394 - Mega Man 3

Mega Man 3 Mega Man explodes in back-to-back robot battle And... And welcome to Nostalgia, a chronological exploration of every NES game released in North America. I'm Mike. I'm Sean. And I'm Joe. I feel like it's worth clarifying that... Mega Man does not explode in this game unless he dies. He does if you're me. Okay, yeah. Back to back explodes a lot if you're me.

Right, right. But I guess I meant like the back of the box shouldn't be like the headline is that Mega Man explodes. I guess they meant Mega Man 3, like the game explodes. Right, right. Yeah. I thought that was weird, too, though. I was like, are they advertising how bad you're going to be at the game? Yeah, don't put this cart in a toaster. Put it in an NES or it will explode. Or on a chair.

There it is. Thank you. So early in the episode. Okay. It's Mega Man 3, though, and I feel like this is another one of those games that we just know is important. even if we've never played it before. I've never played this one before. Have you guys played this one? No. I bet I had played it in passing as a kid. I remember playing multiple Mega Man games briefly as a kid, so this could have been one of them.

I played, I remember playing eight. I played the two for the podcast. I think there was a couple X's in there. And that one 3D one where you kick a ball. I feel like I probably said this in the Mega Man 1 episode, but it's worth, I mean, that was how many years ago now. I think it's worth just repeating that, like, I owned Mega Man X, the original, on Super Nintendo, and I love that game. I thought it was great.

And so as a result, I bought like one of those Mega Man anniversary collections on either PlayStation 2 or GameCube and never even got to Mega Man 3 because I was just stunned at how hard these games were. uh you know like for for a ps2 minded brain to go back to this nes stuff it was like i can't i can't make any progress in these games and i just i don't think i played more than a half hour of megaman anniversary collection which is a shame because it's probably

Hours and hours of endless fun. But the podcast forces me to play these games, so we will be playing them. Mega Man 1 and 2, both currently on the Essential Games list. Feels like a huge feat.

that both of those games are on them, even when they're offering kind of the same exact product. You know, it's not like, oh, they're different games. They're the same kind of game, and Mega Man 3 is going to change the formula a little bit. We'll get into it in the episode, but... It's mostly the Mega Man we know. It's Capcom pumping out these action platformers year after year after year. It's become a yearly cycle. And essentially the third main Mega Man game on the NES.

introduces the slide mechanic, and Rush, the dog, his transformations. So...

You know, those are like the two big things. But otherwise, like it's eight new robot masters. It's there's a new mid game chapter with this doc robot character who. actually has the abilities of the bosses from Mega Man 2. That's kind of cool. There's Proto Man, who I think is known as Break Man in these games. It's his introduction as well. And he just kind of...

Has his own little mini stage as well, which is a little lackluster, but we'll get to that. And last but not least, Dr. Wiley, who is now completely reformed, is working again with Dr. Light. I asked the question. If you were someone who tried to take over the world via the power of these robots twice, and again, I don't know the politics of the Mega Man world, but if you announce that you're reformed, shouldn't you go to jail first? You shouldn't just be able to go back to working on robots?

I don't think jail's a thing in this universe. There is no government at all, is what you're saying. Yeah, it's just robots and scientists and robots and scientists. Mega Man's a robot. Is he fully, or I thought he was a cyborg. He's a full clanker, man. He is a robot. Yeah, we prefer to call them bots on this show.

Can I rewind a little bit and just talk about our history with this series? Yeah, I'm sorry that I didn't let you do that. No, no, no, it's okay. So I don't do this often. Usually it's one of you guys that kind of... tries to rejog your memory or you just keep the memory from when we originally recorded and it doesn't like leak out of you like my dumb brain. But, uh, I just wanted to, you know, kind of recenter.

where we have been on this and obviously we voted we kind of unanimously voted these essential um but in both instances mike you threatened or or even just sort of like predicted that mega man one would be removed now the one that i did not listen to again was the best of 89 when you could have removed

One did you did you try and remove one like officially? I don't think I tried to remove it. I don't recall doing that Yeah in one you said I see a future in which I have removed Mega Man 1 or we have removed And in two, you're like, I don't know, I might be coming at Mega Man 1. So it's actually...

It's actually funny that we didn't at least have a discussion about it. So I think it's interesting coming back to it here because it's been a couple of years since we've talked about the games, or maybe like four years. Yeah, and it's crazy to me because it's been so long since we've talked about it and there's still like 15 more or something. There are six Mega Man games on the NES. Okay, so we're halfway. Yeah, we're doing great.

Before we get into the game and everything, I want to just also tread some old ground here on Mega Man and just remind everybody that the Mega Man loop... is there's eight robot master stages. You select any of them. You can start the game wherever you want. And whenever you defeat that robot, you win their weapon.

And now you can use that weapon on everything else in the game with a limited supply that you can refill. But like the idea is, is that you basically gain the power of one robot master and use it. exploit its weakness on the other appropriate robot master to then have an easier fight right and so there's there's a known path of like okay if I if I started this guy

and just continue to go around in a predetermined path, I'll always have the strongest weapon to make these fights a little bit easier. And that works into the fact that in Japan...

Mega Man's name is actually Rock Man, and it's supposed to be like a rock, paper, scissors thing where everything has a weakness and a resistance. And I feel like I understood that more with Mega Man 1. than i do now because i i looking at the robot masters in the game i don't think you can tell who's weak to who like this is this isn't rock paper scissors anymore this is like

Okay, Snake is weak to Needle. Needle is Needle to Topman. It's hard to figure out. The idea that in Japan his name is Rockman changes things a little bit for me. But to me, I never thought, I knew about this rock, paper, scissors thing, but I never thought of it like Pokemon.

Where it's like, yeah, snakes are weak to needles or whatever. Whatever Snake Man's weak to. But more so that just like... Snakes probably are weak to needles, by the way. I mean, yeah, that would actually be pretty... I think they're weak to most of the things that Mega Man acquires. Yeah. But... I just thought of it more as like, not so much like, oh, you're supposed to be discovering like their intuitive weaknesses as opposed to just like, oh, like this, the...

The one guy's flying up there and there just happens to be a thing that lets you shoot at that angle. I never thought of it like, oh, you're supposed to know. I just thought of it more like, oh, if you have that thing, it's going to make it easier. I never thought of it like Pokemon, you know?

I just thought of it more like, oh, I wonder what this, this. You'll experiment and then you'll figure out like, oh, this actually makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. I'm fumbling over my words here, but like, yeah, I'm on a boss and I'm having a really difficult time. hey, maybe I'll come back after I've gotten a couple more weapons and try one of those and see if they work on them, knowing that one of them will. Yeah, I mean, that's an important note because you don't have to have the...

the most powerful weapon to take on any of these bosses. You can complete every single one of these bosses with just the normal blaster. So there's no reason to think... that uh it's you know it's it's not encouraged by the game at least to like know the optimal path i feel like the only way to know the optimal path is by talking with other gamers and figuring out like oh this weapon did this amount of damage because it's not even like

It's not even straightforward in the sense of they only each have one weakness. The Magnet Man is weak to the Spark, the Shadow Blade, and the Magnet. So it's not like... he they can't uh there aren't multiple paths you know there's any way to handle it I feel like it comes from playtesting interestingly enough like the levels themselves and figuring out like well who is the easiest to like

defeat and start this game off so i have at least one additional uh powered up weapon at my disposal yeah and it's not even always at least for me about an actual weakness where like this thing is going to do more damage to this enemy sometimes for me it was like i don't know if you'd call it like accessibility or something where it's just like like the example i used a minute ago an enemy that's flying up in the air the whole time

I need something that's going to be able to reach him better, you know, even if it doesn't do more damage. Some of it's, to me, more about, like, the trajectory of the projectile or... or the actual function of it and not just like the damage output on this person. Yeah, and we have really interesting powers this time around. There are some that are just basically stronger blasters, but I mentioned the needle cannon.

