Sunk Like an Enker: Mega Man in Dr. Wily's Revenge (Capcom, Game Boy, 1991)

A long long time ago, I borrowed the first Gameboy Mega Man game from a friend. Like nearly every other Mega Man game of my youth, i played through the regular levels, got to the Wily stage, and never beat it. Since Capcom rereleased it for 3DS Virtual Console, I got a second chance!

It’s a difficult game, much more difficult than the NES Mega Man games, save maybe the first, but the thing i was most surprised about was how short the stages are. With the ability to create save states at any point, the stages take much less time than if you have to continue from a stupidly far away checkpoint (yes, even for such short stages), and I was able to breeze through it pretty quickly. While it’s cheating, I don’t really like the game enough to play through it the intended way. It’s okay for a Game Boy conversion of Mega Man, pretty good for a first effort, a little better designed than the original NES Mega Man, but it’s still nothing special, nothing new. It takes away a lot and adds very little from the NES game, new levels, some new music, a new saw blade enemy and a new but unremarkable boss called Enker. While it’s technically better than Super Mario Land as an NES to GB conversion, it’s not as interesting. That’s partly because Mario Land revels in its oddness, in how different it is, while Wily’s Revenge tries to only be a conversion of MM1 with a little MM2 to pad it out. The stages are different, there’s a new enemy and a new boss, but it’s only competent instead of actually good. The music is in some cases a fine recreation of the NES music, but in a couple, notable Cut Man and Elec Man, it actually pulls off some interesting effects thanks to the Game Boy’s stereo sound output. I never had headphones as a kid, so I didn’t hear the music in stereo until I had the Game Boy Player for Gamecube. It’s a really unique sound, and the composers use techniques so it sounds like the music is really coming from all around you. 

Despite having mostly boring level design, Dr. Wily’s Revenge has at least an interesting-looking Wily boss, where Wily sits in a giant robotic Wily head with some pretty nice details. While the attacks are nothing special, it is pretty neat to look at, which is pretty in line with the rest of the game: the graphics are surprisingly sharp and detailed, it’s just the game itself that isn’t that great.