Mega Man & Bass

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Notes

Mega Man & Bass is another Mega Man game, in the original series of Mega Man games. As a running theme from the previous game, it was originally release on the SNES in Japan but not localised, and then later ported to the GBA and released abroad.


The game is pretty similar to the previous Mega Man game I played, Mega Man Zero 4, and most of what I had to say there still applies, so this will mainly be a comparison to that game.

The story is similarly perfunctory. A robot named King raids the robot museum for designs so he can build a robot army. Then at the end, it turns out he was working for Dr. Wily all along! These games are almost a self parody at this point (even when originally released on SNES it was alongside Mega Man 8, not to mention all the spinoffs like the X series).

The gameplay is a bit clunkier than the Zero games. There's no wall jumping and dashing is replaced with a slide along the ground. You do get a choice of Mega Man or Bass, who play a little differently. Bass has the ability to aim away from dead horizontal, which seems like technology Mega Man should really get installed.


MMAB is more like a classic Mega Man game than Zero in that it revolves around killing the robot bosses and getting their weapons. I think the game gets better after you have a few weapons under your belt, as you have the ability to deal with situations cleverly, by picking a good weapon, rather than being forced to blast through with the default buster. Each boss is also weak to another bosses weapon. Exactly how weak varies: some are totally trivialised but some remain tricky.

The ending is a predictable gauntlet, with 2 "final bosses" (King and then Dr. Wily) with multiple stages each, with refights of all the robot bosses in between. I still think this is a lazy way to pad out the game and increase the difficulty (given the lives system in place).


MMAB is certainly not a bad game, but it repeats all the Mega Man tropes ad nauseum, which I'm not a big fan of. Also, on the GBA, I think the Zero series is better.