That goes through walls. So you kind of like are able to hit enemies. And not all walls, but it goes through walls that you're able to hit enemies on the other side of things. That's where you can take care of them before you have to approach them closely. Or the... laser beam that can bounce off the walls and everything so you can hit enemies that are higher up without having to get close to them. And then there's the spin in place. Yes, the top spin. It feels like something that...

It must be incredibly strong because it's incredibly useless otherwise. It must have a time and a place. I'll try it out during the level, like on the next level. I don't know how you guys... strategically use your power-ups but like I'll give it a shot just so I know what I'm doing with it and I'm like wow I just I just spin

I just spin, and I tried it against an enemy, like, oh, maybe I can do some actual melee damage for once. And I just kept taking damage while I'm spinning. So I just thought it was kind of useless, except for during the boss. That was recommended next. I didn't even really use it during the boss. I did watch a video of someone actually completely annihilating a boss with it, but I never found it useful in any of my...

Like I never naturally decided to use it and found it useful. So my understanding of how it works is, and it's a little technical here and I don't have the technicality to explain it, but apparently whatever iframes are, I don't know what they are. I'm so sorry. Mega Man doesn't have them. Invincibility frames. Okay, great. So Mega Man doesn't have them. So if the top spin does, let's say, four bars of damage to a particular boss.

every single frame of it counts. So it could do the entirety of the life bar in a single top spin because it's counting every frame that it connects to the hip box. which makes some fights very trivial, but it doesn't work on everything. There are some enemies that are just immune. to some of these weapons, not just the topspin, but other weapons too. There's nothing you can do about that. And I think it makes sense if topspin doesn't work on...

hard man, right? I presume a hard man has strong resistance to a lot of things. He should be. He's hard. Yeah, exactly. He hopefully has strong armor or something. But...

It was interesting that the best part of this game does remain these power-ups that you get for beating these bosses early on because I feel like somehow this is just new. shmup power-ups in those shmup kind of games, but they always find a way to redefine the game a little more in this platforming context than I'm ever expecting.

uh other platformers to do you know like other platformers I feel like would give you the ability to jump higher or create a platform and like Mega Man has those options as well but the power-ups that he gains by switching these weapons makes all these weapons like incredibly useful and still three iterations in like

Still interesting. It's not like, oh, they ran out of ideas here. Because snakes is a weird idea. I would think that snakes can't work. You can't get snakes as a power-up. What's he going to do? Shoot snakes out of his cannon? That's exactly what he does. Little snakes come out. But they crawl along the screen and they can ride all the edges of the wall so they can hit areas that like enemies hug that you can't reach. And that's perfect. That's a great use of snakes.

So that's the combat. There is one other major change, and that is the slide mechanic. This is the first game to introduce it. I... Feel like that would be weird to go back to Mega Man 1 and 2 now without a slide, because you're forced to use it a lot. Like, they definitely want to teach you that it's useful, and there are certain enemies where, like... Sliding is optimal instead of trying to jump over them or go under them. The slide is the preferred mechanic. But is the slide like a...

Is it an added skill thing or is it like a necessary thing now that they've included in the game of like, well, you have to slide because they design things around sliding, whereas like, you know, oh, sliding also has this flare element to it. Can it be both? I think it's necessary, at least in... They're trying very hard to teach you that it will be necessary beyond just like...

Oh, this is the, you can only get here via sliding. I think that's just like a reminder to use it. But like there's times in the, I don't know, bolt, electro. Volt I don't know what the electric guy that one or whatever yeah like where you're you got like some timing stuff that you're gonna have to

Or the one with the walls that just kind of get built up over time really fast. Like you're going to want to slide through that because it's sort of like it's a timing thing. And then there are enemies that have attack patterns that. are just high enough that you can slide under them. It would be like crouching if that ever existed in Mega Man. And so I think it is like you can, you can take the damage, I guess. And just.

and just go about it that way but if you're trying to conserve energy for bosses and stuff but then you're gonna wanna be sliding yeah it's also just like it's There are a lot of situations where it's just really good movement tech, I guess, where you don't need to be doing it, but it does...

you do move a little faster you it does it is a good dodge so even in times where the game is not designed where it's like oh you have to slide here a lot of times it was useful a lot of times i found it more useful in jumping you know and then other times yeah i thought it was

really only in addition i never felt like uh it was like uh they're just trying to force me to do this shoehorn and in you know again like sean said obviously there's a lot of times where you do have to use it but i think it is

Yeah, also just like, hey, get used to doing this because it's going to be helpful if you do, you know. You also have the dog now. Yeah, you have Rush. And we had in Mega Man 2, like, there were... uh additional power-ups that you could uh acquire to like have some kind of platforming mobility But Rush now, like, puts a character behind that. Mega Man's, of course, robot dog. Every robot needs a man's best friend robo-dog as well. And Rush has the springboard.

The like the jet that he transforms into that you kind of ride as like a hoverboard. And then the one I didn't understand for a long time because you summon it and it immediately says, nope, I'm not supposed to be here. But it's a submarine for the water parts of levels. When you get into him. Yeah, you get inside him, which don't say that part again. And all that to say, like, I think it actually does become more than just, like, a cool new character. I do think, like...

Between the coil, which becomes very useful and very obvious that like they want you to use it in certain places to like get cool power ups or one ups and such. The jet really becomes like a. an easy way to like as long provided that you keep the uh i don't want to call it ammunition but everything has like its own power gauge provided you keep that filled

You can skip a lot of hard enemies in these regular stages just by using the jet to lift you up over them and get to the ladder that you need to reach. Which can be useful if you're dying and need to conserve energy because the bosses are harder. You haven't learned their patterns yet. But I guess he's also a good boy? Yeah, I guess. I found it, like, it was good design, I guess, that there is a point, if you're going in the order I went in, there is a point where you cannot proceed.

unless you use him and i didn't know that i had even unlocked him yet because i didn't read the manual for this it's also meant that i had no idea what was actually going on in the story for a long time but that's how they're hearing over there but uh You have to use the dog jump. And I didn't, you know, I pause and I don't see a dog jump. And.

I was pressing button combinations because I remember, like, oh, yeah, in the art, the dog's there. And I remember this is, like, a thing in newer games, too. And in, I think, Smash, where you jump on them. So then you realize that even before you've unlocked anything, this is on the second page. So it was a... An interesting moment of like, okay, I just have to navigate a menu, a couple menus deep to use this jump, which kind of takes some of the energy out of it, but it's there.

Yeah, now that you mention it, it's a little strange that it starts out on the second page when it's the first thing you get. But yeah, it never got to a point to me where it was... It felt like it's part of the platforming, like Twitch reflex gameplay. It felt more like a little more like cognitive. You need to stop and think. It's almost like a puzzle solving moment whenever you need to use the dog.

Very simple puzzle, but yeah, you got to like jingle in your pocket to grab this tool. Yes, exactly. And we mentioned also the introduction of Proto Man, known as Break Man in this game. He has a really cool whistle that plays before he ever shows up. And I feel like that adds a lot of personality to him. Maybe a bit of mystery. Who is this guy?

But the actual fights are really poor, in my opinion, especially for a Mega Man game where the attack patterns and learning them is half the fun. He just... He just jumps around the stage, not even knowing if you're in front of him or not, I feel like. It's funny that you say that, like, oh, it's so mysterious. And then it's as if, like, there is a second player that is just spamming jump.

