Mega Man II (Game Boy)

About Mega Man II (Game Boy)

Mega Man II (1991) is the second Game Boy Mega Man, made by Sokoban developer Thinking Rabbit, mixing bosses from Mega Man 2 and 3 as Dr. Wily uses a stolen time machine.

Mega Man II (Game Boy) in Depth

Dr. Wily steals an experimental Time Skimmer from the Chronos Institute and travels 37.426 years into the future. Alerted by the robot dog Rush's sense of smell, Dr. Light sends Mega Man into an underground passage full of Robot Masters from past adventures, then on to Wily's fortress with four more. There he meets Quint, a future version of himself that Wily captured and rebuilt; once beaten, Quint hands over his Sakugarne jackhammer, and Mega Man follows Wily to a space station to defeat him.

Like other Game Boy entries, it combines two consecutive NES games, here Mega Man 2 and Mega Man 3. Mega Man runs, jumps and shoots, and can now slide. The first four stages, home to Wood Man, Air Man, Crash Man and Metal Man from Mega Man 2, can be played in any order, and each defeated boss gives up its weapon, with limited ammunition refilled by enemy drops. After reaching Wily's fortress, a teleport room opens four more stages with Top Man, Hard Man, Magnet Man and Needle Man from Mega Man 3. Energy tanks fully restore health, and defeating some bosses unlocks Rush adaptors: Rush Coil for high jumps, Rush Marine for travelling underwater and Rush Jet for crossing long distances.

Making Mega Man II (Game Boy)

Capcom gave development to Thinking Rabbit, best known for Sokoban, rather than Minakuchi Engineering, which had made Mega Man: Dr. Wily's Revenge. Series artist Keiji Inafune admitted the different feel of its design came from the developer's limited knowledge of the series. It received mixed reviews, blamed partly on Thinking Rabbit's inexperience with this kind of game, with criticism of bland level design and a poorly optimised soundtrack; 1UP.com's Jeremy Parish dismissed it as "a random assortment of enemies and stages from Mega Man 2 and Mega Man 3 from NES, downsampled and downscaled for Game Boy". As a result Thinking Rabbit was not retained, and Minakuchi Engineering made the later Game Boy games. It has since been re-released on the 3DS Virtual Console and Nintendo Switch.