How many hits an enemy can take before it becomes a bullet sponge, in your opinion?
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Mega Man boss battles are terrible
- Thread starter AnansiThePersona
- Start date
Megaman was dark souls before dark souls.
The bosses are the main draw, stages are designed around them, their tracks are memorable. Not all bosses are created equal however, there are some stinkers. MM 2/3/4 have arguably some of the most memorable ones in the series. IMO the rest of the bosses are hit or miss until X1.
BTW my preferred boss order:
Metalman, Woodman, Airman, Crashman, Flashman, Quickman, Bubbleman, Heatman.
- Known for being difficult.
- Stages are hard to navigate until you learn the layout/gimmick.
- Each area ends with a boss fight.
- Boss fight is preceded by a special door.
- Kill a boss, get a special weapon.
The bosses are the main draw, stages are designed around them, their tracks are memorable. Not all bosses are created equal however, there are some stinkers. MM 2/3/4 have arguably some of the most memorable ones in the series. IMO the rest of the bosses are hit or miss until X1.
BTW my preferred boss order:
Metalman, Woodman, Airman, Crashman, Flashman, Quickman, Bubbleman, Heatman.
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I feel you, OP. I been slowly playing through the nes megamans and getting more salty with each one (up to 5 now).
They have some cool points but there's always some bosses that feel cheap as hell, and I always want to go in a game straight up and give it a good shot, and then halfway through I'm like UGH this games pulling teeth, and someones like OH YOU SHOULD HAVE READ A WEAKNESS GUIDE IN ADVANCE.
And then they make you do all the bosses again, for padding.
In summary: I tried getting gud, it was awful. Please send participation trophies and bubble wrap.
They have some cool points but there's always some bosses that feel cheap as hell, and I always want to go in a game straight up and give it a good shot, and then halfway through I'm like UGH this games pulling teeth, and someones like OH YOU SHOULD HAVE READ A WEAKNESS GUIDE IN ADVANCE.
And then they make you do all the bosses again, for padding.
In summary: I tried getting gud, it was awful. Please send participation trophies and bubble wrap.
I never use the weaknesses in Mega Man games. I see those as secrets that someone would find if they gave up and tried other levels and came back. Almost a way of making the game easier for certain people.
Also, most action game bosses for quite some time were limited to "DPS races". A lot of action games are still that today. That's like saying fighting games are "just rock paper scissors".
My only issue with X, is that I felt that some of the bosses became too hard to fight with just the buster, and I felt more so pushed to figure out weaknesses. They just took too little damage from it, and the levels themselves were already a little too easy. But that's X.
Did you play any games back then?
Also, most action game bosses for quite some time were limited to "DPS races". A lot of action games are still that today. That's like saying fighting games are "just rock paper scissors".
My only issue with X, is that I felt that some of the bosses became too hard to fight with just the buster, and I felt more so pushed to figure out weaknesses. They just took too little damage from it, and the levels themselves were already a little too easy. But that's X.
Did you play any games back then?
I laughed at the thought of a DPS race with Megaman bosses. Pattern recognition needed!!! Jump 'n shoot!
They aren't bullet sponges though? I mean, maybe if your playing the Wily Wars version of MM2 it feels that way as they lowered your damage against bosses to 1 single bar of damage so bosses do take longer to kill, but the early games usually have really short boss fights (if your using the buster), with your buster doing 2-3 points of damage on an enemy health bar. Plus their patterns and attacks aren't that hard that the bosses become impossible (in my opinion of course). Of course if you use the weapons they are weak to the boss fights then last just a couple of seconds and really don't pose much of a challenge at all.
I guess Yellow Devil with just your default weapon would qualify as a bullet sponge fight (as well as his hard mode fight when playing as Oil Man on Powered Up) as it takes a considerable amount of time to beat.
Boss fights are what make Mega Man. There's a few robot masters where blasting away without giving a shit about dodging is a winning strategy, but more often than not they'll absolutely wreck you if you try that with the buster.