It feels less like AI and more like a kid that's never played a video game before. Well, yeah, I almost wonder if that, maybe not literally that, but if that was the intent, where it's like, this is supposed to feel like another Mega Man. Like a haunted game. and it's kind of like the game is handed yeah look at this is what you look like now that's funny uh but he shows up several times not even in like some of the regular stages he'll show up as like a mid boss or whatever but like

It's weird that he shows up and does the same thing every time. I feel like I kind of expected that in the regular stages, the Robot Master stages, that like, okay, yeah, it's just the same fight because that's what he does. But when you get that... After you take down the robot master stages and the doc robot stages, you get like this icon in the center that's just like his icon. And it's like, oh shit, we're going to his lair now. But it's just a fight with him.

uh on one screen and he continues to do the same thing and i tried a few different like power-ups to come at him with but i feel like the game was also leading me in this direction where it's just best to use the power uh the regular blaster and slide under him whenever he jumps uh like in your direction you just slide directly under him and keep firing from his back it's a very easy fight

Once you realize that you just have to not interact with him. Yeah. Yeah. Or find the cheese. Yeah. What I was hoping for out of proto man, what I wish there was, is like every time you get a new power up. he gets a new unrelated power-up. Like he's on his own journey getting his own power-ups. But then every time you fight him, it's going to be different. I think that's so cool. And I guess I just like...

I don't want to make the game any longer either. So I wasn't suggesting like a break man level in that center icon. It just felt like a big moment in the game where like, okay, you've taken down all the robot masters and usually you would go to the...

Wily Castle at this point but instead you have to have this mini fight with Brickman again and it just turns out to be the same exact fight it felt like a misstep because the the up until this point in the game everything had been kind of from a from a design perspective like what we expect of megaman there's new power-ups which is cool the slide is a interesting like platforming mechanic but

But mostly, if you were good at Mega Man 1 and 2, you're going to be good at this one too and just gradually get better at it as you learn. The pacing switches once you get to the...

Wiley Castle stuff, which, spoiler alert, Guy didn't reform. He's evil as hell, just like he always was, and nobody should trust people who say that they've reformed if they've committed, like... crimes against society i guess like maybe they need to do some time before they're ready to re-enter society i don't know what that says i don't know what the lesson is there but what i do know is that once you get to the wily castle in previous games

This was my demise, whether it was Mega Man 1 or Mega Man 2, but especially Mega Man 2. Like, wow, I in Mega Man 2, I just could not.

uh make good progress uh in wily's castle and i never got to see the end unless i was cheating in megaman 3 it's a little bit of a reverse i feel like wily castle is like shorter levels broken up like a lot quicker and uh the uh yeah there's some annoying things like they still include the boss rush and um the megaman hologram stage also kind of sucks but like for the most part they are like shorter tighter levels that are really just about fighting like

fun bosses that aren't robots, after you've fought 12 total robot masters across the doc robots and the regular stages, it was like a reverse Mega Man 2. I feel like Mega Man 2...

had really good regular stages, and then the Wily Castle was near impossible. Here, I felt like it was reversed. What about you guys? Well, I would like to first just reply to what Joe said about how... how he thought Proto Man should be built. And I would just say that if they're going to make Proto Man power-ups, you've got to give the player that power-up at some point, right? That's just 101, right? I don't think so. Okay. But that's how I would feel about that. In terms of the...

the sort of level structure here. I like, you know, one and two, uh, did not beat this game. Uh, I, I don't have, uh, I don't have the endurance to get good at these games. So I played the, I played all of the original eight levels. Um, and then like saw some of the.

the the next four which are just like harder versions of those levels so i was never gonna get past that anyway but i i think like if we're gonna if we're talking about this the It's not so much a reverse, it's that, like, it's also, you've got that extra padding in there, which is taking all of the difficulty from, like, the wily stuff from the previous games and just sort of...

putting it in the middle of this one, and now you've got, like, this weird, like, bell curve of difficulty in the game. So it's just, like, a different sequence.

If that makes any sense. No, I can hear you on that because I think that's a good point that I probably should have made is that, yeah, from like a pacing perspective, I just feel like those Doc Robot stages, which I kind of glossed over, but you accurately said are just like... remix stages of some of the um stages you already did in the regular round of eight those those levels just feel like they're they're making the game like artificially longer by including

uh new bosses which are technically old bosses because you fought them in megaman 2 but there's also this weird like you're fighting the Mega Man 2 bosses but not as themselves but they have the sprites in the game like you watch the sprite of the Mega Man 2 enemy go into the uh doc robot but then he's like this larger enemy that's like a pain in the ass to dodge and it's like why couldn't we just fight the megaman 2 uh robot again like that whole section

is very challenging, not even just because it prolongs the game and makes it more likely that you'll use up your lives and energy tanks. It's more challenging just because I feel like the remix stages are harder than the stages we already encountered. And the robot masters or doc robot here is just a harder boss that you have to fight like eight times.

Before you can get on to the Wily stages. Yeah, I don't know exactly how I feel about it. Because, like Sean, I really mostly just played the main Robot Master stages. But I don't...

I don't find it an inherent flaw, again, having not played all the Doc Robot stages. And I know that there's two bosses per stage and four stages. There's still eight more bosses. It's kind of like... another Mega Man game you know it's like so like I mean I guess I don't hate the idea of there being like three acts in this game there's the first act which are like the main levels then there's the second act which are like the

super-powered returning bosses from previous levels, and then the third actress is the Wily Castle. The only thing that kind of bothers me about it is that if you're going to do remixed stages of stages that I've already done, I know there's a lot to ask, but like... Why not just give us four new stages? Yeah, that's it there. Like, I'm all for more content, but even just watching these new, these remix stages, like, it's not new. It's just...

It's just padding. Some of the level layouts are almost exact to the point where the room lengths are exactly the same. They've just changed what's inside of them. But, Joe, to your point about these mid-stages being like an act two, it's kind of like Mega Man's... pokemon gold moment where like now they've gone back to kanto like that you go back to megaman 2 just unfortunate that they didn't include the levels themselves i guess but

I get the premise of just, you know, revisiting this is probably enough in the context of this game and using the design, the levels that were designed with the slide in mind and the rush power-ups. Like, I understand why it happened. I guess I just feel like this part slogged a little bit in my gameplay of like, maybe I just am used to the, okay, you defeat the robot masters and then you go fight Wily.

Um, cause like, remember Wiley's castle isn't like one level. It's, it's like, I think it's five or six stages this time around. Like that's asking a lot. So, uh, that's also the point where passwords no longer like. save any progress so up until that point the password system can have you jump back in at any like particular thing of like whichever uh enemies you encountered or um

If you're on the Doc Robot stages, which ones of those you took out, you can save all of that. From the moment you fight Breakman, you can no longer have a password that says, okay, well, you made it to Wily Castle 3.

I get it. It becomes a rush at that stage. It just makes for a slightly weird pacing. But enough about that. I feel like we can move on and just talk about... I have a quick comment about this sort of I don't even know how to describe it I guess like progress block or sort of like maybe diminishing maybe a diminishing return what I don't like and I don't know if this was the case in 1 and 2 because I couldn't I can't quite remember but when you die and you end up a life in Mega Man 3

whatever usage of your power-ups you you did like however much ammunition you used out of your magnet or whatever like that stays like if you used up all of your power-up You no longer have that after dying. I don't like that at all. I think that if I have to restart a level or restart a boss, like at least give me.

you've already taken away a life of mine. Like, at least give me my ammo back. Yeah, yeah. It makes it all the more challenging. Yeah. Yeah, I would say on the whole, like, that is a bit of an anomaly because the rest of the game...

continues to follow the Mega Man 2 to 1 trend of making a more forgiving game. There are certainly more of those giant yellow HP orbs. floating around this time than there were in two and in one there was practically none or might have even actually been none i i can't recall right now but like there was it was very hard to recover hp in one two made it a little more accessible i feel like three

has an additional accessibility thing as well in the energy tanks because those energy tanks are something you can save within your continues as well. So like if you... If you game over and you get to the continue screen and you had like three energy tanks left over, you still get to keep all three of those. So it does remember like things in the bad way, but it also remembers things in the good way too on game overs.

