Mega Man 2 (“Rockman 2: The Mystery of Dr. Wily” in Japan), is an action-platform game developed and published by Capcom for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). It is the second installment in the original Mega Man series. The game was released in North America June 11, 1989. Although the original Mega Man sales were weak, Capcom allowed the Rockman team to create a sequel, but they had to do it on their free time. With more than 1.5 million copies sold, the game is the best-selling Mega Man title and established the series. Critics praised its audio, visuals and gameplay as an improvement over the first game. Many publications rank Mega Man 2 as the best title in the series, and as one of the greatest video games of all time.

Pros:

Back when the biggest video game was a quaint plumber running around with happy tunes, Mega Man was a metal heads wet dream! A robot running around with a gun arm destroying other robots and stealing their powers!? AWESOME! This game is fun and easy to pick up, but hard to master and beat. The game is difficult in the classic NES sense, but it is actually a hair bit more manageable than the other infamous games in the Mega Man series, which I think was a good call. It set the standard for 8 levels/bosses in all following Mega Man games and you have to complete a final world some extra mini-bosses (ROBOT DRAGON!) and finally beating Dr. Wily. Once a boss was beaten you get that bosses special weapon and the different bosses have weaknesses against other bosses weapons. So if you play this game in the right order you can knock it out in as little as 30 mins (that’s almost impossible though). One of my favorite things about this game though is the awesome soundtrack composed by Takashi Tateishi. Every song on this bad boy is a catchy 8-bit metal masterpiece (except for maybe crash man) and the Dr. Wily starting levels song is probably the best song ever created for the entire Mega Man series. Enjoy a rap version of all the music in this video below!

Cons:

There are some shortcomings with this game. There are specific parts where you can tell the creators are just trying to be mean. Mega Man has to use his limited powerup power to creating platforms to jump to a ladder or fall to your death, ledges that you need to jump to that despair, and when Mega Man takes a hit he jumps back a bit so if you are trying to pull off a tricky maneuver over an endless pit, say goodbye if you take any hit. Interesting factoid on the cover has Mega Man holding a pistol instead of having a gun arm, the artist chalks this up to the bad graphics and though it had to be a one handed pistol instead of something like a rifle. A fuck up for the ages. There are no saves, that’s classic NES though, so you really need to rock this in one sitting. At the end of EVERY Mega Man, you have to fight the bosses all over again… I always thought this was kind of annoying and a game designer copout, just recycling to make the game take longer I guess. Finally, your awesome final boss battle is when Dr. Wily turns into an…alien…? yeah it’s pretty dumb. Luckily *spoiler alert, it’s a Wizard Of Oz type setting when Wily is just controlling a fake alien Wily behind the curtain, so I guess that’s some fun kind of comic relief.