Mini Mega Man Marathon March Mania; Mega Man 3: "We will show you our peaceful ways, with a giant heavily armed robot!"

With the success of Mega Man 2, Capcom saw that they had a successful franchise on their hand, and would start to suck it dry. Again, if I was doing all of these, I'd drive myself insane from all the Mega Man games. It's time though to make the jump to Mega Man 3 and see the new Mega Man Level Pack!

Dr. Wily's always watching!

Starting with the plot, and Dr. Wily...I'm sorry, Dr. Wiley... yeah, Capcom had a bad habit of awkward localizations for a very long time, something I think is still going in some of their games... Fun fact, that misspelled their own name one time. Granted I'm not one to judge when it comes to spelling errors, but still. Getting back on point, Dr, Wiley has agreed to end his evil ways, and work with Doctor Light to build Gamma (no not that E series one) a giant "peacekeeping" robot. However, 8 new Robot Masters start acting evil, along with a mysterious red robot who jumps a lot and has the power to make the player themselves jump around like an idiot, so its up to Mega Man to save the day... and also stop Wily cause the "end his evil ways" thing was a facade. Once again, all of this isn't explained in game and is a basic excuse for why you do the things you do in the game. Serviceable for its time.

In terms of gameplay, Jump and Shoot Man got himself an upgrade! And a pet! This game was the introduction of Mega Man's Slide ability, which lets him slide through small gaps, which while not revolutionizing the game, there's no moment that you have to slide in an action set piece under a door for example, but it does allow for more exciting moments on screen other then the exact same sprite moving at the exact same speed for three games now. You also get access to Rush, Mega Man's trusty robot dog. In Mega Man 1 and 2, you had access to some non-damaging weapons that added variety to the platforming challenges. Things like a light bridge creator in Mega Man 1 (I forget the name off the top of my head), to three Items (called Item 1, 2 and 3) that allowed you to hover across pits, climb walls and creating your own floating platforms in Mega Man 2. In Mega Man 3, Rush serves as the replacement for Item 2, the hoverboard, and has two extra abilities. The Rush Coil which acts as a spring to let you jump higher, and the Rush Marine, a submarine you use to travel through parts of levels (the hoverboard is called the Rush Jet for the record). Rush is a really nice addition to the game and further adds variety to the level structures. To beat a dead horse, while the levels themselves are a lot of fun, there is one part in the middle which is a pace killer, Doc Robot. For Doc Robot levels, you replay slightly harder versions of four of the levels, and in each level, you fight the doc twice. The catch? He's using the abilities of the Mega Man 2 Robot Masters. I wouldn't have a problem with this if it wasn't just for these four levels if he appeared in the fortress levels as well. But as is, its filler, padding, and not a good form of it either because you don't have access to the Mega Man 2 weapons, so you need to learn the new weaknesses for one level, and that's it. The difficulty is also all over the place at times, as the Fortress levels are very easy thanks to all the pickups you get in it (seriously? 6-7 E Tanks?), but overall the game is a lot of fun.

And now to repeat myself for the third time. Sprite work is good, but no noticeable upgrade between the last game and this game, soundtrack's great (favorites being the Title theme, Stage Select, Needleman, Magnet Man, Snake Man, Spark Man and Shadow Man (who sounds great in the Smash 4 Soundtrack). Repeat conclusion about fun games for their time that still hold up, see you next week. When I go to do Mega Man 5 and onward, I'm going to be lumping some of them together for the record.

The following is copy and pasted from the most recent Toy box review, which you can find here: https://mediaholicstoybox.blogspot.com.au/2018/03/transformers-age-of-extinction-voyager.html (it's not cheating if you're copying yourself)

For April and May, due to the MAYvel content, and the prelude to it taking up April, content for the Toybox will be on hold. I've tried three posts a week before, it wasn't fun. The three Sundays after Easter Sunday will not have posts on here. The content schedule is currently

Mega Man 3: Main site (21/03)
Power of the Primes Wave 1 Pretenders: Toybox (25/03)
Mega Man 4: Main site (28/03)
Lego Doctor Strange Sanctum Sanctorum: Toybox (01/04)
Spider-Man: Main site (04/04)
X-Men: Main site (07/04)
Spider-Man 2: Main site (11/04)
X-Men 2: Main site (14/04)
Spider-Man 3: Main site (18/04)
X-Men 3; The Last Stand: Main site (21/04)
Ant-Man:  Main site (25/04)
Lego Avengers Infinity War Hulkbuster Smash Up: Toybox (28/04)

While content for the Toybox in May is still being decided/ obtained, the main site's content is as follows

Captain America Civil War: (02/05)
Star Wars: The Last Jedi (04/05)
Doctor Strange: (09/05)
Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2: (16/05)
Spider-Man Homecoming: (23/05)
Thor Ragnarok: (30/05)

Transformers content on the Toybox (in case it wasn't obvious I'm writing this in a way so that I can copy it into the MM3 review for Wednesday) is planned to resume in June with the remaining PotP's characters from Wave 1 (exception being Rodimus Prime as I plan to review him alongside Rodimus Unicronus), along with Combiner Wars Bombshell, Chop Shop and Titans Return Kickback in the PotP Skrapnel review. I'm not sure when I'll be able to tackle Wave 2 of Power of the Primes, and if there's somehow a gap between finishing Wave 1 and when Wave 2 is released, then I will review some known PotP's figures, or more non Transformers figures. The Toybox is kind of a "goes with the flow" thing. Anyway, see you next time!