Sure. It wasn't so much game over as it was like, it was just between lives. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hear you. Yeah, and that bothers me too. I think that it didn't bother me as much as it... could have because to be honest i didn't run out of power up super super often because i usually just stuck with the main gun except for the very specific scenarios where i needed other guns you know

Yeah, like you would save them for the boss fights. I suppose that's a less fun game though, Joe, right? Yeah, I mean, I wasn't even saving them for the boss fights. I think I just... often didn't need them you know i mean like yeah but isn't it just more fun to just like use your stuff you just got these cool weapons don't you want to use them i used them when i felt like oh this is the spot where i need this thing but a lot of times it was just

Maybe this comes down to, again, having to pause the game and select the thing. It does take you out of it. I would say that I kind of had the same... philosophy for like the first half of my playthrough of this where I was just like I just won't do this I won't use anything at all until I get to the boss because that's when I have to use this

Because it's apparently strong enough on this boss to be recommended. And I would also say... Go ahead. I don't even know if I was... saving it for bosses i did use the power-ups what felt to me like a lot it was just that like the the main blaster was but clearly by far my primary weapon

And then there were a lot of times where I was like, oh, shit, like I'm never going to reach this guy, but the snakes can. And then I'd use the snakes for a little while, but usually not enough where I'm going to completely run out of. the power for that weapon before I'm on to back to my blaster and then onto something else. But it's always very situational. If there wasn't a specific situational reason to use a weapon, I was just using the blaster.

Sure. And I guess I was just like, oh, well, now I have enough power ups that I don't have to like they all have independent ammunition or energy, I guess. So I can screw around with the magnets on this one. Or I can use the shadow strike or whatever you call it and not have to worry about running out for the boss because that's not the one that it's weak to.

But I would die pretty often. And when I thought that the original blaster wasn't quite cutting it and I go in, I'm like, oh, I can at least get some more like DPS out of this thing. And I'm just still out because the ammo drops are kind of random sometimes. It was a weird feeling.

Yeah, the ammo drops being random doesn't help. But I do feel like especially in sections where they kind of knew you were going to be using power ups, there's one stage in particular where like, it's kind of implied that you should be using the rush jet.

uh to fly across this rather than trying to platform through it they did scatter like a lot of refills in that in those particular sections to like be like okay well make sure you keep collecting these so that you keep using this particular power up in this section I'm not saying that the game is, like, considerably easier, but I did notice that, like, even after, like, in the boss rush stage at the end, towards the end of Wily's Castle...

After you defeat each boss, they do give you like a large HP replenish after each one. So you can just like collect that refill and take on the next boss rather than trying to like scrape by and have near perfect runs. There was just more like out in the open. Like you saw more of the Mega Man 1-Up lives. You know, like you had to figure out how you were going to reach them, but they were there. I feel like the game in general was a little more kind.

to people who not necessarily were like willing to explore there's nothing there's no like hidden uh canals or anything but like more willing to um to spend time with it and and know about these these things the unfortunate thing is is again if you die while having none of this stuff there isn't like a oh well I'll just go back to this other stage where I know there's plenty of ammo refills and refill up before I take on the new stage you know you can't do that you can't go backwards

And while we're talking about all the bosses and everything, I mean, there are some enemies in this game that also, like, really suck. I don't know about you guys, but those... That bee?

who drops down those five Bs. That is nightmare stuff right now. That's the first enemy I ran into and really like, oh, this is going to be a fun time. Then you got the one on the like... pogo stick or plunger or whatever yeah yeah he does like a pole vault and then you have to like do this very specific dodge move uh like just to because you can't hit him

From the front until... I don't know. Yeah, until after he vaults. And then you have to... Basically, you have to slide under his vault and then let him run at... you jump over him and then shoot him like three times in order to take him out and that's just one time that's one enemy it's not like it's not you're gonna oh good i'm glad i got him out of the way he's gonna do that three more times on that very screen yeah i

I feel this way about, I think, all three of the Mega Man games, but there are a lot of enemies in them that you need to understand the pattern that they're going, like their flight path or whatever, before they come at you. in order to dodge them you can't react you know you have to preemptively react where there are things like on the ceiling I'm like this is gonna swoop down at me but it like swoops down in a trajectory where it's like well I couldn't have predicted that and it seemed to like

predict kind of where i was gonna go in a way where it's like i need i needed to know it was gonna do that beforehand you can't like i almost feel like i can't just dodge the bees were one of them maybe not even that exact uh circumstance But the bees, even like the speed runners I'm watching are getting hit by the bees. I just feel like you can't dodge those bees. Well, like on that note, like, excuse me, I think like a lot of times, like the most efficient way to move forward.

is just to tank a hit or two. Like, there is knockback, but it's not, like, a guarantee to throw you down. It's not Castlevania knockback, yeah. Yeah, and it's not always a guarantee that even if you are on kind of, like, a small platform that you're going to fall. It's still very likely that you're going to fall from that knockback and lose a life and go all the way back.

If you are smart with it, you can... I think a valid strategy is just take the hit. And the bees, sorry to stay on them, but it does feel like... There's one singular bee that drops like what? A bunch of larva eggs or something? Is that what he's holding? Yeah. And then they break free from that. It does feel like there should be a moment where it's like, oh, not a big deal. I'll shoot.

the larva before it touches the the platform and breaks open so that i have to deal with five bees you cannot do that for the record don't i tried a lot of even with emulation like rewinding and being perfect it does not happen The bees will come out, and you'll have to deal with all five of them. And I feel like there are other enemies in this game that fly and come at you, like those penguins, but they were much more manageable.

than than the bees were so the bees are just like it's really just because there's a lot of um uh spike deaths and uh or or uh endless platforms and stuff like that so it becomes harder it's again i think to sean's point just

tank the hit and move on and it's fine like they won't be able to chase you through the entirety of the stage but it also like slows down the game tremendously so it has that going for it in terms of like being oh my god yeah jumping over some terrible some terrible slowdown Overall, though, the Mega Man world, I know we established that there's no central government or anything, but the enemies and characters, for the same reasons people love...

Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest and the enemies you see in those games. I am starting to appreciate the charm of the Mega Man world, not just with the new characters. we meet that become main characters like rush and proto man. But like those, those guys who wear the hard hats and look like Goombas almost, you know, because they're so, they're so small. Like they, they amuse me now. They're like the mega man world minions.

yeah they're they're cute they're cute i think that we're not at the point yet where it is like self-parody but once we once we get to our place in time like i think that the megaman like other mans like the like top man is already kind of getting close to like this what do you mean top man this is yeah yeah where's bottom man

I don't even mean like in any kind of euphemistic way. It's just like you were getting into really silly things. Yeah, you've run out of like elements and you're on to like toy like toys it should be mentioned that the just like in Mega Man 2 the robots here were designed as part of a contest that Capcom held Four fans in Japan. And there was apparently over 50,000 submissions for ideas for the Robot Masters. And yes, somehow Top Man won as one of those designs.

I don't know what you got as the grand prize for being one of the selected things. It is kind of amazing that a company was able to just freelance its workout for free.

uh to a bunch of kids to like come i don't know you guys come up with the robots and they did it but i did find oddly enough there was like an ebay auction maybe back in like i don't know the 2010s i didn't even check the exact date but it looks pretty old and expired of a guy who sold his runner-up pencil tin and ID card that Capcom shipped to him as like, your design wasn't selected, but you're awesome.

And we love your idea. So we gave you an ID card and a pencil tin. What is the ID card? The ID card is in Japanese. I don't know exactly what it says, but oddly enough. It doesn't grant you entry to Capcom. No, it doesn't. But here's something interesting. So it's an ID card and you've designed a robot master. So of course, who would be authorizing you?

Yeah, you're Dr. Wily. You're one of his minions. Yeah, the bad guy here is thanking you for helping him create another Robot Master to take down Mega Man. Cute.

though megaman is on the even the guy saved the envelope uh that it came in in the mail and megaman is on the envelope along with capcom and their official address and everything so it's kind of sad that like capcom won't revisit like who is basically their mascot at this point in time like they won't revisit this guy but they're happy to just keep churning out monster hunter games which don't interest me at all but clearly make a lot of money for the company um you know or like i don't know

Sean, Resident Evil, is Leon the main person that should be the mascot of Capcom, or is that like, no? I mean, I don't have the same... I don't have the same problem because I don't have any kind of emotional connection to Mega Man. And I do with Resident Evil. So I'm pretty okay with it. I also don't care about... Monster Hunter, though. But I guess which Resident Evil person should be, like, the mascot? Obviously, hyper buff Chris Redfield with biceps larger than his head.

