Mega Man and Bass

 I'm not one for overly difficult games, but this one has been on my list for a long, long time.

I think I've covered more Mega Man titles than any other series. What can I say, I've always loved these games. Despite being an iconic video game character, the blue bomber fits more into the whole "off the beaten path" theme than you would think. I forget where it was, I ended up looking at the series' sales figures and was shocked to find just how few units it has moved. I guess it makes some level of sense. Mega Man has had quite a few fits of starts and stops, often coming out with two, three, four titles in the span of a few years before going dark. A lot of this is due to spinoffs, I always considered the classic and X series to kind of be one and one A, but there is also Battle network, Legends and a host of other interesting outliers. A lot of folks consider these games to be incredibly difficult. Honestly, I just don't see it. Maybe it's because I have played these games over and over, but I've never found them as hard as most people claim they are. Sure, they have their moments, like the infamous Yellow Devil boss, but I would never put them up there with stuff like Castlevania or Contra, and especially not with Ghosts and Goblins or Battletoads. However, there has always been one entry that I believe is as difficult as advertised.

Initially released in 1998 for the Super Famicom (basically the Japanese SNES), Mega Man and Bass would find its way to the U.S. in 2003 as a Game Boy Advance port. When I first saw the release date, I thought it was a typo or an error of some kind. But no, this game really did come out for the Super Famicom in 1998. That's three years after the release of the PlayStation and Saturn and two after the Nintendo 64. Series director Keiji Inafune is quoted as saying this was done to target younger, more casual gamers who may not have moved on to new hardware. Personally, I think that's an awesome stance to take. Perhaps that's why I am such a Mega-fan, Inafune-san and I are on the same page. Unfortunately, whoever actually designed the game did not get the message. Because MMaB does not play like a game designed for younger or more casual gamers. This is by far the most brutal, unfair game in the Mega Man series, at least in the classic series, it is an absolute grind from beginning to end. Difficulty isn't inherently a problem, some of the best games of all time are really, really hard. But when a game is hard because of poor design decisions, or because it's trying to be as mean as possible, that's when it becomes a problem. And believe me, here, it's a major, major problem.

One caveat here before we get started, I did my playthrough of this game as Mega Man, as I always do. I've said it before and I'll say it again, the series is called "Mega Man" for a reason. You have the option to play as Bass here, but that never really appealed to me just like playing as Zero in the X series never did. I've been told this game is much easier as Bass, so I did take a shot at playing a few levels with him and after doing so, I definitely agree. The game is much easier as Bass, so much so that it almost feels like it was designed almost entirely around his abilities. Those differences may seem small in theory, Bass can rapid fire and double jump. But in practice, they are major, major differences that make the game completely different depending on who you choose. I have always been great at slamming buttons, so I only found the lack of rapid fire an issue once or twice. But there were a lot of situations that felt impossible without a double jump, which is problematic from a design standpoint. Mega Man did have other tools in his arsenal to get around these situations, but, well, we'll get to that in a minute.

There is some semblance of plot here and it's a little deeper than what you would typically see in a Mega Man game. A robot called King has run amok, breaking into both Dr. Wily's laboratory and the Dr. Light's robot museum, stealing plans for both of their creations. His goal? Create a utopia where robots rule over humans, something Mega Man must stop. Bass may not be as altruistic as his blue rival, but he also has quarrel with King. Defeating this new enemy will prove to Wily that Bass is indeed his strongest creation. I don't put too much weight on the plot in games like this, but it does actually get relatively deep and some of the themes covered here are surprisingly heavy. The game uses the same graphical style and sound font as Mega Man 8, which I was never really a fan of. It worked far better in MM8, it's a bright, colorful, cutesy game that's probably the easiest in the franchise. MMaB looks the same, but it's brutally hard and it just doesn't fit with the aesthetic. One thing I will say is I think the robot masters are a pretty solid looking group. Our roster here consists of:

-Cold Man (generic ice-bot but still kind of cool looking)

-Burner Man (clean, efficient-burning propane in robot form)

-Pirate Man (I mean, it's a robot pirate, of course it's awesome)

-Ground Man (One of the coolest robot masters in series history)

-Magic Man (not my favorite but thematically appropriate)

-Dynamo Man (probably the weakest here, but still not bad)

-Tengu Man (back from MM8, and he's still pretty cool)

-Astro Man (also back from MM8, still goofy)

In terms of aesthetics and design, it's a great list. Ground Man, in particular, is awesome. He looks like a giant mech covered in drills and he switches between a walking and tank mode in his fight. Pirate man is a pirate that's also a robot, how could you go wrong? I wouldn't call Magic Man or Burner Man, cool, but at least they are interesting. I wasn't a fan of recycling robots from Mega Man 8, especially when one of them was Astro Man, but at least they have different patterns and powers.

Unfortunately, as good as the lineup is aesthetically, they are equally bad or worse in technical design. Again, Ground Man is the standout here, his fight is fun and frantic without being unfair or ridiculous. But his is the only fight that's actually any semblance of good. Astro Man feels awful at first but isn't so bad once you realize his pattern. Cold Man is supposed to be the boss you start with, which was fine for me as an experienced MM player but probably a bit too much for a newbie. Magic Man and Pirate Man's fights are below average, but they weren't horrific. Not good, but not horrific. And that's an important clarification here because MMaB might have the two worst robot master fights in the entire series. First, we have Dynamo Man. This guy starts out okay, the first three quarters of the fight is actually pretty fun and would have been a fairly solid, very chaotic fight. But then, it happens: Dynamo Man jumps into a contraption on the ceiling...and begins healing himself. You have to destroy both sides of this contraption to stop him, and you can only shoot them from the outside. So that means you have to jump up to one side, shoot it and then move to the other. And he doesn't heal slowly either. If you don't have Astro Man's power, you are pretty much done. Even with it, stopping the healing is almost impossible, your options are pretty much get lucky with that or get lucky that he only tries to heal once.

