Ep. 15: Does Mega-Busting In Fact Make Me Feel Good?

With the franchise fully established and the production team stabilized, Capcom brought Mega Man 4 to the Nintendo Entertainment System, attempting to move forward while also adopting some bad habits that would stick with it for decades to come. Can a came be both good on almost every dimension and…

Sticking with its guiding principles of “quick” and “cheap”, Capcom handed the reigns of its portable Mega Man series to the creatively named “Japan System House”, which promptly produced the series’s first true retread. Mega Man II for Game Boy is a slice of pepperoni pizza reheated once too often…

The video game equivalent of a later “Thin Man” film, Mega Man 5 represents Capcom buying time for its once-proud flagship while Street Fighter II sat at the top of its priority list. Despite its repetitive nature, the game is nothing if not familiar and reassuring. And that’s not a bad thing! But …

We examine Akira Kitamura’s final significant directorial contribution to video games - the Mega Man derivative Cocoron, a move-and-shoot platformer that begins to contextualize what isn’t a Mega Man game. The Game: Cocoron (ココロン) Original Platform: Nintendo Family Computer / Nintendo Entertainmen…