Mega Man Legends (PS1)
Legends speak of a great disaster that strikes Kattelox Island every 100 years wiping out all life on it, but stories of the past about danger are often disregarded even when ruins hinting to its truth dot this supposedly ill-fated island. For legends that do drive people to act, greed is a more powerful motivator, and on a flooded planet, a tale of a powerful energy resource called the Mother Lode promises to be able to power all of mankind’s technology indefinitely, leading to the rise of fortune seekers called Diggers. In the action shooting game Mega Man Legends these two tales intersect by happenstance, a Digger being just what’s needed to get to the bottom of the island’s history.
MegaMan Volnutt is the Digger in question for this story, the character different from the various blue robots found in other Mega Man titles but still packing an arm cannon and blue armor for his work searching ruins and fighting the Reaverbots found within. Working alongside Roll Caskett and her grandfather Barrel, unexpected damage to their aircraft the Flutter leads to a crash landing on Kattelox. Initially they only care for finding repairs, but the amicable trio are easily swayed to stick around and assist with the island’s new pirate problem. Believing there to be a great treasure beneath Kattelox Island, the Bonne family uses an array of advanced war machines and some adorable yellow helper Servebots to try and convince the city to give them the keys to the ruins. While they are a consistent threat throughout the adventure, the Bonne pirates end up being characters you’re more delighted to see than worried, these villains often the right level of goofy where they don’t feel outright ineffectual because they balance their humor with their strength. Much of this ties to their leader Teisel Bonne who is certainly the show stealer when its comes to the Mega Man Legend’s cast. The game does do quite a bit to examine Tron, Teisel’s younger sister, and her confusion over why she’s pining over MegaMan after he shows her some early friendliness, but Teisel is constantly effusive and consistently entertaining when he’s on screen. When in battle he’s a competent pilot of their various battle robots, and when you do catch him doing something casual in his time off, he’s never doing anything too absurd, just living the normal parts of his life with the same zeal.
Mega Man Legends does have a greater focus on its plot than previous Mega Man titles, even including side quests where you help the small range of characters you get to know around Kattelox Island’s small but bustling town. However, Mega Man Legends does operate with confidence in the fact it could continue to tell its tale in a sequel, this first entry not only bringing up a lot of information it doesn’t have the time to explore, but it even drudges up elements like Roll’s missing parents in the finale just to note that no progress had been made on that mystery over the course of the game. Kattelox itself and its concerns are the greater focus as other mysteries are prodded at lightly or large clues are put down to be explained in the future, but focusing on MegaMan’s relationship with the townsfolk wasn’t necessarily a bad idea. The interactions aren’t always particularly deep, joining a “gang” organized by three local youngsters is more about finding items to give them than a growing bond, but the little activities and small range of locations does lead to a growing fondness for the location that makes dealing with its issues a reasonable point of focus. It likely isn’t a game that will draw in players with its story, especially since sometimes it feels thin and simple in efforts to appeal to younger players while suddenly complex at others, but the small interactions and little developments involving the townsfolks do help Mega Man Legends hold your interest even as other elements threaten it.
The shooting in Mega Man Legends is a bit of a bugbear that’s hard to overlook. Most of this comes down to the way movement is controlled and the knock-on effects it has to the way enemies can be designed or how you can even counter them. Your movement when playing as MegaMan allows you to move forward or back by pressing up or down, but you actually run in those directions instead of having the option to backpedal, leading to a little awkwardness where you need to run away then turn and fire repeatedly in some fights. The sideways movement and turning have a much stronger effect on how you’ll play though, Mega Man Legends choosing the unfortunate control style of requiring you to turn left or right if you want to face those directions rather than just pressing left or right when you want to move that way. The game does designate buttons for strafing though, this vital tool for shooting while running to the side a smart inclusion but one that doesn’t fit the best with the action. Essentially, you can move in any of four directions but have to do gradual turning if you want to adjust for your often fairly mobile targets. You can decide whether turning or strafing are set to the left or right directional buttons or L1 plus R1 so you can find a more comfortable control style, but the clunky movement ends up leading to a possible compromise when it comes to battle difficulty.
