Apr '23 Monthly Game Club - Mega Man Legends

My friend rented this game once when it came out, I remember watching him play in a mostly featureless cave and not being very impressed. This should be a good opportunity to revisit.

Iā€˜ve been meaning to play this game for like over a decade after a friend of mine had the N64 version as a kid. I bought the Japanese PS1 version of this game at a Book off a few months ago but I had some issue with it where it wouldn’t ever load when entering the junk shop lol. Iā€˜ll probably just end up playing the Vita/PSP port even if it isn’t that good of a port from what I hear.

This was on the N64 emulator my brother set up for me when I was a child which means itā€˜s among the first handful of games I ever played. Good fun and a cool environment but I don’t think I ever managed to get that far into it. Probably was a bit tricky to navigate with keyboard controls…

Perfect game.

I have my hands full of games right now between PC and switch, but MML might be the perfect thing to get me to fire up my CRT for the first time in a couple months (took a break due to having less solar power)

I have played through this game so many times since I first had it when I was *seven*, but never actually beat it.

As a seven year old I had MML2 on Playstation, where I mainly kicked snowmen and their buckets around, exploring just the town because dungeons were scary. Then I would rent Megaman 64.
Reminder that there is an N64 version of this game that is technically inferior in some ways (voice), but also really cool and superior in other ways (gšŸ‘€d graphics????)

This thang's just short enough to plow through in a month, I think.

I always get stuck on that part where you have to defend the city. Anyone here know the trick to that?

Started playing this in english and the dub immediately made me decide to try playing in japanese except I don't know enough japanese to play this untranslated. Dammit!

Maybe this'll be a good excuse to figure out a decent setup to play videogames in japanese and save words I don't know to study and generally if I can learn some japanese by playing videogames. After all:

[URL=https://i.imgur.com/Ngpt6e7.jpg][IMG width=500]https://i.imgur.com/Ngpt6e7.jpg[/IMG][/URL]

Even though I really enjoy the silly of-the-era English voices, I am shocked no one's made undubs out of this series!!

@ā€œconnrrrā€#p110695 I was sure thereā€˜d be one and I was very disappointed when I found out there wasn’t! I found this recent decompilation project though. https://github.com/ChrisNonyminus/mml1

@ā€œsteenā€#p110691 From What Iā€˜ve played of the Japanese version it isn’t too bad, but anything without furigana makes looking up Kanji a pain and I havenā€˜t been able to find a text dump of the game anywhere, and there’s some interesting differences between the English and Japanese versions such as being able to listen to a full J-Pop song in the record shop. Also having actually good voice actors like Mayumi Tanaka helps a lot, but I still really like the campy English voices.

I started playing it, and I'm liking the vibes (aside from there being cops everywhere)

In particular I love this legend:

>!



>!

>!

>!

The little hub at the beginning is max hang out

That guy is 100% a voyeur. Why so defensive?

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@ā€œsabertoothalexā€#p110704 The little hub at the beginning is max hang out

Yessss.... am I the only one who tried for maybe 5 minutes to kick a soda can into one of the garbage cans? (it did not work)

I love the English voices. I think they perfectly fit the atmosphere. The game's a cartoon, after all.

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@ā€œTradegoodā€#p110706 am I the only one who tried for maybe 5 minutes to kick a soda can into one of the garbage cans?

I tried for way more than 5 minutes when I was a kid. >!Try kicking it into the bakery!!<

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@ā€œchartā€#p110700 anything without furigana makes looking up Kanji a pain

Yup, but while digging through RetroArch's settings I found this suspiciously named function called [AI service](https://docs.libretro.com/guides/ai-service/) which seems to use OCR to read text from a screenshot and then overlays it on top of the screen like so:

[URL=https://i.imgur.com/5EpMfo2.png][IMG]https://i.imgur.com/5EpMfo2.png[/IMG][/URL]

Character recognition seems to work surprisingly well despite the pixelated kanji so I was thinking of modifying [the server](https://gitlab.com/spherebeaker/vgtranslate) to display the japanese text on a webpage so I can copy and paste it instead of overlaying it as a blurry image.

@ā€œTradegoodā€#p110703 I think the depiction of cops is pretty good in this game actually.

https://youtu.be/pCoZxUYnm-4

Okay, Iā€˜m about an hour or so in on PS1. So far, it’s been a bit of a struggle honestly! I've realised I have played the intro to this game before, and also I guess this is the game that the old Egorapter video about Mega Man X was taking shots at! The whole walking forward three steps and then being frozen out of controls to be told X is jump… yeesh.

But the game sure is beautiful! If it wasn't for all the texture warping you could almost believe this was like a modernized retro-inspired game rather than an actual contemporary one. Absolutely timeless visual style. The voice acting is fun, I particularly enjoyed the voiceover for the introduction. There's a bit where the guy is saying like "Courage, _GREED_, **POWER**.." and each word has its own inflection. I would also probably prefer to play in Japanese but, although I have been learning for a few years now, I'm not there yet.

The controls are taking some getting used to. I noticed you can switch the L/R and L1/R1 button functionality in the menu. I tried both and neither really feels great so just gonna stick with the default. I have found running circles around enemies while shooting (holding L and R1 for example) is a pretty effective strategy so far. Some minor QoL things it took me a little longer to figure out than I would have liked!

  • - Triangle skips/speeds up dialogue.
  • - Pressing circle moves the camera behind you, so if you want to do a quick 180 you can tap down and then circle.
  • Also I have been hit by a cars repeatedly. A couple times it made me really jump, cause it's such a loud -_SMACK_- and they just come outta nowhere! They move so slow, yet somehow are really hard to keep track of.

    I'm a bit surprised at how JRPG this is. The music, the text boxes with weird spacing like MegaMan, giving major Breath of Fire vibes.

    Edit: oops just realized I was playing 2

    @ā€œsteenā€#p110691 Iā€˜m surprised there isn’t an undub version of some sort?

    @ā€œthebryanjzx90ā€#p110721


    >

    I’m a bit surprised at how JRPG this is… the text boxes…

    I was going to joke that I must have downloaded a Final Fantasy rom by mistake.

    I played the first hour or so, right up to the part where >!you rescue the pirate girl from the dog and she flies away on her ship!<. I enjoyed the wild-west early 3D controls (which was made even worse because I forgot I had bound the circle button to the outer ring on my joystick). The art is great, especially upres'ed. But I didn't have much fun---the aesthetic isn't doing it for me and the combat is... clunky. How long should I give it? Is there a point by which I should know whether I'm onboard or not?