Part 16: Wily III
Because I refer to it in the normal video and this comment section below, the old video is already included. However, it is for both Wily 3 and 4. If you care for not being spoiled by past me, you might wanna stop watching after the Press is dealt with!
Stage Comments:
Man, that cannon. What a devious trap. Great for farming health, though.
Uh.
Weapon ener...no.
Lives? Maybe?
Refights are a boring affair, I never really got the point. "Boss rush" has been a concept for many games, like the Castlevania ones, but in many of those (especially the older ones) you don't really get more powerful. So a boss rush is going to be really fucking hard. In Mega Man, you've got tons of options, and in laters games, more life, armor, superjumps, whatnot. Therefor, all this boss rush serves is to hammer the point home that you're an overpowered über-God now who can obliterate opposition which gave him trouble to no end before.
Except, you know, if you had a boss that gave you trouble, you'd have aquired his weakness first anyway and obliterated him with that. And the whole "I'm invincible now!" angle is kind of not what I'd think good preparation for a tense final fight.
What I'm getting at is that refights are a waste of time and should never have become a staple. In this game especially, because the general lack of effort put into Mega Man 5 shines through here in numerous ways, which I didn't even touch upon, but that's what this wall of text is here for.
Just off the top of my head:
- The stage music restarts constantly whenever you get teleported. Especially grating when you arrive in a boss room, because it'll start for a second, then the boss theme kicks in.
- The bosses are fought in their original rooms, which makes no fucking sense. It's a first for the series, and I'd say it's just complete laziness. Copypasting the original fights is obviously easier than coming up with a whole new room palette. I mean come on.
- Contrary to, for example, the intricate weakness grid of MM3, who's good against whom is completely arbitrary in this game. Please watch the old video to hear more of my thoughts on that matter, just in short: Power Stone is awful against a grounded enemy, and Water Wave and Crystal Eye are shit against guys who jump all the time. Wave erases bullets, it would be perfect against Napalm Man at least for that. You'll never want Crystal to hit the wall, Charge Man is a great candidate for having it as weakness. Finally, Power Stone is garbage, but Star Man is the easiest fight, and he's actually airborne most of the time, so the Stone flying upwards would suddenly be relevant. More thought put into that than Capcom ever did.
Boss Comments:
This would be the worst boss in this game, except for the fact that we have a worse concept (Dark Man 2) and a worse overall boss (the final fight) as contenders, which is just sad. I covered most of what I wanted to say in the video already, because by God, I had enough time for that, but just to add to this, the fight is terribly unfun shit. Extended periods of waiting for a probably missed opportunity if you're a first-timer, because that screen-dip is horribly, horribly implemented. Not that this is a great surprise, after all, each and every piece of original coding in MM5, the moving platforms in Star Man, gravity, Rush Coil, falls apart at the seams the moment you look at it funny. It's even more egregious here, because you kind of have to jump in order to hit the boss, which means you are going to run into the problem of it being shit.
If you never use Napalm Bombs in Star Man's stage, for example, you might never notice that the floor isn't even real, but here, it's right in your face and insanely annoying. Also pointless. What a shitty boss.
Overall, all the vitriol I just gave the level goes to show how badly the game falls apart at the end. Keep in mind that I really like playing MM5, it's one of my favourites just to blaze through, but especially Wily 3 and 4 are atrocious. The standard laziness prevalent throughout all of the game works here in unison with the typically rushed, thoughtless end game stage design we've experienced in all games so far to form a product that might not be a terribly frustrating as the first two games' final stages, but it's terrible nonetheless and will leave a seriously bad taste in your mouth.
Next time: Waiting a bunch and cursing elderly German evil scientists.