This was a game I tried playing years ago on my only briefly owned Mega Drive Mini and couldn’t stand because the latency was so bad. The latency was so bad on that mini console in general that I barely owned it a few days before reselling it, and I’d never heard particularly good things about this game since. However, recently after finishing Super Ghouls’n Ghosts on the Nintendo Switch Online service, I was so lost for what to do next that I booted up this game to show some friends just what a mess it was. I was originally just going to play it and not actually finish it because all I was using it for was to kill time, but I ended up needing to kill so much time that I just ended up finishing it anyhow XD. It overall took me about 4.5 hours to beat the game via the Nintendo Switch Mega Drive Service with as much rewind and save state abuse as I wanted because this frankly was just not a game I respected nearly enough to try more than a time or two to finish a big challenge without them.
Wily Wars is a remake of Mega Man 1, 2, and 3 for the Sega Mega Drive with an extra “Wily Tower” half-sized original game put in at the end for anyone who finishes all three original games on one save file. As such, there’s not really a story here beyond the respective games’ original ones and then the “You’ll never defeat my tower challenge, Mega Man! >:3” intro to Wily Tower, but that’s just fine. You don’t need a great story to enjoy the NES versions of any Mega Man game properly, and the upgrade to 16-bit doesn’t change anything about that~.
What the upgrade to 16-bit apparently does change is the controls, because holy heckin’ crud does this game play terribly. Even without the Mega Drive Mini’s bad latency problems, this game still controls so weirdly and badly that it drove me crazy the whole time I was playing it. All of the original games’ speeds seem to have been messed with in some way or another that I’m not entirely sure was intentional, but at any rate, it makes for a frustrating and very uneven experience regardless of developer intention.
The most immediate and consistently burdensome thing comes from how Mega Man’s movement has been changed. Compared to the NES originals, Mega Man has a significantly longer amount of time between pressing right or left and him actually starting to move that direction. For anyone very familiar with how NES Mega Man plays as much as I am, this is never not jarring, and it’ll lead to a lot of deaths just because he doesn’t move as fast as you expect him to. Weirdly, he still seems to have totally consistent and snappy movement mid-air, which leads me to believe that his cruddy movement is down to them slowing down his transition from tip-toe forward into running. Regardless of the cause, the game’s movement drove me crazy, and there was many a time where I rewound my state because I’d so carelessly forgotten that my movement was way worse than I expected it to be :/
The other most consistently burdensome thing that is also an issue beyond simply being more used to how the NES games control is in how Mega Man fires his default weapon the mega buster. In the old NES games, Mega Man can fire as fast as you can mash the button. You can only have 3 bullets on screen at once, but if you’re firing pellets into an enemy, they’ll vanish as fast as you can pump bullets into them. In Wily Wars, however, your fire speed has been very radically lowered. Mega Man can only fire maybe 3 or 4 bullets a second now, which may still sound like a lot, but at least for someone who can button mash like me, that’s cutting my fire rate compared to the NES games by more than 50%. Stage design and enemy HP is basically totally unaltered as well, so there are a lot of points where you’ll have no choice but to tank a hit because the enemy you’re fighting just can’t be mulched down as fast as they were originally designed to be.
The last really significant problem introduced by the mangled speed is the overall difficulty balancing of the games. Bosses have had their stats tweaked quite a bit, but in a lot of cases I’m still not really sure if it was intentional. A lot of bosses have been nerfed quite heavily by their weakness doing *far* more damage to them than it used to in the 8-bit games. Many of them also move much more slowly too which makes dodging a lot of their attacks trivial. However, just as many bosses (especially some Wily stage bosses) have had their speeds *increased* significantly to the point where their attacks are far far harder to dodge than they used to be. On top of that, the mega buster seems to inflict less damage to bosses than ever in some cases, and bosses largely seem to do significantly more damage upon hitting you.
I’m already of the opinion that Mega Man 1~3 have fairly weak boss design in a lot of places because they’re so aggressively tuned that the only really valid strategy to beat them is abusing their weaknesses, and this makes that problem far worse than it already was. It makes spamming E-tanks for harder fights more of a necessity than it’s ever been, and the whole mangling of their balance makes games that already struggle in these departments worse than ever in many regards. It’s something that compounds the issues like the bad movement and slow fire speed for a triple threat of a bad time, and it makes potentially appreciating the generally far better balance given to the Mega Man 1 bosses pretty cold comfort when all is said and done.
The stage and boss design struggles from the worse speed and rebalancings of boss speeds and damage, but they’re all still fundamentally the stages and bosses from Mega Man 1~3, so their biggest annoyance points are still the same as ever (like those awful moving platforms in Guts Man’s stage). However, where does that leave our entirely new Wily Tower levels? The team seems to have either not been allowed or (imo, more likely) not been able to fit more assets for actual levels onto the cartridge for the Wily Tower, so all of the stages and normal enemies are just shuffled environments, obstacles, and baddies from Mega Man 1~3. It’s honestly a pretty fun gimmick for stage design, and I don’t really mind the lack of novelty in that regard.
The only really new enemies are the new bosses made for this section, and they’re okay I guess? You’re allowed to take any 8 weapons and 3 helper items you want from Mega Mans 1~3 into each Wily Tower stage, which is neat, but it also greatly amplifies the rock-paper-scissors weakness design of Mega Man given that it’s trivial to simply not possess a boss’s weakness at all upon finally getting to them. Sure, it’s easy these days to just look up their weaknesses online like I did before going in to fight them, but with how quickly bosses go down to their weaknesses in Wily Wars, that trivializes the fights pretty aggressively. On top of how incredibly durable they are to the mega buster and how generally immune they are to many weapons they are (as is the case with so many Mega Man 1~3 bosses already), it makes them novel but ultimately quite underwhelming additions to a game that already really struggles to justify reasons to play it over the originals it’s remade. All in all, the Wily Tower is a neat gimmick, but playing through these versions of Mega Man 1~3 is so bad already that it’s nowhere near enough of a prize to justify that tedium and misery.
The aesthetics, at least, are one aspect of the novelty of a 16-bit remake that really justify themselves here. As someone quite familiar with the original 8-bit soundtracks, it was really fun getting to hear these very Mega Drive-y renditions of those classic tracks. Similarly for the graphics, it’s really fun getting to see all of these environments and stages reimagined with the Mega Drive’s graphical capabilities. A good few bosses are even made slightly larger or more detailed, and while that doesn’t exactly help with the whole boss balancing problem I belabored the point on earlier, it’s at least neat to see <w>. The new Wily Tower bosses do still end up sticking out a fair bit compared to the robot masters in Mega Man 1~3, and in many ways they feel like escapees from some abandoned Mega Man X project, but even still, they’ve got fun designs that give them a character all their own.
Verdict: Not Recommended. Like I said earlier, I never really expected to like this game, and finally playing through it absolutely did not convert me. It’s a tolerable enough time with save states, especially once you get more used to the controls, but at that point, I’d just ask why you’re wasting your time playing through such a butchered version of games that are so much better and more easily played via their original versions. Mega Man 1~3 already have their fair share of design issues, and Wily Wars fixes precious few of them while introducing a good deal more. The only real reason I could see to play it would be for a veteran Mega Man fan to see just what these remakes and the Wily Tower are like, but I don’t allow a potential reason of “morbid curiosity” to impact how I give these recommendation verdicts because otherwise then I’d be unable to “Not Recommend” anything. Your time is simply better spent playing better Mega Man games and better games full stop than wasting your time with these botched experiments.
