Dr. Wily takes off on a safari hunt to track down a strange object he and Dr. Light had discovered months ago. The said object turns out to be a gigantic supercomputer with a mind of its own. It recreates for Dr. Wily the scientist’s second two sets of Robot Masters (from
Mega Man 2 and
Mega Man 3) and emits radiation that causes machines all around the world to go wacko.
Roll goes down and Rock vows to save her by taking out the problem at its source. Dr. Light shields Rockman, Beat, and Rush from the radiation (no word yet on why the Robot Masters and Blues were not affected) and these three head out to the location of the supercomputer.
This three-disc game is almost pure FMV. Basically you watch anime and influence the story’s outcome similar to a
Choose Your Own Adventure book. There are generally three things to do here; in normal mode the animation stops periodically and you are presented a textual prompt to pick between two choices (things like “go left” or “use Rush”). Occasionally, however, arrows will flash on the borders of the movie screen indicating that something is about to hit Rockman; you have to press the control pad in the direction of one of the arrows to dodge in time. When Rock is attacked the screen shifts to the third mode which is a first-person shooter style mini-game where you have a targeting cursor that you move around and aim and fire at things attacking you. Rockman can even charge up, although you unfortunately don’t really see your own shots, just enemy reactions to them.
Except for the cover, the artwork is rather traditional in this game, although the animation seems to have borrowed some aspects of the
Mega Shows like Rush acting like an idiot. Still, it’s a good watch, although don’t expect to be able to follow the story if you can’t read and understand Japanese.
I think the strangest thing about the plot is the fact that the game ends when Roll dies, not when Rockman does. You can get poor Rock tossed into a bottomless pit or blown to atoms (there’s one cute scene where Shadow Man grows an arm cannon from somewhere and vaporizes Rock, then stands next to the resulting pillar of smoke laughing)...yet Rockman always comes mysteriously back to life just in time to stand in Dr. Light’s lab and watch Roll die. Truly bizarre.
Most of the weapons operate pretty identically to each other in this game; you can rapid-fire all of them just like your normal Buster. Basically the only difference between the weapons is the type of damage they do (some robots are more vulnerable to certain weapons than others). Also some of the weapons’ shots are a tad bigger than others. The only one real exception is the Time Stopper which freezes the action for a brief moment, so you’ll want to fire it once, then quickly switch to another weapon to blast away.
On the final subscreen the weapons are listed in the following order (they shift around some during the course of the game, but you can compare the following chart with the screen shot above to see what’s where):
Rock Buster |
Metal Blade |
Bubble Lead |
Atomic Fire |
Time Stopper |
Quick Boomerang |
Shadow Blade |
Leaf Shield |
Air Shooter |
Crash Bomber |
Search Snake |
Needle Cannon |
Gemini Laser |
Blues Shield |
Magnet Missile |
Hard Knuckle |
Top Spin |
Spark Shock |
Rockman transforms both arms into cannons and fires them both at once, producing a gigantic super-shot which puts the supercomputer Lamoon out of commission. The entire temple collapses.
With the demise of the supercomputer, power returns to the world, and Roll wakes up, much to the delight of Dr. Light.
Meanwhile, when Rock comes to he’s back outside the destroyed temple, surrounded by Beat, Rush, the Mega Man 1 Robot Masters, and Blues. While they all discuss their victory, Dr. Wily discreetly gets away. But everyone just laughs it off, because after all...they won.