Mega Man 1 Did Something Incredible...

recent subscribers might not know what videos built the Channel's Foundation but longtime subscribers would know that this show would be nothing like it is today without the Mega Man franchise about a year into my career I covered the Mega Man X Games in a retrospective that took me from 116 subscribers to about 3,000 in 10 months time I later did some Mega Man Zero stuff but I've largely been focused on Mega Man X content ever since it has been a very very very long time coming but after years of requests I'm finally here to tackle the original Mega Man series The Classic series that started on the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1987 for today's episode I'll be giving my full history with and current thoughts in the original Mega Man game focusing on what it did right in building this franchise and how the game almost didn't get a sequel in hindsight it's crazy for me to think about how long it's been since I last played most of these games with some exceptions I've played just about every classic X zero ZX and Legends game when I first got into Mega Man 9 years ago it was the X Series I tried first and that was the one I put the most time into playing replaying and then talking about on YouTube over and over so while I have been through the classic Mega Man games multiple times it has been many years since I last sat down and played one of them from start to finish in fact the last time I played most of these games was the cause of my not reviewing them first if you want to cover Mega Man it seems logical to do the original series before the spin-offs right well yes but the reason I wanted to do X first is cuz I had more interest in that and also because one of the first projects I ever did as a Creator was let's playing the classic series that precedent was the reason I skipped them when reviewing them and covered the X Games first on this channel back in 2016 but back then I was like a 15-year-old fumbling his way through Let's Plays almost no video making experience whatsoever I literally didn't have the mic plugged in throughout Parts one and two of Mega Man 1 and only figured that out when doing part three so what is Mega Man well it was a 2d platformer developed by Capcom in the 1980s and where we're back for the final part of Mega Man for the NES it's nostalgic but uh yeah I don't have those Let's Plays up anymore the world is probably better off without them but starting today that perspective shall be renewed because the classic Mega Man retrospective has officially started over the next year or so I will cover just about all the games in the classic series which may be more than you think so yeah let's pop this game in and start playing I literally just got this NES a few weeks back I might add as well as a bunch of other old consoles in this CRT for the purposes of really getting that retro feel I haven't actually been in the presence of a real NES in decades so it felt pretty cool to own one now but speaking of that retro feel if we're going to start playing a radical game like Mega Man we'd best consult the manual to see what this game's all about right I mean you put the cartridge in the console and you just get taken to the title screen with no Fanfare the manual is how you got the basics of the game back in the day so let's see what we're dealing with here all right useful game hints a thermometer shaped Mega Man energy meter appearing upper left in gam playing scenes serves to monitor Mega Man's power levels if and when Mega Man is bodily struck or hit with enemy projectiles degrees of energy are lost okay well let's see the controls four separate action tips pressing any of four action tips moves you and Mega Man in that direction left Mega Man moves Left Right Mega Man moves right up Mega Man leaps upward and down Mega Man crouches down wait what we're talking about a game with two buttons and a d-pad to work with and somehow we messed up the controls the manual simultaneously claims that a is jump and that up is jump and the game most certainly has no Crouch button all right so the Manual's a mess but at least the story is somewhat there it's Mega Man versus the powerful leaders in fighting forces of monsteropolis that strange multifaceted land of robot-like humanoids okay I don't know what a monsteropolis is supposed to be but despite the weird wording the fact that it gets Dr light's name wrong and calls Wy his assistant it's still somewhat the same story as the actual game but I'm getting the impression that this manual is not to be trusted so let's toss that out and start from scratch in the year 20xx Dr Thomas light invents a line of human-like machines called Robot Masters that can perform tasks above a human level some of the first were his robotic assistant/ children rock and roll but then he expanded it to make robots capable of helping Society bombman gutsman cutman elect man Iceman and fireman one of light's old colleagues Dr Wy is jealous of his success and decides to override his robot Masters using them in a scheme of world domination Rock volunteers to be turned into a super fighting robot and thus Mega Man was born so now that you know the basics of the story you can make sense of this menu Mega Man's most Innovative contribution to the world of 8-bit gaming was that you pick which of the six levels you play and in what order when playing as Mega Man it's much simpler than the manual makes it out to be the only thing the up and down buttons do is climb up and down ladders besides that Mega Man runs to the left