Mega Man 5 - Development

Development

Mega Man 5 was developed by Capcom. Artist Keiji Inafune, who had major involvement in the development in all prior Mega Man games, worked under a new project leader for Mega Man 5. As with past entries in the series, Inafune used his experience to guide his supervisor and the other team members. He did this in order to avoid making an what he considered to be an "unreasonable game, an affront to the players". As a result of this leadership, Inafune felt Mega Man 5 turned out with a lower difficulty level. The team already felt they had accomplished all the gameplay they could with the release of Mega Man 4, so they decided to simply "introduce powered up versions of everything", such as the Mega Buster. Hayato Kaji, who worked diligently on the fourth installment of the series, was called in to help out during the middle of Mega Man 5's development. The game was "taking a while to come together" at that point according to Kaji. Inafune summarized his work on Mega Man 5 as being fun, but he admitted having trouble with some of the designs, balance, and colors.

As with previous titles in the series, the eight Robot Master bosses in Mega Man 5 are a result of fans sending in their own designs to Capcom. Capcom received over 130,000 character submissions for the game. Inafune recounted having a difficult time getting approval on the chosen bosses, having had to re-illustrate them several times. However, the artist had little trouble in designing Beat, whose first draft was accepted by Inafune's superiors. The idea for Beat originated in the development of Mega Man 3, where the concept support robots included a dog and bird. The team chose to keep the dog character as Rush for this earlier game, while the bird would serve as the basis for the character Beat in Mega Man 5. The musical score of Mega Man 5 was composed by Mari Yamaguchi. She would later collaborate with other composers of the core franchise for Mega Man 10 in 2010.