Game Reviews: Megaman 8

Megaman 8 Review

August 17th, 2014

  Well, this took me near 5 months of playing to beat this one but with blood, pain, and agony I've slain Wily in Megaman 8!

  Let me begin this review by saying Megaman 8 stood the chance to be a decent game. The anime cutscenes, aside from some forgivable bad dubbing, were nicely animated for their time. It was the 10th anniversary of Megaman and this seemed to lend to the next level of stepping up their game at Capcom.

  The graphics were pretty fine for PS1 standards but they leave a bad taste in my mouth as it's a 32 bit transition away from his retro 8 bit and even MM7's 16 bit style was cool.

  It terms of audio MM8 is middle of the road for me. The stages' music was ok but unmemorable which for a Megaman game is unforgivable due to the wonderful compositions of the previous games. The voice acting was bad too but that was standard fair for the 90s so I can let it slide with the exception of one instance in which I'll get to. Though it did seem the boss's voice acting detracted from any edge they had. For the most of the game the audio only bugged me so I muted it and put on other things.

  All the robot masters themselves were fine and well done. They all seemed to play on each others weapons and had a balanced system of rock paper scissors in terms of weaknesses so they nailed that part of the Megaman formula well. The weapons also felt like they had genuinely good uses outside of boss battles and were actually fun to mess around with, so thumbs up there.

  Megaman 8 also introduced an upgrade system so that things like knockback could be eliminated and more shots could be fired which can be bought with bolts that are generally hidden out of the player's way and promote exploration which is fine but the powerups all seem like stuff you should have from the start to make things less infuriating.  

   Another thing that sucks is they removed E-Tanks [energy tanks which you can buy or find to refill your health] and replaced them with a gimmicky fucking Rush item that allows him to once per life rain down random powerups of health but mostly weapon energy to fill you up. This was fine once I got used to it but must have led to a ton of otherwise avoidable deaths because of the randomness and location of his drops. 

  Now I think I'll just get into it. This game has some of the worst controls in any game I own. The delay on your jump is beyond fucked up and that honestly wouldn't be a problem but that's bad for two reasons. First is the standard reason, it makes the gameplay infinitely harder and platforming is a nightmare. I guarantee I lost 85% of the lives i lost in this entire game because of bullshit jumps.

  And that brings me to my most infamous complaint of this shit game is that they tried to be gimmicky. The level design is most stages is your typical Megaman setup with odd quirks most of which I thought were fine. For example, in Tenguman's stage I was treated to a sidescrolling classic shoot'em up level where the powerups were fan service from other Megaman games like Eddy and Auto from the previous title. I thoroughly enjoyed these stages, they were well conceived, not too frustrating, and were all around actually FUN. They did it again in Wily Stage 2 and it was awesome! Probably my favorite part of the game.

  As a polar opposite, on Coldman's stage I was presented with the single most ABYSMAL thing in any game ever without a doubt, the snowboarding segments. These segments were atrocious and absolutely broke the game for me. Aside from the delayed jumping which lost me most of the lives, a voice and icon appear on screen in a super annoying fashion and tell you when to jump which would be fine for a tutorial but it happens EVERY SINGLE TIME you do these segments for EVERY SINGLE JUMP. This is why I muted the TV, those signals were always fucking wrong about when to jump and lead to infinitely countless deaths.

  The main part of this game I will always remember and will prevent me from ever going back to it is Wily Stage 1, as it is the king example of these segments. The game to that point was standard Megaman, not the best one but still decent and had some good ideas. This segment broke me. It took me maybe a very segmented week to get there. I did this segment for the remaining 4 months I've played this game and it was what prevented me from completing this game for so long.

  The first time I beat it was late one night a few week back. I got the option to save and so I was incredibly happy to move on but after slaving through the remaining Wily stages and getting to his level I set the controller down to go to breakfast with my family, leaving the system on. I return to a powered down PS3 which I didn't think much of considering I had saved. Yet in typical Wily fashion, its a gauntlet and even if you save you go back. In the  end I beat that stage on 4 seperate occasions due to not being able to beat the game on 3 of those times. That’s bullshit to begin with, don’t have a save function that doesn’t save jack shit!

   But what’s so bad about that stage? Well, first of all, the problem is the platforms are way to small for a laggy jumping and sliding system. The screen also doesn’t scroll far enough for you to see where you’re jumping too. That’s bad enough but couple that with the atrociously precious jumping skill nessecary in order to circumvent these problems and it takes literraly months to perfect. Even now I couldn’t probably do that run of the lavaboarding stage perfectly, it’d take a lot of dying to get through. Even all that doesn’t amount to what comes next. You get a checkpoint after the lavaboarding segment but they had the balls to put a bullshit run through enemies and assatry of platforming right after it with a boss with another gimmick item weakness, the kicking ball bomb exclusive to this game that has terrible aiming for most purposes. He not only takes a ton of practice and lucky shot to beat but also if you die, you go all the way back to before the damn lavaboarding segment! This part of the game is the biggest shit compilation of a level I’ve ever seen. It’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for NES level of bad. It absolutely crushes the game and it’s playbility.

       Moving on from that, the final encounter with Wily is in essence a remake of the fight from Megaman 7 which if you know anything about that fight is the hardest final boss level in any Megaman ever due to the timing on the jumps you had to do to avoid his projectiles. Well, it is even more so broken now with the crippled jumping control and the lack of E-tanks. In MM7 E-Tanks were essential to beating Wily and you needed all 4 plus the SP-Tank. In Megaman 8 you have your singular health refill which you generally have to use right away due to the fact that it’s form 2 from a bullshit form 1 that usually killed nearly half my health at least. The fight took me a few hours but eventually I succeeded and finally conquered this bullshit filled monkey that’s been hanging on my back for half a year now.

   At the end of the day this game had a lot of potential but it’s weighted down by lazy or just generally bullshit problems and level design. Gimmicks are fine when done well as shown by the shooter segments but when done poorly like the boarding segments should be scrapped and not implemented as to not water down a decent game. Seriously, if they had removed the boarding segments of just fixed the jumping and scrolling issues this could have been a solid title with some unique gimmicks but they didn’t and that seriously detracts from my experience with the game. When the bulk of you time playing a game is spent bored with frustration trying beat a terribly programmed mess of segment and that hatred is what you have to take away, it’s utterly disappointing as a gamer. We don’t want to have to say games are bad and I’ve been really conflicted with this one but in the end it’s clear to me that one segment done incredibly poorly in an ultimately less memorable and mediocre entry into this beloved series can indeed ruin said entry. The good things are all weighed down by bad. The anime cutscenes are cool but the voice work is terrible. The levels are decently made with interesting bosses but the control is not good. There are good and bad gimmicks. It’s a game that had so much potential like Skyward Sword but many little things broke it very similar to that game.

   So in the end, I have to give Mega Man 8 a 5.2/10 for having some redeeming features but it’s ultimately a game I’d never want to go back to if possible because it’s just so broken at some points.