Let's Play Mega Man & Bass | When Developers hate You... | Jack Is Streaming Solo

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Tifa is still sick, so Jack gets to play another game from his childhood and that she wouldn't touch.

The Mega Man series is a classic. The games have laid the groundwork and defined a whole genre. To this day, people are making romhacks, breathing new air into these games. Or they make new games altogether that very clearly have their roots here.

Not Mega Man & Bass, though.

Originally only released in Japan as Rockman & Forte for the Super Nintendo, Mega Man & Bass only got a western release in English when it got ported to the GameBoy Advance in 2002.
The game was basically Mega Man 8.5, even being released after Mega Man 8 had come out for PlayStation and the Sega Saturn.

But a whole lot of things went wrong here.

The good: You can pick whether you want to play as Bass or Mega Man. Bass has his own moveset, including a double jump and the ability to shoot different reactions. Mega Man plays like you would think, charging his buster and sliding all over the place. Also, he does a thumbs-up.

The bad: The game itself.

If you remember the old games being hard, well, this one brings that feeling back but adds a certain "we're kinda done making these games so we hope you'll give up after this one". Enjoy some difficult platforming with enraging enemy placement, an unhealthy dose of instant-death spikes and enemies that can absorb entirely too much damage.

How about boss fights with very tight windows to dodge and attack? If you thought Mega Man X was too easy with the bosses being weak to certain weapons, well, Mega Man & Bass does the opposite. Sure, effective weapons have some effect, but that might not be enough to save you. Or how about a boss that can heal himself at a pretty rapid pace? Or an unlockable weapon that makes you take less damage but also makes you DO less damage or even NONE AT ALL?

Remember E-Tanks? Those nifty little things that you can find in stages or purchase, that you can heal yourself with when things get tough? Yeah, this game doesn't have them. But it sure feels like they made it with them in mind.

To add onto the dogpile of complaints, the GBA version is rage-inducing by design. Instead of re-designing the stages around the new aspect ratio, the view is zoomed in. And that means you simply won't see when there's instant-death traps around sometimes. Like in the tutorial stage. Similarly, when you could see platforms somewhere below you on the SNES, you just gotta get a lucky guess and do a leap of faith in this version.

Mega Man & Bass is what happens when the developers have either become blind to what the gameplay feels like to people that haven't made the game or they simply didn't care enough to make it fun. Instead of challenging, it feels plain unfair.

Mega Man & Forte wasn't included in the Mega Man Legacy Collection re-releases. For the sake of collecting the series in one place or for preservation, that sucks. But honestly, it's not missed all that much.