Mega Man 11 came at a seemingly random time, released 8 years after the very well-received 10th iteration of the Blue Bomber’s classic range. Crashing out through the trail heading into the holiday season, Capcom have produced what can only can be considered a highly serviceable and faithful Mega Man game, albeit with the bare minimum done to warrant attempting to defibrilate the lad for another outing.
We all remember the explosive saga that occured when Keiji Inafune broke away from Capcom and formed what was then known as Comcept, now Level 5 Comcept. He pledged to make a true successor to Mega Man, being one of the original developers that worked on the series’ inception. Buckets of cash to the tune of $3.8 million rained upon him and his coworkers to give the style of game a true kickstart back to life.
In summation, Mighty No. 9 didn’t turn out to be the product anyone wanted, let alone what Inafune himself envisioned. A supposed return to glory was struck down by development problems and feature creep, delivering an underwhelming run-off-the-mill 2D platformer.
That was 2 years ago.
In late 2017, Capcom announced during the franchise’s 30th anniversary celebrations that Mega Man would be returning in his classic form, but with a twist, an evolution to the tried, true and extremely popular 8-bit recreation that the fanbase were STILL begging for hand-over-fist, despite nearly a decade of industry silence on the matter. Less than a year later, we have that game in our hands.
Everywhere that Mega Man 11 succeeds in its quest for innovation while obeying the mandate of 8-bit formulae it stumbles slightly. The functions are all there and working beautifully, yet a few things remain truly unrealised in how to bring classic Mega Man out of its retro funk without continuing to let the concept drag down further intricacies.
Anyone who knows video games knows the Mega Man formula by heart; It hasn’t budged an inch since Mega Man 2. Defeat the 8 robot masters, collect their weapons and forge a path through Dr. Wily’s fortress-of-the-day. Few risks have been taken with tweaks to this pattern, even with the prescence of a shop for power-ups and parts to minimally tweak the iconic jump-and-shoot antics.
Gameplay remains as bipolar in nature as it always has; You either spend the majority of your time panicking and hammering the X-Buster in every direction you see motion, or you aren’t on your first playthrough and wipe everything in your way out in an instant with weaknesses and smart use of Mega Man 11’s big showpiece, the Double Gear.
It’s hard to say whether the Double Gear was a wise addition, considering the base gameplay has changed so little, alongside what seems to be an abscence of difficulty tweaking to account for it being in your arsenal. In summary, the Double Gear is a dual-function superpower, either slowing time down around you, which remains highly circumstantial and difficult to implement on-the-move, or activating a high-powered move with each weapon the game has to offer.
This is where the balance starts to crumble. Abilities such as Power Gear Tundra and Power Gear Chain are just FAR too tantalising to not use whenever possible. With the ability to quite literally coat the entire screen in massive damage or pop out a cartoonishly large bomb that blows half the screen in front of you sky-high, you really have no need to even attempt nuance in tactics. This is heavily accentuated by the clear-as-day lack of proper balance tweaking done to account for the Double Gear being a function alongside the remainder of your abilities, hence you either struggle manically without it or you completely wipe with it in tow.
It doesn’t end there for the weird difficulty design. The very nature of basic platforming is your worst enemy in this game because far too much care has been given to keep the archaic binary design of succeed-or-fail challenges firmly locked-in. Jumping a gap to get to a single block in a pathway ascending to a higher area is all well and good, but when you consider the five or more enemies at any given time careening towards you in a beeline, you need to be ready to clear your path in very specific ways. There is roughly a 5% survival rate after getting hit while trying to platform in this game, usually down to pure fluke or convenient spacing that most of the time is set up by brute force, knowing that you stand a better chance of not plummeting into a death pit if you pop yourself into the middle of a field of chaos rather than try to edge-guard and take out enemies systematically.
While the lack of care in balancing for the Double Gear might find someone who doesn’t wield it constantly with nil health before they even realise it’s happened, they’re much more likely to meet demise from the plethora of death pit pokes and instinctual timed jumps the developers have lovingly planned out long before that even gets a chance to happen.