or right jumps with a and shoots with B there is no aiming in Mega Man as you don't don't Point your gun up or down at any point enemies will fly in from every direction so the challenge of Mega Man is lining your shots up with where you think the enemy might be and then shooting them with your arm cannon that can shoot up to three pellets at once some enemies will require you to wait for their Shields to be down or can't be destroyed at all so you need to time your way past them like the giant jumping machines or the floor enemies in a lechman stage that speed up when you're near them they can be destroyed with special weapons but not the default equipment Mega Man is a very simple gameplay system but I think it's fun to work with and provides Variety in how you approach enemies as some stages will be more left to right but others are more vertical so you get into a lot of different combat situations in this game like I said just a moment ago the idea of picking what the stage order is was pretty unusual when this game came out as the typical action platformer had a set of stages in a predetermined Order each robot Master gives Mega Man a new weapon upon defeat and another will be weak to that weapon even here in the first Mega Man game this system made it so that the playthrough has more variety and experimentation than other Platformers at the time I already know the boss weakness chain starts with bomb man and you work your way up to fireman at the end but if you want more challenge you can start with a harder stage and take it from there people playing this for the first time without a guide will have to experiment with the stages to see how far they get so finally being able to beat a stage and see the game get easier once you get more upgrades is always really satisfying the route I laid out earlier is the most optimal one but it's not the only easy path to getting through the game with boss weaknesses alone bombman and cutman are pretty equal in terms of who is the best boss to take on first cutman is the one highlighted on the menu by default might be the first stage for many players as a result however I think it's more optimal to play bomb man first which then makes it easy to battle gutsman and then cutman the next one is Elman and his stage has this extra gadget called the magnet beam which can only be reached with gutsman's weapon or with elman's but going to gutsman's first eliminates a potential backtrack which is definitely preferred since this game doesn't allow you to leave stages unless you get a game over or beat the level again but you see what I mean though right despite it being the first Mega Man game this system allows for strategy and planning your playthrough which was the game's most Innovative feature of 30 7 years ago and the fact that it still holds up in that regard is something I find pretty impressive but of course no game is perfect well okay then guess the game is a little [Music] janky okay maybe this game is really janky yeah shock and surprise there are many ways in which Mega Man 1 has not aged well you just saw me take damage after killing a boss which could have easily led to my death if I had less Health since I'm so accustomed to how Mega Man Handles in later entries it's always weird revisit Mega Man 1 and see how different it felt to play despite having the same core controls as many of its sequels what you just saw was how Mega Man if suspended in the air will plumm it to the ground at a decidedly unsafe rate when you're placed over Bottomless Pits like gutsman's stage or in the middle of Iceman stage you can see a formula for disaster here but even when on the ground or jumping from point to point there are still issues when you start moving left or right Mega Man takes like a frame before getting to top speed it's hard to describe but it always feels sluggish to move and then when you let go of the d-pad Mega Man will take a few frames to stop moving it just doesn't feel very precise through all of that Mega Man feels like he's got cement strap to his feet cement that was laced with butter or something cuz he's both very heavy and kind of slippery at times oh and the knockback can send you into the abyss as well the level design is usually fine but it has some low points too a good stage in this game would look like cutman or gutsman where it has a decent mix of combat platforming and verticality then you have a stage like El man's which is is mostly climbing up ladders where you can get knocked down and have to climb back up I also thought this part in fireman stage was funny where it seems like something is down there and you have to time your movement around the fire only for it to be a pit like why is that even there the most infamous bit of platforming in this game is an icean stage first you have the disappearing and reappearing block gimmick which is a staple of classic Mega Man stage design this is easy enough to get through a timing but then the middle of the stage has this massive pit you need to time your way through on moving platforms that fire bullets from each Direction combine the slippery controls with the fact that gravity plunges Mega Man to his Doom at light speed and you have the makings of a tough section the conveniently placed energy refill halfway through convinced me that this part was designed for you to want to use the magnet beam to draw a platform and Skip past it even the manual highlights this items placement and use but it's kind of weird how it's either hard as hell or just cheesed entirely now this is the part in the review