Air Man Isn't Even All That Hard (Mega Man 2)

(Hello again! Today we are talking about Mega Man 2, a game whose gravity is massive. Quite possibly the most revered action platformer on NES, and even if you don't agree with that you have to admit that it's way up on the list. It's far too much for even my esoteric madness to handle, so I'm proud to introduce the first guest post of The Nintendo Project, Resumed! My pal and intrepid game designer, John Thyer, is here to tell you why Mega Man 2 is brilliant. Most of you already "know" that, but much like Phil Sandifer's TARDIS Eruditorum, we are here to ignore what we "know" in favor of talking about when a revolution has taken place. I'll defer to John now, but not before popping you a link to the games he's made. They're pretty neat. And now, friends and constant readers... Mega Man 2.)

So. Let’s talk about title screens.

NES games, by and large, did not have great title screens. For a long time they all followed the “text on a black background with no music” template set up by the earliest games on the console, like Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong. Even once they moved beyond that template, very few did anything interesting. Most of the exceptions were from Nintendo games -- Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Super Mario Bros. 3 -- but even these didn’t do anything more than set the mood. Very few added to the story of their game in a truly meaningful way.

Mega Man 2 is the exception. It stands toe-to-toe with the the best title screens of the 16-bit era, when heavy-hitters like Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VI, and Earthbound entered the scene.

You can give it a watch over here. Let’s look at a few interesting details:

1) The first detail that sticks out is the music: the song playing is the same as the ending music to Mega Man 1. This is a cute touch, and it’s a clever way to provide a bit of connective tissue between the two stories.

2) Later Mega Man games would come to use expository intro text as a crutch, but 2’s manages to summarize the entire setup of the game in only three sentences. Not only that, but it’s the only expository text in the entire game!

3) The pan up the side of the building it still damn cool.

4) Listen to how the music develops during the pan upwards. The transition to the big, heroic Mega Man theme at the top is seamless.

5) When the player presses the start button, Mega Man puts on his helmet and teleports away, signalling the start the game. (This will be important later.)

That’s a staggering amount of clever ideas to fit into such a small amount of time. Keep in mind that Mega Man 1 doesn’t have any sort of intro, and neither does 3 for that matter. The intros from 4 onward are all overlong and boring, and I’m pretty sure most players skip past them on replays. Speaking to my own experience, I let 2’s play out every single time.

So, that’s the first forty-five seconds. What about the rest of the game?

Well, one of the most striking things about playing Mega Man 2 in 2014 is how messy it is. It has dozens of little design problems and unfair moments of a sort that aren’t really present in the later Mega Man games. 

The most egregious offender is the Boobeam Trap in the fourth level of Wily’s Fortress (or as its more commonly known, that goddamned Crash Bomb boss). It’s easily the most poorly thought out enemy in any of the NES games; failing the puzzle means choosing between farming energy for ten minutes or killing yourself over and over until you run out of lives. Getting stuck in that situation completely sucks the momentum out of the game, and many players give up rather than deal with it any longer.

Other quibbles! Wily’s forms have only one attack each. Mega Man’s controls are still just loose enough to occasionally throw you off of a key jump. Air Man has attacks that are actually impossible to dodge. There’s only one boss theme in the whole game. And then there’s the debatable matter of the disappearing and reappearing blocks in Heat Man’s stage and the lasers in Quick Man’s level -- whether or not those parts are fun, they’re almost definitely at least a little unfair.

Unfair or not, Quick Man’s level is still one of my favorites. The stage is a careful, rehearsed race against instant-death lasers that demands absolute perfection on behalf of the player. What I love is how this contrasts with the messy, chaotic boss fight against Quick Man, which isn’t so much about memorization as it is about reflex and instinct. Interestingly, in both cases the player has an “out”: Flash Stopper can make either the stage or the boss trivial. But it can’t be used on both, so the player has to decide which one is more threatening.

This is an example of how the robot master stages take a simple idea (in Quick Man’s case, speed) and prod at it from a number of different angles. It also showcases how the levels play off each other in neat ways, like how Flash Stopper totally changes the dynamic of the level. Some of the levels are more traditional and straightforward, while others focus on neat gimmicks. Some are brilliant and incisive like Metal Man and Wood Man, and some are only successful in spite of themselves, like Flash Man’s poorly conceived maze and Crash Man’s slightly-obnoxious vertical climb.