Mega Man 11’s venture into modernising the classic line’s visibly decaying skeleton is not as pretty as anyone would have imagined. Don’t get me wrong, the background work has some truly beautiful points, which they’ve used to attempt to make the universe seem less overtly block-like, but it is immediately undercut by the foreground’s visual design, which in every situation from cover-to-cover is giant, hideous building blocks. Where a series like Mega Man X succeeds is the use of environments to assemble a proper feeling of a lived-in world, rather than sending you through structures built exclusively to be a Mega Man level.
The tile design worked well while it remained in the 8-bit aesthetic, but they seemed to have forgotten that Mega Man 7 and 8 didn’t adhere to this intentionally primal visual style. It is immediately jarring to the eyes of the fanbase and newcomers alike, marking what I consider as the biggest trip-up the game has on show.
The thematic line-up is fairly weak in Mega Man 11. Some interesting elements barge their way into the arduous line-up in the form of Acid Man and Balloon Man, but remain easily overpowered by the inanity of concepts like Block Man and Impact Man (drops blocks and has a drill for an arm, respectively). After producing fairly memorable themes and bosses for the classic resurgence when Mega Man 9 and 10 came out, Capcom have sunk back to the dartboard approach to level ideas that was so visibily on parade when they flat-out asked for fan submssions, nearly delivering the series to an early death at the tail-end of the NES line-up.
All of this isn’t to say that they didn’t find some interesting uses for mundane ideas for the purpose of boss fights. Block Man bonds with a mass of blocks to reveal a large golem form that tries to hammer you into a corner, Acid Man goes for a dip in the acid bath to jet across the screen, covering the lower half with a tidal wave; Even the more traditional fights in the case of Torch Man and Blast Man have an interesting new element added to the mix due to the Double Gear’s slow-down function, properly tweaked to fit with them moving extra fast, rather than you moving extra slow.
It brings me zero joy to inform that Mega Man 11’s soundtrack might very well be the worst Mega Man soundtrack I’ve ever heard. There is absolutely nothing memorable in here, nor even endearing. Droll buzzing placeholder tracks play out without taking too much of your attention as you play, but it disappoints me that they couldn’t muster creation of an OST with real gusto and pace, the type of music that has always driven the action on show. They are completely capable of doing it, but the effort to do so is simply not here.
Mega Man 11 has a story, if you’d believe it. The story is nonsensical, riddled with holes and acted out like the voice actors just want to cash the check and get back to doing roles that matter. You weren’t expecting a killer narrative out of the Blue Bomber, neither was I. Does that make it okay? Probably not, but that discussion is far too extensive to pin here. Expect nothing, get nothing. All is as expected.
Jumping and shooting is still proper satisfying, even in the roughest and most chaotic of circumstances. Level layouts and boss fights will keep you guessing, at least as far as your first playthrough. The motions are passed and you come out of Dr. Wily’s fortress feeling like you’ve done it, again. You’ve completed yet another Mega Man game, barely different from the rest of them.
Of course, as is customary at this point, plenty of Time Attack, Score Attack and Boss Rush challenges lay at the side for you in the game’s Challenge Mode, which while unfortunately adding little in terms of actual content, extends the shockingly short length of the campaign to a more acceptable portion for what is nearly a full price game.
If Mega Man is your thing, the 11th installment wouldn’t be your least wise investment to say the least, so long as you aren’t expecting them to deliver properly on the promise of a fresh and evolved take on the formula. Perhaps this is just them regaining footing, ready to surge forward conceptually as we face the future. We won’t truly know until we play Mega Man 12.
While my overall impressions of Mega Man 11 might seem to appear definitively negative, the gameplay that everyone knows and loves is very much in-tact and is a blast to re-experience after such a long abscence. It was difficult to resist prefacing this criticism with the saga of Mighty No. 9, because while that was a complete failure in every regard, Mega Man 11 has cleared the bar.
That said, the bar practically sits on the ground after years of the iconic subgenre being neglected long-due tender loving care, but Capcom have nonetheless cleared it with the smuggest grin on their face you could possibly imagine.
Glitching Is Art 
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