Mega Man V

At last, here we are. Mega Man V, the final Game Boy title, part of the “Rock Man World” series. I’ve got an unreasonable amount of screenshots for this one, so the text is probably gonna end before the pictures do.

Mega Man V starts out relatively cutscene heavy for a Mega Man game of its time. We learn we’re under attack by evil space robots and that the Mega Buster is ineffective against them. This leads to Dr. Light creating the.. Buster Arm I think the name was. In gameplay terms what this means is that Mega Man’s charge shot throws his fist out instead of just a charged shot. Somehow this is effective against the space bots.

Speaking of Space Robots, this is the first Game Boy Mega Man game to feature exclusively new Robot Masters. These guys do not appear elsewhere and are all brand new. They’re not really Robot Masters, as they’re space robots and are all named after the planets of the Milky Way.

The game mainly follows directly from Mega Man IV in terms of mechanics; Dr. Light still has a shop between stages, most Rush items are the same and the game feels the same to play as IV. One new addition is Tango, a new robot pet that frankly rules but does not, as far as I know, reappear in the series. When you bring him out, he rolls up into a ball and attacks enemies on screen until he runs out of power. Cool cat.

The space robot stages are mostly alright and all feature an exploration component, similar to the previous game. The bosses themselves are hit or miss; some are very awkward. The weapons are also very hit or miss and the weapon weakness order is all out of wack.

Outside of the space robots themselves, all four unique Rock Man World robots return for the later stages as an homage to the other games in this series. It was a neat touch and it reminded me how great they all were.

Of course it’s revealed Wily is behind the invasion of the space robots. He didn’t make them but he manipulated them, I guess is the plot here. He also revived a warrior robot amongst them who is levels of magnitudes more powerful than all of them.

This special guy, Sunstar, appears after some of the weirder and more gimmicky Wily fights in the series so far. Not bad fights mind you, but oddly gimmicky. In an interesting twist for Mega Man games so far, the final boss is a Robot Master-like enemy, in a multi-tier fight where the ground ruptures a few times, resetting the arena.

This game is one of the better Game Boy Mega Man titles, but I think IV edges it out as for which is the outright best. IV was a blast to play for what it was, and while this one is very good it falls flatter here and there.

At last, the Game Boy games are behind me. It’s finally time to go back to the NES for a few more games and then we’re reaching the 16-bit era. Oh boy.