where I'd usually start talking about the beat ability of the various Robot Masters and yeah I did two playthroughs of this game for that reason the first was just me doing the weakness order I listed before but the second is when I just started picking stages at random interestingly I think the game's design makes it so you can really do just about any stage first some bosses are definitely easier than others Alman is absolutely the hardest boss and probably my least favorite stage of the six so don't do that one first what makes all the others kind of a tossup is that I've had runs where I just stand mostly still destroy the boss in the other side of the room with the default Firepower and others where I couldn't really do much as I got wrecked this this means that the bosses in this game without their weaknesses are Wars of attrition you just have to hope you get a good cycle and don't take damage even a boss with a predictable pattern like Iceman packs quite a punch if you get hit for the most part the special weapons you get from bosses are also unremarkable I tried using them in my runs but they just aren't that useful the super arm requires a block to be nearby to use which is often not the case the hyper bomb takes far too long to explode so enemies can easily avoid it the rolling cutter is a bit too slow the ice slasher is okay but it leaves enemies hit box is active when it freezes them The Firestorm is decent as it puts a circle of flame around Mega Man which does give you some extra frames of protection but doesn't do much damage and then the thunderbeam is the only really strong weapon in the game as it fires up down and forward and Deals massive damage just with the side effect that'll cause the game to slow down having said that I mentioned earlier that Mega Man had an issue garnering an audience back when it first came out now that I've outlined the areas where this game was unpolished or janky perhaps you're wondering well what was it bad word of mouth or something to that I say no I don't think it really had anything to do with the game itself because janking and unpolished games were the rule more than the exception on the NES but it's just odd because the game is pretty cool and unique I mean who wouldn't want to walk in a blockbuster and go to the game section and rent this game it looks perfectly oh my goodness Capcom I'm sure you saw this part of the video coming if you know anything about Mega Man why did Mega Man have an issue selling in the west look no further than the abysmal box art the game had in the US it is low hanging fruit to make fun of this cover art but I mean if you're talking about Mega Man 1 how could you not The Story Goes that this game wasn't intended to get a western release but when Capcom USA decided to bring it over the marketing team had one day to get the cover done and in 6 hours this masterpiece of was born Capcom decides to release the game in Japan in a limited amount surprising everyone the game catches on in Japan Capcom decides to bring the little robot to America it had some of the worst box art in the history of video games it doesn't look anything near the Mega Man that we see today the box art for the first Mega Man game in the US was done very quickly the president of Capcom us said to his marketing guy you know we need a cover done tomorrow and he went out and got a friend of his to do it in like 6 hours where do you begin I mean it doesn't look anything like Mega Man his face is terrifying the color palette is messed up because Mega Man doesn't even have a drop of yellow on his character design he uses a gun instead of an arm Cannon nothing is happening the background is Bland and none of it tells you anything about what kind of game this even is or why you'd want to play it over some other NES shooter even kg neun sites the US box art as a large contributing factor to why Mega Man 1 struggled in the sales department and you can see why today bad box art Mega Man is a meme the internet has been laughing at for decades and it even has become a recurring gag in other Capcom games I genuinely think this terrible cover art stifling the game in the west and could have been something that ensured the game never got a sequel this is a real shame because the original Japanese art design this game still holds up the Japanese version's key art doesn't excite me much either since nothing's really happening in this one either but I'm just saying the art style is strong inafune was pretty new to Capcom when he started doing character designs for this game and I think these original designs like the Robot Masters or Mega Man himself are really striking and colorful translating to the NES Sprite work pretty well a lot of NES games have very basic backgrounds and while Mega Man will have flat colors or blank backgrounds I think the game has visual variety across its many stages combined that with the really catchy upbeat soundtrack I think it's fair to say that the presentation of Mega Man 1 is really solid for the standards of 1987 but with all that said once you defeat all six Robot Masters you can proceed to the final stages where Mega Man will defeat Dr Wy this is going to be awesome well okay then once the auditory torture is complete you begin the first of the final four stages the the Wy Castle in Mega Man 1 established some tropes other games would continue to use in the first one several segments require you to use your special weapons since this is the first point in the game where the designers know the player is guaranteed to have them all so you