MegaMan’s arm cannon can fire shots fairly quickly but more notably, the game handles some of the targeting for you to accommodate for the stiff turning. Your shots will home in on enemies a bit, often heading towards weak spots or bending a bit so you don’t need to be overly precise. This is a reasonable adjustment at times, and while it does mess up some boss battles with multiple target zones as the game has its own ideas about where to send those shots, it unfortunately gels a little too well with the strafing options. A good deal of the game’s tougher Reaverbots and bosses can be handled by just holding down a strafing button and firing, MegaMan hard to hit while constantly running and his arm cannon’s guidance help meaning you’re still reliably landing shots. This simple strategy can work on foes as important as the final boss so long as you toss in some well timed jumps to boot, but thankfully the fights aren’t fully invalidated by such a simple strategy. Foes start getting their own homing shots or become quick enough they can hit you if you aren’t actively dodging their abilities, but the more effective design ideas are fights where MegaMan’s range of movement is strictly limited. Fighting atop boats or the Flutter at points will not only give you less running room, but the bosses focus more on damaging your ride so you need to shoot down their attacks and find your moments to strike. For each battle simplified by a brainless strafing tactic there’s usually one that requires more active participation, and considering save opportunities aren’t always close to boss fights, it can sometimes be a relief when you find one that won’t lead to a lot of lost work. You can manually aim your gun too, this unfortunately locked to the same button as locking onto a target and leading to issues there, but even if you turn off lock-on, your shots still home to their desired spots on their own. You do have to stand in place while aiming manually which feels like it would work as a fine enough risk for the greater accuracy, but instead it mostly just serves as a necessity during battles with flying foes but one that doesn’t work as well as you’d hope even then.
Because the battle system often comes up short though, the ruin navigation itself perhaps ends up the more interesting idea at play in Mega Man Legends. In fact, enemies start to feel more like obstacles because quite often you can stand in place and fire on them to kill them, but their appearance can damage you if you aren’t watching every angle or are getting to complacent. Ruin navigation involves a lot of exploration and avoiding danger rather than thrilling battles or tricky foes, the game’s dungeons having enough space to scour for treasure and for enemies to lie in wait to serve as barriers to your efforts. Treasure can definitely feel impactful in Mega Man Legends even though there’s more powerful weaponry and equipment than you’ll ever reasonably need, but even small upgrades you buy or have Roll develop from loot can meaningfully effect your abilities. Higher attack power will naturally lead to enemies dying more quickly, but the range of your shots can make clearing enemy-filled rooms less risky and you can up how rapidly your gun can fire to speed up fights as well. Enemies drop large crystals called Zenny when defeated but it disappears quickly, your rough movement making it a bit testy to grab it all but it also encourages the risk of running into a hot zone to make sure you get the rewards for your actions. Additionally, MegaMan can equip a secondary weapon that includes many different items, from things like the Drill Arm that lets you explore new areas in dungeons to powerful attack tools like the Powered Buster’s slow but strong shots. You’ll truly feel more capable even with incremental growth which helps the ruin searching feel more valuable and in turn more compelling, the marquee third-person shooting perhaps best considered more a component of a dungeon crawling experience than the main draw.
THE VERDICT: The rough and sometimes disorienting play control of Mega Man Legends inevitably holds back its shooting segments and leads to combat strategies that are effective but not entertaining. Thankfully there are times the game can produce a competent boss battle or better uses its opposition as hazards to your Digger work. Exploring the ruins for treasures and trying to get out to avoid a game over plus the time you spend getting to know the small city on Kattelox Island help the game avoid being defined by wrangling your unwieldy aiming options. With characters like Teisel Bonne to inject surges of energy into a plot that doesn’t aim to wrap up all its mysteries, there is still enough life in this game to make it interesting despite the damage poor combat does to it.
And so, I give Mega Man Legends for PlayStation…
An OKAY rating. Perhaps with a greater dose of nostalgia to fog my glasses, Mega Man Legends would be a beloved game because of the areas where it does work well. It’s a short but involved adventure, the game moving you to new parts of the ruins quickly and having the Bonnes crop up with enough regularity that they’re entertaining but not overbearing. Little things exist around town to do even if they’re simple and often as straightforward as just talking to the right characters to complete a side quest. Some boss battles do feel like real tests of your ability to aim or move rather than just another time you can run to the side while holding the fire button to win. Still, if something does go awry in Mega Man Legends it will likely be because of the stilted movement. Collecting Zenny before it fades would still be a good motivator for putting yourself in danger even if it wasn’t hard to actually walk where you wanted quickly in a small space, but then when fighting actual battles you may struggle lining things up for things like leaping up towards a ledge to grab that ends up costing you dearly. Mega Man Legends could very much be a game bumped up simply by making its controls easier and more natural to handle while reining in the power it gave strafing shots to compensate, and making the enemies more mobile after such a change could ensure they still pose a threat. As is, there is still the enjoyment in exploring strange ruins and avoiding what dangers lie within, but your movement is too much an obstacle for the dungeons to embrace more advanced configurations.
A somewhat sloppy jump to 3D for the Mega Man series but one that knew to fill in the experience with more than just action to ensure its stumbling points don’t lead to a full flop, Mega Man Legends can have its moments once you come to its grips with its roughness and yet it didn’t delve deep enough into them to make this game as legendary as its predecessors. Focusing in on getting to know a city of people and scouring a dungeon for treasure over just making it a pure robot-shooting experience ends up saving it, so while inexperience with 3D movement likely lead to Mega Man Legends’s flaws, it’s at least not a legendary disaster and one with some nice ideas worth uncovering once you dig beneath its rough exterior.