There isn’t really a subtitle here but I figure it’d be almost impossible to search for the title otherwise. The year seems like a good way to do things. Mega Man has had tons of different manga titles over the years and it’s always good to discover more. This one goes by very quickly with just a few chapters but you can still feel the vision. I’ve yet to see a Mega Man title that was just downright bad after all. Chan may come the closest as a goofy gag title but I’ll reserve judgement until I’ve finished it. Maybe it picked up later on.

The plot basically follows the first game. A bunch of robots have gone rogue across the city and it turns out that the nefarious Dr. Wily is the cause of this. He has caused them to all go rogue in his mad quest for power. Mega Man is quickly transformed from a nice house bot into a combat machine in order to stop them. Dr. Light did his best to make Mega Man as powerful as possible but does he really have what it takes to defeat these guys? It is always fun seeing early Mega Man though before the personality was completely cemented. For example he’s not your average peace goer here, this Mega Man is absolutely ready to crush his opponents.

He does offer them a chance to surrender of course but after that he immediately jumps into how he’s going to destroy them. It’s definitely quite brutal but hey they’re robots so they can always be rebuilt. That’s the general idea at least. It is nice to see Mega Man taking time to strategize and consider what to do next though. Ordinarily the fights aren’t long enough for this but with 4 chapters, we get a really long fight against Guts Man and a few of the other robot masters also get extended battles. Mega Man has to find the weakness each time and make use of it.

One detail this manga also adds that a lot of others forget is the energy meter. In this manga, it’s a real thing so the more he uses his special weapons, the less energy he has. At one point he runs out of the ice weapon when against fire man so he has to improvise with his mega buster which was pretty fun. That’s definitely happened to me in the past while playing the game because sometimes you just need them for those pesky minions. Sometimes the minions are harder to get around than the bosses to be honest.

The art is also really solid throughout. It’s definitely one of the better looking Mega Man titles that I’ve read. I’m not putting it at the level of Gigamix or anything like that but it is really easy to read and is pleasant on the eyes. The fight scenes work really well and you can always follow the action. It definitely helps that the fight scenes were extended so the artist could really show off here. It would have been a success either way but really getting to show off the art during the action scenes made this a real win.

There isn’t a lot to discuss in the manga though in part because of how it’s a straight adaption to something that didn’t have much of a story regardless. It’s Mega Man tearing his way trough all of the robot masters after all and that’s about it. It’s still a really fun read though, you just don’t have to go into too many details here beyond the extra attention to the gameplay as I mentioned before. I suppose another thing you could mention towards that is it’s nice to see how they even factored in how the copy Mega Man will always be slightly slower since he has to wait an instant to copy the original’s movement. So Mega Man used that against him and took the guy down for the count.

Another addition to the realism here is in how Mega Man had to take a while to figure out what Yellow Devil was weak against. I mean to a video game vet like me you always go for the eye but otherwise I can see how you would just keep trying different moves until something worked. That’s something that happens to me with regular robot masters since a lot of them aren’t really obvious on what they would be weak against. What would you use against someone like Drill Man right? It’s a really tough thing to think about and often times you’ll lose by the time you figure it out so then you better hope you had more lives at the ready. (Yes, they even factored that into the manga. The 1 Up seems to work as some kind of senzu bean so that was pretty fun)

Overall, This is a pretty fun title. It’s over very quickly with just 4 chapters but at the same time that’s still longer than some of the Mega Man oneshots I’ve read. The story itself may be one that you’re super familiar with by this point but it was a good bit of fun either way. The art was sound and the writing was good. You can’t really ask for much more than that in the end. I’d definitely recommend it to all Mega Man fans and hopefully we get some more Mega Man titles coming soon. You can never have too many of those.

Overall 7/10