Remembering the Mega Man Who Never Was

So, before I get into this, I just want to say that I wasn’t planning for such a gulf between updates, ShadowRock’s posts notwithstanding. Long story short, after a brief lull following the last stuff I posted, an avalanche of stuff happened for me to deal with, Mega Man-related and non. Trying to deal with everything has created a bit of a logjam, but there is more stuff coming! Three reviews I’m working on, and another article separate from that, in fact. It’s just going to take a little more time.

In the meantime, I wanted to update you all and maybe present a little bit of content that’s quick and less research/resource intensive as well, so I hope you’ll enjoy it.

Oh, and in the course of researching for some of this stuff, I ended up coming across a link to an article on the site that no longer worked. The article was there, just that the site moving around broke the link. If you’re ever out and about and come across something like that, please drop me a line at the.mega.man.network (at) gmail.com so I can look into it and try to get it fixed!

Now, on with the show!

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I’ve been a Mega Man fan for a long time. Pretty much as long as the franchise has existed, even before it could reasonably be described as a “franchise.”

As a fan, things today are so much different than they were then. There is just so much news, so much content, so many games… it’s rather wonderful to behold.

Even now, as we’re long past the era of multiple releases each year, numerous toy licenses, new comics, cartoons, manga, and so forth, it isn’t usually long before something new to talk about comes up.

But it wasn’t always this way.

Back in 1990, we basically had precisely four things: Two games for the Nintendo Entertainment System, a rather loose interpretation of the character as part of a Saturday morning cartoon show, and an almost equally loose novelization of the second game. Or you can make it five, if you wanted to collectively count the occasional magazine coverage.

As it happens, it’s that fifth one we’re looking at today, since that’s basically where all the news happened in those days.

About a year after Mega Man 2 had graced the cover of Nintendo Power magazine, we got our first look at Mega Man 3 from the Summer Consumer Electronics Show, or CES, which was the big biannual event where new games were shown off before the Electronic Entertainment Expo was founded.

At the bottom of the first column on the first page of the show’s coverage, we got this little blurb and one tiny screenshot. Note that at this point in time, Mega Man’s creator had been known as “Dr. Wright” in one game, and “Dr. Light” in the other. Despite the latter being the more recent (and the one that would eventually end up sticking in the west), it was perhaps not the most unreasonable mistake to make.

It seemed like that was it for the time being… or at least, it would, but there was another bit on the opposite side of the page that would no doubt catch a young Blue Bomber fan’s eye — because that’s precisely what it was designed to do.

This raised all sorts of questions, especially to a young mind, one of which being “‘Mega action in the tradition of Mega Man II‘? Does that mean this is a sequel? Is this part of Mega Man III?”

The graphics looked like a more advanced Mega Man, and even the frog looked pretty similar to the Croakers/Kerogs seen in Mega Man 2.

Perhaps this is a case for enforcing copyright and trademark protection against similar works. Maybe I was too young to understand what that one line of text they had was getting at. I might have possibly been so desperate for more Mega Man that I was seeing it where it did not exist. Or it could be that I was just dumb.

Whatever the case, I had it in my mind — at least initially, that this had something to do with Mega Man, title be damned. “‘Power Mission’? What’s that? Is that the mission for Dr. Wright that they were talking about in the other paragraph?”.

To me, it looked like Mega Man was going to have to spend at least some of the game fighting without his iconic armor and trademark arm cannon (we wouldn’t have the term “Mega Buster” here until the fourth game, years later), and would instead have a more stripped-down helmet and boomerang. Which was kind of neat, but also made me a little wary.

My worries would only last a few months, as more Mega Man 3 info would arrive in the November/December issue of that year, and put my fears to rest.

So then, what was this other game?

It wasn’t “Power Mission,” at least not by the time it was finally released. Instead, it would take on the name of Power Blazer when released by Natsume in Japan, and while being somewhat Mega Man-esque, it was reportedly not very good. So not-good, in fact, that western publisher Taito would end up seeing to many changes being made before releasing it in April the following year as Power Blade for the NES, which was apparently good enough to warrant the cover of Nintendo Power:

I had no idea that the two games were one in the same for many years, and figured that “Power Mission” had simply fallen by the wayside, either not being released in America or just being cancelled outright. Instead, its transformation from Mega Man-looking hero to a more Schwarzenegger-ish action star and the gameplay improvements that came with it led to the game doing well enough to garner a sequel, albeit one arriving late enough in the NES’s life that it’s relatively hard to come by, thus commanding around a grand (more or less) to snag on eBay.

To this day, I’ve still yet to actually give any version of this game a try, but since learning of its connection to this Mega Moment from my youth, it’s had my interest. Incidentally, I’ve also wondered if anyone else has had the same misguided impression of this game that I once had?

You can find out more about the game, such as changes made in localization (“pretty much a completely different game”) at The Cutting Room Floor, and a deeper dive with even more comparisons of both games (plus the sequel) at Hardcore Gaming 101.

Thanks for reading!

Credit to Nintendo Power Memories for the Nintendo Power images, and to The Cutting Room Floor for the banner image!