It's March 1st, 2010. As near as I can tell, the Black Eyed Peas are at #1 with "Imma Be". Quite a few important world events happened on this date. We will not be covering them. March 1st, 2010 is a day of new life, and the last gasp of a very old one. My only nephew is born in the late hours of the morning. That was exciting in and of itself, but the other event is interesting in its own right. Mega Man, the steadfast action platforming series from 1987, died with the release of Mega Man 10. Now, before you get angry, dear reader... I am not suggesting that Mega Man 10 was a bad video game. Far from it. I had fun with the thing. Mega Man 10 did not kill the Mega Man series, but it was also (as of this writing) the end of the whole mess. Really, while we're here, can I just eulogize for a moment? We didn't know that Mega Man 10 would be the last one on March 1st, 2010. In hindsight, it really is a shame. Mega Man 9 was nothing short of a miracle. There's a moment early in Phil Sandifer's massive esoteric write-up of the first episode of the revived Doctor Who where he expresses this sentiment:"Still, in a world of crime scenes there must be kings. The random acts of vandalism, wall scrawl fiction for the anoraks huddling under the bridge, must in time add up to something. To the big one. The shocking crime in an otherwise nice neighborhood. “These things don’t happen here.” Of course they don’t. Ropey sci-fi programs that haven’t been popular since the 1970s don’t come back to be the biggest thing on television. That’s not how this works. And yet here’s the crime scene, splatters of anti-plastic everywhere."
The same can be said for Mega Man 9. These things don't happen in the world of video games. Old action platformers from 1989 don't come back to be the best thing ever. And yet, the evidence is there. Mega Man 9. The masterpiece. The heart and soul of Mega Man 2, freed of its rough edges. Free to flourish without Boobeam Traps or one attack bosses. Free to light the world on fire with the same passion that fueled our hearts when the Berlin Wall fell. This should have been a revolution. Then we got a sequel out of it, and it wasn't as good but still quite enjoyable. Then it died. The soul of Pure Platforming cannot be snuffed out for good. Not just yet. It will inhabit a new body, a Mightier body than before... but this is the curse of regeneration. The beginning of this new era is the end of the old era. We have watched Mega Man die in front of us... but some defy this. The ROM hackers. The fan game makers. Now we've reached our point, after a pointless lamentation for a dead soldier. Mega Man Unlimited is a Mega Man fan game made by a fellow calling himself MegaPhilX. It is a game that I am sure was made with love and a genuine desire to not see the regeneration of Pure Platforming fade away. Let us square away this crime scene, then. Let us look at Mega Man Unlimited.
Well, ah... it certainly is a Mega Man game! Look, I'm going to level with you here. I've got a lot more esoteric nonsense about game design and thematic storytelling and god knows what else to pour out of my head regarding Unlimited, but before I do that we need some respite. At the end of the day, I'm here to review this sucker, but I find it difficult to say normal things about it beyond "sure is Mega Man". The classic series, after over 25 years, is video game comfort food. Unlimited is no exception. You've got a plot where the bad robots run around being bad for some reason, and Dr. Wily swears up and down that IT'S REALLY NOT ME THIS TIME GUYS, HONEST! From there you do the whole jump and shoot thing across the themed levels, fight the bad robots, get their weapons, use the weapons to go through the themed levels easier, and at the end it really WAS Dr. Wily who was behind it all and you blow him up THE END. Now, to give MegaPhilX some credit, I really do appreciate the effort put into this. All-new music, new levels, tons of new enemies and weapons and stage hazards... there's a lot of work in this fan game. It's a labor of love, not unlike Mega Man 2 must have been back in 1988 for those folks in Japan. The pixel art alone is impressive. I've dicked around with pixel art. It's hard as shit. I want to state upfront that I do believe this was made with nothing but love for the Mega Man series. That the people involved loved the idea, and didn't want it to fade out with goddamned Pump Man, of all things. Really, they had to have been to make this. The level of care and dedication is admirable. It truly is.
And, of course, now I have to shit all over it by complaining about how it missed the mark for me personally.
We're going to go off the rails a bit here, but I can easily sum up why I don't love Unlimited as much as I should; it's the wrong kind of hard. I'm not a stranger to hard video games. I play a lot of them. Mega Man Unlimited was not the hardest I've ever played, but it is a hard game. It's also, as I said, the wrong kind of hard... for me. This is all opinion, of course. If you personally love the stuffing out of Unlimited and think I'm full of shit, then I probably am. You also come out on top in this equation, because you get to fully enjoy this declaration of love to the Mega Man series. Me? It misses the mark, in general. That shouldn't suggest that I dislike it outright. I'm flip-flopping back and forth, but let me explain here. I have my own personal taste when it comes to hard games. I like moderately tricky platforming where a mix of quick reflexes and careful planning are needed. When it comes to Mega Man, I like having lots of different approaches to a situation. That usually comes in the form of special weapons, and Unlimited has a pretty damn good selection. Off the top of my head you've got something which acts a lot like the Metal Blade, a laser that can explode and create a big area of effect to deal with threats swooping in from odd angles, and a weapon that doubles as an air dash. They're a hell of a lot more fun to play with than the weapons in Mega Man 5, I'll give Unlimited that! So what's the problem?
Mega Man Unlimited feels... obnoxious in its difficulty. Obnoxious in a way that the Mega Man series rarely delved into. This is probably a result of it not being an official Capcom project, but it shows. I'm sorry, but it does show. Before I get into it outright, I'll start with the good. Unlimited isn't all bad or obnoxious, and there are some great levels here. My favorite being Nail Man's. I've included a handy dandy video link of the stage below. Do watch, if you're so inclined.
