This Week In Retro: Mega Man Legends (Patreon)

December 18, 1997: Dig, Mega Man! For everlasting peace!

by Diamond Feit

2022 marks the 50th anniversary of Pong, the first hit arcade game. 50 years of history is nothing compared to other mediums, most of which stretch back a century or more. As silly as it sounds, I view the 1970s as the prehistoric age of video games as programmers and eventually large corporations struggled to define what a "video game" could be. This makes the 80s the wild west, a period of rapid expansion with most of the rules we now take for granted being written on the fly. Successful games warranted sequels, but those subsequent creations often varied wildly in tone, genre, and basic gameplay from their predecessors.

Sticking with this metaphor, I consider the 90s a sort of industrial revolution. Competition intensified as new consoles seemingly dropped every year, technical fidelity improved at a rapid pace, and everyone convinced themselves that the only path forward for the medium lay in three-dimensional gaming. While this glut of new platforms led to plenty of original concepts getting a shot at the market, it also forced established franchises from the 8-bit era to adapt in a hurry. Making an NES game using sprites on a cartridge and making a PlayStation game using polygons on a CD are two very different processes, and not every developer (or brand) survived the transition.

Amidst that tumultuous time, Capcom stood tall as an 80s success that grew even larger in the 90s. The company had produced lots of hit arcade and home console titles in its early years, and maintained that momentum in the following decade with popular releases like Street Fighter II, Breath of Fire, and Resident Evil. Of those three series, the latter is particularly interesting as it debuted on the Sony PlayStation and used 3D graphics, but began its life as a follow-up to a 1989 8-bit RPG. By experimenting with new technology in order to revisit past concepts, Capcom demonstrated a willingness to innovate, not just iterate, when adapting previous works for new audiences.

If we're talking about Capcom in the 1990s, however, we must talk about Mega Man. The Blue Bomber debuted in 1987 on the NES at a time when Capcom was more famous for its arcade output, with the eventual success of the action-platformer series helping to shift that reputation. By 1997, Mega Man had become a pillar of stability for his corporate overlords, starring in over 20 games across multiple console generations. Yet as Mega Man approached his 10th birthday, the producers who oversaw his games were eager to try something new. As Keiji Inafune said in a 1997 interview, "we wanted to break away from what Mega Man had been up to that point, and do something with more freedom."

And so 25 years ago this week, one day after the 10th anniversary of his very first appearance, Mega Man came to the PlayStation in an all-new adventure, Mega Man Legends. Beyond shifting the gameplay perspective from 2D to 3D, Mega Man Legends aims to tell a story beyond the usual formulaic plot of defeating Dr. Wily and his never-ending army of evil. In doing so, Keiji Inafune and his team rewrote the rules regarding their fighting robot, casting Mega Man and his allies in a very different light in order to appeal to an audience beyond his usual fans.

After a decade of just living his life as "Mega Man," in Mega Man Legends our hero has the last name of Volnutt as he travels the world with his sister Roll in search of ore to excavate in order to survive. They crash land on Kattelox Island, a quiet mining community that welcomes visiting diggers like the Volnutts. However, the residents are less inviting to traveling air pirates, a group of whom also happens upon the island at the same time. This puts Mega Man in the uneviable position of ingratiating himself to his new hosts by repelling armed attacks from his fellow new arrivals.

From his humblest 2D beginnings, one of the defining features of Mega Man's games was player freedom. All of the robot masters occupied their own individual lairs, linear levels that must all be completed before facing Dr. Wily. Yet players could always determine their own path by choosing which boss they wanted to fight. This metagame of Mega Man titles mattered because he grows stronger by taking the unique powers of each robot master as he destroys them.

Mega Man Legends puts several twists on that flowchart concept, delivering more freedom in some regards while restricting it in others. Kattelox Island, as a location, offers a degree of open exploration the likes of which 2D Mega Man games could never provide. The island is mostly peaceful, for one thing, so Mega Man has ample space to run around in with no threats at all. He can visit the local shopping arcade, take a peek in the library, or take his business directly to city hall. All of these places have ordinary people walking through them and, if there are streets, random cars driving around. It's nothing as complex as Grand Theft Auto but it gives Kattelox Island a whiff of realism that few video games bothered to provide at the time.

Mega Man Legends also goes above and beyond in the story department, in that it actually tells one for a change. I've gone on record with my appreciation for classic Mega Man games but even when later releases added cutscenes and *shudders* voice acting, they never had a narrative to speak of. They had characters, they had places, they had conflict, but their primary purpose was providing hours of action, not gripping plots. It's one reason Mega Man 2 resonated so strongly with us as children; I can still recall being shocked by Dr. Wily transforming into an alien before learning that the entire battle had been a facade, followed by a somber ending where Mega Man seems to disappear (or retire from fighting at the very least).

