Rockman 7 FC

I played through Rockman 7 Famicom (Rockman 7 FC), which is an NES-styled "demake" of Mega Man 7 (originally for SNES).

It was....okay.  Now I'm going to be honest, I haven't played a classic Mega Man game in quite a while (it's also been a long time since I played through MM7 on SNES), but I found this one to be kind of disappointing, which surprised me a bit.  I honestly can't remember how much of this was just due to MM7 not being great at its base, and how much of it was the design of this remake in particular.

Obviously it's hard for me to make a concrete comparison analysis without having a proper frame of reference to point to, but I mean, there weren't really any problems as far as recreating the standard mega man physics (felt on point for the most part), and this didn't have the punishing "lose buster charge when you get hit" function or anything like that, so I can only assume that the big difference here was in level and boss design.

This is the first time I can remember going into a classic mega man game (or fangame, in the case of rokko chan / mega man unlimited) and feeling this way, so it's kind of interesting to have this realization that yes, the level design really does matter and can be screwed up in a way that makes it less satisfying.

There are of course some concrete level design examples that I can point to that were subpar.  There's a few unfair "gotcha" moments, such as a falling spikes pit that -- due to the lack of timed screen transitions -- doesn't give you enough fair time to react to the first time (at least they give you a 1-up afterwards).  Stuff like that.  But overall maybe it's just that the levels had a lot of more "boring rooms".  Things like this:

Assuming they tried to roughly follow the level design of the original Mega Man 7 game on the SNES, this is actually probably understandable.  Mega Man 7 looks like this:

Notice just how much space on the screen Mega Man's sprite takes up here.  The proportions are entirely different, so what you can fit on a screen is severely limited in comparison.  The hallway I posted in the first image probably makes a lot more sense when Mega Man is twice as big, but when he's at this smaller size it just seems kind of empty.

Here's a room from Mega Man 2, for comparison:

I'm not saying this is the sole reason for what I'm feeling, but I have a feeling it definitely contributes to it in some way.

On the plus side, the infamously-hard final wily boss felt significantly easier here, so I was thankful for that, at least, haha.  Now that I think of it, maybe a big reason for that is just because Mega Man's sprite is smaller and thus more easily able to avoid the projectiles.  Funny how changing the size of the main character can have such widespread effects...