Discussion:Mega Man 2/À faire
--- Kitamura: Unfortunately I don’t have any more information about them than what was in your comic. In my mind, there’s two kinds of weapons in Mega Man: those whose usefulness is immediately apparent, and those where you won’t know what they do until you actually try them. With Bond Man, the 7th boss, we already had the idea for a weapon that stops an enemy’s movement, but that was as far as it went. We never planned out anything for the 8th boss.
The truth is, there were a number of flaws in the MM1. The way we thought about weapons and the robot masters then was different than how we thought about them in later games, including MM2. In the first game, we designed the weapons by thinking about the corresponding robot master weakness. This focus on the robot masters sometimes caused us to neglect thinking about whether the weapons were fun, how they would actually work in-game, etc.
Ariga: I see. So how did that change for Mega Man 2 and later games?
Kitamura: In MM2, we first planned how the weapons would work: their effect, how they moved on-screen. Then we matched them to robot masters. That way, if the player pays close attention to the way the weapon works and the way the boss moves, they might get some hint about what his weakpoint is.
For example, take the Quick Boomerang. It’s the only weapon that fires continuously if you hold down the attack button. Metal Man reacts whenever you press the fire button, so if you hold the button down, he won’t do anything. So normally if you get close to him and fire you’ll get hit, but the Quick Boomerang’s range is just outside Metal Man’s detection range. You can take him out easily with it. There’s other examples too, but that’s the way we started to think about weapon design in MM2.
Ariga: I see, it’s a neat idea. It feels good in the game, too.
Kitamura: Les ennemis et les armes sont le noyau de Mega Man, donc nous y avons beaucoup réfléchi. Malheureusement, MM1 et MM2 ont vraiment beaucoup de points durs. En MM2 en particulier, nous n'avons vraiment pas eu le temps. Nous n'avons guère passé de temps à peaufiner et à polir les patrons.
Ariga: Right. Inafune also mentioned that you had no time for MM2, only 3 months (including debugging).
Kitamura: Normally we’d do a lot of playtesting, trying out all the weapons in different places… but in MM2 we didn’t do anything. Once something was finished, we’d check that it worked, and that was that. If we hadn’t done it like that, we never would have made the deadline. MM2 received a ton of critical praise, but on the other side, there are some people who think it’s rough and flat. I understand why they think that.
Yellow Devil, Mecha Dragon
Ariga: I heard from Inafune that the Mecha Dragon was supposed to be included in MM1. I think it was still rare for Famicom games then to have such a big boss using the background layer, and in such a speedy action game too. How did you come to that decision, to use the bg layer for Mecha Dragon?
Kitamura: Well, Wily Stage 1 is the real heart of MM2. It’s the first stage where you get to play as the “fully powered-up” Mega Man.
Ariga: That is true, it’s always been the part where I get most excited.
Kitamura: And to be honest, when I was making Mega Man, my biggest concern was that people would think it was a boring, plain game. Little Mega Man fighting other little enemies of the same size with his little “pew pew” pea-shooter… if that’s all people saw, how could they not think it was boring? That’s why, in order to erase that image, I wanted to include some unique big enemies and bosses.
The idea to make use of the bg layer for a boss was something I wanted to do from the beginning. It wasn’t any kind of special fixation on the bg layer; rather, it came from necessity, from thinking about the Yellow Devil’s attack pattern. The only way we could do a boss like that was to utilize the bg layer. At the time, one of the managers at Capcom saw the Yellow Devil and went “Whoa!” That was half the battle right there. (laughs)
Secrets
Ariga: Another thing I’ve wondered about for awhile: why can you kill Metal Man in two hits with the Metal Blade?! Was that actually in your planning docs? I remember being momentarily stunned when I discovered this… then I burst out laughing! There’s never been another boss like that before or since. It was really memorable.
Kitamura: That was written into the planning docs, yes. It’s a “hidden trick.” In the old days, if your game didn’t have any secrets, it was difficult to get it featured in the various gaming magazines. Also, there’s the secret in Mega Man 2 where you can change the stars to birds in the boss select screen—that was added for the same reason.
Kitamura wanted Wood Man’s stage in MM2 to have an effect similar to Slash Man’s stage in MM7, where the trees could be lit on fire.