This stage has a lot of great obstacles and enemies in it. The nail Gordos who alternate between an X and a cross pattern for their shots. The platforms that are like Guts Man rail platforms but vertical. That bit where you zigzag upwards while Metools on jackhammers rain rocks down on you. The nail-shooting platforms that alternate. Getting through it all safely requires that you take things in and plan your approach. I love it, and the boss fight is fun as well. There's a pattern, but there are enough elements to keep you on your toes. Same for the stage itself. If all the stages followed that design philosophy, I would love this game a hell of a lot more. Unfortunately, it does not. It's the little things that add up here. One too many "wide jumps" that are so close for clearance as to feel pixel-perfect. One too many pits guarded by enemies that float up from them to knock you back one. Way too many very tight jumps where you pretty much brush against instant death spikes. Hell, one too many instant death spikes. The worst offender, though, doesn't contain any of these. Allow me to introduce you to the pulsating purgatory of Rainbow Man.
So. Rainbow Man's stage is a level built entirely around those instant death beams made famous in Mega Man 2. This should strike fear into the hearts of many. It has some cute gimmicks revolving around manipulating the beams, like redirecting and refracting the beams. No, the problem here is that it's too much. Sometimes your goal is to gun it to the next screen. Sometimes you need to shoot a thing on the way there. There's no real way to tell unless you've been there before. In my experience, it took me 5 continues to get this thing down. It is rote memorization, and that is the only way to get through it; by burning the correct way to play into your mind. Now, I like some games that do that. Hell, Quick Man did that and I still like Mega Man 2 a lot. The difference is that Mega Man 2 gave you an "out" in the Flash Stopper. Granted, if you used that out, Quick Man was a hell of a lot harder... but that's my choice to make. Here, your only choice is to bash your head against it until you learn how to do it. That, in general, is the Mega Man Unlimited experience for me.
I'm no stranger to burning patterns into my brain. Hell, I beat Battletoads. The difference is that with that, I knew what I was getting into. I was expecting it. When I go into a Mega Man game, a classic series fangame that's a loving tribute to the old games from Capcom, I kind of expect that same play style. I don't expect this, and it kind of sours me because that isn't what Mega Man is to me. That's not to say that you can't make a game out of that... but Mega Man and this sort of "masocore" notion don't mix well. You can make an incredible hard game experience out of killing the player in one hit and making them navigate ludicrous things. I love Super Meat Boy and VVVVVV for this. Both of those nail it, but they nail it because they follow one golden rule: quick respawn. You mess up in those games, and you're pretty much back where you were in an instant. Ready and primed to try the difficult obstacle again, to modify your technique, to focus yourself and take another shot at it. In a snap. Mega Man, with its lengthy stages that only have a few checkpoints, doesn't fit this play style at all. Unlimited actually manages to make this worse by both making the stages longer and reducing the checkpoints. Now you only get two; one at around the midpoint, and one at the boss shutters. The stages build up their gimmicks after the midpoint. More often than not in levels, especially the Wily stages, I found myself messing up on the final screens because they were the culmination of that level's tricky gimmick. Failure meant a good three minutes of redoing shit I'd already mastered to get back to the part I was having trouble at. This caused me no end of frustration. Was I bad at the game? Yeah! Get good, scrub, and all that... but was I having fun? I mean, that's what I'm playing for, right? To have fun? If your game upsets me like that, then something's wrong with one of us. Probably me, but I just had to get that off my chest.
Okay. We're going to end on a positive note here. The final level of the game is brilliant. It's admittedly kind of "fannish", the sort of thing that only Mega Man anoraks will get excited about, but the way that things play out just sells me on it. I'm going to link it again, but I'll also blab about it because that's how I roll.
(you can stop that once it gets into the ending proper, if you prefer.)
So, after a harrowing battle with both Bass and a Wily Machine, we enter Wily Castle Stage 5... and descend. Plenty of weapon energy refills. Even an extra life and an E-Tank! We must be getting ready for something big! The last gasp of Dr. Wily, I suppose. Not really. There's a strange capsule up high once you enter the boss door. It shatters, and some janky looking robot with a blonde ponytail falls out. Any Mega Man fanboy would be going "ooh" right about now. Yes. It's Zero, from the Mega Man X series. In the classic series. I told you it was fannish. This is not a fight you can win. Despite that, they gave you weapon energy and E-Tanks and junk. Zero is immune to everything you have, and he will just wreck your shit. Totally and utterly. Much has been made over how the Classic Mega Man series ended, with a lot of folk buying into the whole "Cataclysm" theory where Zero awakens and slaughters everyone en masse. This sort of follows that, but it also illustrates how underpowered Mega Man is. Of course he's not powerful enough. He hasn't gone X yet. Not realized his infinite potential. Of course Zero will beat him within an inch of his life... but Zero is still not ready to destroy all. He collapses once he's beaten you down, and Dr. Wily takes him away. This is not a victory for you. This is a narrow escape. Hell, Zero took off your buster arm... and now you need to escape the exploding castle. Defenseless. Weakened. You've had an ability taken away from you from some unknown power, and now you've got to make it out with less than you were. That's some Fugitive level shit right there, and it's brilliant. I love it.
So, that's Mega Man Unlimited. I really don't know what to say about it. Certainly, it's better than nothing. It's better than a lot of things. At the same time, for me personally there are a lot of sins it commits that I can't quite bring myself to forgive it for. That's just me, though. If you love it and think I'm full of shit, then by all means! For me, though, it would take a lot to make me go back to it. I can only hope that Mighty No. 9, with Inafune on board, follows that same spirit and spark that drove Mega Man back in 1987. Unlimited's emulation of that spark just doesn't sit right with me, and that saddens me.
(If you want to try Mega Man Unlimited for yourself, it's available for download right here.)
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