have to move some blocks with the super arm or the thunderbeam and freeze some fire with the ice slasher the magnet beam is also required to get past this part in Wy Castle 1 this level's pretty easy but it's Infamous for the boss fight against the yellow devil at the end this blob machine will form via blocks flying across the screen and you have to dodge it carefully this is pretty simple in concept however in execution it feels nearly impossible to dodge at times perhaps that wouldn't be so aggravating if it weren't for how much damage this Behemoth actually did versus how little Health it loses but as it stands it's a really irritating fight players of the game have one recourse a glitch activated by pressing select when a projectile hits an enemy it refreshes the game so that the attack will just damage the enemy again and you can spam that until the health bar is depleted this is the best way to defeat the yellow devil and I'm just going to be real it's always something I fall back on when I'm getting my butt kicked by a boss like a Le man once you get past that though the Wy Castle is nothing a player who made it this far can't handle including the war of attrition boss like this copy Mega Man fight in Wy Castle 2 I really don't even know what the ideal strategy for this even is so I just Spam the fire attack and hope I empty his health bar before he does the same to me then Wy Castle 3 is always a level I forget even exists as it lasts all of 45 seconds before the boss fight and it's really easy to clear the final stage replenishing all your life and weapon energy just before for the Boss Rush and the final battle against Dr Wy which has two phases that are both pretty easy to deal with even if you don't use the pause glitch as it takes a lot of by the frame damage from its weakness but despite the relative ease that comes from beating this game I will say I always get a hit of nostalgia whenever I beat the game or listen to its ending music I told this story once a long time ago but just paint the picture in 2015 I had gotten into the Mega Man X Series via X1 through X3 being on the Wii U EOP and then X4 and X5 on the PS3 store I really wanted to get into Mega Man and X1 was considered the favorite by so many so I tried that first I had a tough time with it but once it clicked it really clicked and then I played the first five X Games from there I really wanted to become a fan of this series as a whole so I picked up the zero collection on DS and the Mega Man Anniversary Collection on PS2 which came with Mega Man 1 through 8 and some other spin-offs I just remember the day I beat Mega Man 1 in this really bright sunset in the spring of 2015 I did struggle with the game at times but thought it was a really fun and rewarding game the end credits theme really hit me because the melody is the same as the iconic intro music from Mega Man 2 even without having played it yet every Retro Game Enthusiast worth their ass salt knows the Mega Man 2 intro music but then I find out by beating the first game that the tune actually originates from here I don't know how to describe it hearing the music just made me feel like I had ascended from someone who was kind of sort of trying to get into Mega Man to someone who was a fan of it that's always what this ending makes me think of and it's always why I remember Mega Man 1 pretty fondly even now as this video has gone over Mega Man 1 is certainly not a game that has aged perfectly it is indeed relatively unpolished but I think the game is really appealing I was saying earlier how the format of stage design this game thought of was pretty new for a game at the time adding nonlinear progression to a stage-by-stage action game when listing out what makes Mega Man 1 a good game it struck me how much of the DNA is shared between this game and some of my favorite games ever like Mega Man X1 through X4 many franchises that got their St in 8 bit might not be recognizable as the same series even just a few entries later like The Legend of Zelda but no I could praise Mega Man X2 for so many things that got their start in Mega Man 1 I think that's truly an incredible feat despite the fact that it wasn't really much of a hit game even by the standards of 1987 game sales it was appealing enough as a concept that it managed to get a sequel and become the big franchise that it is today it's certainly not my favorite game ever made but I'll always have a fondness for it and if I ever choose to replay it I'll have a good time with it that's about all the time we have for today so next up will be that Miracle sequel that saved the franchise the one that is still held by many as the best in the series Mega Man 2 I haven't played this one in years either so what will I think of it upon the replay well next week we shall all find out so until that time comes I'll say what I always do if you made it this far into the video I thank you all for watching and I'll see you next [Music] time

Channel: J's Reviews

Views: 125,764

Keywords: mega man, mega man retrospective, mega man x, retrospective, mega man review, mega man legends, mega man x retrospective, mega man zero, mega man 2, mega man history, mega man (video game), mega man 1, megaman retrospective, mega man dos, mega man universe, mega man 2 review, mega man series, mega man battle network, mega man 2 retrospective, mega man 3 retrospective, mega man zx retrospective, mega man zero retrospective, mega man & bass retrospective

Id: PMxEhezBQv0

Length: 18min 19sec (1099 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 02 2024