They move and jump predictably. Of the ones that do jump around to some meaningful degree: Quick Man is a pain in the ass, but his movement is mostly mitigated by his room design and it's learning to time and bait the boomerangs correctly that's an issue. Crash Man feels like he's all over the place but he only jumps in response to you shooting, so he's wholly controllable. And Flash Man just wanders back and forth reliably, so you can use the high points in his room to get over him. The other five aren't difficult to physically dodge in the first place.
Buster doing 1 damage to bosses in MM2 is from the difficult mode, which was the Normal mode in Japan and our normal was easy mode in Japan the Wily Wars didn't have the easy/normal mode and instead only had the normal/hard mode.
The boss re-fight certainly isn't padding, it is one of the biggest challenges in any Mega Man game, and is often one of the highlights. Fighting 8 bosses back to back with limited healing requires a much better understanding of how to fight them than fighting just one. I love the boss re-fights.
The trick to playing a Mega Man is to accept that dying isn't a big deal. You will die, a lot. But you don't lose anything when you die. You can hop right back in and try again and do better. I love the Mega Man games, but I die in them constantly. That doesn't bother me though. Each stage only takes about ten minutes or so to run through. Dying isn't a big set-back. Managing my inventory in a mobile game takes more time and is more frustrating than any Mega Man stage.
By accepting that dying isn't a big deal, you will get better too. If you are still struggling, try watching some videos, like the ones I linked earlier. You might learn how to adjust your approach.
That's actually a really good question lol I don't think it's as simple as "how many hits" when it comes to bullet sponges, it's the whole structure of the fights. Having a hard time typing it out. I just don't enjoy it.
Ah, good point. Makes me wonder why I thought WW bosses had more health... Oh well, I'll replay it soon enough so I can see what my deal with that game was.
That is how you blindly mash through fights without actually learning them, yes. There are very very few unavoidable damage situations in mm boss fights.
Using weapons against bosses unless required like some wily machines is golden tanooki suit bullshit. It's a crutch for people that can't be bothered to learn the fights.
Using weapons against bosses unless required like some wily machines is golden tanooki suit bullshit. It's a crutch for people that can't be bothered to learn the fights.
It's only really an issue in Zero 1. In 2 and especially 3 and 4 you can kill everything in your path to fulfill the enemy count.
It's kind of an integral part of getting better at those games imo. Just blazing through a stage requires you to be good at dashing and jumping, but blazing through and beating everything in your path requires some solid knowledge of your abilities and how they can be used to most efficiently take down enemies.
Like for example
Each of the two enemies technically take two normal slashes to kill each, but if you're doing an S rank or something and understand the power of your saber, you can just slice through them like that. That stuff's basically a requirement on higher levels cause you need both low time and a high enemy count.
that gif <3
Dash slicing while blazing with dashes and dash jumping through your route in MMZ feels so amazing. May have to replay it after I finish X2/X3 - it has been too long since I played Z2-4 anyway.
Don't you have to start the game over if you run out of lives? Like imma be real, I save scummed that biz. This isn't the bronze age. So idk.
Also, having to do a difficult/tedious section again is kind of the main penalty in most games. That's how dying becomes a setback, no? If dying sets you back more than just having to re-do a significant amount of stuff you already did, I probably wouldn't be playing that game. Are.... are you playing games like that? :s
And back then, us primitives churned our own butter and had no electricity
either. We had to use rotary dial on our telephones and we had to wait two whole years to see a movie if we missed it in the theatre
I swear some of you guys have this mindset of it's old, so geez, it must suck.
News flash...if its older that does not make it inferior, just different than what you are used to. Maybe you should try it out if its older. It worked for vinyl.
either. We had to use rotary dial on our telephones and we had to wait two whole years to see a movie if we missed it in the theatre
I swear some of you guys have this mindset of it's old, so geez, it must suck.
News flash...if its older that does not make it inferior, just different than what you are used to. Maybe you should try it out if its older. It worked for vinyl.
If you didn't save before the level (more recent games) or didn't write down the password (older games). In the case of X you keep whatever upgrades you got even running out of lives in a level.
If you lose a life, you start at the last checkpoint. If you lose all your lives you start that stage over with a password.
I don't really like the lives system so I'm glad we have save states and people should liberally use them.
