Well, here we are again with another Mega Man game, and boy, if I didn't have anything to say about Dr. Wily's Revenge, I'm certainly not gonna have much to say here about Mega Man III. But hey, we might as well give it another shot, right? 

So what's the story this time? Well, more of the same I guess on a even lesser scale. This go around, Wily's for some reason taken over a oil platform and has converted it to gather energy from the Earth, and as usual, it's up to Mega Man to go and knock Wily down a notch, even if this means taking down multiple robot masters he's faced before, this time from Mega Man 3 and 4, as you can probably guess from the pattern we've encountered so far. Then again, given how Mega Man II had a actual interesting idea for a plot and squandered it, I guess a nothing plot is better than a wasted one. Either way, don't expect much of a story here, even by Mega Man's bare standards of storylines.

Orrr, if you're in Japan, instead Wily's hijacked some strange supercomputer that apparently dictates the everyday lives of Mega City. This machine is apparently capable of screwing with the weather, messing with the transportation in the city, and then Wily's robots drop in to cause some more havoc, presumably while Wily's off doing this during the time:

So uh, I guess that's about one interesting thing you get out of this story - they totally rewrote it under everyone's nose, although frankly, the game's so uninteresting that I had to be told about this after the fact, and edit this whole section in. 

Either way, you pick your nonsensical poison with the region change. You either get the random oil rig Wily opts to take over, or you get the random supercomputer that's capable of somehow messing with the weather of Mega City and grind all of their lives to a standstill while robot masters cause havoc. Either way, do you care about the plot? I doubt it. 

With the one interesting tangent over, let's get into the full mix of things. In terms of what's been encountered so far, I can at least easily say that this has been the best attempt to convert the Mega Man series to the Game Boy. If you recall back to the previous blog post about Mega Man II, you'll remember the story about a new team having worked on that game, a team that was inexperienced with Mega Man and caused Inafune to outright state that it was the single worst Mega Man game made under his watch. So with that, the original team from Dr. Wily's Revenge has returned to the fray. 

For what it's worth, the result is that they've really tightened up the problems that was experienced with Dr. Wily's Revenge. The eight robot masters have properly laid out stages, which are clearly labelled, and therefore means it follows more of the traditional Mega Man level structure (and therefore means you aren't going into levels totally unaware of which robot you're fighting), and you get a chance to use more of the weapons, for what little that's worth. For what else it's also worth, the difficulty scaling that a lot took problem with in Mega Man II has also been fixed. 

Really, the best way to sum it up is that it's a Mega Man game. For better or worse, that is what it is. It is both Mega Man III's best quality and it's worst flaw. Because it's literally just that. It's a decent conversion of Mega Man 3 and 4 for 80% of the game. But unlike the previous two games that at least had some rather interesting things to discuss in how it converts various aspects of the series to a less powerful handheld, this game is literally just that. It's a conversion of Mega Man 3. That's it. Nothing really else to it.

As such, which it's definitely better than Wily's Revenge and Mega Man II, it's also just completely more generic and uninteresting. It has absolutely nothing to it worth really going out of your way to play it in this day and age. You can tell the team was passionate to really nail the Mega Man gameplay this time, and to their credit, they did do it - but it means it's such a copy and paste that there's just nothing to it. Why play it when you can play either Mega Man 3 or Mega Man 4 on NES? It essentially means it's literal only purpose is being a portable Mega Man game in a era that had no way to play either game. 

It also seems that there's a curse on games titled Mega Man 3. If you'll recall back to my review of the NES Mega Man 3, we discussed the issue of slowdown with this game. Luckily, the Legacy Collection included a new feature that allowed you to stop the slowdown of the game, and enjoy it at full speed.

Unfortunately, there's no Legacy Collection for the Game Boy games, and that means the slowdown in this game is absolutely horrific. For as impressive as it is that they managed to convert NES levels to the Game Boy, the console really cannot handle it. Not at all. It then compounds with the fact that the difficulty scaling is also ridiculous in this game, overcorrecting the issue with Mega Man II, and having plenty of bullshit situations where the game just completely blindsides you, mixed in with slowdown that means you're likely to miss many jumps because of it and fall to your death. 

I guess we could talk about Punk, our third Mega Man killer, and I suppose there is something a little interesting in that he's kind of a proto-Bass in terms of rebellious personality who wants to rebel, choose his own path, and fight strong opponents, but given there's as little story here as there was in past games, it's not explored very much, and Punk goes down about as easily as the previous Mega Man killers, so again, there's ultimately not much to say here.

Along with Mega Man 5 (as in the NES, not the Game Boy game), this is the most "this exists" Mega Man game. It's fine, but there's no reason to go out of your way to play it.