Mega Man V

1994 · Action Platformer · Game Boy

About Mega Man V

Mega Man V (1994) is the last Game Boy Mega Man, the first with entirely original bosses, in which Mega Man fights the planet-named Stardroids from space with a new detachable Mega Arm and the robot cat Tango.

Mega Man V in Depth

Months after Mega Man IV, Mega Man and his sister Roll are confronted in a field by Terra, a robot made of alien material that his Mega Buster cannot hurt. Defeated, Mega Man wakes in Dr. Light's lab while Terra and his eight Stardroids seize Earth's cities in hours. Dr. Light gives him the Mega Arm and a new companion, Tango the cat. After beating the Stardroids and Terra, he learns that Dr. Wily was behind them and storms the Wily Star, where he refights Enker, Quint, Punk and Ballade and the Stardroids. Wily then releases the ancient robot Sunstar, who turns on him; after Mega Man beats him, Sunstar, moved by Mega Man's ideal of peace between humans and robots but too damaged to be repaired, destroys himself and the Wily Star.

Stages are chosen in a non-linear order, and each boss's weapon is added to Mega Man's arsenal, with each boss weak to a particular weapon. Instead of charging a shot, charging the Mega Arm launches Mega Man's fist to strike an enemy and return. The Stardroids are named after the planets, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, with Terra named after the Latin for Earth. Rush's Coil and Jet modes help navigation, Tango turns into a buzzsaw that ricochets round the room, and Power Chips buy items from Dr. Light between stages.

Making Mega Man V

Minakuchi Engineering, which made three of the four previous Game Boy Mega Man games, developed it for Capcom, and Inafune designed the characters from initial concepts, saying that a theme "as vague as space" made things easier and harder at once and that he had "a lot of reservations" about the Stardroids. It was one of the first games with Super Game Boy support, adding a colour scheme and border on the SNES. Reviews were positive though critics noted little change: Famitsu's reviewers said only the stages, structure and enemies were new, and VideoGames called it a fun "rehash". Nintendo Power liked its gameplay and graphics but found it too short. In 2008 Nintendo Power named it the 14th best Game Boy game and the best of the portable Mega Man series. It is rare outside Japan; a planned 2004 Game Boy Advance compilation of all five was cancelled, but it came to the 3DS Virtual Console in 2013 and 2014 and Nintendo Classics in 2024.

Mega Man V Trivia

Earlier Game Boy Mega Man games reused four bosses from one NES game and four from its sequel.
Keiji Inafune said it took the longest to make of the five Game Boy games.
Inafune, a cat lover, especially enjoyed designing Tango, whose name continues the series' musical theme.
The Wily Star is a reference to the Death Star.
It was the last game for an 8-bit console to use the classic Mega Man sprite until Mega Man 9 in 2008.