It used to be that when I'd rank Mega Man games from favorite to least-favorite, Mega Man 7 would always land on the bottom of my list, and consequently I'd refer to it as "the worst original-series game." As I was doing that, though, I knew that "worst" was an unnecessarily negative descriptor and that it was serving to misrepresent how I actually felt about the game. Mega Man 7 was, more accurately, a "bottom-tier" Mega Man game, and that was fine because, in my view, even bottom-tier original-series entries were solidly made, enjoyable action games. Really, there was no such thing as a "worst" original-series game.

Well, that's what I thought until I played Challenger from the Future, which, I'm sad to say, is a legitimately bad Mega Man game and a very mediocre video game in general.

It has its positive qualities, sure: It controls well. Its action flows smoothly. Its music, while ill-fitting and a little too high in pitch, is nicely composed. And it introduces some unique and interesting ideas. But unfortunately, its negative aspects far outweigh its positive ones. It's inadequate in too many ways: Its level design is generally flat and mundane. Its Robot Masters are boring and forgettable. Its minor enemies have no personality, and inexplicably, the majority of the enemy case consists of seemingly-organic insects and sea creatures (killing which is supposed to be against robots' code). Its backgrounds and textures are nicely rendered but otherwise generic-looking and uninteresting. Too many of its mechanics are rough and unpolished. And Bass, at the start, is even weaker than he is in Rockman & Forte, and thus he really struggles to take down HP-rich minor enemies and even the weakest bosses (playing as him is such a nightmare that it hardly seems worth it to try to endure long enough to get the Bass Buster upgrade).

But Challenger's biggest flaw is that it simply isn't much fun to play. Its gameplay is overly repetitious, slow in pace, and often too punishing. And because it fails in these areas, it becomes the first legitimately bad original-series Mega Man game. It truly is the "worst" of the lot.

Still, I recommend that you seek out Challenger for novelty's sake. It's a good idea, I think, to get a sense of what the game is and to use the opportunity to play around with its host platform--the WonderSwan, which is a cool little portable and certainly worthy of your time and attention. But I also recommend that you stop short of doing anything beyond sampling the game.

That's the best way to mitigate the pain.

 I have to stress again how disappointed I am that Challenger's level designers' didn't do more with the WonderSwan's vertical-display ability. It's such an interesting feature, yet, sadly, they decided to put it to use in only one stage. I mean, there was so much more that they could have done with it!

Now, I'm not saying that their adding some additional vertical-mode stages would have shaken up the formula in a big way (something Capcom was and still is averse to doing), no, but it would have at least made Challenger a more-interesting and more-novel-feeling game. Also, the addition of more vertical-mode stages would, I think, have inspired the designers to dream up all kinds of unique and interesting ideas and do so in the pursuit of proving the value of doing something new and different. And Challenger might have been a better game for it.

Instead they missed a big opportunity.

 The good news is that my experience with Challenger from the Future has put me in an exploratory mood. It has inspired me to seek out all of the Mega Man games I missed over the years and attempt to get into them.

I figure that I'll start with the Mega Man Zero series, since I love action-adventure games, and I'm eager to find out how the X and Zero series' stories connect. Then I'll go from there.

And in time, I'll surely become what I've always longed to be: a better Mega Man fan!