Game Journal: Mega Man: The Power Battle & Mega Man 2: The Power Fighters (1 Credit Clear)

I cleared all three routes of Mega Man: The Power Battle (1995) and Mega Man 2: The Power Fighters (1996), two action-platformer games from Capcom.

Mega Man: The Power Battle is a straightforward boss rush in the style of the mainline Mega Man console games, and its difficulty is pretty much in line with those games too. I highly recommend it to anyone who likes Mega Man, anyone who wants to try to 1CC an arcade game for the first time and wants to start with something on the easier side, or anyone who wants to play some two player co-op Mega Man with a friend.

For some reason there's a lot of misinformation surrounding this game, such as it being a fighting game or it being ultra difficult, but it really is just a fun little game that you can play if you like Mega Man. All three characters play pretty much the same and all three routes are pretty much equal in difficulty, so just pick whichever one looks fun to you. And the bosses you fight early in the run will have less health, so you can just start out by fighting whichever bosses you struggle with so you can burst them down quickly.

Anyway, it's a great game! It's fun to fight some souped-up versions of the bosses from the NES games, and it feels fantastic to knock bosses down with the charged mega buster.

It has some small annoyances, like how the screen flashes every single time you hit a boss with a weapon they're weak to, but thankfully if this is an issue you can just stick with the mega buster and the game is barely any harder. It would also be nice if you could just directly select which boss to fight instead of having to time your button press when the cursor automatically moves over the stage you want. Thankfully the sequel (Mega Man 2: The Power Fighters) fixes both of these things, as well as being slightly more difficult. So if you have fun with this game, I highly recommend playing the sequel next!

Mega Man 2: The Power Fighters is very slightly harder than its predecessor, so it's a great next step if you want more arcade Mega Man. All four characters play very similarly so pick whoever you want, although I do love how you can damage enemies by dashing into them as Duo. More action platformers should have grappler characters!

Both of these games are a very interesting experiment from a game design point of view. I have written a lot about the differences between arcade-style action games and console-style action games, especially when it comes to enemy design, pacing, difficulty and so on. But one place where these two styles of games often converge is in their boss fights, as even console games find it acceptable if a boss locks you in a small arena, aggressively tries to corner you, and switches between multiple attacks in ways that you have to react to. So one way that you can quicky make a console action-platformer work in an arcade is to chop out everything other than the boss fights. You can just make a boss rush game if you want to!

The main downside to these games, other than the small annoyances I mentioned earlier, is that they are both very easy by arcade standards. This is a boon for people wanting to grab their first arcade 1CC or for console Mega Man players who want a new game that's similar in difficulty to the other Mega Man games, but for players used to arcade games there's not much challenge here. They're very fun games though, and they're both worth a try!