LAST TIME, ON DRAGON BALL Z...wait, wrong intro. AND NOW, FUCK MEGA MAN 2 AND EARTHBOUND IN THE EAR
I need to go on record here as saying I fucking LOVE me some Mega Man. And yes, it is two words, you philistine. Fight me. And I'm talking pretty much all Mega Man. The cheesy cartoon. Mega Man 5, 6, 7 AND 8. As a matter of fact, I'll go on record as saying that MM8 is my favorite in the series, only just behind MM3. We have no Mega Man Legends 3. They beat the bloated carcass of the X series long after it made sense to do so. These are crimes, but I'm almost 40, and I've had a wealth of time to ruminate upon the many crimes of the studios I could rely on sight unseen to give me a good product as a youth, review or no review - Capcom, Square, Konami, Nintendo. Hell, I'll throw in Taito and Tecmo too. But the focus here is on Capcom.
Capcom! Capcom and their stubborn insistence on letting the best parts of their portfolio die, because we need yet another Resident Evil and one extra crappy assed Street Fighter crossover, right? Mega Man is the pillar modern Capcom was built on, as far as I am concerned. And they've let it erode and wither, threatening to collapse the entire temple. And that transformative process can be laid at the feet of the success and stone-cold classic status of Mega Man 2. Except I don't like it. I rather actively dislike it. I've rarely met anyone who agrees with me, either. And really? It's all due to a long list of extremely petty, mostly minor complaints and grievances. Let's get started right at the beginning: the opening screen.
Look at this smug little bastard. Roll is off to the side with a hair dryer, providing the dramatic wind. Friggin diva.
It's a brilliant intro and sets the stage for what's to come, starting with the closing melody from the first game, zooming up the building to find Mega standing on top of it, with kickass hero music playing. And that's the thing here, even more so than with FF7, more akin to Sonic 2: all of my grievances can only be blanketed in praise because what surrounds them is so good. Much the same with Earthbound later in this article. Damn it. But my first issue is right there in front of your face. See it? A difficulty select! Normal, or difficult. Normal being a far more forgiving mode in terms of enemy patterns, damage done and taken, on and on. Difficult being...the actual original game as designed by Inafune and the gang between other jobs for the zaibatsu.
Why is this an issue for a petty bastard like yours truly? Because it is yet another symptom of an underlying illness that was strong and loud in the 80's and 90's, and quieter now - but still, judging on the shitty modern day behavior of Nintendo, Capcom, Konami et al, an issue today: blatant disrespect for North American gamers as incompetent, inept twits who don't know what's good for us, aren't skilled enough or smart enough to play their games, and better shut the hell up and just take what they give us and like it. And I'm not just going to make complaints without evidence. Nay! I shall provide an exhaustive list of examples of this behavior because this article wasn't delayed long enough. No, I require a TANGENT.
Thank you, Howard Phillips, for sparing young me from this garbage. It's like wiping your ass with sandpaper: it'll do the job, but you'll end the day with tears and regret.
Nintendo of course has and continues to do this plenty. First, they keep back the original Mario sequel, based on feedback from Howard Phillips that it was too hard, and too similar to the last game, and you know what? I agree with him. The Mario 2 we got is unique, colorful, and fun. SMB2J, Lost Levels, whatever the hell, is hard for the sake of being hard and more of the same. Nintendo's primary method of disrespecting us idiotic Americans is selling their stuff for full retail price close to a decade after whatever console has been out, nonstop stupid gimmicky assed peripherals they stop supporting, making the long awaited sequel to Kid Icarus absolute garbage...and this latter day Switch 2 bullcrap. However, it's the gimmicky peripherals that piss me off most.
I AM SCREWYOUTUS OF BORG. PREPARE THY ANUS.
No one did that particular brand of poorly supported garbage, take what we give you and fuck what you actually want you dumbassed foreigners, our American staff is the enemy and so are our customers crap like Sega. That up there isn't a goddamn games console anymore. It's a Borg. It wants to assimilate us and resistance was indeed goddamn futile. I was a Sega kid. I'm BITTER. There's Konami's well known egotistical greed mongering bullcrap, deliberately making games back in the day balls assed impossibly hard on our shores to kick kids who can't afford to buy a game and just rely on rentals square in the taco (Castlevania 3, Bayou Billy, etc.), Capcom doing idiotic Capcom shit, and that began RIGHT HERE. With Mega Man FUCKING 2. I BEAT this damn game as a kid, but did I get any credit on the playground? No! Because it wasn't DIFFICULT MODE I beat. Instant social pariah status. No wonder I need fucking therapy. Capcom owes me money.
