Quick Critique: Mega Man Legacy Collection (Patreon)

In an attempt to justify my having bought not only the Mega Man games for yet another time but a collection of Mega Man games for yet another time, it was on sale. The games are what they are so I won't spend much time drooling over my life with Mega Man. Mega Man is a great game but they were working out a lot so it's kind of unfairly hard in lousy ways but it has heart. Mega Man 2 is one of the greatest video games ever made. Then they just start to get worse from there until you hit Mega Man 6 and it's just sad. It's great to see the games in super crisp, bright raw sprites on a TV but the Legacy Collection isn't quite sure of where it wants to be on authenticity. You can't use the triggers to cycle through weapons like in the remakes but they did add an auto fire option (which is total BS) so they're fine with adding extras. What really bothers me is that they left in slowdown and sprite flickering. Authenticity be darned, it would be far far better to provide the option to turn that off. And if memory serves me, the PS2 Anniversary Collection did just that.

There's more to focus on for the package itself. It has some extras but they don't go beyond what's pretty expected. It has some art galleries, but they've mostly been seen before or are in the Official Complete Works book. The biggest omission was that it doesn't have the Nintendo Power sketches of the Mega Man 6 user bosses or any of the Japanese contests. I would have loved to see those. There's a sound test, but it would have been nice to be able to use it in menus so you can listen to the songs as you browse the art gallery and notes. The names are wrong too. The giant robot dog's name is "Hot Dog". Everybody knows that! I don't care if North American instruction booklets just pulled things and names out of thin air, that dog's name is Hot Dog and the other enemies are Atomic Chickens, Tikis, Lightning Lords, Fan Fiends, and the Guts Dozer! The Legacy Collection doesn't allow for saving like the Anniversary Collection, but you can create one save state per game. They're oddly slow to create though. You go into the options menu, choose save, confirm you want to overwrite the previous save, click OK to confirm that the save was created, exit the menu, and the options menu then saves too. The gallery gives you a link to practice against the Robot Masters, but not enemies or Wily machines so it could have been a lot more complex.

The big new addition is a series of challenges but they aren't interesting or unique at all. They're all just some random snippets of a stage or you have to beat a boss. Some challenges even reuse the same snippet of the level again. There are leaderboards but if you watch the top players, they're not actually doing the challenge and are exploiting glitches to finish them. If all the challenges are is a way to showcase who can exploit glitches and abuse the rapid fire mode the hardest, then what's the point?  I think you're just scored based on your time to complete the challenge but it doesn't tell you the times for silver or gold and it really just encourages fast, sloppy play rather than something unique or thoughtful. The PSN trophies are basically the same. The only trophies are to beat each of the games and then to beat all the challenges. No real thought or care went into what could have been a really exciting part of the package. I beat enough of the challenges to unlock all the boss rushes and then left the mode. Thankfully, the challenges unlock in order of the games, so you can unlock the boss rushes (the only fun challenges) playing mostly MM1-3.

The Legacy Collection doesn't really seem to justify its existence in a world where you can hop online and buy the Anniversary Collection or download the original games and remakes on the eShop or PSN or even buy that NES Classic thing. If you don't have a way to play the early Mega Man games, then by all means wait for a sale and then pick this package up, it's totally serviceable. However, if you already own copies of the good games in the franchise, the extras in the Legacy Collection aren't worth the asking price and you can ignore what could have been a great way to showcase the franchise but is little more than a cash grab for nostalgia.