In MM2, in the forest at the beginning of Wood Man’s stage, I had him code it so that if you used Atomic Fire on the trees, everything would burn up and the Batton (bat enemies) would all fly off. Sadly that ended up getting removed from the game. (laughs)
In any event, Matsushita was extremely against all this. He thought if we started adding things like that, there’d be no end to it.
In MM2, the wall boss of Wily Castle stage 2, “PicoPico-kun”, was originally different. In my design plans, as the blocks flew out at you, you’d have less and less places to stand (you could fall into the pits left by them). However, because MM1 was criticized for being too hard, our programmer Matsushita said there was no way we could do something like that in MM2, and he left the floor intact. But the floor tiles disappearing had been the whole reason I made that boss, so I thought the change really sucked the life out of that battle.
If you want to play it as it was, try not stepping on the places where the blocks have fired. That’s the “raw” version of PicoPico-kun! I designed him that way… it should be really hard, but also really fun.
Ariga: Interesting. My friends and I usually try to do a time-attack style speedkill of that boss, and we always thought that he was hard enough as it is. (laughs)
Kitamura: By the way, la plupart des noms ennemis dans MM1 et MM2 ont été faites par mon collègue plus jeune, Naoya Tomita (aka TOM-PON). For the entire development, I was extremely against the name PicoPico-kun. He didn’t listen to me though. (laughs)
The “PicoPico-kun” boss fight was meant to be fought with less and less room to stand on.
For MM2, I asked Tomita to draw the sprite for Mega Man in the “Get Equipped” scene and the ending scene. Tomita wasn’t very good at drawing then, so Mega Man is rendered a little clumsily, but at the same time, I liked the childlike quality. I think that’s how a kid would have drawn him. Tomita drew a number of other sprites, with highly individual and unusual designs, but I thought they were too far outside the image of the Mega Man world, so we had him work on backgrounds instead.
I really liked his sensibility though. We used to have a lot of random talks, and I got a good glimpse of his unique personality. (laughs) --- Palette Animation
Ariga: One of the amazing things about MM1 was the beautiful (for the Famicom) visuals. Background palette animation has been a stunning feature of the series since the very first game.
Kitamura: The backgrounds were drawn by one of my junior colleagues, Yasuaki Kishimoto (aka Yasukichi). He drew the ending scenes for both MM1 and MM2.
Ariga: I love the backgrounds in those endings.
Kitamura: In other games we developed at Capcom, we did all the graphics together. Kishimoto did the backgrounds, and I did the object sprites. We were both amateurs, but he knew a lot about computers and games. In that sense, when it came to computer graphics, he was really my teacher. He did almost all the backgrounds for MM1 and MM2. Back then, we had no in-game editing tools: you had to see what you’d coded in by loading it on-screen. To animate backgrounds on limited hardware like the Famicom, Kishimoto and I came up with the idea of palette animation.
Ariga: The palette animation was taken up by later games in the series too. For its time, I think it was a revolutionary idea, both visually and in terms of the space it saved in memory.
musique
Ariga: I’ve always loved the music in the first Mega Man.
Kitamura: After MM1 was released, it was decided that we’d do a sequel. For MM2, Takashi Tateishi was assigned as the composer, and I was really worried when I heard his first songs. I was taken aback—they were extremely cutesy sounding, like something from Bubble Bobble or Fantasy Zone…
Ariga: Ah, I read elsewhere that he said he struggled a lot with MM2. The planner (which must have been you) wouldn’t sign-off on his compositions, and it was just one rewrite after the other.
Kitamura: I realized what his mistake had been. He had looked at pictures of Mega Man and truly worked hard to write songs that captured Mega Man’s world. Consequently they all ended up feeling like variations on the theme of Mega Man’s character.
When we requested songs from the composers, we’d send them pictures of the backgrounds and other sprites for guidance. The source of my worries with Tateishi’s initial compositions was that they didn’t match the game in-motion, while you were playing. They didn’t match the movement speed or actions (jumping, shooting) of the gameplay, so despite the fact that they were very good songs, they felt too “laid-back” in the game.
He was going to have to re-write them. At that point, I decided to try giving him some new guidance.
- You’re floating in the water, everything is sparkling, but there’s danger!