Though the thing about re-doing sections is that you get slowly but surely better at them. Die enough times to beat a boss fighting with your buster, and you'll eventually have a full grasp of their pattern and what's the exact efficient and safe way to take them down. That feeling of improvement is part of the fun.
What? No.
If you run out of lives you just get a password and are sent back to the stage select screen with two new extra lives. You have infinite continues. The extra lives are only for keeping mid-stage progress. Each stage has two checkpoints: the halfway point and the boss room door. Par for a Mega Man stage is getting to at least the halfway point with your first life, then getting to the boss with your second. That leaves you the last life for beating the boss. With a little practice, you can cut that down.
Mega Man stages are built so that the stage and boss are a single unified challenge. Developing the skills to beat the whole stage with two extra lives is the entire point of playing the game in the first place.
This is one of those instances where I think you really need to understand the context. Look at the boss fights in various other NES platformers. I'd argue the Mega Man bosses are better than average amongst their peers. For 1v1 humanoid fights, at least - so not counting big spectacle fights like some of the more notable Contra bosses.
But I agree in the sense that later sub-series, particularly Mega Man Zero, showed how to take that pattern-based design and make more compelling, dynamic fights out of it. So when you have this evolution in pattern-based boss design complexity, it's clear to me that we're looking more at tech limitations which were eventually bypassed, as opposed to any kind of broad quality assessment.
But I agree in the sense that later sub-series, particularly Mega Man Zero, showed how to take that pattern-based design and make more compelling, dynamic fights out of it. So when you have this evolution in pattern-based boss design complexity, it's clear to me that we're looking more at tech limitations which were eventually bypassed, as opposed to any kind of broad quality assessment.
What you're effectively saying here is that X and Zero > Classic, which I agree with overall but I think that Classic's strength actually lies in the platforming and the levels. I feel that the dash and wall jump make the platforming in most of the X and Zero games too easy. Many of the stages feel like quick formalities between the boss fights, whereas in Classic the balance is more even between stage difficulty and boss difficulty (if anything the stages are harder).
Um, you do know you're supposed to learn the patterns and dodge attacks, right?
Hard disagree. Zero might be my favourite Mega Man series overall, but I loved Mega Man Classic and thought it was amazing.
They were right alongside Castlevania 1 and 3 as the definitive NES platformers for me.
I only liked zero and Battle Network, maybe one Star Force and ZX.
In general i dont like the obsession with classic Megaman 2 WiiWare games and ugly 2.5 platformer shouldn't be enough but what can we do :c
I think they are great. You can look for the weakness or you can try to do it through skill and pattern memorization with buster only.
I'm not sure how the mentality that you should "tank" Mega Man bosses would even arise unless it's in a person that hasn't played many 2D games. Dangerous stuff comes at you relatively slowly and you jump or dodge it. It's intuitive.
I'm not sure how the mentality that you should "tank" Mega Man bosses would even arise unless it's in a person that hasn't played many 2D games. Dangerous stuff comes at you relatively slowly and you jump or dodge it. It's intuitive.
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Yeah, agreed about the 'unified challenge' thing. I definitely feel that and all. I wouldn't want to play mega man WITHOUT the bosses. But a modern mega man with better bosses? Hmmyes, I DO very much like shovel knight. ;)
I definitely think the games are dead good by NES standards. But I never did beat a lot of games back then anyway.
Is this some elaborate ruse to tank old game prices on eBay?
GEE EARTHBOUND COMPLETE IN BOX WITH INTACT SCRATCH N SNIFF CARDS SURE DOES BLOW
GEE EARTHBOUND COMPLETE IN BOX WITH INTACT SCRATCH N SNIFF CARDS SURE DOES BLOW
If this was actually the case in the game's design then the boss rush at the end of the game and its limited health recovery would be impossible if you ran out of weapon ammo and E-Tanks.
The boss battles are the biggest appeal of Mega Man because they require the most effort to defeat of the game's challenges, give the cast personality, and they facilitate the concept of growing stronger through the course of the game. You start with eight that you can pick at any time and in all likelihood you're going to get stomped by their stages that first play. You're not going to make it through without learning through repetition, and those techniques you learn by doing so are often required to beat the boss. After eventually beating all eight with each one requiring multiple attempts to learn and grow, you're tasked with beating all of them again in a row at the end. Being able to defeat all of them in this restrictive setting shows how far you have progressed.
