Mega Man 4 - Reception and Legacy

Reception and Legacy

Mega Man 4 has enjoyed a mostly positive critical reception. Reviews contemporary with the game's release by the United States magazine Nintendo Power and the United Kingdom publications Nintendo Magazine System and Total! all found Mega Man 4 to have high quality graphics, sound, and gameplay. However, they also noted very little improvement over previous entries in the series. GamePro was satisfied with the lack of changes. "Mega Man 4 continues the tradition — crazed robot baddies, good character graphics, great background art and warped, mechanical music," the reviewer said. "When you have a good game, why make radical changes? Capcom sticks to the blueprints in Mega Man 4 — guaranteeing happiness for Mega Man fans everywhere." Mega Man 4 made it into IGN's "Top 100 NES Games" list at number 95, with staff writer Matt Casamassina praising its attempt at better narrative and an essentially similar experience to the first three Mega Man games. Lucas M. Thomas of IGN stated that, as a stand-alone title, the game is one of the best experiences available from the NES library, although not when compared to its superior predecessors. He enjoyed the use of a second set of castle levels to significantly extend the length of the game, a tradition carried on by the next two titles in the series.

Numerous video game journalists and enthusiasts including Thomas, Craig Skistimas of ScrewAttack, GameSpot editors Christian Nutt and Justin Speer, and 1UP.com's Jeremy Parish, refer to the fourth installment as a turning point for the quality of titles in the Mega Man series. Nutt and Speer admitted that the series was beginning to deteriorate with this game, likely due to the growing reputation of the more powerful Super Nintendo Entertainment System at the time of its release. Parrish proclaimed, "Here's where the series starts to go off the rails a bit -- the Dr. Wily fake out was silly, the music was terrible, the bosses and weapons were uninspired, and the ability to charge up the Mega Buster is often cited as a game-breaking innovation." Thomas identified the chargeable Mega Buster as disrupting the balance of the game and rendering many of the Master Weapons useless, one of the concepts that set the Mega Man games apart from other action-platformers.

Mega Man 4 was re-released for the PlayStation as part of the Rockman Complete Works series in 1999. This version of the game features a special "navi mode" that guides players through each level and has arranged music remixes. A port of the Complete Works edition was released on the PlayStation 2 and Nintendo GameCube in 2004 and the Xbox in 2005, as part of the North American-exclusive Mega Man Anniversary Collection. The NES version has also been re-released on Japanese i-mode mobile phones in 2005, worldwide on the Wii's downloadable Virtual Console service in 2010, and on the Japanese PlayStation Network in 2011.