Capcom Reveals Mega Man Legacy Collection 2
In 2015 Capcom bundled the first six Mega Man games together into the Mega Man Legacy Collection, releasing them at a budget price for Playstation 4, XBox One, 3DS and PC. There had been ten Mega Man games by that point, and people started asking “where are the other four?” The answer to that question took two years, but here they are — Mega Man Legacy Collection 2 was announced today, finishing up the run by introducing Mega Mans 7 through 10 to modern consoles. It’ll be released in both digital and physical forms this August.
Numbers 1 through 6 came out on the same system (NES) and have a uniform style, but Mega Man 7 is when things started changing by necessity. The industry had moved to 16-bit consoles like the SNES and Mega Man had to follow (he dragged his feet as long as possible though — Mega Man 6 was released in 1994, the very last year NES games were sold at retail). There would only be one MM game that generation….Mega Man 8 was released for the Sony Playstation and Sega Saturn, complete with the trappings of the day — fancy polygon-enhanced environments and regrettable voice acting.
The Blue Bomber was revised at that point, starring in spinoffs like the 3-D Mega Man Legends games and the Battle Network series for Game Boy Advance. By the time Capcom considered a true Mega Man 9, the audience that had played those games back on the NES had grown old enough to feel nostalgic for the original style. #9 and #10 were rendered in the original NES graphical style.
Capcom first published a compilation of Mega Man titles back in 2003 as Mega Man Anniversary Collection for the Playstation 2 and Gamecube. That collection contained numbers 1 though 8 — all that existed at the time. This was followed up with Mega Man X Collection for the same systems, but so far Capcom has announced no plans to re-collect the X series again.