Category: Retro Gaming

When I first started playing Mega Man Legends 2, I was shocked by how long the opening cutscene was, and then impressed by the first couple hours of gameplay. It was clearly focusing on building up a more epic plot than the first game, and it seemed pretty solid for a while.

Then things turned around, and I started to find myself less engrossed in the game. Namely due to some tedious gameplay elements and a world that felt fractured and less fun to explore. Also some other little things here and there. But the fact remains that I was spending more time feeling frustrated by MML2 than I was having fun with it. And that only got worse before it got better.

In the first Mega Man Legends, you gain better “digger licenses” as you progress through the story, allowing you to access new dungeons and explore more of the gigantic maze below Kattleox Island. MML2 has a similar feature, except it’s only used to access optional dungeons. And also all of the enemies in the game “level up” in a way, making them tougher, but also increasing how much money they drop. This is all fine. I’m on board. Also, instead of just getting them at certain points, you must take a test for each. It’s nice, because you can take all the tests right away to max out the difficulty and your earnings right at the start of the game.

The problem is that the S-Class test (the last one) is unbelievably hard. You need to make it through a half-dozen rooms and defeat every enemy in each in under 5 minutes. You’re also restricted to the default equipment set, so no buster power-ups or special weapons can be used. This makes it hard because every enemy is an unforgiving bullet sponge, and some of them can inflict a status effect that prevents you from shooting. Needles to say, if you get hit by that it’s essentially a forced retry. I could go into further detail, but the point is that I absolutely could not pass this test. I tried at least 25 times, and that’s a conservative estimate. It depends too much on perfect execution, and MML2’s control just aren’t tight enough for that. So I gave up, and whatever was in that final optional dungeon, I’ll never know.

Also, losing out on that last money boost hurt a lot. It seems like everything in Mega Man Legends 2 costs about twice what it should, with many of the later weapon upgrades coming in at a million zenny. For reference, the most any single enemy can drop at A-Class is 7,000 zenny. So that’s a lot of grinding if you’re a completionist. I, fortunately, am not. I focused most of my cash into powering up one of the cheaper weapons (which was still damn effective), but still needed to grind a whole bunch to afford some of the other upgrades. There’s also a whole sub-quest about buying furniture and junk for the Flutter to make Roll happy, but as much as I want Roll to be happy, it costs so much and just wasn’t worth the time.

To catch up from where I left off last time, the fourth dungeon was ice-themed, and you know how that goes. I was very upset that there was no boot upgrade that stopped Mega Man from slipping on the ice. Though maybe there is and it was just lost in the S-Class dungeon for all time.

The final dungeon was where it all turned around, though. It’s a pretty sweet space-station with a gravity-manipulating gimmick. There are also multiple areas, and there are some really cool visual shifts throughout. It ends in a boss rush, as is Mega Man tradition. I’m normally not overly excited for endgame boss rushes, but it was really satisfying to get a rematch with that damned frog boss now that I was sufficiently powered-up and was able to curb stomp it. Very theraputic.

Now, back in the day when I played MML2 for the very first time, the final boss completely stymied me and rendered me unable to finish the game. So I was a little apprehensive about the final showdown once I made it there. And my fears were vindicated! Her attack patterns are very difficult to dodge, she does a buttload of damage, and there aren’t a lot of openings to shoot back. But after only a couple tries, I was able to finally eke out a victory, with only a sliver of life left.

Then she transformed and I got wrecked. Because of course there’s a second phase.

So I went back down to Earth to upgrade my health canteen, which is the Legends stand-in for E-tanks. And this is where MML2 finally gives the player an advantage: it seems like you can just keep upgrading that health canteen as long as you can afford it. I got mine up to 40 units (4 full heals) and I could have kept going if I’d had the cash. I don’t know how far it goes, but that’s already more than enough to cheese your way past basically anything the game will throw at you.

And so it was, that I battled that final boss again, and won. I used up every drop in the health canteen to do it and still just scraped by, but I won. It was finally over. The shadow that had been looming over me for the last twenty years was finally dispelled, and I am free to move on with my life. Given the text above and published previously, I don’t think I’ll ever play Mega Man Legends 2 again. It’s just so… I want to use a softer word, but I think it might be bad. There’s a solid base there, but there are too many parts that are designed in such a way that they’re just frustrating to overcome. If the controls were tightened up and the money requirements eased up? I think that would go a long way. But it’s just not that much fun as-is.