Let it be. Then twice his head. So, you know, just real fast because we were talking about the contest. Top Man, obviously, is the funny one, but Shadow Man, Spark Man, Magnet Man, Hard Man, Gemini Man, Needle Man, Snake Man. I feel like for what it's worth, I understand that a competition that receives 50,000 submissions generates a lot of great buzz for Capcom and potential sales and everything. But Capcom totally could have also just...

came up with these same villains, right? It didn't require the masses. To be like, we're out of ideas. We need your help. To our point, it's the third Mega Man game. You still have elements you can use. You have like... you know there's just there's an endless but we know it there's up to 10 megamans and all those megaman x games like we know there are others but here um they're already asking for help yeah there is something very alluring to me

About the idea of like being a kid and, you know, I, games that I liked, I would design my own games, like on a piece of paper with colored pencils, you know? So the idea that like, just the imagination.

involved in like oh like people just made these like you can make a Mega Man what are they called bad robot master yeah no the what are these enemies called the robot masters you can make a robot master like out of anything you can think of like that's just that's just cool to me uh you know yeah obviously you're right like they didn't need to do this but i think you said it it's a pr thing and it it uh It seems to have been effective.

I actually do like the idea more that if it was like, guys, we're totally out of ideas. We really need help. They were in crunch. They were obviously in crunch. They make these games once a year and there's a team of like six people making it. it's almost like it's going to be harder where it's like oh yeah we got to pick now we have to design things based off of something someone else came up with we have to design like gameplay around it

But while we're talking about the design of these things, I do want to also just say I really just all the enemies, all everyone, everything on on screen, like in a regular stage. I just I really like it. They're so.

silly but so cool and so and still kind of scary like at the same time and it's just like it all they they should not all three of those things shouldn't fit together so well but they do i i really appreciate the design of all these Mega Man games yeah at the very least you can say that it's too many enemies on a screen or that the enemies are really hard or whatever but like it is also like thoughtful enemy

design in the sense of like how each enemy is completely different from each other yeah it's not just like a different skin shade than every other enemy that you fought and they just come at you and run at you. They have mechanics. So the pole vaulting guy sucks but it's also really cleverly designed. Um, we were, you were talking about contests, Joe, and I just wanted to mention the two that I know of, which is, uh, I think Nintendo held it for Legend of Zelda Link to the Past.

they're uh the winner of a contest i think in the power maybe something else um was in like a secret house that you could um get into and his name would be in the game so he was literally in the legend of zelda

And you know this one, but I'll tell the listeners. There's also the secret boss in Kingdom Hearts 1. kurt ziza which sounds like a villain to begin with like they couldn't thank god the guy's name was kurt ziza and not like jim smith right exactly like i'm fighting jim smith but like kurt ziza like i didn't know what a kurt ziza was yeah i didn't think it was a person but i also don't you gotta look up kurt ziza kingdom hearts because it's like a snake

in robo-armor, kind of? Not robo-armor. This was something that they planned to make based off of a fan? Well, I think they already made the enemy. I don't think they waited to find out who won. Yeah. The fan just happened to be a snake in armor with swords. 40 snakes. Yeah, perfect. But when I was a kid, I just have to say about Kurt Caesar, like I didn't know that it was a fan contest. And I just remember, like I didn't, my brain didn't.

read Kurt as the name Kurt. Yes, I still don't. To this day, I don't do that. I just read it as one thing, Kurt Ziza. Yeah, and when I learned about that, I was like, oh, of course, Kurt, that's a name. But it didn't read that way to me because it just sounds like such a Final Fantasy Kingdom Hearts enemy name. Yeah, well, Kurt is a good name because think about it. To your point about John Smith or whatever, even if it was just John Ziza.

Like that, that doesn't cut it for me. That's not right. John is too popular. Kurt does feel like an attack even like, like something that might slice you. Don't get curted. Yeah. Like a Mike, Mike Zeezer. Yeah, Mike Ziza's not doing anything other than making pizzerias. Yeah, I'm sorry, guys, but none of the three of us have names that would work as an enemy in a Squaresoft game. I agree. I agree 100%. Okay, moving on.

Because we probably should. Back on track to the Wily Fortress. Just want to talk about some of the bosses in there. We don't have to do comprehensive or anything. But I need to tell you where I lost. my Mega Man 3 mojo, and that was with a good old friend, the Yellow Devil. He's back. He's the Yellow Devil Mark II, and he's basically the same idea, if you think about it. He looks different, sure.

And he behaves like kind of the same way where he moves from block from block, one side of the screen to the other. And I know there's a pattern and I know you can learn it. I cannot learn it fast enough before I get hit.

and I wish I could have been that guy who said I overcame it in time for the podcast, but I could not beat the Yellow Devil. I would have maybe tried a little harder if I could have died and went right back to... like fighting him like like the room right before him and you just go right back in but you have to do the whole level over again too which is a short level but it's just like it was just asking too much i wasn't going to be able to figure out the pattern

So from that moment on, it did become a Game Genie moment. But the Yellow Devil just remains inaccessible to me when he appears in these games because he was tough the first time. He's tougher now. Or maybe not, because the slide adds an interesting mechanic where you can slide under these. I just think there's not enough room in the fight for me to be able to take these hits. Because when you get hit by a block, it's not like...

oh, okay, I just can't have that happen 12 more times. It's taking off chunks of your damage, of your health. So you have to make sure that you learn this pattern quickly. Yeah, and then I don't remember in the other games... The pieces of him do different patterns now. They bounce and they don't just slide across the screen anymore. Yep, and there's a weird glitch thing there where if they're in the blobby form...

If you are hanging out on the other side that he's not on, you'll take massive damage for being on that side where he's going to spawn in. And I'm like, well, that doesn't, you know, I shouldn't know that. Like, there's nothing over there currently. Yeah, and I just, I don't want to assume, I usually am under the assumption that everyone listening to this knows more about these games than I do, but just...

Just for the sake of caution, if anyone doesn't know what the Yellow Devil is, it's this giant enemy that's maybe, you know... 20 times the sprite size of Mega Man, and each little cube 20th sprite, each portion of his sprite breaks off from him and shoots across the screen.

one at a time that you have to dodge and that's just in between its attacks so like not only are you fighting him but like every couple seconds you have to like wait while he transitions to the other side of the screen and avoid all of those too so it's like you're in kind of two fights at once all while and then this is gonna i'm just gonna like shove my nitpicks into this section right here all while there is some very questionable hitbox stuff going on

Um, and maybe some input eating. I don't know how you guys felt with about these specific complaints, but I felt like your hitbox against a lot of enemies was larger than your sprite. And, uh, I would like input to turn around to shoot, and I would eat my turnaround input, and I'd be shooting in the opposite direction. Yeah, that happens. These are things that happen playing this game, so it's not always your fault.

when you get hit or fail to take advantage of an opening, and sometimes that hurts. Yeah, and I don't want to say that the yellow devil is impossible. I just don't think I had that. the time commitment to make it beyond that. Because what's interesting is the yellow devil is pretty early on in Wiley's castle and he's tough.

After that, you have to fight these Mega Man holograms, which are also like a tough enemy if you don't understand that like, oh, only one of them is the real Mega Man hologram, which is like, wait, that's not how that works because I'm the real Mega Man.

What is this? One of them is also the real Mega Man and the other two are holograms? Or are they all three holograms? Anyway, that one's a challenging boss because they kind of like... appear from their hologram base they run to the left shoot like crazy all three of them at the same time and homing at you

uh all three of them and then they run to the right and they shoot some stuff and then they go back to their hologram base and and then you have to like oh i don't know which one's the real one anymore because now they'll appear so you kind of have to do some guesswork but if you had the snake power up and you knew that

You can actually take out the real Mega Man in one sequence because the snake thing will do enough damage if you just spam it before he goes back in the hologram tube. So that one's like...