The flipside of this proto-open-world design is that the action necessarily becomes more rigid. Mega Man Legends has no main menu that lets players select their next destination; the only way to get around the island is by foot or occasionally hitching a ride to select locations. The territorial robot masters from the 2D era have been replaced with pirates and their adorable Servbot henchmen, and Mega Man will always face them in the same scripted order no matter what. Thankfully, Mega Man Legends' emphasis on storytelling and conversations must have upped the localization budget, as the voice acting is much improved compared to Capcom games released even one year earlier.

I might be burying the lede here, because fundamentally, Mega Man Legends plays nothing like any of dozens of previously-released Mega Man games—even Mega Man Soccer still focuses on running from left to right. Volnutt certainly looks like the previous heroes of the series, as he has the same blue armor, sports a built-in hand cannon, and tends to throw his arms up into the air when he leaps. Yet those 2D action titles demanded precision movement to evade fast-paced threats and skillfully overcome deadly obstacles. Boot up any NES-era Mega Man game and within seconds of pressing Start, you'll be swimming in hazards.

Mega Man Legends takes a far more lackadaisical approach to combat, giving the player a lot more open spaces to roam. Combat arenas are not only wide but also tall, as the pirates have a penchant for building flying war machines. With 3D controls still in their infancy in 1997 and dual-analog sticks not yet the norm, players had to make do with the D-pad and shoulder buttons in steering Mega Man into battle. This makes the simple act of turning around—an instantaneous ability in the 2D games—take entire seconds to complete. There's no way Capcom could expect Volnutt to succeed without diminishing his foes in both speed and number.

Yet as few players were accustomed to 3D action, even fewer staff members at Capcom knew how to design it. Producer Keiji Inafune had exclusively made 2D games prior to this project; only one member of the Mega Man Legends team had any experience with 3D thanks to his work on Resident Evil, but even that title used fixed camera angles, tank controls, and lumbering zombies to slow the action down and maintain tension. The brightly-colored bustling community of Kattelox Island is the polar opposite of the Spencer Mansion, as every location in Legends is fully modeled using 3D polygons, giving Mega Man Volnutt complete control over his line of sight.

As a Mega Man fan already feeling a little nostalgic for the NES in 1997, I bounced off of Legends hard when it came to the PlayStation. By no means a veteran of three-dimensional gaming, I had already spent dozens of hours playing Super Mario 64, GoldenEye 007, and a number of other titles that let me explore my virtual surroundings by the time I set foot upon Kattelox Island. Compared to the Mega Man games I had fallen in love with, Legends moves at a snail's pace with frequent, extended conversations between the Volnutts in between action setpieces that, while visually appealing, lacked any of the nail-biting thrills that the 2D incarnations had in spades.

Giving Mega Man Legends a second chance 25 years later, a lot of its charms shine through its fumbling approach to 3D movement and combat. The character models, while crude by today's standards, project energy and personality with large, expressive eyes and faces that actually emote—a stark contrast to the expressionless figures seen in contemporary games like Resident Evil or the much-celebrated Final Fantasy VII. I had fun kicking a can down Main Street, rescuing a villain from an angry dog, and I think I might have accepted a date from a stranger. I had substantially less fun fighting airborne foes who flew faster than my buster could track them, and the giant boss which fires ginormous green homing lasers drove me mad.

Whatever its flaws, I found Mega Man Legends far more inviting and memorable than I gave it credit for back in 1997, and I would love to see a modern take on an action/adventure hybrid like this with smoother controls and a more agile protagonist. It doesn't look like Capcom will resurrect the Volnutts anytime soon though; Keiji Inafune later told GameSpot that "[Mega Man Legends] didn't sell anywhere as well as I had anticipated." Capcom did invest in one spinoff and one sequel—the latter of which ended on a cliffhanger— but a proposed third game ended up canceled once Inafune left his position at the company to create his own studio.

I don't know if this qualifies as a silver lining, but at 35, Mega Man seems to have weathered the ups and downs of corporate whimsy quite well. He doesn't star in video games quite so often as he did in the 90s, but he's far from forgotten in the halls of Capcom. After a wave of rapid excisions of all things Mega Man in the immediate wake of Inafune's departure, the company eventually saw fit to create Mega Man 11, and in recent years has sought to tap into the Blue Bomber's past with legacy collections of past games. And if capitalism has demonstrated one thing, it's that an opportunity for profit can surpass any long-simmering grudge. Someday, with or without Inafune, we just might see Mega Man Volnutt kicking cans and picking flowers again.

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but is forever online, sharing idle thoughts on Twitter and playing games on Twitch.