Fortunately, the first game is still perfectly good, and I will happily go back to that one time and time again. The Misadventures of Tron Bonne, a mini-game focused spin-off, was also a lot of fun, so there are ways to get my MML fix. Just not this one. With the benefit of this hindsight, maybe it’s a good thing that Mega Man Legends 3 got canned before it ever really got off the ground. But I guess that’s something we’ll just never know.

As I continue to slowly plod my way through Mega Man Legends 2, I find myself wondering more and more “Do I genuinely enjoy the first game, or is it just nostalgia?” Because MML2 really isn’t doing much for me, and I can’t pinpoint exactly why.

I touched on this before in regards to the plot, but I think the bigger world also hurts the gameplay, in a sense. In MML2, the story has you go through a handful of elemental-themed dungeons to collect the four sacred macguffins. This makes it feel a lot like Zelda, which should be a good thing, but I don’t want Mega Man Legends to be Zelda. The original game had a collection of underground tunnels and ruins that seem segregated at first, but as you collect various weapons and power-ups, you slowly discover that most of them are actually smaller sections of one gigantic interconnected maze. It was amazing! Now that I think about it, MML might have been the first 3D metroidvania. MML2 has no such reveal, as each dungeon is located on a separate island.

Plus, the conceit for exploring the ruins in MML is “maybe this one will have the legendary treasure!”, which is significantly less video game tropey, and just more fun in my opinion. I’m way more excited to keep adventuring when I don’t know what’s at the end of the next ruins. Knowing that the goal is just to check another goober off the list isn’t nearly as compelling. (Though the compulsive part of my brain begs to differ.)

At this point, I’m probably about three-fifths of the way through the game, and I’m desperately hoping that the worst is behind me. See, the second dungeon is the Water Temple equivalent, which allows you to flood or drain each level as required. Only you need each floor to be flooded at pretty much all times to get anywhere, so it’s basically 90% underwater. And Mega Man moves SO SLOW underwater. Easily half-speed, and it is so impossibly tedious. I think I spent two hours in this dungeon, and I’d bet that I could have shaved off at least half of that if I’d been able to move at a reasonable speed. Maybe it’s my fault and I missed the Gravity Suit upgrade, but I don’t think that’s the case. I think that it’s just a really poor design decision.

Now let’s talk about a greasy anime trope that made me sigh in contempt. MML has a scene where you walk in on Roll while she’s changing, which is like… ugh, really? But it’s a very quick scene and I think it’s even optional. You’ll miss it completely unless you go into the wrong door at the wrong time. MML2 has a similar scene, where you walk in on Roll in the bathtub. It’s not long either, but this one is forced. You literally cannot move the story forward without seeing it. I suppose that the bathtub scene does get replaced with a “depressed Roll” scene if you treat her like garbage, but why would you do that? Who would do that to Roll? So yeah, the bathtub thing is completely unavoidable.

MML2 doubles down on this, though. About halfway through the game, you’re pitted against Tron in a boss battle. Once you win, the robot she’ piloting explodes, and the camera switches to a blushing Mega Man. A couple of Tron’s servbot cronies then sheepishly explain to her that her clothes were burned off in the explosion, and that she is now buck naked. In what other medium besides anime do characters completely fail to notice that their clothes are no longer present? It’s ridiculous in the worst way, and it just sits on this reaction shot of Mega Man for what seems like ages as Tron admonishes him for staring and being a big ol’ pervert. Yikes.

So that’s that for this update on my Mega Man Legends 2 playthrough. It’s possible that the rest of the game could really turn it all around and amaze me, but I’m thinking that’s probably not going to happen. I think what’s going to happen is that I’m going to get to the end, finally beat it, and then never play it again. I’m having a hard time coming to grips with this concept, but I think that I might legitimately dislike Mega Man Legends 2. Is that kind of thing even possible?

I replay Mega Man Legends fairly often. Probably every other year, at least. I could likely even squeeze in more replays, as it’s a pretty short game. It’s an all-time favourite of mine, even as its age becomes more and more apparent with each subsequent run.

Despite this, I’ve only ever played the sequel once, and I didn’t even finish it, at that. The final boss was just too tough for me, and I guess I must have been distracted by some other shiny thing before I could work up the skill to finally conquer it. I’ve been in a very PS1 kind of headspace lately, so I decided last weekend that it’s time to right this long-standing wrong.

