As the first three classic Mega Man games draw to a close, another three would open up. The initial three have created a foundation for the Blue bomber with amazing music, detailed graphics and hard as nails challenges, with effective and fun controls. Truly how every platformer should be like. To me, Mega Man is the ideal platforming game. Yes, Mario has it's many moments in the sun, and its platforming abilities shown to us as superb, but Mega Man is what perfects that platforming to the nth degree. So with another seven Mega Man classic games down the road, one can only hope that the future of this little boy in blue has games that match what it was before, trying to keep things fresh, excited, challenging and most importantly, maintaining that perfection of platforming that I have grown to love.

Unfortunately, this game fails that. Allow me to explain.

One thing worth mentioning about this game was that it was created in 1991, when the Super Nintendo came out. Capcom could have been working on a Mega Man game for the newly released console, but felt better if they kept with the 8-bit style. I don't know why they did it, but maybe they felt that it was better not to break anything that wasn't broken. This game gave me high hopes to begin with, with a killer cut scene and promising story, ones of which were hopeful to steer away from the old "Dr. Wily did it" plot that has happened three times now. It tells of Dr. Light receiving a letter from a Russian scientist, called Dr. Cossack. He claimed to be the worlds greatest engineer, releases his robot army on the world, and wanted to test his creations against Dr. Lights. The good doctor puts Mega Man up to the test in order to maintain peace. And so the game begins.

Eight new robot masters: Skull Man, Toad Man, Ring Man ,Bright Man. Dust Man, Dive Man, and Drill Man and Pharaoh Man, most of which sound fairly good. The same deal applies here, fight off all eight robot masters, go to Dr. Cossack's castle, and stop him. Normally in a Mega Man game, I like to spend a little time on the level select screen to try and work out the order, and I normally fail, but with these robot masters it's very hard to work it out. I can make a connection with a few, but them I can't make any more afterwards. I suppose Mega Man 3 had a few of these as well, so it's not that big a deal.

As with Mega Man 3, you have the helpful slide ability with you. In addition to that, you can also charge up your plasma cannon to deal more damage. As a bit of a purist, I feel that this kinda makes the game play a little too easy, but at the same time, it does balance out the difficulty a bit for those new Mega Man players. However, that being said, the whole game is disappointingly easy. it is by far the easiest Mega Man game I have played. Getting to the boss room in every level was a doddle with minimal deaths, and defeating most of the robot masters was really easy. Not all of them were easy, but most of them were.

How it normally works is that you fight a robot with your plasma cannon, defeat it, and hope that the next robot master you fight will be weak against the weapon you just acquired. Then you can just work around that with trail and error (or stubborn skill with your plasma cannon) to eat away at the rest of the robot masters. However with this game, charging your plasma cannon to full power does the same damage as that robot masters weakness. So in effect, you always have the power to deal 3 bars of health to the boss, making the point of working out and experimenting with different weapons almost pointless. You could just use your charged plasma cannon for all the bosses to defeat them easily. This makes defeating any boss pretty easy if you have basic skills in a Mega Man game. This annoys me because the charged plasma cannon doesn't balance the difficulty a bit, it makes the whole concept of the game too easy, making it disappointing to me. Bright man and Skull man were pretty much the same, and only Ring man proved the only real challenge, showing you had to dodge his attacks effectively to beat him. The rest didn't have that, they seemed cheap and repetitive.

Another thing I found disappointing was the music. It wasn't as strong as the other three games. Truth be told, some of the music near the end (and the title screen music) was pretty amazing, but the rest seemed weak and not very engaging. The password screen music was annoying and not very well composed, not to mention lazy, and the level select music just didn't do it for me. The robot master levels themes just didn't catch me as good (well, most of them), and overall, the music generally disappointed me.

The last thing that annoyed me was the level design of the entire game. Some of the levels were too short for my liking, while others didn't have tricky enemy placement or hard platforming like the others had. It just had this...simplicity to it. It was too straight forward, and there were not enough quirks in the levels theme to keep me fully satisfied. However, I will praise it's different routes that it holds. Sometimes you can in fact branch off into a different direction, and you can come across either an energy tank, or a special weapon. The special weapons are basically like the items off Mega Man 2, so to speak. One is a cool grappling hook like the one Batman has, and the others are floating balloons you can step on for extra height. It is a nice addition that makes the whole thing not as straight forward as I might make it seem.

However, I will highly praise the graphics. If there ever was perfection in NES graphics, the Mega Man would get the gold in detail. As the NES Mega Man games grew on, the level of detail applied in the graphics would get greater and greater, and the forth game really started to show that. The backgrounds were nicely detailed, and the castle had a neat design to it. There was a nice level of detail in the blocks and all the enemies were nice to look at. The animation though is precisely the same as the first three games. The controls for that matter are exactly the same, as they should be.

Overall I give this game a 7.4/10     I wouldn't call this a bad Mega Man game, because in all fairness, it's not half bad as a platformer. However, as a Mega Man game, I found it hugely disappointing. The bosses were too easy to me by design, and were made that little bit easier with your newly found chargeable cannon, the music was disappointing to me, and the level design seemed cheap and lazy (for the most part). If you want to start Mega Man, then by all means start with this game. It's certainly a nice Mega Man game to start off with that doesn't exceed the intense difficulty the first three offer.