It's one of the worst robot master fights in the history of the franchise...and it's not even the worst one in this game. Because while Dynamo Man has one fatal flaw that makes him a chore to fight, Burner Man is just miserable throughout. First, you have spike pits on either side of the room, which Burner Man will try to push you in to. He does this in several ways, the first of which is charging at you. His charges are hard to read and his sprite is huge, making him almost impossible to jump over. So his primary attack is pretty much impossible to dodge and will either deal tons of damage or kill you outright. Next, he has a flamethrower, which he will spray in front of him while jumping forward, a process he will repeat three times. The only real way to escape this is to turn and run, but if he does this too close to the spike pit that's not possible to do that. But it's also impossible to jump over him, so now we have and attack that, if activated at a certain part of the screen, is a guaranteed hit. His third attack are his bear traps, of which he will throw three. Once these things are on the ground, they are hidden and can only be spotted by looking incredibly carefully, something you don't have time to do because you are constantly on your toes trying to dodge his dashes and keep yourself in the middle of the screen to not get trapped. His final attack involves him throwing bombs at you from off-screen. Yes, I said off-screen. His room is huge, so half the time he will be off the screen, making him hard to react to. Worse, you can't hurt him when he is off screen...but he can damn sure hurt you. This is an even bigger problem on the Game Boy Advance as you have even less screen real estate to work with. With a boss like this, you might think the weakness would shred him. And it kind of does. At least it would if you could actually hit with it. The idea is you use the ice wall to push Burner Man into the pits. But to actually do it, you need to hit him almost pixel perfectly. If you miss, even once, you are going to run out of weapon energy before he runs out of health, so good luck.

So yeah, we just had a whole paragraph on how bad one single robot master was, so we are not off to a great start. The weapons are at least okay, but most of them are just rehashes of similar weapons from old games. Your prize for all that misery with Burner Man is a basic flamethrower weapon, while the almost-as-bad Dynamo Man gives you a screen clear. Pirate Man's weapon is the remote mine, a nice weapon but it kind of misses the point of why he's cool in the first place. Tengu Man and Astro Man give you tengu blade and copy shot respectively, these are worse than their MM8 powers. At least the copy shot, which spawns a clone that fires continuously, is unique. Magic Man gives you the magic card, which allows you to throw, well, magic cards up or forward. These will bring items back to you as well. It's a cool weapon, but Mega Man should really be sleeving his cards and storing them in a deck box. I hope those are proxies you're throwing buddy. Anyway, Cold Man's ice wall is the most important weapon in the game for Mega Man. It's terrible for defeating enemies, but the key here is you can stand on them. Remember those gaps I mentioned that only Bass can clear with his double jump? Yeah, this is how Mega Man gets over them. That's not good design at all. Ground Man's spread drill is the biggest standout here, drills that break into more drills isn't something completely original, but it's effective and fun to use.

Things don't get any better with the stages. The level design here is mediocre at best and even the better levels are disjointed and throw a mess of different challenges at you rather than have a coherent theme. One of the things that Mega Man stages tend to do well is introduce a gimmick, allow you to learn it in a safe envrionment and then make you deal with it again under much more dangerous circumstances. It's a tried-and-true formula, but it works and it still feels different because most of the aforementioned gimmicks feel unique and intuitive. But all of the levels here just go from gimmick to gimmick without ever developing an identity. Dynamo Man's stage has exploding blocks, conveyor belts, dark areas with lights and pit hoppers, in that order, without replicating them once. Burner Man has invisible floors, then spears coming out of the walls then a god-awful segment with fire telleys and it ends up feeling like four different levels in one. Another issue is the mini bosses, which are absolutely brutal in MMaB. All of these things take millions of hits and have ridiculous patterns, normally these kinds of bosses are highlights of Mega Man games and they are all abysmal here. Some stages are better than others, Pirate Man and Magic Man have okay levels, but even those are mid at best. Ground Man has been the standout in the other categories...but his level is awful. There is at least a way to skip the worst part of it if you look hard enough. All of the levels seem like they are just random segments slapped together and while some of those segments are fine, most of them are underwhelming. The final stages aren't much better, though they don't have a ridiculous spike in difficulty like you would see in some MM games.

I've seen a lot of reviewers call MMaB a bad game, and I don't necessarily agree. MMaB is a bad Mega Man game, but it's not a bad game in the scheme of things. The controls work, the graphics are nice and the robot masters have decent design. It also seems to serve as something of a "final boss" for MM fans, many of whom had played the rest of the mainline series or X series far more. Its challenge isn't always fair, but it's there. Challenge isn't necessarily bad, but it has to be done in a way that feels fair. MMaB didn't feel fair in any way, shape or form. I think a lot of this was down to poor design, something that is a little shocking for the franchise. Is it the worst Mega Man game? Well, it's certainly down there. Again, the worst Mega Man game is still better than the best of most franchises. But in it's universe I would have to put it at the bottom with...you know what, let's take a raincheck on that. We will get back to that next week. For now, we will give MMaB a score of:

6.25/10