So I have a long history with the Mega Man games growing up. I came up with the Mega Man Derusting series to do such a task. The goal is to play and finish the Mega Man classic series along with most of the X series and some other Mega Man titles. I still have some of my Mega Man and X carts and discs and hadn’t really played them in years but I wanted to share my adventures on stream of relearning my way through the classic titles, and in some cases finish the later games to completion! 

THE REVIEW:  Released for the PSX in 1997, this was the first mega Man to jump to 32 bit along with Mega Man X4. MM8 was also released for the Saturn with 2 extra mini-bosses in the form of Wood Man and Cut Man. Plot of Mega Man 8 isn’t so much a “Wily wanting to take over the world” like the others, but Evil Energy from space and a mysterious robot named Duo showed up which got the curiosity of Dr. Light and Wily. of course Wily decides to use the Evil Energy for his next Robot masters as its corrupting Wily more and more. This one added animated cutscenes to continue the story and questionable voice acting when translated to English. I actually didn’t like this one as much as the previous games.

.GRAPHICS & SOUND: Mega Man jumped into the 32 bit era with beautiful and cartoony graphics! The graphics and animation in this game are quite fluid and pretty to look at, even Mega Man swimming looks good! Everything is bright and colorful even in the darker themed levels and there’s a lot of flair and stuff going on in the backgrounds of some stages too (like Clown Man’s stage). Even the animations for the special weapons look good and I like the animation for Rush! The FMV anime scenes portraying the story look good for its time too.

The soundtrack for this is pretty good too. Nothing jaw dropping like previous games but everything again fits the theme of the stages. Clown’s Man’s stage music is carnival music, etc. The big thing is this is the first mega Man game with voice acting, and unlike X4, this isn’t that good. The cast tried but they sounded like it was phoned in and Dr. Light sounds like Elmer Fudd (Dr WahWee!) and Mega Man sounds like he hasn’t had his puberty upgrade yet. Check out the original j-pop song for the animated intro “Electrical Communication”, it rocks!

PLAY CONTROL: Mega Man controls pretty good in this one, probably better than in 7! It will take getting used to having separate buttons for the Mega Buster and the Robot master weapons but I do love this idea! Changing weapons on the fly happens pressing L or R on your controller. The auto-scrolling Rush Jet stages control quite well too, like playing your favorite shooter! I’m still not used to Mega Man swimming though.

CHALLENGE: This game is hard like most Mega Mans on the first playthrough due to the Robot Masters, the stage gimmicks and the jet sled levels. Of course if you decide to play this a 2nd time it’ll get easier. I’m not a fan of this one for all the stage gimmicks, even though some of them were fun like Clown Man and Sword Man’s stages. Others not so fun like Astro Man’s mazes. Some of the Robot Masters you can basically facetank with their weakness and others you have to fight strategically. Your own energy powerups in this come from the Rush Health that you get from beating a mini-boss, and it is nice that all your energy recharges between stages! There’s 4 different Rush Abilities to earn from mini-bosses. Sadly the game gives you no indication that you received them until you see it on the sub-screen.

The jet sled levels are not fun and will take practice to get down “jump jump, slide slide”. I can see the idea behind it in Frost Man’s stage, but the 2nd jet sled level in Wily Stage 1 is very tough, an getting a game over past it means restarting that over again. Wily Stage 1 being quite hard was a poor design idea by the devs and is quite the turn-off from trying to finish this game. It also doesn’t help that the boss of Wily Stage 1 is tough to beat and you need the Mega Ball to defeat it (I did try other weapons also for fun). Thankfully Wily isn’t that rough to knock off, but I do hate with the later Mega Man games where a game over means going through the boss rush again before the Wily battles.

I’m glad to finally have he last Mega Man Classic game out of the way but I found this one kinda blah. Good story and upgrade to 32bits, but the challenge and control of this will turn off a lot of people, except maybe those who conquered the SFC or GBA Mega Man & Bass.

I GIVE MEGA MAN 8 3.5 OUT OF 5 ENERGY TANKS!!

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