Finally, we have the last in a six-video-game saga for the Mega Man series. The Mega Buster is here, the floor slide is here, and of course, the power-ups are here. Once again the levels are a little longer than usual, as started with the previous title. If this occurred from improvements to the Nintendo Entertainment System hardware, I don’t know. There’s still that small part of me that thinks if I were running the original game, we’d need more time to complete levels, but we have the critical Rewind feature, and the all-important save state.
I did notice that when Mega Man climbs a ladder, the graphics are less than perfect because his feet are not aligned with the rungs of the ladder. I first noticed this problem in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, where Link is a 3D polygon and the ladders are a 2D sprite. Sooner or later, he’s totally out of whack with grabbing the rungs of the ladder because the developers didn’t line up the pixels. Fifteen years later, the Tomb Raider reboot in 2013 got ladder climbing pretty much perfect. What a digression.
As mentioned with the introduction of the Mega Buster, you don’t really need the power-ups you get which is a huge letdown. On the subsequent console, Super Nintendo Entertainment System, we would get a series that started with a bang, and died with a whimper, Mega Man X, but oddly, Capcom went ahead and released a Mega Man 7 for the hardware just to remind us that no one forgot the main series. No matter what you think, these are six games of video game history, with Capcom helping to establish the role of a third party developer like Activision on Atari before them. This time, they were licensed by the hardware maker.
4/5
Blimps Go 180 