Pre-order Mega Man 11

I'm not sure why we all collectively decided that modern Mega Man sequels were explicitly a license to kick the player square in their generative organs. I was there for the 8-bit generation, and I never thought Mega Man was particularly difficult after the first one — but here we go again. I got to sit down and play a solid half-hour of Mega Man 11 at E3 2018, and I was warned before I started that I'd probably want to knock down the difficulty a few pegs. The game, apparently, had been leaving a broad trail of frustrated, broken players in its wake since the show started.

I can see why. The first big hurdle for Mega Man 11 is simple muscle memory. It's explicitly meant to be a next-generation sequel to the original NES series, but it's gotten enough of a graphics update that it ended up resembling Mega Man X on the SNES. The part of my lizard brain that's been playing these games for 30 years kept trying to tell me that this was MMX and as such, I could cling to walls. As it turns out, not so much, and that's why I kept falling to my doom.

The big new system here comes from Mega Man's new Gear upgrade. One button activates a power-up that improves the damage from his standard-issue Mega Buster while it's active; another speeds Mega Man up, effectively throwing everything but him into slow-motion. Both types of the Gear run off the same meter, and if you ever let it run down all the way, Mega Man's systems short-circuit and you can't use either of them for a few seconds. In practice, the game virtually demands that you use the slow-motion almost constantly, to navigate the traps, tricks, falling platforms, and assorted other obstacles that each stage puts in your way. Once I got used to the idea, it was surprisingly easy to lean on the Gear as required, but I did have to constantly remind myself that they were there.

The general plot is about the same as it's always been: There are eight Robot Masters, you can attack them in any order you like, and whether or not he says he is, Dr. Wily's probably behind the whole damn thing. Each Robot Master you defeat gives you access to a brand-new weapon that will turn out to be the key to defeating one of the others, although you'll have to figure out which is which through trial and error (or visiting GameFAQs, because Nintendo Power doesn't exist anymore). It's more or less exactly what you've grown to expect.

It is, however, significantly more intense. Like Mega Man 9 and 10 before it, Mega Man 11 takes advantage of the extra processing power from newer systems to turn up the challenge. There were two Robot Masters available to challenge at E3, Fuse Man and Block Man, and both of them had complicated stages leading up to tricky boss fights. Fuse Man zips around his boss room, constantly dashing and teleporting, to the point where you need slow-motion from your Gear to realistically have a chance at dealing with him; Block Man begins as a simple hop-'n'-bop sort of boss before turning into a three-story nightmare once he loses about one-third of his health.

I'll be honest. I was playing on Casual difficulty at the show floor, which was the only reason why I got as far as I did. On Casual, any given hazard that damages you only takes off a single pip of Mega Man's health, which was the only reason I survived. Block Man's stage is full of tricky platforming action involving a constant series of falling blocks, while Fuse Man's stage is a constantly shifting maze of electrical patterns, offering you limited options to get through without injury. It didn't feel quite as deliberately painful as my first few tries at Mega Man 9 did, but it deserves the reputation it had on the E3 show floor. This is slightly more forgiving than its predecessors, but that doesn't mean a hell of a lot. Shoulder-checking an oncoming train is slightly more forgiving than Mega Man 9.

That being said, Mega Man 11 does strike me as hitting more of a sweet spot than the last couple of games did. It's challenging without being quite as self-consciously grueling, which is much more faithful to the spirit of its franchise. I had a lot of fun with it, all the more so once I got the chance to play around with the Robot Masters' weapons, which have a ton of potential applications the same way the MM9 weapons did. It's still not a game for the faint of heart, but the customizable difficulty and additional advantages from the Gear system provide a lot more options. It's not just nostalgic; it actually does feel like an evolution.