All the bosses' attacks are avoidable but they are meant to be hard not only because of the NES difficulty mentality but it makes them more memorable. They aren't nameless enemies like "cat on slot machine" from Rescue Rangers or "robot with jetpack" from TMNT that is only named in the manual. These bosses have clear faces, names, and minute hints of personality in how they fight and pose. The boss weakness chain was created to keep the player, often young children, from getting discouraged by the difficulty. Instead of it being this vague and condescending concept of "git gud", there is now a hope and a goal. If they can just find out what boss is weak to this one weapon they got, they can progress. And that's not even including the abundant amount of E-Tanks available to refill health at a time of need.
The bosses are difficult to defeat outright requiring effort to learn and adapt, while still offering alternative solutions for players who don't have that time investment or skill. This is exactly what is considered great game design that appeals to a wide range of players and skill levels. Instead, you're taking the worst of both attitudes. You're not learning how to fight the bosses claiming they're unbeatable without abusing invincibility and are complaining they're too easy when you use the systems meant specifically to aid lower skilled players who are having trouble fighting bosses.
But let's say for the sake of a terrible argument that Mega Man 2's bosses are bad because they can't be beaten without abusing invincibility frames and the weapon weaknesses trivialize fights, Mega Man 3 and beyond introduced the slide mechanic and X / Zero titles use dashes and wall jumps. You now have tools specifically for evasion and increased movement that rewards skillful dexterity and reflexes, essential to fast-paced and satisfying action gameplay. And in later Mega Man titles the boss weakness deal considerably less damage like two or three pips of health instead of Mega Man 2's massive amounts of damage, so even with the weakness you still have to put some effort into the fight that no longer ends in 4-5 hits like you argued in your OP.
I will concede that the security laser / Wily Alien bosses that can only be beaten by Crash Bombs / Bubble Lead are bullshit since you'll most likely need to game over to recover weapon energy for it if you fail, but that and your post only apply to Mega Man 2, so why did you make blanket statements about the ENTIRE franchise in your OP and particularly in your thread title? Seeing as how you got me to click your thread, I guess I have the answer to that, don't I?
On a different note, I'm surprised no one has mentioned the "Megan robot masters" typo.
I've always loved Mega Man for the actual stages while tolerating the boss fights. That's fairly par for the course for me as I generally don't enjoy boss fights all that much. I'm the same way with Souls games. Love exploring the levels, hate going up against bosses.
Comparisons with dark souls reveal the problem with Mega Man bosses. Bosses in Dark Souls telegraph their attacks and players time and space to learn the patterns without just dying over and over again. And when you die, you can usually get back to the boss relatively quickly. From playing Mega Man 1-3, bosses are so fast and so erratic, and the margin of error for dodging attacks so narrow, that if you don't come in knowing the pattern you're dead before you have time to learn much of anything. If you play without save states you'll be replaying the same stage a dozen times just to have enough time with the boss to learn it.
Did you quote the wrong person with my name? Because I didn't say what you quoted, haha.
I think games do age as standards change and new games build on what was there before. A game should always be judged as a product of its time, but that doesn't mean the modern lens ceases to exist. I love Mega Man a lot. A hell of a lot. But the weakness system in the original and X series makes battles far too much of a breeze. Encounter design without the weaknesses gets better in each entry.
Back when the games first came out, there was a novelty to finding an enemy's absolute weakness and decimating them with it. Now that that's worn off, it's easy to see the flaws in the system. Thankfully, even with the flaws, the games are still great fun and some of the best platformers out there.
Yeah, really not a fan of the boss fights in Mega Man. Depending on whether or not you have the right weapon, they're either piss easy or long and annoying. The idea that you have to guess what order to beat them in goes against how the rest of the game is designed to be incredibly intuitive. And the less said about 90% of the Wily bosses the better. Mega Man's real strength lies in its level design, not its boss fights.
"Patterns only work if the game is slow paced".
