A Critical Look at Mega Man 7 Stages: Is Wild Coil Good for ANYTHING?

A reader brought to my attention that Wild Coil is aimable when charged. I went through the other three stages in the second half again to see if this added any value to the weapon, which only confirmed that Coil is aggressively useless.

If you really wanted to, you could hit King Gojulus in the jaw from the ground this way. That is much slower than jumping to do it, and will take longer than almost anything else you could throw at him.

The fact that I mention it anyway should tell you how far I have to reach to test this thing. For instance:

We can hit this Sniper Joe without having to jump, but we need to charge the Wild Coil to get it that high, and it takes two to kill him. We could instead just shoot Freeze Cracker against the wall twice to get it done faster and easier.

This is still one of its best uses among Slash Man, Turbo Man, and Shade Man’s stages. The other is fighting Batton in Shade Man’s if you forgot about half your existing arsenal and badly want to use this somewhere.

After finding so little to do with Wild Coil in the part of the game you find it in, I went back through the other stages. There’s plenty of secrets to miss, so it’s not unlikely that a player could be going through these with Coil, right? There had to be some use for it in here somewhere.

I thought I might have found what I was looking for right away. Here we have an enemy lower than Mega Man that Wild Coil kills in two hits. That seemed reasonable, until I tried it with Danger Wrap, and realized this is exactly what being able to drop a bomb is for, killing it in one.

The search continues.

With good aim, we can bounce a Wild Coil through the passage and mildly bother a Petaforth. Taking it seriously, we could just attack it from above, except we’re also going to attract the attention of Tsuranattori, which Coil is awful against.

This one is perfect though. The Petaforth is alone, and in a great position to drop Wild Coils on. We just need to take aim and… it leaves. It leaves and despawns, because it would rather kill itself than let Coil have even one moment in the spotlight.

Roaches! They’re low to the ground, and Wild Coil kills them in one hit. We can’t use it to deal with the Mets though, while Freeze Cracker can be aimed in any direction, hits through the platforms, and is wide enough to kill roaches with a forward shot.

We could use Coil for this one too, but Freeze Cracker does the same job and makes the lava safe. Freezing the lava might even be why we came back here.

This is neat. Danger Wrap can be used to set a trap for the Dust Crushers, and kills them in two hits. You know what doesn’t do that? Wild Coil.

Look, we can use the upward bounce to shoot high enough to hit this icicle!

The icicle we needed to cross these spikes. Right.

Okay. Here it is. I found it.

If you jump over the Gabyoall and stand in precisely the right spot, you can both freeze the Gabyoall in place and hit the Cannon. This one enemy setup uses the upward charged shot for height, and the backward shot for the Gabyoall, perfectly demonstrating everything the Wild Coil can do, which no other weapon ca…

…

Don’t use Wild Coil.

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Bonus:

Couldn’t resist including that bit in here. –LBD