The Blue Bomber makes a wonderfully successful jump into the third dimension
What Is It? Mega Man is one of the most iconic characters in videogame history. The Nintendo games were classics that helped define a system and genre, while the Super Nintendo X games took the series to new heights. By the time the PlayStation and N64 were out, it was only a matter of time until the Blue Bomber tried his hand at a 3D title. (Yes, Battle & Chase was actually the first 3D Mega Man game, but it was a racing game so it does not count)
Mega Man Legends has a helmetless Mega Man teaming up with Roll, Barrel, and Data. Mega Man is a “digger”, a person who roams around exploring ancient ruins to find lost treasures. Roll is his spotter, Data is a monkey that allows you to recharge and save, and Barrel is Roll’s grandfather who helps run their ship. That’s honestly a decent bit of lore for a Mega Man game.
After crash landing on Kattelox Island, Mega Man begins exploring and interacting with people in a nearby town. You soon meet the Bonne family, a group of pirates acting as the game’s primary protagonists, who are also diggers searching for treasure on the island.
This is an open world Mega Man game. There are a few different sections of town, each with at least a handful of buildings you can enter. The Junk Shop will be a frequent stop for you, purchasing upgrades to your health meter, weapons, and refill canister being some of the more important actions there. Elsewhere, there are random shops to stop and chat with locals, a few side quests to handle, and a fairly busy city with an impressive amount of NPCs for a PS1 game.
The ruins are the primary action-oriented parts of the island. You will visit a few of them over the course of the game. They each have an overarching goal to progress the story, but also offer many items which you can hand over to Roll to craft your required, or just plain helpful, upgrades. Going into a ruin, solving it and talking to a few people in town is as close to a gameplay loop that Legends gets, but it often strays from that with random boss fights.
The game employs a unique take on tank controls. Up on the d-pad moves you straight, down-back, and left/right essentially strafe. The front trigger buttons (on the PS1 version) turn Mega Man in either direction. The camera stays behind Mega Man. It’s a bit confusing to explain, but by the final fight you will be quickly strafing, jumping, and cartwheeling to avoid fire, all while being able to keep your aim on the enemy to fire at the same time. If you have played many tank control games, you will understand how impressive it is to pull this off. The controls do take a bit to get used to, but once I got comfortable with them, it was one of the highlights of the experience for me.
You will mostly be fighting generic looking robots. There are a few different varieties that attack and defend in different ways, but nothing too amazing on this front. The boss fights, on the other hand, do stand out. They all follow the same pattern of forcing you to learn patterns in order to dodge while also picking your spots to lay down fire. They all look great and are a lot of fun to fight.
You will utilize your trusted Buster gun at all times, with an interchangeable special weapon going on your other arm. These are unlocked throughout the game and occasionally tie into progressing in the story.
The game takes about seven or eight hours to play through. My time was closer to eight, I didn’t spend a ton of time exploring everything in the town, but I made sure to see every room in each ruin.
The Best Part: This is one of the best looking PS1 games. The blending of the anime styles with those early, chunky 3d polygons hits perfectly for me. Add in a bright, wonderful color pallet and I was hooked from the start. The environments are a bit repetitive, particularly in the ruins, as are some of the enemies. This is a small gripe when basically everything else in the game, particularly NPCs, bosses, and the small city areas, all pop off of the screen.
The Worst Part: The weapon/item upgrade system. The homing gun is the strongest available special weapon, but you need a ridiculous amount of currency (shards) to upgrade it to be useful in tough fights. The game rewards exploring to collect shards, but makes upgrading the best weapons and items really expensive to the point of it either being a super long grind to get there or requiring you to know which upgrades are worth spending your shards on ahead of time. You will earn a ton of them while playing the game normally, but if you actually use them along the way, those sweet late-game upgrades will be out of reach. It’s not that this system is outright bad in any way, it just makes it near impossible for first time players to get the best stuff.
The Verdict: Mega Man Legends is a fantastic game. I say this through the lens of someone who plays a lot of PlayStation 1 games, many of which feature tank controls. That is an important footnote because while the control scheme here is one of the best, most functional takes on tank controls ever, it is a far cry from modern third person shooting controls.
If you are willing to accept the learning curve on the controls, I think it’s a pretty safe bet that you’ll like what Mega Man’s first 3D adventure holds. The combat is fun, the characters are charming, the game looks great. It is, quite simply, a game that I had a hard time putting down once I got started.
As for downsides, I will say that this is not a 100% pure action game like the Blue Bomber’s 2D affairs are. There is a lot of running around a city, talking to NPCs, purchasing upgrades, and so on. This is a far cry from the nonstop action Mega Man games typically feature.
If you want to play a 3D game in the Mega Man world, one that borrows from the spirit of the blue hero without directly copying the gameplay elements which made him famous, there is a lot to love in Mega Man Legends.
How to Play: PlayStation 1*, PSP, N64 (as “Mega Man 64” in North America), PC
*console played on for this review
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