Okay, at least there's like a cheese method. There's no cheese method to Yellow Devil. You just have to be able to survive at least three sequences of him doing that like block to block thing. The after the holograms is the...

boss rush of every single robot master in Mega Man 3. Not the Mega Man 2 ones again, but the Mega Man 3 ones. And I gotta say, like, it's nice that this time you don't have to... do all of the bosses and then immediately fight dr wiley i think that was true in megaman 2 uh but this is this is still not good i feel like i complained about this on megaman 2 i hope i did uh but i don't think that this is

great design to be like okay the whole beginning of the game was go through their stage find the robot master take them down to get I don't know what are they collecting here it says it in the manual they're collecting some kind of elements They're connecting energy crystals. So you collect those, right? That's what the whole point is. And then Wily runs off with them after you collected them.

So why are they back? And why is it just them, like, instead of, like... Because Wiley rebuilt them with his own... I know, I know, but, like, it's like we already... It's treading ground we already did. You know what I'm saying? And now it's just like, oh, we'll do it all in the same sequence.

I just don't like that, but it is, you know, to add to the challenge. It's a tough challenge, but now you know their weaknesses, presumably, and you'll be able to deal with them without losing too much health. And they give you health.

after you defeat each of them. So you could theoretically, like even if you have a bad fight against one, you could have two good fights and go back to full health. And like I said, you don't have to fight Dr. Wily at the end of this boss rush. So it's not as challenging as it once was. Still padding. Yep, still padding. I totally agree with you. Then you fight Dr. Wiley in his new Wiley machine. I don't know. I'm sure these things have a more official name, but it's the third iteration of this.

This is where it almost just becomes that moment in the game where like, if you got to this point, you're fine. You know, like now it's all like cinema flair and just like, let's wrap up this story because, and I'm sure there'll be some people that disagree with me. But Wily's a pretty easy fight. And after him, you fight Gamma with Wily controlling him. Gamma, by the way, for plot point, is just like he's supposed to be like the one robot that will protect the world.

And it's just like, I don't think we should ever be building a giant robot to protect us, especially if we have all these robots that go bad. uh in this world we shouldn't be building more of them but they did that every single one yeah like every single one ever in the history of the universe right uh and so he comes out with this awesome sprite where um

You know, he takes up the entire screen. He's kind of like in the background. But his stage, again, it's just a boss fight. It's pretty easy if you know the weakness. You could take him down in two shots. And finally... The top spin power up is is useful because if you do get to the second phase of the gamma boss fight.

And top spin on top of his head. It's an automatic KO. So what a cool way to finish the game by just doing a little, oh, yeah, well, how about this? And tornado spinning on his head.

A little finishing touch. A little finishing touch. I mean, you know, after that, it's all story beats. We find out that Proto Man is Mega Man's brother. That's interesting. Yeah, I wouldn't know. I wasn't really sure what was happening. Yeah, so it's his brother, which they kind of tease us with. They also do like a credits list. They're like number... the number of the robots so now we have like number eight elect man number nine right but it's like

It gives it gives those ones like their purpose and everything. But then eventually, like with the other robots, it gives them like the name and then like another name. And I was like, who's is that like the actor? I couldn't find a solid answer I'm sure it's just somebody who worked on the game but I'm like why are they being paired with these and then I was like oh you know what maybe it's the winners of the contest

Oh, okay. I couldn't confirm it. I couldn't confirm it, but I have to think that's the most likely thing. I do like the idea of just making up an actor name. Because remember, I'm pretty sure, didn't Castlevania do that? The original? Yeah. I've never seen the ending organically, but... I forgot about that. Yeah. Also, a neat little thing here at the end of Mega Man 3, after you learn that Proto-Man's your brother and everything, you see him in the sky.

But if you look to your right, you will also see a little UFO, and that is probably Dr. Wiley's hinting that he is not gone, and he will return. Who would have thought? Who would have thought they would make Mega Man 4? I would think. They've made up to 11 now, right? I actually don't know.

I feel like 11 came out, like, 9 and 10 were still, like, NES-inspired, even though they came out, like, on the Wii or something like that. But 11 is, like, a more modern, like, faithful thing, but made by Capcom.

Well, it's pretty crazy to me that we're going to have six of these by 1992 and then only 11 by 2025. Yeah, right? Like, what happened to the pace? But you have to remember, then they jump over to the X series, Joe, and there were eight of those. Oh, okay. So those... still our Mega Man series yeah and then there was there was like alphas Mega Man alphas as well and then the 3D one where you can like kick a can sure

There's also Mega Man Soccer on the Super Nintendo. I don't know why they made that. It really is a thing. Oh, wow. Yeah, I wish I was joking. But to give some development context here for just Mega Man 3...

The development began pretty much immediately after Mega Man 2, and the lead supervisor of the first two games, Akira Kitamura, quit. I guess like in the middle of this game or like maybe like in the early weeks of it. But they basically had to like figure out how to do this without the guy who had been making them. So it's already a tight team. That's why they hired out all those kids. Right, right, right. And Inafune, who's the artist who's credited with a lot of Mega Man success.

He said that Mega Man 3 is one of his least favorite entries in the series due to what went into the game and what was behind the release of the game. So that just sounds like maybe a lot of... in fighting about what drama three should be yeah exactly stuff that like he's like not going to tell us but he kind of told us everything by saying that the kids yeah yeah um but

I don't know. I don't feel like this is a rushed, unfinished game. It's bigger than the other ones. It can just continue expanding the scope. Yeah, it definitely has a polish to it. You know, it's in that high percentile of all NES games by far, as far as, like, polish and completeness. Yeah, I feel like there's usually some kind of, like, telling mark.

That, like, oh, this game went through, there were a lot of arguments, there were some falling outs. I think it's more noticeable in, like, I think maybe, like, the... I don't know. If you watch, like, what happened... Like on YouTube, that's one of my favorite YouTube series about like just games and some movies that have really troubled production timelines and stories.

uh usually you can tell like that this game is like kind of the committee that designed it didn't really like each other and this doesn't really have any of those hallmarks right right and um this is more this is in like development context but left in the game. There's a lot that you can do if you plug in a second controller while playing Mega Man 3 that probably wasn't intended. It was probably debugging code for the game.

Because it's completely removed in the European version, which I've got to imagine came out afterwards. It wasn't like, oh, stop the presses. We'll spend a couple extra days. It was like, the controller 2, if you hold the right... on the d-pad the right button on the d-pad it gives megaman a super jump uh even allowing megaman to jump out of pits and such like he can just jump almost the entire height of the screen if you hold up

it will slow down the animations. And if you hold up and a, it will freeze the timer on some of the animations. So not like the, there's no like in-game clock or whatever, but like the timing on some of the animations, including. like no yeah enemy attacks and explosions and other things um so it it even causes like some bosses to just like freeze in place so um

If you haven't tried that, plug in a second controller. All right, that sounds like something that would happen to a game with a rough design schedule. Yeah, but again, would you ever think to plug in a second controller on a one-player game? No. Should Mega Man 3 have had a battle mode where you and one of you plays as Mega Man, one of you plays as Proto Man, and you have all the power-ups, and you just shoot at each other in an arena?

No. That's kind of just what the Proto-Man battles are. Right. I do love that. I think it is online. It looks like Journey. You don't know you're online. Spoiler. I think. I never played it. Wow. Huge spoiler. But probably not now. I mean, is anyone online playing Journey right now? To be fair, I never played it, so I'm just guessing. So it's really not a spoiler. It's a theory that I have. Well, we'll go on that journey together, Joe. I love it. You can't. You can't do that.