The levels manage to accomplish two totally disparate goals. 1) They each have their own unique and memorable identity. Later Mega Man games often had stages that just sort of blended together, and as a result the games were way less interesting. 2) They come together to create a singular emotional journey. While it’s impressive that each stage succeeds on its own merits, what’s more impressive is that they form a own cohesive narrative arc.

Let me explain. Every stage ends the same way: Mega Man triumphs over the robot master and collects a powerful new weapon, and occasionally a special item from Doctor Light.This ritual is repeated eight different times, and each time it’s clear that Mega Man is growing stronger and stronger, until finally he has defeated all eight of Wily’s Robot Masters.

There’s this idea in game design that the most important thing a game can do is make the player feel powerful. This is where the whole methodology of power-ups and experience points comes from. Start the player off with a fairly weak ability set, and then as the game progresses reward them with stronger and stronger abilities. This creates the sense that the player character is going on an actual journey, with actual trials and growth.

This is a nice concept, but it’s really only half of the equation. The player can’t just keep gaining new abilities. They also must have those abilities tested.

The Robot Master stages are ultimately about empowering Mega Man; Wily’s Fortress is about testing him. It’s a final exam on all of the abilities the player has learned throughout the game. Sometimes its obvious, like walls and pits that require understanding Dr. Light’s Items. Other times its more subtle, like the false floors in Wily 3 that can be identified with knowledge of one of Bubble Lead’s more obscure characteristics. It can even be cruel, like the Boobeam Trap demanding perfect weapon energy management while pummeling your energy meter with nigh-undodgeable attacks.

The Wily Levels are also the first stages that force the use of Dr. Light’s Items. It raises the stakes in a meaningful way; instead of playing through obstacle courses clearly designed with eventual victory in mind, parts of these levels can only be circumvented if the player uses an outside force. This contrast with the Robot Master stages creates the sense that in order to progress, the player has to break the game.

The boss fights also raise the stakes in a dramatic way. While all of the previous bosses are humanoid, roughly Mega Man’s size, and take place on solid ground, the first boss of the fortress is a gigantic fire-breathing robot dragon that’s fought on several precariously placed blocks, and they progress in increasingly strange directions from there. It’s also important to note the excision of the transition screen between the stage and the boss fight, so not only is the first appearance of the dragon also an effective jump-scare, it also further differentiates the Wily levels from the preceding Robot Master stages.

Most important of all is the music. Wily 1 is probably the most famous Mega Man song ever, and for good reason. It’s the most musically elaborate piece in the whole game. Listen to the way it establishes the core melody and then holds onto it for most of the song, often playing it in the background with one square channel while the other bounces around doing something else entirely. It’s a masterful little diddy, and there’s a reason it still gets a lot of attention.

Try contrasting that with the second tune. There’s a reason it doesn’t get nearly the same amount of love: it’s just plain unpleasant. It’s repetitive, dreary, and unbearably suspenseful. Try listening all the way through and feel the way it builds and builds and builds before finally slipping back to the starting key. It’s the chiptune equivalent of the heartbeat in Space Invaders, a song purely designed to compliment the game and raise the intensity of the experience. So while it isn’t the sort of melody you’d listen to in your car, it might be the single most effective song in the whole series.

The two songs together give the Wily Levels a subtle aesthetic arc. The player starts out empowered and ready to take on Wily, then descends deeper and deeper into the center of the fortress. It’s a little similar to the descent-into-Hell vibe established in the early Metroid games, but the linear structure actually makes it more focused and dramatic.

All of this is leading up to the immaculate climax. After the mandatory rematch against the robot masters, Mega Man comes face to face with Dr. Wily himself. The battle is nearly identical to the final battle of the first game (except with strangely less interesting attack patterns), so veteran players will expect this to be the final battle of the game. Not only that, but the map of Wily’s Fortress clearly marks this as the last stage. When Wily escapes after the defeat of his machine and the floor falls out from under Mega Man, it’s a genuinely well-executed twist.

