I’ve been playing way too much Mega Man Powered Up over these last three weeks—way too much. My completion percentage is sitting somewhere around 40-45% right now because I just haven’t been able to keep myself from playing the game over and over again with each of the characters. If I had to wager, I’d say that, given that it takes me anywhere from an hour to an hour-and-a half to complete the game depending on which difficulty I’m doing, I’m nearing thirty hours of play time. And if I had to make another wager, I’d say that only five of those hours were aggressively unfun. Some of that is because of the characters I used, but a good portion of it is because of a little thing called Hard Mode.
Obviously, Hard Mode is supposed to be difficult or it wouldn’t properly earn its namesake, but I feel like the developers completely missed the point, dropped the ball, crashed and burned, and whatever other metaphor you care to mention when it comes to making Hard Mode a natural extension of Normal Mode. In order to illustrate my point, let’s look at a breakdown of the three modes.
Easy Mode is for those players that want to dip their toe into the Mega Man experience, so to speak. Enemies are largely lethargic obstacles to be avoided, not adversaries to be toppled. They don’t make much of an effort to deal damage to Mega Man and when they do, it’s negligible. The bosses have their most challenging attacks scaled way back or excised altogether and they flinch nearly every time they take damage, making stun-locking them the fast track to an easy win. Add to that the addition of what I like to call mercy blocks throughout the stages’ most difficult platforming segments and the complete removal of Wily Machine Number 1’s second form and you can see why successfully playing through without breaking stride can net you a completion time that’s just shy of an hour. I should know because I’ve run through it no less than fifteen times. This mode is good if you just want to have a romp through the stages while listening to their excellent music without fear of death.
Normal Mode is essentially a tweaked version of the original game to make it infinitely more playable, yet retain the same amount of challenge. All enemies act as they normally would and mercy blocks have been removed. The only thing worthy on mentioning here is that the Robot Masters have been given a special attack, but they’re easy enough to react to or outright neutralize.
Hard Mode is where the proverbial difficulty train flew off the rail and slammed into the brick wall that is my patience, showering the area with its atrocious design decisions. In a nutshell, where Normal Mode was conceived so that the player would have to utilize reaction time and a good amount of skill to be victorious, Hard Mode demands the same amount of skill, yet also asks of the player an obscene amount of prediction time—that being you have to guess what’s going to happen, then react, whereas you’d normally see what happens and then react.
One of Hard Mode’s biggest problems is that enemy locations weren’t scrambled to account for their advanced abilities. Killer Bullets now home in on Mega Man when they get close, Foot Holders return to their random movement patterns from the NES game and can shoot horizontally, and Big Eyes can jump the length of the screen and do so at an increased speed, among other things. Individually, those wouldn’t be too difficult to work around, but in typical Mega Man fashion, you’re dealing with those tweaks as well as the parade of other things that want little Mega Man to explode into shiny blue orbs.
Perhaps Hard Mode’s most egregious failing is that it lacks the harmony that Normal Mode does. Like with Easy Mode, once you’ve run through the game a few times, you can come pretty close to making a beeline for the boss at the end of the stage without breaking stride. Hard Mode doesn’t leave any room for this. The utter chaos on display in each level is as baffling as it is hostile to the player. Trust me, after you’ve died for the fifth time because the Foot Holders in Ice Man’s stage wouldn’t line up properly for you to thread Mega Man through their shots while simultaneously lining him up to land on the next platform, you’ll swear the game is sustained by nothing more than your anguish. That’s the same kind of “difficulty” the NES Mega Man employed and it wasn’t any more balanced then as it is now.
Every time there’s an element of Hard Mode that’s done right (with the highlights being the Robot Masters and Wily Castle bosses who manage to subvert expectations without being impossibly difficult), there’s a head-bashingly stupid, and frankly unfair, way the game was made more difficult. Why not remix the stages again and work the new enemy patterns into that design instead of taking a hammer to the square peg that is the Hard Mode enemies and trying to force it into the round hole that is the Normal Mode stage design? That would have gone a long way towards making Hard Mode feel like it was inspired by Normal Mode instead of hobbled together and hastily duct-taped onto it.
There’s no way I’ll ever hope to complete Hard Mode with the characters that don’t emulate Mega Man in some way. It’s a shame that the game wasn’t altered to account for each Robot Master in general, but at least Normal Mode is doable with each of them—provided you can react instead of predict what’s going to happen. I’m more than happy to call the game done when I complete Normal Mode with all of the characters and save Hard Mode for when I’m feeling up to surmounting an impossible challenge.
No, wait, that’s what Challenge Mode is for. Sorry, Hard Mode!
Tangential Aether 