“Mega Man: Dr. Wily’s Revenge” — The Blue Bomber’s GB Debut!

Honestly speaking, Mega Man V is probably the one original Game Boy outing of the Blue Bomber that most will remember. Mega Man IV, though, is still thought of quite favorably and is a very fun game as well, but the other three generally seem forgettable to many. In some ways, this is likely because the first three, while experimenting with a couple new ideas, are more like playing condensed versions of the NES games that most of their bosses and stages come from. This is even partially true for Mega Man IV, but to a lesser degree. Mega Man IV still borrows bosses from the NES (in that game’s case, four from MM4 and four more from MM5), but it also adds in a store, nice cutscenes, and gameplay mechanics like the presence of a store (this being the first time in series history for Dr. Light having a shop to purchase new items in, despite people thinking MM7 was the first time this happened!).

Mega Man: Dr. Wily’s Revenge is the first game to appear from the series on the GB and features four of the robot masters from the original Mega Man on the stage select. Once these are defeated, the player advances to Dr. Wily’s fortress, which rather than a series of levels is basically one long stage. At the end of it, you take on four bosses from Mega Man 2 and then Enker, the first of the “Mega Man Killers.” Enker is definitely a different boss, and this was something unique to the GB games. Finally, the game ends with a second fortress up in outer space, which was also pretty cool.

Anyway, this game brought back quite a few memories for me to sit down and play again. I didn’t realize it was so short (completed in under an hour at a very casual pace), but it still was a lot of fun. Given that I want to do a full playthrough of a great fan-game called Quint’s Revenge, I’m inclined to follow this up shortly with a playthrough of Mega Man II (GB), which should be something else fun to look forward to!