Mega Man Eternal thoughts

The question that ran through my mind playing Mega Man Eternal was: how do you go to this much effort to make a full-blown Mega Man game that doesn't control like Mega Man? The stages are robust and varied, with a lot of unique concepts. There's a range of different enemy types and hazards and a lot of diversity in gameplay. There are some really cool setpieces like the Guts Tank charge, the simulated levels from MM1-10, and the final stage and battle. The tilesets are often gorgeous (with some notable exceptions, like the background in the second half of Illusion Man). It often looks and feels like Mega Man when done well.

So why aren't I controlling Mega Man? Why does it feel like I'm playing a bad Flash knockoff?

Mega Man's jump and fall speed are very different than any of the classic series. His upward and downward acceleration is sped up: he reaches max height much quicker and falls like a rock. It actually reminded me of the old Mega Man DOS game, where every frame of a jump animation moved the same distance. Put simply, he can't jump as far, and if you have any familiarity with classic 8-bit Mega, you won't recognize the movement in this game.

To someone who isn't a veteran of Mega Man, this may not sound like a huge deal. You push the button and the blue guy jumps, right? You can walk, slide, and shoot; it's Mega Man. The key to why MME doesn't work in its current state is that Mega Man's movement was carefully calibrated across many games to be well-suited for the terrain types and hazards the player encounters. In classic Mega, the tools you have to navigate the game are suited for what you encounter along the way. Even when the engine was somewhat clunky (Mega Man 6, with subpixel edge clips and eaten jump inputs) the game was designed for the character you controlled. MME doesn't feel like that. Its layouts were designed to replicate what classic Mega Man does, and a much less responsive engine was provided to traverse it. It's frankly inexplicable to me to put this much time and effort into so carefully recreating what Mega Man does, and then accept an alien, barely functional engine for playing it.

If movement is bad, damage is far worse. In MM1-10, when Mega Man gets hit, there's a brief knockback animation and a longer period of invulnerability for the player to recover. There's some variation depending on the console generation or specific engine: MM7 had very short invulnerability time, MM2 had longer knockbacks during laggy sections, etc. But in MME, there's a new knockback animation that lasts almost the entire duration of invulnerability. So if you get hit, you can get hit again almost as soon as you recover. You have no chance against an enemy that's slowly advancing toward you, or on a conveyor belt, or especially in the air. This is especially bad in the final boss fight, where the knockback is twice as long and a single shot could infinite you up to 5 or 6 times. Compared to the opportunity you have to react in classic Mega Man, MME's damage penalty feels sluggish and cheap, and drastically changes the maneuverability of the player character. You're not controlling the Mega Man you're used to in Mega Man Eternal -- instead, it's a less responsive character with heavier jumps, more punishing stun animation, and glitchy movement mechanics around ledges and screen transitions. No matter how you feel about quirks or "fun anomalies", this is functionally worse and not in a fun way. I don't see any design advantage to making the character harder to control than the source material it's duplicating. This isn't a unique spin on MM or a different style of control; it just sucks. Play any water stage in MM1-10 and then play Wily 1 in MME and tell me the experience was improved by this game's jump physics, for example.

Most of this is negative because my playthrough of this game was very frustrating and the preemptive explanation by the developers on the forum indicates they're aware of major differences and don't see them as a problem. That was not my experience; a large percentage of the great things MME does were hampered by its control issues in a structural way. It's inexplicable to me why it was necessary to duplicate everything classic Mega does in every aspect - from stage design to enemy diversity to pacing to weapon balancing to music - but not necessary to provide the player with movement that matches what the game demands.

This is the key ingredient that breaks MME as an experience for me, that keeps it from being something I would enjoy coming back to like other high-level fan games and romhacks. It's not an aesthetic choice or formula twist. I think you could make an interesting MM game that removed stage selection, or got rid of special weapons, or did a Metroidvania layout. MME's physics don't feel at all like an intentional choice that was made to suit the game they created. It feels like they made a Mega Man game with a crappy movement engine. It feels like a relic of the early stages of development that they just got used to, and never addressed along the way. It feels like something that could've been/can be fixed, and would instantly improve how the game plays. Instead it's just kind of an interesting replica of what's cool about Mega Man with unfortunate control issues.

I want to take care to emphasize this isn't intended to shame the developers for making a game that isn't exactly the way MM fans think it should be. I wanted to go into detail about what playing Eternal was like, and I felt strongly that a good game experience was hurt by control issues that, from what I can tell, are considered a feature and not a problem by the developers. But making something this big is an inspiring achievement and however I feel about the result, I have no patience for the idea that anybody was wronged or cheated by playing a game they didn't like. A game didn't exist, a team spent years working, and now it does; that's not a negative, even if someone wasted their evening playing it and not enjoying it.

And FWIW, I don't feel like playing it was a waste, even given what I feel are structural problems. I enjoyed the creativity behind it, and I hope these guys improve it and go on to do more things.