1up Retro Blog Reminisces About Super Adventure Rockman

Over Mega Man‘s twenty-plus years in the video game business, a lot of his games have made it to the shores of North America. Heck, some have even gone to Europe.
Despite this, however, there are also a number of Mega Man titles we haven’t seen, or have been held back until new opportunities had arisen for them to be released. Super Adventure Rockman is one such game.

Released on the SEGA Saturn and Sony PlayStation in the middle of 1998, Super Adventure Rockman was a full-motion video adventures that spanned three-discs, with the animated portions being broken up by first-person segments which involved fending off foes with the Mega Buster by way of a targeting cursor. That there has always been a certain lack of a Rockman anime (not counting the Rockman.EXE series that would come years later) helped make this item somewhat desirable among fans of the Blue Bomber.

As it turns out, however, it seems that the game has more detractors than genuine fans, and chief among them is the Man behind the Mega himself, Keiji Inafune. From UDON’s Mega Man Official Complete Works art book:

“To be honest, I feel I owe the players an apology for this one . . . There was a phase when the company was basically selling Mega Man to the lowest bidder, and I really feel like this title is the worst of the worst . . . The ultimate unspoken rule about making a game that is geared towards children is that you simply cannot kill anyone, but here you have military helicopters falling out of the sky and people dying in droves. If it had been up to me, I would have at least made it so they all ‘got away safely’ via parachutes or something. Then as if that wasn’t bad enough, Roll dies… and to top it all off, the whole world is destroyed! I was like, ‘ Did they really need to go that far?!'”

Granted, there are fans who would no doubt disagree with Inafune’s assessment due to their own desire for a darker Mega Man tale. But it seems that even those who have played it feel that the game itself is rather lackluster; 1up’s Retro Gaming Blog has an entry for the game, in which the author states “As someone who played through all of Super Adventure, I have to say, Inafune’s right — this game is ridiculous as a Mega Man game.”

Personally speaking, I thought this game would make for a good Wii port– maybe clean things up a bit, change aiming the Mega Buster to work with the Wii pointer, bring in the cast from Mega Man Powered Up, and drop it into the arms of waiting fans. But from the sound of it, perhaps that isn’t such a good idea– and it doesn’t seem Inafune would get behind it, either.

In fact, in light of Inafune’s comments, one has to wonder if the game would still be considered in-continuity. Then again, there are various fans who deny X6-plus, or Mega Man Zero, or both, so I imagine people will or won’t include it in their own personal fanon of their own accord.

LanceHeart