Mega Man 2

"A 10 seems high, but how many other games can you play over 40 times and still enjoy it?"

How do you write a review about Mega Man 2? What is it about that which haven't already been said way to many times already? Since I myself never owned a Nes most because I'm a bit to "young" for this system, I can't think of many games Capcom did before the Mega Man games except a few Arcade classics. The Blue Bomber has always been the mascot for Capcom to me. Yes I know there's Captain Commando, Ryu in Street Fighter's glory days, a random zombie from Resident Evil and I guess when I write this review it's Dante, but to me Mega Man has always been my favourite series.

The first game was a big success on the Nes, and Mega Man became almost as big a important character to the system as Link, Mario and the 4 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It was really cool that you played Mega Man just like any other shooter, except that Mega Man could run and shoot at the same time (which may sound strange now but that was one big thing back on the Nes) and what made the game even cooler was that when you had defeated one boss you got his power. For example winning over Bomb Man allowed Mega Man to throw bombs and defeating Guts Man made Mega Man the ability to lift really heavy blocks. The sequel was supposed to be more of everything. More stages, more enemies, more kickass music e.t.c.

Just like the previous Mega Man game, there isn't much story in this game either. In the previous game the evil Dr Wily had taken control of six of Dr Light's robots that were built to serve mankind, but Dr Wily instead used them to try to take over the world. But of course our hero Mega Man stopped him. Now Dr Wily is back, and this time he has built eight new robot masters to try to once again take over the world. It's up to Mega Man to stop him.

Another thing that made the Mega Man games so special was that you could decide in which order you wanted to face the robots masters, or rather you could choose in which order you wanted to play the stages. Since you get one weapon from each boss, it's smart to figure out which weapon you think will be good for that stage unless you want the game to be more difficult. It IS however possible to beat any stage with just the mega buster as the only weapon so you can play through the stages in any order that you want to.

So the game play in this game is kind of a mix of Super Mario Bros and any game where you shoot enemies. You can only kill enemies by shooting them, but in order to beat any of the stages you must also jump from different platforms in order not to fall down to a certain death. There are pits, spikes and lava in the stages that you want to avoid at any cost.

In the first Mega Man you could find the magnet beam which instead of doing damage to the enemies made it easier to get past some stages because you could walk on the magnet ray. In this game you can get three different "items" which serve the same purpose. Item 1 creates a platform with a fan that goes straight up, and this is the best item if you want to reach high places. Item 2 is kinda like a fast rocket that you can use to get to the other side of a dangerous place which is to big to just jump over. Finally there's Items there, which is what I call a wall-climber. If you aim against a wall, it will go higher up as long as you stand on it.

When you reach the end of a stage, you will fight a robot master. If you manage to defeat this boss, you will get his weapon that you can use at any time. However you have a certain type of ammo of each weapon except the Mega Buster, so I usually save all my ammo for the other boss fights. Enemies might drop ammo when you kill them so if you know that you won't use a certain on weapon on the stage's boss then go nuts. Each robot master got a few weapons that he's weak against.

A lot of people say that Mega Man 2 is almost as Mega Man 1 except with different stages, but there are some important things that this game added to the series, except for the obvious items. First of there are some walls that can only be destroyed if you fired a Crash Bomb (a weapon you get when you have defeated Crash Man) on it. In fact this game set the standard in many other games how the weapons that you got would work.

With the Metal blade you can shoot in eight different directions, just like Shadow Man's weapon in MM3 to name one. Snake Man's (also from MM3) weapon is almost a clone of Bubble Man in this game, and I don't know how many clones of Wood Man's weapon I've seen in the series. And lets not forget that you can charge the weapon you get from Heat Man, just like you can charge the Mega Buster in every game in after MM3. Without the weapons in MM2, the series could've been really different today.

A lot also say that the first Mega Man is to hard and that the enemies takes to much damage, but in even the enemies might still do much damage he can now use an item to refill his health. This is the first game in the series where the classic energy tanks or just E-Tanks can be found. They can be find in some stages and the a usually really tricky to reach. One E-Tank refills all Mega Man's health and you can carry up to 4 E-Tanks. But remember that once you lose all your 1-ups, you also lose all your E-tanks.

It also introduced us to the password option, which allowed us to turn of our system and continue later, but I got to admit that I've never ever used it.

To add the replayability even more there are two different difficulties. The normal difficulty is actually really easy for a veteran Mega Man player like me, and some of the bosses dies way to fast if you use the weapon they are weak against. However for someone who isn't used to the difficulty most of the Nes games got it's smart to start on this difficulty. Personally I think it's more fun to play on the more difficult difficulty, but it's not so hard that it takes away all the fun from the game.

The only thing Capcom removed that was in the original was the score system, but lets be honest how many plays platform games to get as high score as possible? The series added new things in the later games, but MM2 could still be the best in the series because it's so simple, and so fun to play through over and over again. There aren't many Nes games that I would today give 10/10, but Mega Man 2 is a timeless classic.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 05/14/09

Game Release: Mega Man 2 (EU, 12/14/90)