Collection essentials #584: Mega Man Anniversary Collection

Mega Man was one of the most prolific series from one of gaming’s biggest companies. The NES console alone was home to the first SIX Mega Man games. So rereleasing and compiling the games in the main series made a lot of sense.


The six NES Mega Man games first got rereleased on the original PlayStation only in Japan. These ports retained the original graphics and weren’t full remakes, but contained more enhancements than you’d normally see from an NES port. Thankfully, Capcom figured that American gamers ought to have something similar, so a few years later they gave us this compilation which contains the first eight mainline Mega Man titles along with enhancements and bonuses. They also contain a couple obscure arcade games called Mega Man: The Power Battle and Mega Man 2: The Power Fighters. If you want more information on these games and what they’re like, please seek out my past blog posts about them. 


Some of the enhancements were taken from the PS1 ports, though I understand quite a bit was left out too. I don’t know the details on that so I won’t be talking about it. So what DOES the Anniversary Collection offer? Well, there are easier difficulty options, such as giving the player more lives, in-game hints, and a rapid-fire button. There’s also remixed music for most of the songs in the six NES games. A nice quality-of-life improvement is that you can now use the shoulder buttons to toggle through the many weapons Mega Man fills his arsenal with. What’s nice is that you can choose to turn off most of this stuff if you want an experience that’s closer to the NES originals. Note that Mega Man 7 and Mega Man 8 are pretty much straight ports of the originals from SNES and PS1 respectively, and they don’t have these enhancements (though apparently there’s an easy mode available for 7).


The Anniversary Collection ports are certainly not perfect. One strange mistake is that they don’t give you the option to use a button layout that mimics that of the original NES games. Some graphical effects in the end credits of Mega Man 7 are missing. They picked the inferior version of Mega Man 8 to port, meaning that the bonus content of the Sega Saturn version is missing. 


This compilation was released on the three major consoles at the time. They had more differences than the typical multiplatform game, as each version has their own extras and quirks. Strangely, the GameCube version doesn’t have any of the remixed music, and the controls are locked to a configuration that basically swaps the jump and fire buttons from the NES originals. There are watchable extras, sort of like what you’d find on a DVD, such as an interview with the series creator (unless you have the PS2 version). 


I remember when the Anniversary Collection first came out and caused a buzz among some online friends of mine. I didn’t get it right away…until the Xbox version came out at a budget price a while after the other two versions, that is! I don’t believe I owned any Mega Man game of my own up to that point, and it seemed like a good way to get into the series, and it was! However…I was rather turned off when I tried out Mega Man 1 and 2 and got my butt kicked by what I felt were overly cheap deaths. I wasn’t entirely wrong, but it unfairly soured my view of Mega Man as a whole and made me put the game on the shelf for years after that. 


My interest in Mega Man rekindled in the early 2010s, and in early 2014 I decided to plunge into this collection and try out all the games instead of just the first two. And I wound up having lots of fun! I thought some of the remixed music was really excellent, to the point where I genuinely prefer some (not all) of it to the original NES renditions. 


Nowadays, there are different collections of old Mega Man games available on modern platforms, the two “Mega Man Legacy Collection” titles. I actually haven’t spent much time with those so it’s hard for me to compare, but they’re definitely not the same as this compilation and don’t have the enhancements from the PS1 ports. Is it worth going out of your way to experience the Anniversary Collection specifically? Perhaps! If you want easier difficulty options and like remixed music, I think you’d have a good time with the Anniversary Collection. 


Nowadays I’d probably sooner go for the original NES releases, but I still have a lot of fondness and nostalgia for the Anniversary Collection. I might even prefer Mega Man 4 on here in particular since the remixed music is so darn good. While it’s not perfect, as a quality retro compilation (which is somehow now retro itself), Mega Man Anniversary Collection is a worthy essential in my collection.

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