Mega Man 9 is great; it's a tremendously well made game, more carefully crafted and designed than possibly any game of the era it attempts to resurrect. I've beaten it twice so far, and I'll probably have more to say about it at some later date. What it is, however, is living under the shadow of its iconic predecessor, Mega Man 2. It doesn't matter how good the game is, how well designed the levels are, they are going up against our collective childhoods here. You could make a game that is objectively the greatest game in the entire universe, the all-singing, all-dancing omni-game that acts as everything to everyone, that beams stimulus directly into our brain and rewards your play with a neurochemical response like cocaine and twenty orgasms all stacked into one - and it still wouldn't stack up to the memories of our childhoods. And, y'know, sometimes I feel like we're all just chasing that dragon when we play video games.

So, I was compelled to play Mega Man 2 again; I think this is the second or third time I've played through this year? I deviated from my normal pattern and did it backwards, taking all the robot masters out with the pea shooter, and it felt really good. Going through Quickman's level on that raw muscle memory honed from hundreds of times down those laser-deadly freefalls, stepping on the disappearing blocks over torrents of fatal lava; it's exhilarating to do those things that I thought were a sight short of impossible as a child, but seeing as I apparently no longer suck at video games, not anymore.

I always come to realize when I play it - the kind of fleeting revelation that you always understand on an intellectual level, but can only entirely get it when you're in the midst of playing it - that it isn't just my childhood that makes this game so compelling, it's just that it's the best game ever made. This isn't saying it's perfect - to be frank, Mega Man 9 is a much more balanced and careful game. It's just that there are few games, on the Nintendo or, well, actually anywhere, that in such a simple, effective manner, understand how to work the player's psychology, and are able to convey a sort of narrative through these emotions. There's no story to Mega Man 2, at least none that was ever interesting in any sort of real sense, but there's a drama unfolding in your head, like when you run up against those aforementioned disappearing platforms or lasers. Neither of these are actually that difficult if you understand what you're supposed to be doing, but even after my hundredth time through the game there's that panic that has to be overcome. It's hard to remember what it was like back in 1989, jumping across a series of blocks in the first stage of Wily's Castle, and having this giant dragon come up behind you, barely pixels away, having to make these exactingly precise jumps while being chased, but even now it gives me a bit of a charge. The dragon itself is a pushover - but the psychology of the event is what brings the encounter its danger - your own (over)reactions are your worst enemy.

Probably one of the biggest reason the game resonates so well on an emotional level - the music, seared into our very souls by thousands of repetitions, square waves to drive our analog parents insane. Ogeretsu Kun, Manami Ietel, and the legendary Yuukichan's Papa created some of the best video pop to ever come out of a sound generator. There's no way anyone can forget the funky little number in Crash Man's stage, or the bluesy Flash Man theme, the flickering bass and sultry whines of Heat Man's stage, and the epic, driving Wily Stage 1 theme, immortalized as Okkusenman, as you heroically break through the outer defenses and into Wily's inner sanctum. This all came together with the theme of the stages and, the visual design, the music in harmony with the colour palette. A few other games in the series have achieved the kind of synthesis that this game pioneered, but Mega Man 2 will always stand out in this regard - and this is probably one of the weaknesses of Mega Man 9, that the music didn't seem particularly uniquely suited to the stage itself.  And even with all this - and I'm sure I've read this somewhere before, probably by Parish - the game is most effective at its most spare. The last few stages before the finale become slower, darker, more sparse, until there is just silence. The last two levels feature a song that is effectively four notes shifting octaves - combined with the black background, the rusty greens, grays and dark purples, creates this sinister atmosphere, thick and tense and oppressive, even though the levels aren't actually all that much of a big deal themselves. And the most absolutely genius moment of the game is at the run-up to Wily himself at the end, the austere, final level, a long underground corridor, completely silent except for the dripping of acid. It's an unnerving level, and it was especially so when I was seven or eight years old where it was actively frightening. It all leads up to the bizarre final encounter, which is impressively epic itself despite not actually being much of a fight.

And then the ending, a melancholy affair with the music to match, certainly uncharacteristic for the series.  Mega Man walks toward the screen and through the seasons, alone, a little hamlet behind him in a small window, until at the end he looks up, the screen fills to display the entire landscape, and all that's left is Mega Man's helmet. For the ending of a Nintendo game, it's downright poignant. Did Mega Man die, as the rumors went when I was a kid, did he disappear for the good of the world, or did he return home to be the housekeeping robot he once was? Certainly, the only development of Mega Man as a "character" through the game were your own ordeals with him, but it still feels lonely and sad, and there's a definite note of finality; it echos that confused mix of relief and longing for more that comes with finishing a great game. Of course, Mega Man wasn't dead, and he came back for sixty more games. Yay?  By the end, even if you've played through it a hundred times and know it inside and out, it still feels like you've been through something much bigger than the game actually is. And I think that's the triumph of Mega Man 2, and something that hasn't been replicated in the series, and, at least for me, in video gaming in general. Perhaps they don't even try, realizing the futility of trying to bottle lightning. Its immediate sequel told its story like this to some extent, but the (comparatively) forgiving design and the inclusion of cutscenes made it much more conventional in tone, and the rest of the series didn't even put in any effort to do so in the first place - much like how the games were designed, really! Even Mega Man 9, a game crafted in the image of Mega Man 2, focused more on devious level design; and while emotions run high in some of those borderline sadistic levels, it still doesn't try to replicate the same feeling. The series has a lot of baggage now - video games themselves have a lot of baggage now - and you can't shake that off, even in a back-to-basics revival.  And I don't know if, twenty years after the fact, it's still possible to really work on that level in the same way without just being derivative of what came before it, especially this great and shining light; so I'm kind of glad, in a way, that they didn't just throw in a drippy cavern for kicks (though I was sort of expecting it, and was a little bit surprised when the game ended when it did!)

I've heard it was a labor of passion, that Inafune and his team made this on their own time because they believed in it so strongly, and it's striking when you look in the credits and there's only around a half-dozen actual names involved in the game's development. It's amazing, because games these days cost tens of millions of dollars and have teams of hundreds, but none of these people can make a game as good as Mega Man 2.