So that's problem one, but problem two is a little more insidious. All Mega Man games have a few ideal boss orders, based on difficulty of the individual boss and stage you find the boss in, what upgrades you get from who and from where to help in other stages. It's never as open ended as it actually feels, and for me, that's on display in an insanely obvious way in Mega Man 2. The game isn't difficult from good design. It's difficult from a series of baffling, idiotically unfair beginner's traps, and much like I said in the FF7 rant, if you aren't playing the game in a certain way to maximize the use of your time and your effort, fuck you, you're doing it wrong.
Didn't beat Flash Man before Quick Man your first time out, and now you don't know the path and so have zero chance against the death lasers? Screw you, kid, you deserve the death lasers!
Didn't get Item 2 before Heat Man's stage, and now have to jump over the aggravating, reoccurring shit that is the disappearing block maze, this time suspended for a LONG GODDAMN WAY over an instant kill lava pit? Screw you, kid, you deserve the instant kill lava pit!
Fought your way through Wily's tough ass stages and now you're gonna fight this here boss that needs you to come in with full Crash Bomb ammo, hit them in an EXACTINGLY PRECISE pattern to kill both them and the wall, and if you fail, there's no real way to refill said weapon energy, so you need to game over and do everything AGAIN? SCREW YOU KID. Keiji Inafune gets high on the salt of your tears. Feel that? It's the softly stroking tongue of indignity and shame.
ARCHIVAL FOOTAGE, YOUR HOUSE, 1989
Which of course leads to the other goddamn issue. This series at it's best is about doing cool shit with cool weapons you ripped from the sparking, mangled corpse of some miserable, dead piece of electromechanical fucknugget you just scrapped. Some games, say Mega Man V, the weapons are mostly so butt you won't bother. Some, like 4 or 7 have a variety of cool, effective stuff to use. Mega Man 2? Once again, the illusion of false choice is here: you will acquire and use the Metal Blades because to do anything else is simply DOING IT WRONG. To an extreme degree. Think of some other games where there's one obvious better choice. Contra's spread gun? Child's play. Castlevania's holy water? Stuff and nonsense! The dagger in Ghosts and Goblins? A runner up! An also ran! Always the bridesmaid, and never the bride! The Metal Blades are your bride now, and by god, they are going to consummate this marriage with RUTHLESS EFFICIENCY.
HONEY! I'M HOME!
I'm going to take a quick break. Go fulfill my spousal duties. Have the bactine and bandages on standby, it's gonna be messy.
INT, DINING HALL/CHARNEL HOUSE, CASTLE GRUYERE, CHEESE MOUNTAIN
"SO! Is everyone having fun? Are you happy your liege has returned? Do we need another trip to the learning tree?! I get it now, Inafune! The tears! The suffering! It's what goes into Karma Jolt! So why wait? Let me give you another helping, you ungrateful rabble! And you! Stack of raccoons! Grab a few of those clowns and make a fresh skin suit! You're stinking up the joint more than Mega Man 2 did!"
Okay. Earthbound. Earthbound. How do we even begin to talk about goddamn Earthbound? Here's my conundrum, okay? I'm not going to go into what others have gone into ad nauseam here. No talking about the odd way Nintendo marketed it in America. No whinging and whining about Mother 3 never getting released and what a travesty that is. The trouble here is that, maybe more than all others here, Earthbound is a game that provokes a strong reaction. If you like it? You really like it. If you do not? You really do not. Somewhere in the middle are the rest of us: dazed and confused for so long it's not true. Piece of shit game, never bargained for you. But is it a piece of shit? No! But also yes! AGGHH!
Hold on, folks! His majesty needs his meds!
The first issue I have with Earthbound is simply that it feels...slow. The pacing of the story and the reasons given for why these kids have all these special powers, how absolutely no one thinks that that is strange, and maybe I'm just old and impatient now, but the interminable grinding I needed to do to play through this during my recent ordeal was a lot to handle. It felt like a job, really. I needed some CONTEXT dammit! But at the same time, the quirkiness, the sense of humor, the colors, the art design. Unique. Quaint, perhaps. Charming, definitely. But let's talk grinding and the fighting in general.