The PlayStation 1 version of this game, which exists apparently, I had no idea. um rockman complete works so that makes me think it's a japanese only uh game but it added a uh what was called a navi mode i guess navigational mode which added on-screen hint pop-ups, which I can only imagine must be incredibly annoying. Shoot the enemy. Yeah, right? What could it have done other than been like...

Use this weapon on this boss, right? There's not a lot of like, you know, oh, watch your step, right? You don't need something like that. But again, just another thing that FromSoft stole. From earlier video games. And these features were added to the Mega Man Anniversary Collection, so maybe I should look at playing the baby mode.

with my copy on PS2 I could definitely use a baby mode for these games I feel like I also heard though that there was like extreme lag on the anniversary collection on PS2 so maybe that's why I was so bad at those games What could possibly make a PS2 game lag an NES game? I don't know. What made a PS1 disc... Why did a PS1 disc make Chrono Trigger lag?

Why did the chicken cross the road? Oh, actually, you know what? Yeah, Joe, you're right. It was the load times, not actual lagging. And also, like, would it matter if things lagged in a turn-based game? Anyway.

Some questions, okay? Okay. Which single mechanic makes Mega Man 3 feel the most different from Mega Man 2? The slide? The new friendly dog? Or the Doc Robot stages? The slide. See, I might play devil's advocate here and say, I think maybe the Doc Robot stages. The slide does, but I feel like, honestly, it didn't.

it having not played the other ones in a while i was not like oh my god this is so different i actually had to remember yeah wait was there a slide in megaman 2 or not so like it definitely does make a difference but i don't think it was like uh I don't think it was as significant as there being eight more bosses, you know, granted now just to argue with myself here, you don't even have to talk. I'll just argue with myself. Um, granted that the fact that they are taking previous bosses.

Maybe just by definition makes it more like the previous games and not more separate. So who knows? I mean, my argument against that is that some people. would never even notice that those bosses exist because they don't get to them. They don't get to them. Fair enough. Which is me. Me too. So I'm going to stick with the slide. To me, it's like you can automatically tell the difference between

Like Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 and Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3. Because in Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3, you had the revert. And that means you could like... you could have these really crazy long like combos going and I could be wrong. And maybe that was into, but, but like it's something foundational and like, That slide is like a foundational move that you're going to either use all the time or completely forget about. But it's still like it's a part of your move set. Yeah, I'm sold. I rescind.

What one change would you make in a Mega Man 3 remaster without losing the NES feel? Hmm. I might make my proto-man change. Give him a... Make him... Give him some power-ups of his own. Should he have new power-ups you've never seen, or should he have callback power-ups? Like, what are you thinking? I like new power-ups you've never seen, only because I like the idea of, like, there being these...

unobtainable things that he's doing like he's on his own alternate journey he's an alternate version of you he's got totally different things maybe if you really want to get uh if you really want to get like you know make the game development a little more complicated is uh Give him one power up that counters each of your power ups in some way. It's kind of interesting that we've never had like a Final Fantasy game where like halfway through we run into the other group that's questing.

Yeah, we had the same plan over in our town. We defeated this boss already. We're planning to do this. It's like, oh, you guys want to team up? And they're like, no, we want to stop you too. there's gotta be a final fantasy that has that maybe not a final fantasy but uh definitely an rpg has to have that mechanic in it somewhere because that's just really fun that's a fun idea i agree with you i like the proto man one sean not to put you on the spot but can you top it

No, I don't have any. I think, like, it would... It would be a multitude of changes. Yeah, I hear you, I hear you. But also, I feel like you did call out your biggest complaint was about the ammunition not replenishing between deaths, and maybe that's a simple enough fix.

to like call it slap a remaster on it it's now easier there you go uh yeah and you know i didn't i didn't think about the question either if i'm being honest but in in terms of like what I would want to see now while still keeping the NES feel like I think you can just release the same game but like let's give these games like the pixel remaster treatment where you can kind of like tweak them as necessary like

Okay, enemies do, you know, 0.5 times damage now, you know, and you just turn that setting on and you go through the game and you're able to experience it. But it's kind of like, you know, you know what you did. You went into the settings and you had to change those things. There's no like easy mode, but you have to live with that. It's the same thing with turning experience points up four times on any of the Final Fantasy Pixel remasters.

I'm going to be able to sleep at night doing that because I have now gained enough time to go to sleep. If I did the one time experience, I would be still playing to make up the same amount of time as the four times. So I'm fine with it. I think a lot of games. not even just NES games, but a lot of older games, could benefit from just like this settings menu where you kind of like adjust the feel of like...

Especially for JRPGs. How often turn-based encounters happen? Do they happen at all? I'm not saying change the system where it scales with you or something. God, no. Please don't do that. I have one now. Please.

Blood and gore. Why not? It's Mega Man. Yeah, have like a blood and gore slider. You can go from like none, like default, and then like truly like gib-tastic, like super meat boy. Stuff on all the walls and stuff. Would it be blood or would it be oil? Oh, you're right. It's like oil and gore. I think that...

You should still keep the graphics just pixelated, you know, exactly the same graphics, but have, like, fully, like, Unreal Engine 5 blood and gore coming out of it. The Japanese subtitle of Mega Man 3. was Dr. Wily no Saigo which means the end of Dr. Wily so I guess they were trying to like fake out a trilogy here but I don't think anyone thought that this was like the end of a trilogy but you could make the case that like

Mega Man 1, Dr. Light and Dr. Wily are working together and Dr. Wily betrays Dr. Light and then you have that. In Mega Man 2, now Wily's acting on his own.

So, you know, you got to take him down with the new robots he created without the help of Dr. Light. And now, at the end of the trilogy, Wily's back with Light, but only to... betray him again but that's not really like I don't know that's just like a repeat of the story of one a little bit except for now you already know that he did the betraying yeah that sounds a little like daytime TV maybe that's exactly what Mega Man was made for a little telenovela

It's a will they, won't they with Dr. Light and Dr. Wily. Will they get back together? Yeah, they should have. Between each level had sort of like a B plot that went over. Like their little love affair. Yeah, just seeing them like out to dinner and, you know, Dr. Wiley's like, what do you say we play credit card roulette to decide who pays for the bill?

Do they have credit cards in Mega Man? I don't think there's money. Yeah, there's no money either. That's so interesting. Yeah, there's three things. That's it. Robots, people, and robot dogs. Yes. But that begs the question, are there dogs in the Mega Man world? No. Just robot dogs? Yeah. Maybe they're in like a simulation. Maybe Dr. Light and Dr. Wiley went inside a computer. Well, yes, of course they are. Is it a simulation though? Or like just inside of a program?

Well, we are in a simulation. And they're in our program. Got it. Okay, that's all my stuff. I just wanted to mention real fast since I was talking about the anniversary collection. There is one other way to, like, play these. in the old-fashioned way, and that is with the Sega Genesis release of The Wily Wars. It only came out on Genesis. It remakes Mega...

Yeah, The Wily Wars, and it remakes Mega Man's 1, 2, and 3 with a 16-bit art style, but apparently also, like, some different physics and stuff, too, so I'm curious, like... are the wily wars like panned like do they not feel like megaman or is it like a slept on thing where it's like oh a lot of people just don't know about it and turns out like that like just like how super mario all-stars doesn't like replace

super mario brothers 1 2 and 3 on the nes it kind of like is like well i prefer to play it on super nintendo with all stars or no i pretend i prefer to play it on the nes like the way it was intended interesting conversation i don't have an opinion because i've never played wily wars But I do have an opinion on something, Sean. And that is if Mega Man 3 will be on the Essential Games list.

