Welcome back to Save State, where the Mega Boy has become a Mega Man. We’re currently living in the year 20XX and hopefully it’s everything you’ve hoped and dreamed for, but I’ve been living in the past, continuing down a path of playing more Mega Man games. Since replaying the very first title in the series, I seemed to have developed a Mega habit. Now for this week I look at Mega Man Two, which was developed only one year after its predecessor, and happens to be one of my favorites in the Mega Man series ever. In recent years, there has been a lot more discussion about whether or not the first three Mega Man games in the series are overrated in comparison to the ones that released later, which is primarily why I decided to continue replaying the titles in this series as a kind of retrospective on the Mega Man franchise.

Mega Man Two opens with notably higher production values than the first game, going so far as to give players a glimpse into the backstory and world of the Blue Bomber. Players can see the futuristic cityscape while also being told about the struggle between Doctor Light, a fictional representation of a genius billionaire, and Doctor Wily, a more realistic representation of a real-life billionaire. The opening crawl ends with the iconic shot of Mega Man atop a building, hair blowing in the breeze before putting on his helmet and teleporting to the stage select screen, this time giving you a choice of which of the eight Robot Masters you’d like to fight.

The way in which the stages in Mega Man Two play is almost exactly what I’d describe as perfect NES level design. The Robot Master Wood Man’s stage takes place in a forest where enemies attack from above you fairly regularly, which teaches you how to avoid and deal with foes you can’t directly shoot since your Mega Buster weapon fires exclusively on the x-axis. You’ll occasionally be stopped by these beefy, fire-breathing tiger robots, which teach you how to apply damage pressure while also avoiding powerful attacks. Bubble Man’s stage has a significant underwater segment where your controls are changed to give Mega Man more jump height, so you have to jump through some passages with spikes on the ceiling, controlling your vertical momentum so you don’t touch the spikes overhead.

Mega Man Two doesn’t have the most complex level design or the most brutal stages on the NES, or anything like that, but it consistently has a strong quality throughout where, if you lose a life, you can clearly see a place where you can improve. There are a couple of instances where there are some death pit gimmicks you might not be able to see coming, such as in the Robot Master Heat Man’s stage with the disappearing blocks, but even in those instances there are usually 1-Up set just before the gimmick so they’re only mild setbacks.

Also new in Mega Man Two are the three Item tools. Eventually replaced by Mega Man’s faithful canine companion, Rush, Items 1, 2, and 3 are all useful traversal items Mega Man can acquire from Heat Man, Air Man, and Flash Man, respectively. Item 1 makes hovering platforms that can be used to scale around tough platforming segments, while Item 2 can be used to skip the long, horizontal disappearing block section in Heat Man’s stage because using it summons a small jet that flies you forward. Item 3 climbs walls and is admittedly less exciting than the other two but is still required at a couple points in the Wily’s Castle stages at the end of the game.

Defeating a Robot Master gives you their weapon, just like in Mega Man One. Bubble, Air, Quick, Heat, Wood, Metal, Flash, and Crash Man make up your boss roster for this entry, each with their own stages and level gimmicks. Mega Man Two was made quickly and likely without much time to balance the weapons against one another because this is the title that likely has the strongest special weapon in the entire Mega Man franchise: Metal Blades. The aforementioned weakness of the Mega Buster weapon is that you can only fire it horizontally, but Metal Blades can fire in 8 directions, deals very reasonable damage, and is also the boss weakness for half of the Robot Masters for some reason. Metal Blades being powerful as they are typically causing players to overlook other special weapons in the game, however, which is a shame since the Air Shooter can one-shot normally troublesome mech enemies while the Quick Boomerangs are great damage and easily spammed at enemies.

Mega Man Two is one of the most accessible classic Mega Man games largely because you can start with all different bosses and still come out of it feeling like you were reasonably challenged and that it wasn’t overbearingly difficult. The challenge really ramps up, however, when you reach the Wily Castle stages after defeating the first eight bosses. Wily Castle 1 has one of the most iconic backing themes in the entire Mega Man series and ends with a challenging mechanical dragon boss that only gives you single blocks to use as footholds over a bottomless pit. Interestingly, this dragon has no invulnerability frames whatsoever, so it can be killed in less than 10 seconds!

