This months early access review, as nominated by Patrons, is Mega Man 64. You can read this review now!
We’ve reached that part of the month where another review gets unlocked for early access. This month, Patrons nominated Mega Man 64. This is available on Patreon for those who are subscribed on the Chilled Out tier and up.
Mega Man 64 was an interesting game to me. At the time, I felt that previous games were really growing quite repetitive. You more or less had the standard formula of taking on 8 master robots, taking their power, getting a few extra utility powers, going to Dr. Wileys Castle and taking on a series of stages to beat the game. While there has been some slight deviations here and there from that formula, it’s been the same standard formula for at least two console generation (NES and SNES). By the time you got to the later SNES games, even the names of master robots really gave you the impression that the imagination of the developers were running on empty.
Then, we get graced with another Mega Man adventure both on the N64 and the Playstation (in the form of Mega Man Legends). It was a 3D adventure which, in and of itself, breaks with the formula by jumping in dimension, but also completely re-imagines what it’s like to go on an adventure in the Mega Man universe. There has been some tweaking of the main Mega Man lore (I think?), but you really had a wildly re-imagined game with either modified mechanics, or entirely re-imagined mechanics.
I have to say, this radical alteration worked incredibly well. You got an impressive new concept that really reinvigorated the franchise, in my view. When the game was originally released, I thought this would bring about a whole new chapter in the Mega Man franchise and we would be in for a whole new era where new fans would get into the game and old fans would have something to get excited about.
You can imagine my surprise when that wasn’t actually the case. There was one sequel (Mega Man Legends 2) that was only released on the Playstation and the series, to add insult to injury, ended on a cliff hanger. While there was a push for Mega Man Legends 3, it never saw the light of day. It was really surprising that this part of the franchise got so little love from developers despite delivering on a very fun experience.
Still, I guess I can be happy we got anything at all and I was definitely grateful to have had the opportunity to play it.
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