So, returning to the Mega Man series, we've come to a series that I've never actually played before - the Game Boy Mega Man titles (or as known in Japan - Mega Man World). I honestly know surprisingly very little about the Game Boy titles, beyond knowing that it's where Quint originates (for one game, where he was one of the most infamously piss easy bosses in the entire series), and that Mega Man 5 is where the Stardroids originate, and that it's a legitimately fantastic game. 

So, when the EShop closure was announced last year, I ended up grabbing all five games, along with Mega Man XTreme 1 and 2, and now, with so many giving them a shot, I thought now was as good a time as any to finally get around to running through them.

(Side note: if you recall back when I mentioned in the Wily Wars review that there's games with less levels than that game - this is the one). 

So, Dr. Wily's Revenge is a honestly bizarre game. The story is as simple as Wily having reprogrammed Light's industrial bots again, and has created a new 'Mega Man Killer' in order to take Mega Man down a peg. From here, what we have is a fairly faithful recreation of the Mega Man gameplay on the Game Boy. Honestly, given the hardware and what they were trying to adapt, the sprite work, and visual style is honestly pretty damn impressive. It's a pretty faithful conversion in terms of raw gameplay, all things considered.

What's strange about it is that instead of being a unique game, or a conversion of a pre-existing game, instead it's a mish-mash of Mega Man 1 and 2, with only four robot master stages (Cut, Elec, Fire, and Ice retrospectively), and then randomly four Mega Man 2 robot masters inside the Wily Castle so you can get their weapons right on time for them to be entirely pointless since Wily's weakness is the Mirror Buster.

So as such, this means their concept for stages here is basically mashing together random stages from Mega Man 1 and 2, and basically saying it's a new stage. You could be running through Fire Man's stage and suddenly you're in a random section of Bubble Man's stage from Mega Man  2. The game is pretty much like that for the rest of it, without much else to say. You run through re-treads of Mega Man 1 and 2 levels slammed together, with some extreme screen crunch along the way that frankly makes some enemies immensely annoying, and randomly - Cut Man is like the biggest threat the game has to offer here.

About the only things of note here is that the structure is essentially what Mega Man 7 and 8 would adopt years later, with you facing four robot masters, then another four later - and that this is Enker's first appearance in the series. Not that it's a particularly impressive showing. He frankly has a pretty easy pattern, and his weapon is pretty pathetic, but hey - it's the first unique robot master we get from this series, and the first of the 'Mega Man Killers'.

That's unfortunately the story with Mega Man Dr. Wily's Revenge. For what it is? It's a impressive first try to convert the Mega Man gameplay to the Game Boy. If you were a kid in the 90s hankering for portable Mega Man action? This would definitely do the job. 

But now? It's just a pretty meh retread of the NES games that still ultimately does everything better, and as such, apart from playing through it to see the little oddity, it's not really worth much of a damn in 2024. Fine enough game, but ultimately unremarkable.

The box art is pretty hysterically bad though.