Ideas!

Recently the nice lady that runs mmhp.net posted a short article about how if you like Mega Man 9 because of its retro graphics you are stupid and wrong and probably ugly, and should be shipped off to a concentration camp.

(Seriously, those are her exact words.)

The whole thing is kind of a head-scratcher, because while I know a lot of people who enjoyed MM9 I don’t know anyone who enjoyed it because of its retro graphics. (Or, at least, only enjoyed it for its graphics.) More commonly people cite tighter, more fun gameplay than we’re used to getting from the Mega Man games as the reason MM9 is one of their favorites. And indeed, this is why I enjoyed it, too.

See, what happened to the Mega Man series was it got hit with a glut of new ideas. Designers started cramming new and interesting things into the series at an alarming rate and without any regard for how the ideas would work together or work with the core Mega Man gameplay. In one game you’ve got Mega Man swimming around, kicking soccer balls, playing a half-assed version of Gradius, piloting a jetski over bottomless pits and juggling about fifty different robo-parts. In another you’ve got him (or his girlfriend Zero) rescuing wounded companions, adjusting mirrors, patiently waiting on lava flows or trash compactors, dodging meteors, dodging meteors and avalanches at the same time, fighting stage-long mini-bosses and getting ranked on his performance all the while.

Somewhere in all that the charm of “kill eight cartoon robots and get their magic powers” gets a bit muddled.

See, it’s not enough to have a new idea in your game. (Well, not enough unless you’re Yahtzee, anyway.) Having a new idea isn’t even half the battle; it’s only half of half of the battle.

Before you put a new idea in your game, you have to be sure it is a good idea. Mega Man X: Sixty-Six and a Sixth has a level with acid rain which acts as a constant energy drain. A novel idea to be sure, but nboody likes it. Because it’s stupid and irritating, see. It’s not good. It should have been killed with red ink right there in the design doc.

Even if you have a good idea, though, you still have to implement it well. The last fourteen or fifteen Mega Man games on the NES have you collecting MacGuffins in order to gain access to Beat. Hunting down MacGuffins is fun! But Beat is… kinda pointless really. The reward, in the end, isn’t worth the search. Speaking of searching, Mega Man Seventy-Two on the SNES has Rush Search; Mega Man calls in his pooch, who scratches the ground, and maybe digs up something nifty. Good idea! Except you can’t actually find anything that isn’t already available in the game shop. And, of course, there’s never any indication where to dig, so if you’re new to the game it’s a process of “take five steps, Rush Search, take five steps, Rush Search, take five steps…” which is about as fun as trying to eat the game cartridge. Good ideas, badly implemented.

That leaves us with new ideas that are good and also well-implemented… but still don’t belong in a Mega Man series. To really knock it out of the park the new thing has to fit with the other new things being added, and also with what’s already there. Do you love the Mega Buster? Of course you do. It’s easy and fun to use, it’s powerful, it’s satisfying when it connects. It also has no place in a Mega Man game. Increasing the power of Mega Man’s basic attack serves to trivialize the eight other attacks the game is supposed to be built around. It’s no coincidence that Mega Man 4 is where most people consider the series starting to slip, or Mega Man 3 as being the last game with challenging robot master fights.

See, Capcom has spent over a decade flailing around with the Blue Bomber, trying to recapture the magic of the original trilogy. And failing miserably. No combination of new and old ideas seems to work, and then someone had the thought to shave off all the superfluous cruft the series has accumulated. “Let’s give them eight robots, eight powers, that’s it. Bare bones. Get back to what we know works.”

And it did. Mega Man 9 is a fan-favorite, and people are shaping up to be excited about Mega Man 10. The graphics are only a small part of it — it’s the gameplay that matters most. It turns out that nobody really cares that MM9’s plot introduces plot holes or ignores Mega Man’s ability to slide or swim. Go figure!

(That said, the retro graphics do improve the gameplay considerably… but that’s another topic for another day.)