Mega Man: Dr Wily's Revenge is the first time that the Mega Man series moved away from the NES. This game released for the Game Boy on July 26, 1991 and unlike the main series, which was developed by Capcom, this version was outsourced to Minakuchi Engineering. In its final form, it's hard not to say that the developers phoned it in to cash in on the series popularity and the success of the Game Boy.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 1/10
There is no actual text to explain what's going on in the game. Even the manual, which in many games is your only way to get a story setup in games at this time period, only says that Dr. Wily once again is going insane and you, Mega Man, must stop him. The bosses that you face in this game are the same that you will find in Mega Man 1 and 2 for the NES.
GAMEPLAY | 9/20
The gameplay is the same as the NES games. You have a pistol and get to choose one of four levels, all of which have a specific boss at the end. Beat the boss and you get his special attack, which you can use to defeat the other bosses. Beat all bosses, and you go to the final stage, where you are faced with a boss rush before you meet the ultimate antagonist, Dr. Wily.
Unlike Mega Man 3 for example, you only have 4 boss fights before you reach the final stage. Those four bosses are the same as in Mega Man 1 I believe, and the four boss rush fights are not actually those same bosses, but rather different bosses from Mega Man 2. So, to me, it doesn't really make sense why you would purchase this game at the time unless you didn't own an SNES, because it is literally just an inferior version of those NES games.
The sprite size of Mega Man looks like it wasn't changed from the NES games, whilst the screen of the Game Boy is obviously much smaller than any TV. I don't know if this even got any design considerations, because due to your size, and the fact that there is no crouch feature, means that you will simply be helpless against many attacks from enemies.
However, in terms of difficulty, you're unlikely to have a big problem here once you figure out which is the easiest way to go through those four bosses. I started against Cutman first, which didn't go well at all. Then I tried Elecman and had a relatively easy time. The boss fight was a mess because of the lack of ways you can defend yourself and the attack of the Elecman which seemingly can cover the entire screen vertically. Somehow I beat him after a while, and once I got his attack, the other levels were pretty much a cake walk, hard to control platforming at times notwithstanding.
If you couldn't at the time get enough of Mega Man, I guess you'll have some fun with this one, but in pretty much every way, this is skippable, since it doesn't even offer new types of bosses or anything.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 7/10
There is no voice acting. Soundtrack is solid with some good tracks, specifically the Elecman theme.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 5/10
The Game Boy doesn't have the capabilities to offer much attention to detail, let alone any color in its original version, and in terms of its art design, this game doesn't really bring anything to the table. In fact, copying pretty much all elements from the NES games makes this pretty uninspiring looking, though Mega Man fans will obviously appreciate what they see on a basic level.
ATMOSPHERE | 5/10
This is a rather average presentation here overall. It definitely feels like a Mega Man game, which is the only praise one can give here.
CONTENT | 4/10
The content that is here is mostly copied or 'dumbed down' from the NES games for a lack of a better word. Its fine content (five levels, 9 total boss fights) but obviously there should have been newer, and more, boss fights here.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 5/10
The Mega Man formula is pretty fun but I think a common issue I'm going to have with it is that many bosses can't really be chosen first, if even more than a specific one, which made me question what the point of offering choice to the player is when I reviewed Mega Man 3, and the same questions apply here. And then when you do have a boss attack, it can (and did here) make other boss fights trivial. But certainly, the idea, and in parts the execution, is good.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 2/10
I guess this deserves an extra point for the fact that they successfully moved the series over to the Game Boy for the first time. But it's obviously a simple copy the previous Mega Man games.
REPLAYABILITY | 3/5
Being able to choose which boss to fight first, and having many different weapons at your disposal, should lead to more replayability than, to your average player, is available here. Unless you really figure out how to actually get through the tougher bosses without getting the other bosses weapons first, doing that doesn't really make sense. And the combat abilities available to you certainly doesn't make it easy, and especially fair, on the player to choose the tougher road.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
The game worked well at all times.
OVERALL | 46/100
Definitely one of the few games in this challenge so far where I would recommend to go back and play it, though I wouldn't say it's a recommendation to all gamers like with Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake and Super Mario World, but rather a recommendation to those who enjoy retro games, as I'm sure plenty of retro gamers actually missed out on playing this game, which to me is pretty underrated due to what it has on offer here.
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