For me, Mega Man 3 is the tightest Mega Man yet. Mega Man 2, while a great game, Mega Man 3 felt more accessible more dynamic and the new mechanics that were added the slide uh rush and um the uh dock robot stages are all like even if i don't love the length of the Doc Robot stages, they're all like welcome things in terms of expanding Mega Man. They all make it feel like a bigger game. I don't feel like this game is unfinished or like...

a decline in the series. I feel like the slide isn't just like a gimmick thing. It feels like it's part of Mega Man, which makes it like I said, it will be interesting to go back to one or two. And I know I said it. on Mega Man 2's episode, but now I really question both 1 and 2 being on the Essential Games list, and especially 1, obviously.

uh, when three can get the job done. Uh, I think it will just be about though, like Mega Man three and two are kind of like, the same exact engine the same game so they're almost like compliments to each other do do you just have to like suck it up and put one like are we in a situation where we need to do that or can we just agree that like both are great like that's a discussion we'll have later

Today is all about Mega Man 3, and I'm happy to say that even though I think this game is still just as hard, the accessibility features that they added and just the kind of like... The way that it flows as you move on, not becoming like this increasingly more challenging thing, but just kind of this thing that like, well, if you made it this far, you can probably persevere.

feels better than what was happening with Mega Man 1 and 2, where it was like, yeah, you're lucky to be here, and you'll be lucky to get any further. I appreciated this change of pace in Mega Man 3, and so I'm giving it my Essential Games List stamp. What about you, Joe?

Um, I think that the Mega Man series, just talking about all three of them right now, they're still the goat when it comes to power-ups. Just their ability to keep things balanced in a way where, like, everything that you get is useful. You get tons of power-ups. They're all very, well, mostly very helpful, very useful in different scenarios.

but you never feel overpowered. It still feels like a challenge in that there are specific things that are being balanced. There's bosses and enemies that are being balanced where you can beat it without these things.

or with them like that's like that's quite the feat in my opinion to to to design something like that um i i feel like this episode we have sounded maybe a little negative um i'll be honest i thought that uh mike i thought you were not going to vote at essential uh just based on the the episode so far uh i thought that And maybe Sean will have a chance to prove this right or wrong on his end. But I thought I was going to be a lone essential vote for this one. But I really did enjoy it.

I haven't played the other two in a long time. So in my flawed memories of two, I guess I vaguely remember maybe liking two a little more. But I do firmly believe that, like, there... There's no need for like only one game existing on, on this, you know, in this series existing on the essential games list. I think that if all three games are fantastic games that are worth playing, then all three games are essential games.

So what I'm bringing it down to is if somebody asks me, hey, I'm into video games, should I play Mega Man 3? What is my answer going to be? My answer is going to be definitely for Mega Man 1, 2, and 3. At least...

before I do a revisit of them. That's where I stand for now. So right now, I still, I'm going to give my essential vote for three different games. I think one, two, and three are essential. All right, Sean. Okay, yeah, so I, um... I mentioned earlier that I revisited our past, at least our essential games list sections for Mega Man 1 and 2 just so that I could recalibrate.

where my head has been these past however many years um and i think it's because like i don't know i think my mood has just shifted like i think i i have less patience now um Because I didn't really... I didn't have all that much fun playing this game. And I know that I did in 1 and 2. But does that mean... Does that mean that this isn't essential? Because like... It's just not really my cup of tea right now because it really isn't.

But, like, it's sort of like, you know, when I talk about football and, you know, there was a time in my life where I would have just said, like, you know, no, no, no. Tom Brady sucks. Tom Brady is a system QB. And it's all Bill Belichick. And, like, there's nothing that he's got that you couldn't plug anybody else in. They'd win just as many Super Bowls. But, you know, looking back on stuff.

And, you know, he then won another Super Bowl somewhere else. And then Bill Belichick wasn't very good. I'm getting off topic. Basically, it's more so like you have to. I visually see objectively that this is just an improvement on two games that I voted essential. That is what this is. Like, there's no way that this is a worse game than those two.

I just didn't, you know, I'm at the point and I'm at a point in time where it's just I didn't really have that much fun with it. But, you know, as like an objective observer, I'm just going to say, yeah, it's essential. I'm concurring. Like, I'm not gonna argue about it.

I do think you bring up a good point, though, about one specific thing, and that is the enjoyment that you are having as somebody who is playing through all of these NES games with limited time. You know, like we release an episode every Friday. Like, it's hard to pick up a franchise that you last touched years ago, right? Like, Mega Man 2 was a while back now. And it's hard to also just, like, keep switching gears and being...

good at these things and Mega Man games in general require them to, you have to be good at them to have fun. You are otherwise learning how to play the game. I think that's worth mentioning that Mega Man 3. And Mega Man 2. And Mega Man 2 actually had like an easy mode, if you recall. It had like a, they called it normal mode, but you could also play difficult mode.

So that one even had like a toned down version thing. Mega Man one was the hardest of the batch. No question. But like, even if these games become more accessible, that's from the viewpoint of like, changing things within the design of Mega Man games to kind of like tone them down they're still Mega Man games they're still challenging compared to the games that we play nowadays where like

Basically, everyone wins as long as they're willing to play. I can't think of somebody who wouldn't be able to finish God of War 2018 if they just wanted to play it. They're never going to get stuck. And like that boss is too hard. Like it's basically like watching a story. Mega Man is not that kind of series. And so, yeah, if you're like picking it up.

And going through it and dying a lot. Like, Joe even joked in the episode that his Mega Man is the one that explodes all the time. Like, yeah, that happens. But that has to also be, like, a rewarding thing, too. And I think that's what Mega Man gets right, is that, like, you'll die, I don't know.

you know, 20, 30 times or whatever, but like you'll get better along the way. This isn't, there's no cheap shots in this game. There are things that might feel unavoidable or that you personally just can't overcome. For me, that happened to be Yellow Devil, but... On an infinite timescale, everything on Mega Man is very achievable in the sense of what NES games are offering. There are tons of really cheap or needlessly hard NES games. This is just one that requires more like...

patience to love. Yeah. I also, I was going to mention something similar when we were talking about the kind of the artificially drawn out length of the game, which I don't disagree with. I do think that like, yeah, having that. those extra levels but having them not be new levels does make it feel a little artificial but it probably is an easier pill to swallow when you're playing this game you're picking it up and putting it down over like years as a child

As opposed to us where we're like, yeah, we got six days to play. Obviously, we start sometimes a little before the week before, but still, it's just a thing that's... there is a time limit where we're like we got to get as far as we can in this amount of time as opposed to like yeah this is just the game that I had for the year you know one of my two or three video games

Then it would be like, yeah, this is how far I am. I'm going to put it down for a few months. I'm going to pick it back up eventually. It's a little different in that context. That's sort of my... It's just also being kind of like trying to have some internal consistency. But I know I have used the defense in a lot of games that we have talked about difficulty in a negative sense of just like, well, if I actually had more time, this would be...

I'd find this a lot more satisfying and the word I am looking for eludes me, but fulfilling. Whereas, you know, it's just the time crunch kind of takes...

Takes the magic out of it sometimes, but I still like doing it. Yeah, and without spoiling it, I do know what the change is in Mega Man 4. Do you guys? No. I don't. Okay, cool. So I won't spoil it here. Is it online secretly? Yeah, it's always online. He's barefoot now. Oh, that would be a twist, right? He takes... He takes off the blaster. He just fights with his fists now. It's actually Samus underneath all the armor.

samus versus megaman is like something that people didn't really make a big deal out of on smash brothers when they finally were both in the same game right like i feel like megaman mario wasn't really like mario's got sonic yeah Mega Man should be going off against Samus, I suppose. Or Samus against Simon or whatever, right? Who'd they put in for... Did they put in Simon or did they put in Trevor? I think Simon.

Good. Okay, no, I can't remember. What weird is, I played Smash for the longest time, and somehow DLC ruined it for me. I stopped playing when they started doing those season pass things, and now I can't remember. any of the 87 people that are in Smash Bros. other than Mario and Yoshi. Is that one soccer player in it now?

Oh, Ronaldo? Yeah, Ronaldo. He's in it, right? Well, he's in Fortnite, and I heard that just the concept of Fortnite is going to be the next character in Smash Bros. After Home Depot. Home Depot for Smash... Seven confirmed. Outro Music