Mega Man 8 was the game that rehabilitated me back into the franchise. The game does habe a few too many of the elements I had seen from Mega Man 7, but on the whole was able to properly satiate my overall desires. The gameplay and weapons were a nice fusion of Mega Man 4 and Mega Man X. The jumping felt a little floaty, but the game is fairly lenient on allowing you to land on the other side of instant death pits, something I'm all for. Thankfully the Mega Man sprite is the right size, its small enough and controls well enough to retain the same feel as the game had during its golden age (Mega Man 2 and Mega Man 3). Mega Man 8 isn't the best Mega Man game, the schizophrenic auto-scrolling stages assures this as they range the gambit from cake to Mind Numbingly Hard, but it was the kind of redemption that could bring me back into the Mega Man fandom flock. It was not the series revival that Mega Man sorely needed, but was still a fine game.
Interestingly, the biggest innovation for the series in Mega Man 8 was the inclusion of voice work and anime style cartoon cut scenes into the game. Innovations that varied in greatly in quality. While the hand drawn cartoon cut scenes were a competent representation of the Mega Man universe with a nice coforting late 90's anime vogue, the voice work was atrocious in almost every sense. The delivery, the choice of actors and the dubbing were a tour-de-force in ineptitude. I don't know about you, but Dr. Light shouldn't sound like Elmer Fudd. Also, the Mega Man that I had imagined playing as sounded, you know, maybe kind of Man-ish, I don't know. Instead what we got was a Mega Man that sounded like he was voiced by an eight year old girl, no offense to eight year old girls of course, they just shouldn't be voicing my favorite little blue bomber. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of all was that I loved every second of it! Mega Man 8's overall charm for me comes partially from the ineptitudes of the voice work. Like Capcom's other big PlayStation release Resident Evil, the voice work is so tragically horrendous that it wraps back around to good. I know, I have horrible tastes, but I can't help it, earnestly done voice over flops just make me feel warm and giggly inside.But while Resident Evil, Zero Wing, The Legend of Zelda's and other games often funny translations into the English Language are rather played out and well known by now, Mega Man 8's horridness lies dormant, hidden from the collective conscience it seems. Since the 32bit era the standards for voice work and translations have been greatly raised, what used to be a plentiful field of hilariously awful localization has become a rarity. Perhaps its an odd thing to pine for, an odd thing that I probably wouldn't want to actually come true, but I do miss games that failed so spectacularly with their voice work. Then again, Virtua Fighter is single handedly carrying the torch I guess.
Mega Man 8 is my favorite awesomely bad voice work in a video game! Anyone else have any favorites that deserve to be eulogized or perhaps even crucified for their plenitude of ineptitudes? Behold the brilliance, if you dare!
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