The hell? Yes, I quoted the right post but the wrong poster somehow hahaha. Just checked my post and I accidentally deleted a bracket from the quote tag and half of my post came out wrong.
I actually quoted you to agree about how the bosses in X/Z are better thanks to the new tools the player have (dashing and wall jumping).
nah man. I mean I get it, most of them are very outdated but that shit was the best back in the day.
In both this topic and topics about sonic mania i have seen people say "dying should not set you back as far as it does"
It barely does! I mean i'm one of the worst gamers I know and I just dont understand wanting LESS penalty for dying in mega man or sonic. Redoing a level, or even just half a level depending on when you died, not only is a minor time expenditure, but also makes you better at the game which is the point anyway. I'm blown away when I read things like "do away with lives in mega man and sonic" like what in the world would the alternative be? Just be invincible?
It barely does! I mean i'm one of the worst gamers I know and I just dont understand wanting LESS penalty for dying in mega man or sonic. Redoing a level, or even just half a level depending on when you died, not only is a minor time expenditure, but also makes you better at the game which is the point anyway. I'm blown away when I read things like "do away with lives in mega man and sonic" like what in the world would the alternative be? Just be invincible?
the only thing I hate about old Megaman games is to deal with awful slowdowns, I loved Megaman 9 and 10 but when I played the old classics on the MM Legacy Collection that shit really turned me off for a while, I only finished the first 3 games atm but it really sucks when you're constantly into easy death for a mistake situations and everything slows down and mess with your inputs.
What the fuck is this nonsense?
There's absolutely NOTHING preventing you from killing all 8 robot masters with the buster, other than the obvious skill barrier. Those weaknesses are entirely optional. If you feel that it makes the game too easy, you can just ignore them. Just like how you can beat a Souls game without levelling up.
These hot takes on old games are getting out of control...
There's absolutely NOTHING preventing you from killing all 8 robot masters with the buster, other than the obvious skill barrier. Those weaknesses are entirely optional. If you feel that it makes the game too easy, you can just ignore them. Just like how you can beat a Souls game without levelling up.
These hot takes on old games are getting out of control...
There is plenty of time to dodge the attacks in Megaman. Not having heavily telegraphed attacks is just another design choice, not a flaw.
As others and myself have said, the exact timing is often very unforgiving and must be learned to an extreme precision (Yellow Devil, anyone?), and death means repeating long stretches of content that have nothing to do with what you actually need to learn. There are all sorts of ways to teach players the skills they need, and Mega Man does none of them when it comes to bosses.
It doesn't mean a whole lot for someone who has played the game over and over again since childhood to say that one *can* beat a boss without taking a hit, any more than it does for a speedrunner to say that one *can* beat Super Mario Bros in less than five minutes. It just doesn't mean anything for the experience of playing the game the first time.
And also AFAIK it's just not true that you can consistently beat bosses without getting hit. For instance, Mega Man 2's Air Man has projectile patterns that cannot be dodged and whether or not you get them is pure RNG.
I'm not down on the games; they are a lot of fun to play today, and I can only imagine they were a revelation back in the day. But the boss design does not hold up, which is why you see no one* design bosses like this even in the retro-throwback indie genre. The closest would probably be Shovel Knight, but those bosses are integrated into the game very differently than the Mega Man bosses are, and also they kill you much more slowly.
*I grant this is an assumption based on my personal non-random sampling of said genre.
Megaman 2 and 3 are widely considered some of the best of the whole series, and even 4-6 are okay.
I do think the games are better enjoyed if you just know the "boss order" but whatever, they are fantastic.
I half wonder how much of this is due to the large amounts of lag most folks have in new displays, and game design being tweaked to accommodate that. I'm not sure that's what's going on, but the original Punch-Out!! can get nearly/totally unplayable on some current sets, so...
I'm also confused as to why getting hurt/death is a problem. Mega Man stages are fairly short (at least in the NES ones), and death doesn't restart you entirely... unless, of course, you ran out of lives or didn't save a recharge tank. Tsk tsk.
See, I don't agree that "boss design" doesn't hold up, but I will grant that bosses capable of killing you in seconds are annoying, as you don't have time to learn what to do. Then again, the worst that can happen is you die, so...