Doesn't seem so bad looked at this way, does it? It's basically a crap sundae, but it's got butterscotch on top. Pretty but shitty.
Here we have a representative battle screen with one of the billionty and 12 goddamn pallet swapped Starmen in this game. The battles are unique. The numbers aren't subtracted right away when you get hit. They start rolling like you're on a game show, and if you heal fast enough, you might not even go to zero at all. Okay, it's cool, yes but...for fuck's sake. I'm a Dragon Quest fan. Okay? This kind of combat? Love it. Love the hell out of it. So why does it feel like such a pain in the ass here? The flashy effects, the animations...every fight just lacks VIGOR. Vim. It feels slow as hell, and makes the already tedious grinding even more damned tedious. And why do you need to grind? Motherfuckers like FRANK.
Only the best in 1990s child abuse shenanigans will do for Nintendo.
This BASTARD. This absolute CUNT of a cliched bastard. The game crashes to a screeching fucking halt. Right here. Because this son of a bitch is strong. And he's FAST. As strong and as fast as that third monkey up the ramp to Noah's Ark, and brother, IT'S STARTING TO RAIN. So, what do you do? You grind. And you grind. And the enemies don't give DIDDLY DICK for cash or experience, and you keep having to go to the damn ATM to store money, which means MORE random goddamn slow as hell fights, and occasionally some dumb bastard popping out to take your picture for 20 tedious as hell seconds. Also on the topic of monkeys, how the fuck does ANYONE get that fucking monkey in the desert his egg without the damn thing hatching? Any of you ever see that movie Monkeyshines, where the monkey keeps killing everyone in this paralyzed dude's life and he ends up tearing the monkey's throat out with his teeth? I'm CONVINCED this vindictive fucker is the same damn monkey.
You slime. You filth. I'm gonna tear you apart.
And that's really the crux of my issue, I suppose. Speed. Pacing. Some actual goddamn common courtesy and respect for my limited time on this ridiculous orbiting rock. On top of all that? Guess what? A ridiculously small, cluttered, broken down mixed up mess of a damned inventory system! Maybe a key item will erase itself after you don't need it. Maybe it'll just live in your inventory forever! Maybe the game will let you put some item you DID need later in storage with your sister, and then you get the joy of trekking ALL THE WAY BACK THE WAY YOU came to get it! Maybe you'll understand what the items in your inventory are supposed to do! Maybe you won't! You'll just run and run and run and get nowhere! Does any of this matter? Much like how many licks it takes to get to the Tootsie roll center of a Tootsie pop, the world may never know.
And what about a fast travel option to cut out the aggravatingly tedious and frequent backtracking? These games always have a way to travel fast from A to B. Right? Of course it does!
Except to use it, you need a long, uninterrupted stretch of space to run fast enough to get up to 88 miles per hour and activate the flux capacitor in Ness's stupid fucking hat, and if you aren't in an area where you can? Get to stepping and hit the bricks, fucko! And you know what? I think I will. Earthbound, you're a classic. Go fuck yourself.
INT: MADHOUSE WITH A DINING TABLE IN IT, CASTLE GRUYERE, CHEESE MOUNTAIN
"Enough! Clear the table! Unleash the clown car! And where the hell is the poor sad bastard who should be hosing out the gore? Dessert! Bring it in! Not that any of you ungrateful bums will appreciate the enormity and quality of the dishes set before you. No! Nothing's good enough! Mario 3, Castlevania, Contra, and Zelda. That's it! That's all you ever want!" The King rubbed his temples. Fuming. Migraine the size of the word count in this double parted article hammering away at his head. "Now, dear," cautioned the Queen, "don't antagonize the guests too much! Your head is, after all, made of cheese, and cheese can be cut so easily!"
"As if they'd do me a kindness like that!" Scoffed the King, dashing his goblet against the gruesome throne of the Clown Lord. "Just bring in the final course. It's time for dessert! And I'd make you all acknowledge the quality of this dish if only I had the power! Wait...oh no!"
TO BE CONTINUED. GODS HELP US ALL.
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