Mega Man Legends 2 just isn’t landing with me the same way the first game does. Maybe it’s because I don’t have the same nostalgia for it that I do for the original. I don’t know. It’s certainly a better game, in technical terms. The graphics are considerably better, the controls are less terrible, the world is bigger, the dungeons are more impressive, the voice acting is even wackier. I could go on.

What bothers me are just a few little things. Most of all, that the lock-on feature is a friggin’ idiot, quite commonly locking onto the enemy farthest from Mega Man, sometimes refusing to switch to closer threats. A lot of the time, it shows a strong preference to lock on to enemies that are around corners, which is never helpful. The solution, of course, would be to not bother using the lock-on, but it’s way too hard to aim manually at anything that isn’t stationary. So that’s a bit of a frustration.

I’m also not super crazy about the bigger scope of the story. Yes, of course it was going to build up to that, and it’s not that the plot really suffers for it. I just have a personal preference for the story of the first game, which focused on a single island and its many mysteries. In MML2, you’re hopping between all these islands, and the fate of the world is at stake, so on and so forth. That’s all fine, but Kattleox island had so much personality, whereas the smaller locales in MML2 haven’t been developed enough to have that same level of charm.

Lastly, the first dungeon boss was just insanely annoying. This stupid frog boss took me four tries to beat, mostly because the room is constantly flooded with things trying to kill you. For one, there are spike traps zipping around the perimeter of the room, and these little tadpole guys flopping about in the center, between the raised platforms that the boss jumps around on. The boss itself is constantly spewing out bubbles that track you until they hit a wall or you shoot them, and there’s a respawning dragonfly flitting around above the arena that exists solely to screw up your lock-on. You might have to see it to get a good idea of how badly this fight is stacked against you, but trust me. It’s rough.

But I’m only like a quarter of the way though as of this writing, so who knows? Maybe it’ll really start to click with me once I get a little farther in. I hope so. I feel giddy every time I play the original game, and it would be awfully nice if I found even half as much enjoyment in the sequel.

It’s the beginning of a new year, and three days from the start of Awesome Games Done Quick 2020. So I’ve got new year traditions and video game speedruns on my mind, which can only mean one thing:

It’s time to play Mega Man X.

I’m sure I mention it every year, but I like for MMX to be the first game I play through every year. I also really want to get myself to a point where I can finish it in under an hour. That said, I haven’t played it in exactly one year, so… I was a little rusty when I did my annual run yesterday.

Before we get into it, I should also note that I play what I like to call the 99% run. Which is to pick up all the upgrades in the game except for the hadouken, because it’s a pain and very slow to get. I don’t dare run any% because I need all those hearts and armor parts. I’m very bad at the final boss fights.

I reset not one minute into my run because I got a little too excited and tried to get a quick kill on the first bee blader, but apparently my mashing technique is much too slow, and I just died. Whoops. Maybe I ought to just try to play quickly instead of very fast.

Things actually got worse on the second attempt. I died to both chill Penguin and Launch Octopus because I was being stupid. I also feel down a hole in Chill Penguin’s stage, but that one was at least partly because of the Switch Pro controller’s mushy d-pad. I was trying to jump over the hole with the ride ride armor, but the game instead had me jump out of the ride armor, which threw me off and I ended up in the hole. It was dumb. Real dumb.

The other really big oops was when I frigged up getting the arm parts in Flame Mammoth’s stage. I thought, oh no big deal I’ll just get them from Zero later. But then I was in Boomer Kuwanger’s stage and I couldn’t charge Shotgun Ice to get to the heart tank, forcing me to replay nearly the whole stage. That was a pretty massive time loss.

I actually got through the Sigma stages pretty cleanly. Bosspider was nicer than ever, and didn’t even throw any babies at me. Then I got killed bu D-Rex because I always get killed by D-Rex. Don’t know why, but I just can’t manage that fight.

By the time I got to the final showdown, I only had 1.5 of four sub tanks full, and decided that I was already over my hour, so I spent three minutes grinding caterpillars for health drops. Then I had the best Velguarder fight of my life, a sloppy Sigma fight, and a halfway decent fight against Wolf Sigma. I only ended up needing two sub tanks, so that’s something to consider for my next run.

My final time came in at 1:07:14. Not a horrible time by any means, but I know I can do better. Four deaths is a lot, and I should have been able to avoid all of them. We’ll see what 2021 brings!