I Get Wild, Wild Enough (Mega Man 5)

(Hello again! It's time for Mega Man 5! This is not a guest post though. I took it upon myself to play through this game again last night, and I've hammered out words about it inspired by our guest posts. Well, since I have little else to say in this space... here I am.)

Let's see where we are here in the old mental landscape... I want to say it's 1995. It could well be 1996 for all I know, since these years are lost to time now. We'll go with 1995, because 1995 is for sure the year I borrowed Mega Man 2 from a friend and had an interesting time with that. But this is not about Mega Man 2. During that nebulous time when the NES was dead, and even the Super Nintendo was being eyed by the relentless blade of the Destructor, our school had this sort of... little used goods store deal going. For some reason. There were books and NES games, I know that for sure. This is where I got my copy of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but that's a story for another day. My long-winded point is that I bought some old Archie comics from this place. Because I was 10 and I liked Archie comics. I remember vividly an ad on the back of one. An ad for Mega Man 5. Through the future magic of the Internet, I'm staring at it right now... and with further powers, you can probably see it too!

Gravity. It's all about gravity. Gravity's Man looms over the box art, with his leader a red and white shadow in the distance. Lightning shoots out of his hands, but dear Mega is unconcerned. He's not even fucking looking at Gravity Man as he deflects the lightning. Jesus. Here, then, in the crushing wastes of the post-SNES days, does Mega Man attempt to survive the crushing gravity of life on a system that is rapidly collapsing. Though the game does what it can to spice things up by toying with gravity in places, it... falls flat. Mega Man 5 has long been my personal least favorite entry in the "classic" series... but it has been a long time since I played it. I've grown since then. Hard Game Beater. Beast in the shape of a man. A scholar of the joyful spark that makes an excellent platforming action game. Mega Man 5 does not outright lack that spark, but it has been diminished. I think I've pinpointed the problem. It comes back to empowerment.

Yeah. Empowerment. You kids remember what John was saying about Mega Man 2? How it creates sort of a narrative arc of Mega Man growing stronger, gaining weapons and items, and then having every lick of those powers tested as he delves into the hell of Wily's fortress? Yeah! Mega Man 5 kind of throws that out the window. In the first place, the Robot Master weapons are not all that good. I'm not asking for something incredibly imbalanced like the Metal Blades here, but a little utility goes a long way. There are interesting weapons, of course. Gyro Attack can be aimed up or down, and the Charge Kick turns the slide move that's been with us since Mega Man 3 into an offensive weapon. The others? They have fun utility, and I really did do my best to mess around with them. It's when you pair this with another part of the game that we see... issues.

The Mega Buster. Brett touched on it briefly in Mega Man 4, but the charge shot returns for 5. Jeremy Parish of the former 1UP dot com has mentioned his disdain for the Mega Buster. Googling has aided me on digging up his exact words, but while we're here. his criticism stems from how it alters the "empowerment". In the first three games, you had a dinky little pea shooter until you killed some bosses and got their powers. You earned utility, and a way of dealing more damage to specific foes and robot masters. With Mega Man 4, Parish claims, empowerment is thrown out the window because you start the game with a super-weapon; your charge shot. Now, I must confess, dear reader, that I've not properly gone through Mega Man 4 in a while. I played a top-notch ROM hack of it recently, but... that's not the same. I don't know for sure if Parish is correct about the Buster in Mega Man 4, but I can say this. His critique sure as hell applies to Mega Man 5.

What was it that I said in that ridiculous Mega Man poem? "A freedom of choice never seen before"? MM5 offers the illusion of choice. I have the data to prove it. I've done my homework. Take a gander at this. And this as well. The sheer force of numbers shows us the data of free choice present in the first two games. If I want to freshen things up and use the Hyper Bomb on Ice Man, it will be effective. Granted, it won't be as shockingly effective as his actual weakness... but it is still a viable option. More importantly, it's not a waste of time. This theory doesn't hold up so much when you get to Wily Fortresses, but by then you have a whole arsenal to play with. Now let's look at Mega Man 5's damage chart. Note how things now work. 3 damage with a charged buster shot. 4 damage with the boss's weakness (3 for Napalm Man). Everything else either does 1 damage or 0 damage. There's no leeway for experimentation. Sure, you CAN use Power Stone on Wave Man or something, but it's a platitude. There's no mild benefit to doing so when your Buster can do so much more... and you have that from the get-go! This upsets me far more than it should. It's a false freedom. You can use whatever you like on the boss... but unless it's the buster or his weakness, there's no point to doing it.

Still... this is not a terrible video game. In fact, it has a gravity of its own. Look to Mega Man 9; my favorite Mega Man game, incidentally. A portion of Splash Woman's level all but replicates a small portion of Wave Man's level involving a vertical ascent atop bubbles. Look to the fan games made in the wake of Mega Man's abandonment by Capcom; Mega Man Unlimited throws gravity trickery into at least two stages. Like it or not, this happened. This happened, and it's almost unfair to complain that it isn't as brilliant as its forebears. You've read what others said about them. They're brilliant, and Mega Man 5 at least has good level design. Hardly ever obnoxious or malicious. Everything is canon, including the crap. Mega Man 5 can rest on the shelf with the Colin Baker era of Doctor Who. Is it the best representation of its legacy? Hardly. Is it silly in places? Oh, yes. This is where we went after the Cold War fizzled. Mega Man was what Judi Dench called 007 in Goldeneye; a relic. Peko's blade was swinging downward. Cloister bells would ring inside his head.

But not yet. One last hurrah. One last robot tournament to prove that he was the best of the best. Mega Man 6 would have him face the mysterious Mr. X... and considering what came out in 1993 involving Mega Man and an X, it's almost fitting. Mega Man will clash against Peko herself, to stake out one final adventure as the Famicom era around him collapses and goes supernova. Trenzalore approaches, but first... the final fight.

That's not my tale to tell, though.