In fact, most of the bosses in Wily’s Castle have no i-frames, which means you can spam shots against them and kill them in short order if you’re good at button mashing. That’s except for Wily Castle 4, which has what is most likely the worst boss in the entire series: a set of five security cameras called Boobeam Trap. This is an awful boss because it’s effectively a puzzle boss with no indication that it is such- the boss only has one weakness in Crash Bomb which destroys them in a single hit, but there are five walls blocking your progress that also can only be destroyed by Crash Bombs. The reason this is an issue is because you only have seven Crash Bombs with no way to get additional weapon energy during the fight, so if you waste more than a single shot, you have to let the traps shoot at you until you die because it’s no longer possible to win. Due to this, Boobeam Trap is probably the single boss in Mega Man Two that is a complete miss, and it’s a major stinker.

After clearing Boobeam Trap, you’re dropped into a room with another Mega Man series staple: the boss rush teleporter room. Thankfully, due to the boss arenas being flat this time, several of the bosses are even easier to fight than the first time around, and you can watch as Metal Man’s own Metal Blades kill him in just two hits. After clearing out the boss’s rush, you’ll face off against Wily in another flying ship of his and can be defeated in just 2 charged up Atomic Fire shots in its first phase, and Crash Bombs or Metal Blades will make short work of his second phase. Wily even sics a holographic projection of an Alien on you, which is easily defeated with Bubble Lead, a weapon that thankfully has more than just seven ammos. With the Alien defeated, Wily’s hologram machine breaks down, just like every other plan he has, and he’s once again forced to beg Mega Man for mercy and forgiveness.

A big thing to note with Mega Man Two is that it not only improved the presentation of the game, but its visuals as a whole. Backgrounds and foreground tile sets are more intricately drawn, you’ll regularly experience larger, more detailed enemies, and you’ll see those improvements in all of the stages you venture through as Mega Man. The controls have also been tightened, as in Mega Man One there was a slight amount of slipperiness when you stopped moving that is nonexistent in the second entry.

If there’s any one negative with Mega Man Two, it’s that this is a title prone to the classic NES slowdown, something I had forgotten happened in this to such an extent because my primary way to play the entries in the classic Mega Man series was through the Anniversary Collection that released on the PS2, Xbox, and Gamecube. The Anniversary Collection lacked the slowdown that’s prevalent in the NES titles because it ran stripped down versions of the PS1 Complete Works versions of the games that never left Japan, so seeing how Mega Man 2 chugs when multiple effects or enemies are onscreen in the much newer Legacy Collection version was quite surprising. Some like the authenticity, however, but it just wasn’t what I was used to.

There is, of course, a large amount of jank in Mega Man Two, seeing as how it was only the second title in the franchise. What sets it apart from something like Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest is that a lot of the balance issues present are actually in the player’s favor, rather than punishing the player for not knowing to buy a specific crystal and crouch in a particular area. Metal Blades being so strong against most of the game and E-Tanks being implemented to help players who are less competent with 2D action platformers are part of why Mega Man Two is so fun. The level design is basically spot on, still taking effort and precision from the player to succeed but not overwhelmingly hitting the player with cheap shots like what was built into the throwback title, Mega Man 9. Outside of a single boss that has problematic design, the rest of Mega Man Two was clearly a design highlight of video games in the late 1980s.

I think this will bring today’s entry of Save State to a close. I’m not certain if I’ll continue to do this as a Mega Man retrospective, but I’ve had a lot of fun playing Mega Man One and Two and might continue going further through the entries of the series to really remind myself of how the Mega Man series evolved throughout the 90s. I hope you’ll join us here in two weeks for that, or maybe some random indie title I found out of nowhere on the Steam store. Until then!