Mega Man 8

Check it out, it's Mega Man 8! And it's finished! This completion marks the final clean-up of my Mega Man Anniversary Collection. Good riddance. The problem with the compilation was that although the games are fun and although the story evolves and changes between each iteration, the games at their core are almost exactly the same. That isn't to say that the first game can even hold a candle to Mega Man 8, either graphically or gameplay-wise. Still, were it not for the system changes (the series jumped to SNES in 7 and PlayStation in 8), the series would have gotten far too stale, probably back around 3 or 4, for me to keep caring. But I would have had to press on anyway, as that's what logging is all about: finishing what you've started. (And what you have not yet started, of course.) As far as this game itself was concerned, it was in some ways the best Mega Man yet but in some ways the worst. The difficulty actually felt slightly higher than in the past few games. But then, so did the graphical quality. This game allowed the robot masters to taunt me as I fought them, even. Awesome. The biggest pro and con of the game, however, were the cutscenes. No longer was the plot simplified into text blurbs and twenty-second intros. Instead, I was treated to multiple-minute cutscenes that took advantage of the video storage benefits of PlayStation discs. They looked pretty tacky, but only the way anything from 1990s Japan looks tacky. Anime, you know? The biggest problem with these cutscenes was the voice acting. It was horrendous. To dub it in English, they used Japanese people and the result was the typical anime bullshit where everybody sounds high-pitched, frenzied, and excited. It nearly ruined the character of Mega Man, in my eyes, to hear him speak with the voice of an eight-year-old boy. It did ruin the Dr. Light character in my eyes when I heard him speak with the zeal of a bloated old Chinese man on the other end of a take-out phone call. His name is "Light" and his is both a super genius and a force of good in the world, and now forever in my eyes he will mumble, mispronounce his R's as L's, and not emphasize a single word. So yeah. The cutscenes were great conceptually and even in practice, in terms of giving me plot and character development. But they were pulled off with such an embarrassing translation attempt that they'll always be what I remember most about the game - for negative reasons. Whatever. This compilation is done, and next up is the Mega Man X Collection. Hopefully I have a little bit more fun with that one. But we'll see.