Has anyone played this? Valk? Anyone?
I just beat it the other night. Most of the reviews I've read are more or less identical to the reviews of every other game in the series, and meant to tell the casual gamer that, yes, this is another Mega Man. And it is. But I'm hoping that someone really hardcore into the series wants to discuss it beyond that.
The game is kind of a loose cross between Mega Man X/Zero and the Metroidvania open-world format. It's a good idea, but I don't think it works especially well here. The map is ridiculously vague, leaving you unsure of where exactly to go, and it encourages a lot of backtracking, which ruins a lot of the pacing as far as being a blazing action game goes.
The world revolves around a town and a sort of home base, which you end up returning to a lot. You can talk to townspeople and find sidequests. One of the first mandatory quests, in fact, requires you to find four townspeople inside this largely flat and boring town. In order. Other later sidequests will require you to backtrack to certain areas as many as six or seven times to find generic items to exchange for power-ups, which, in most previous games, were hidden cleverly inside the levels themselves.
The game also adopts a mission-based format. You choose your mission from your base, and you can only do one mission at a time. If you stumble upon a new area before you've signed up for the appropriate mission, you might wander all the way to the end of the stage before realizing that you can't open the boss shutters. It really kills any sense of explorative excitement that the open map could have created.
The levels are never particularly interesting. Most of them are your standard Mega Man fare, but without the quirks and gimmicks that made the levels in, say, X8 or 5 interesting. One level has a particularly devious (entertaining) design, but if you want to find all the hidden items, you'll have to go through it a half dozen times. Which was at least four too many.
The bosses, for the most part, are devoid of character. The only one that really interested me was a tiny female robot that turns out to be the antenna on the end of a gigantic angler fish. The rest are immediately forgetabble, and worse yet, most are bland and simplistic in combat.
The game does have one perk. Rather than getting a boss's weapon when you beat it, you now get an entire new suit, and most of these suits are pretty useful. In fact, they're possibly the most useful rewards in any Mega Man to date.
The game is fun. I mean, it's a Mega man game, and it still has some of the best controls and most intense movesets of any 2D series. But as far as that series go, I was really disappointed by this one.
I just beat it the other night. Most of the reviews I've read are more or less identical to the reviews of every other game in the series, and meant to tell the casual gamer that, yes, this is another Mega Man. And it is. But I'm hoping that someone really hardcore into the series wants to discuss it beyond that.
The game is kind of a loose cross between Mega Man X/Zero and the Metroidvania open-world format. It's a good idea, but I don't think it works especially well here. The map is ridiculously vague, leaving you unsure of where exactly to go, and it encourages a lot of backtracking, which ruins a lot of the pacing as far as being a blazing action game goes.
The world revolves around a town and a sort of home base, which you end up returning to a lot. You can talk to townspeople and find sidequests. One of the first mandatory quests, in fact, requires you to find four townspeople inside this largely flat and boring town. In order. Other later sidequests will require you to backtrack to certain areas as many as six or seven times to find generic items to exchange for power-ups, which, in most previous games, were hidden cleverly inside the levels themselves.
The game also adopts a mission-based format. You choose your mission from your base, and you can only do one mission at a time. If you stumble upon a new area before you've signed up for the appropriate mission, you might wander all the way to the end of the stage before realizing that you can't open the boss shutters. It really kills any sense of explorative excitement that the open map could have created.
The levels are never particularly interesting. Most of them are your standard Mega Man fare, but without the quirks and gimmicks that made the levels in, say, X8 or 5 interesting. One level has a particularly devious (entertaining) design, but if you want to find all the hidden items, you'll have to go through it a half dozen times. Which was at least four too many.
The bosses, for the most part, are devoid of character. The only one that really interested me was a tiny female robot that turns out to be the antenna on the end of a gigantic angler fish. The rest are immediately forgetabble, and worse yet, most are bland and simplistic in combat.
The game does have one perk. Rather than getting a boss's weapon when you beat it, you now get an entire new suit, and most of these suits are pretty useful. In fact, they're possibly the most useful rewards in any Mega Man to date.
The game is fun. I mean, it's a Mega man game, and it still has some of the best controls and most intense movesets of any 2D series. But as far as that series go, I was really disappointed by this one.
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