- The excitement of being up in the sky, of teetering right on the brink, don’t look down!
- Hurry, hurry! Hurry hurry hurry!
- Concentrate, take your time and figure it out. Disappearing blocks.
- Keep moving along at a brisk pace… don’t stand in one place for too long!
- Smash, crunch, crash, clank! The gears are turning!
- Slipping and sliding through an underground maze! This way, that way, this way, that way!
- Ascending the stairs higher and higher, climb, climb!
Ariga: Hah! I recognize those stages.
Kitamura: To accomplish that, I also told Tateishi not to focus on melodies like he had been. I said to try and let the changes in the rhythm express it. I think writing this way was much more difficult. I didn’t want him to think about the visuals per se, but rather stay focused on the fact that these were going to be used in a game. (laughs)
Ariga: Wow… yeah, that does sound extremely difficult.
Kitamura: But thanks to those efforts, we ended up with songs like Crash Man, Heat Man, and Quick Man’s stage themes. The short, repeated musical loops in Heat Man’s stage, and the intense music of Quick Man’s stage really contribute to the player’s sense of tension in-game. Tateishi did a great job. Of course I think MM1 is a good game, but in terms of all the challenges we faced and overcame, I think of MM2 as a major accomplishment.
Wily Castle Stage 1 theme.
Ariga: The music perfectly matches the mood of the game. Looks like your “guidance” worked…!
Kitamura: Tateishi’s finished songs really exceeded my expectations. And it was cool seeing how he took ownership of them. At first, you see, it was just another job assigned to him. But as he gradually came to see these as his songs, the quality went way up. That made me really happy.
Ariga: He must have been feeling like “I’ve got it now!”
Kitamura: Yeah. And so one day, here’s what happened. The usual pattern was that I’d go into the sound room and check on how he was doing. But one day, very unusually, he called me in, grinning, and said “I just finished something awesome!” That song was Wily Castle stage 1.
Ariga: Whoa….! The birth of a legend!
Kitamura: That song, for Tateishi and myself, represented a culmination of all our efforts on this music. It instilled in us this feeling, like we were real pros now. Looking back on it, it’s funny—for almost every part of MM2, there’s a cool little story like this. It’s such a mysterious game.
e his name as “Dr Wheelie.” (laughs)
Ariga: I guess… he’s the crazy doctor who likes to pop a wheelie on his bike. (laughs)
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Promotional ad for the robot boss contest, featuring Dr. Wily front and center.
Kitamura: One of the faiblesses of Mega Man was that it didn’t have a lot of appel d'étagère. You wouldn’t know it was fun until one actually played it. Addressing this was a big goal for us in MM2, and the robot master character contests were part of our plans. While we thought it would be fun if kids got in on making robot masters, at the same time we really wanted to get the word of mouth going. I did the layout for the boss contest flyer, and I placed Wily’s image front and center to emphasize his character.
We also added the subtitle to MM2, “Wily no Nazo” (The Mystery of Dr. Wily) for the same reason, to let players know about him. The idea for the subtitle actually came before the idea for him turning into an alien at the end. (laughs)
Anyway, as you can see, we tried to build the characters and the story around these marketing ideas. For people who were really excited about the boss contest, I guess that’s a little disappointing to hear, but it’s what we had to do as working adults. On top of that, we were very clear about picking only the best designs, because we had that commercial purpose in mind. As a side effect, by pushing Wily and the robot masters to the fore like that, it forced me for the first time to really flesh out the story and relationship between Light and Wily.
Ariga: Now with Dr. Wily a more developed character, you had to explain Dr. Light too.
Kitamura: As you would think, Dr. Wily’s central movitation turns out to be his relationship with Dr Light. That fact helps explain why the robot masters have a discernably human warmth and quality to them, also. Mega Man is the embodiment of justice. His heart is so good, it’s almost not human. But Dr. Light isn’t like that; he is human. And his big failure was Protoman.
Ariga: Ah! So that’s how you came up with him.
Kitamura: Protoman is the proof that Dr. Light is just a human. Most of the world and story of Mega Man was made in this way, linking up connections between the different characters. Although I feel like I’ve mainly just recited what you wrote about in your comics. (laughs)
Ariga: Haha, no, no. But it makes me very happy to hear! I always imagined it being that way.