The final stage begins with a lengthy falling sequence, and unlike in previous levels, there aren’t any spikes or other obstacles to distract the player. There’s no music whatsoever; the only sound comes from the deadly acid globules dripping from the ceiling (a set-piece borrowed in Daisuke Amaya’s Cave Story). The acid isn’t difficult to dodge, so the stage isn’t much of a challenge to move through. It’s purely in place to build suspense.

Then comes the final boss. Dr. Wily’s saucer descends, and he leaps out and starts hovering in the air (this is significant because Dr. Wily has never done battle directly with Mega Man before), and then reveals his true form: an alien! It comes out of absolutely nowhere, and it’s exactly the sort of insipid “twist” many game designers of the era would pull out of their butts for a last boss.

But then Mega Man defeats Alien Wily (with Bubble Lead of all things, leading to a tradition of last bosses best defeated with the most inconvenient weapon possible), the screen flashes, and the truth is revealed. It was all a trick, a hologram projector put into place by Dr. Wily as a last resort. If this isn’t immediately clear, the screen lingers on the projector as it moves around in the same figure-8 pattern as the boss. Dr. Wily is in the corner, desperately fiddling with the controls even though it’s clear the jig is up. Finally he gives in, falls to the ground, and begs for mercy.

If it isn’t the cleverest bit of visual storytelling I’ve ever seen in an 8-bit video game, it’s only because of the next segment. After defeating Dr. Wily, the screen shifts to an image of Mega Man as he walks in front of a black background. On the side is an image of a valley and a little town. The seasons pass, as indicated by the differing color schemes and precipitation. Finally, Mega Man stops and looks towards the town. The black background disappears and the whole village is visible. Mega Man is gone, his helmet lying on the ground in his place, pulled off and tossed to the ground as he runs towards his home.

Beautiful. There’s a couple of metaphors here, and the passing of the seasons is the most obvious. The ending shows that a lot of time has passed, and Mega Man has undergone a long journey. He’s fought through all of Wily’s forces, and all that time he’s been away from his home. John Teti notes that it’s intriguing that Mega Man walks, whereas in the rest of the game he teleports away after finishing a level. Combined with the melancholy music, the slow walk home shows that Mega Man isn’t just the player’s nameless avatar of destruction. It characterizes him in a really genuine way.

The second is a little more complex. Way back at the start of the game, we see Mega Man standing on top of a building, his hair loose and blowing in the wind. The second we press start, his helmet materializes, and Mega Man teleports off to battle. Only at the very end of the game, after we defeat Dr. Wily and lose control of Mega Man, does he finally take off the helmet.

Do you get it? We are the helmet! We take control of Mega Man when he goes into battle, but the ending lets us know that there’s a being that exists outside of stage select screens and energy meters. We don’t see this side of Mega Man, but it’s there, just outside the screen. In a small way, the ending takes this little blue Astro Boy-knockoff and turns him into a rounded character.

Mega Man 2 is not profound, not in the literary sense. The only NES game I can think of that can make that claim is the original Mother (though I’m happy to hear about any I might have missed). But that doesn’t change the fact that this this sixty-second ending is a lovely, layered scene, and the game would be unquestionably poorer for its absence.

It’s followed by credits, overlaid by a perfect reprise of the title music. Combined with the completed metaphor of the helmet, the music brings Mega Man 2 full circle. Thank you for playing. Presented by Capcom.

Mega Man 2 is a special game for a whole lot of people, and that’s because it goes out of its way to do more than put a bunch of robots on the screen for you to blow up. It is, bar-none, the most exciting, dramatic, and just plain fun story on the NES. It has tension, pacing, twists, silence, and symbols. It has an exciting climax and a meaningful resolution. And while later Mega Man games are vastly more refined mechanical experiences, none of them nail these concepts nearly as well.

Mega Man 2 knows that in order to create a game that really lasts in people’s hearts, you can’t just duct-tape a bunch of levels together and be done with it. You have to pay attention to all of the little details, like the mood created by the music in a specific area or the pacing before a climactic battle. You need to have a beginning that prepares the player to undergo a journey, and an ending that brings emotional closure. You have to tell a story.

It’s an exceptional video game. It was exceptional when it came out in 1988, and it’s exceptional now, twenty-six years later. It will likely be exceptional for many years to come.

And that’s because it pays attention to things like title screens.