Mega Man Legends 2
In the first game you are robot boy digging up batteries in ruins. This time you’re looking for keys to this thing called the "Mother Lode" which is like the biggest battery in the world. A mysterious lady crashes your press conference and is like “
hey maybe don’t open the ancient genocide machine that will destroy civilization.” And everyone’s like “
wow interesting point… anyway we’re opening it.”
It turns out those keys power the ancient genocide machine.
The apocalypse can’t start until you finish the world’s worst scavenger hunt.
GAMEPLAY: What did they fix? There’s auto-targeting now. You hit R2 and Mega Man locks onto the closest enemy. Hit it again and it cycles to the next one. Except you can’t actually choose who it switches to, so sometimes the camera just spins around like you’re in a washing machine. And Mega Man still can’t aim over his shoulder. So he literally cannot shoot and see where he’s going at the same time.
I ended up just holding R2 and the fire button the entire game. Just constantly blasting like I’m pressure-washing the ruins.
The automap is better. It even marks the door you just came out of so you don’t get lost. But whenever the game puts you in a big open area the map just turns into spaghetti. It’s supposed to show terrain but it looks like a seismograph during an earthquake.
Enemies still drop money, and now the Zenny actually flies toward you when you walk by. Unfortunately the economy is still terrible, the Zenny crystals are worthless except the purple ones.
The other big change is the world. Instead of one town, you get an airship and travel between islands. It sounds cool until you realize the towns are tiny. Each one has a shop, a quest guy, and a ruin where the key is. It's kind of like
Shenmue II compared to
Shenmue.
The Reaverbots are back and now they look like animals. To the point where you’re like “why even make them robots.”
The real problem though is the weapon scaling. Mega Man’s gun still sucks. Late-game enemies take like 30 or 40 shots to kill even when you’re maxed out. Roll can build special weapons but you need parts. I built exactly one and it sucked. By the end I had like ten manuals for weapons we couldn’t build because we were missing some random screw from a ruin I never found. And apparently there’s an S-Class digger license exam that unlocks more ruins where you probably find the good weapons. I failed the test and just brute-forced the rest of the game, hoarding E-Tanks and eating boss attacks until they died.
Is the game unfair? Not exactly. You can see the enemy patterns are carefully designed. But the camera has no up-down control. So there are sections where you have to shoot panels in the ceiling and jump through holes… without being able to aim up or see where you’re landing. And Mega Man has an automatic ledge grab that just randomly decides not to work.
6/10
GRAPHICS: One thing I’ll give
Mega Man Legends 2 is the outdoor areas look pretty good. They're still basically corridors, but they’re laid out in a way that tricks your brain into thinking it’s open world. The first snowy town, Yosyonke City, looks great when you arrive. I hoped it was gonna be the main hub. Like the town in
Threads of Fate, the place where you hang out and watch stuff change. Instead it’s just like three buildings. The one fun detail is Roll actually puts on a bomber jacket in the snow.
The final area is supposed to be the ancient city. You expect like some futuristic space mall. Instead it’s just… another ruin. Instead of a jungle or fire or ice ruin, it's a
space ruin. It kind of feels like Capcom knew the series might end here. The ending dumps a bunch of lore in random text boxes right before the final boss.
The first game had really obvious texture warping, especially on Roll’s dropship. That’s fixed. Your equipment still shows up on Mega Man. If you equip a helmet he wears it, and certain accessories change his boots now.
8/10
SOUND: The music in
Mega Man Legends 2 is kind of repetitive but it’s not bad. The dungeon music is still spooky but not quite as terrifying as the first game. The boss themes though are very hype.
You spend more time on Roll’s airship, the
Flutter. In the first game the theme was like this goofy xylophone song. In this game they remix it into a slow sad version. It's like the song went through a divorce.
Voice acting is about the same. Nobody’s incredible but everyone sounds natural enough. Tron Bonne is still great. They also introduce a new pirate named Bola who’s kind of a smartass.
Roll is still terrible. I finally understand the meme where she keeps interrupting you with useless advice. She gives absolutely no clue how to solve anything. Late in the game she gets replaced by her dead mom. She gives the exact same useless hints in the same syrupy voice. So the ghost of her mom is also like “
wow Mega Man this sure looks like a puzzle.” Even from beyond the grave she’s still not helping you at all.
7/10
STORY: Wow, Mega Man talks
even less than he did in the first one. He just glares at the villains as they do their big evil monologues. He doesn’t remember who they are because of amnesia, but he
does know they’re dickheads.
The amnesia plot is getting old fast. The ancients spend so much time explaining things he literally can’t understand, which is just annoying after the first cutscene or two. At first I thought the first game got it right because the final boss dialogue was dense but meaningful. In the sequel it’s just verbose techno-shit.
And who Mega Man is changes depending on what the plot needs. Sometimes he’s a robot, sometimes a clone, sometimes some weird hybrid.
Early in the game he and Roll go to Yosyonke to find her dead parents. Then they basically forget about it, and both parents end up dead anyway. Mega Man meets his “parents” too, but he can’t remember them because (surprise!) his memories are irrecoverable.
There's the infamous cliffhanger: Mega Man gets stuck on the moon. Roll supposedly gets blueprints from her dead mom to build a rocket, but how that works is never explained. Didn’t he already take a shuttle to the moon? Was it destroyed?
Tron Bonne comes back and basically has a vendetta against Roll despite barely interacting with her. She even uses a voice synthesizer to imitate Roll in one boss fight.
Savage.
Gramps is still mostly useless. In the first game he chit-chatted with the mayor; here he’s just tagging along with Von Bluecher, some rich idiot with a super-ship. Gramps just delivers keys so Von Bluecher can gift-wrap them for the villains.
The final boss is essentially the first game’s final boss. Now it's a girl with a bullshit gravity gimmick. Mega Man doesn’t want to wipe out humanity, his siblings do. This conflict has been done better elsewhere.
5/10
