So since I happen to be going over music from MML I thought it'd be good to reflect on them.
Megaman Legends 1
It's pretty impressive for a first shot at the 3D Megaman game that lasts longer than 2 hours. The Bonnes actually show up enough to be rivals, as opposed to someone you meet twice that's supposed to be your nemesis. I get that pure Megaman games have only like 12 stages total, but a guy has to show up more than twice to be considered a persistent threat. The story balances the main plot, which is digging up stuff to uncover the mysteries, versus the side plot of fending off the Bonnes quite well. The hard difficulty for beating the game is a meaningful extension of the game, since it adds a pretty significant dimension to the game that's not just more stats. On Hard, Roll is no longer totally indestructible and in fact she'll often get taken out long before Megaman runs out of health, so you need to find the more powerful weapons for the battles where you've to defend Roll. Megaman Juno can no longer be beaten by just going in a circle while shooting, and requires either some pretty decent footwork or a decent amount of grinding to have enough firepower to beat him before he beats you.
Even the cheesy romance quasi love triangle between Megaman, Roll, and Tron is kind of cool. I mean, none of the girls blew themselves up or got stabbed to death or turned out to be responsible for crime against humanity while having some importance, and that probably put it well above what Capcom or its spiritual successor Inticreates can do for a romance story for the next 25 years.
The Misadventures of Tron Bonne
This is clearly a filler game and it's got no business of actually being good, but it is quite good. This game is basically a bunch of random stuff but it works. The Bonnes are kind of the underdogs even when they're supposed to be the bad guys, so it's kind of cool to see they actually sort of win at least against other characters.
Megaman Legends 2
I'm under the impression that this game is rated highly by influential guys that talk about Megaman, but there's a reason why there is no Megaman Legends 3. It's kind of like Megaman Legends 1 but bigger, and that's the problem. There isn't really anything central to tie the game's extended length since the Bonnes end up being a sideshow so you're often just going into random ruins and finding stuff that apparently has no reason except you need to go to 4 or 8 or whatever number of them. The new characters they introduce are pretty careful other than the Master who is probably supposed to be Zero but he has like 5 lines and since that was the height of the Megaman X series they obviously didn't want to actually tie it in because they're probably thinking they'd make 10 X games at that point and don't want to get stuck with something mentioned in Legends 2.
Now the game is already artificially inflated to be bigger, but it's particularly nasty when you get to the end when Sera's first form has like 10 times the health of any boss you fight before even though you don't have a corresponding firepower increase, and her second form has like 10 times the health of her first form and most of her attacks will take at least half of your health off even with a Kevlar Vest Omega. I honestly doubt most of the people who talk highly of this game ever beat the game, because you either need to be an action gaming god or you need to grind for like 20 hours to have enough money to get the equipment that can make a dent on Sera's insane HPs. There's probably a hard mode after that too but who would be crazy to do that? I think if you ignore the final battle MML2 is playable, but I can't rate highly for a game that is literally too dumb to finish without cheating. I got one of those PSX game genie equivalent things for infinite money, and it took like half an hour to have enough money to upgrade Shining Laser because the only cheat you can do is make you not lose money and not lose inventory when you sell stuff, but to have enough money to upgrade Shining Laser you got to sell whatever the most valuable item you have continuously for 30 minutes. Maybe you don't need to have it maxed out to beat Sera but it's still dumb. Overkill is part of the fun of the series. In MML1 you can have a maxed Active Buster against Fokkerwolf and a maxed Shining Laser against Megaman Juno with like at most 2 hours of grinding, and that'll literally kill them before they get to move on what's normally the hardest battle in the game. It's actually quite satisfying for a battle you barely squeak by that you can demolish by grinding. But in Legends 2 the difficulty is just completely unrealistic and it only exists so that you can have another 15 hours of gameplay to grind and do some of the stuff like the license upgrade that's needed for more money that'd otherwise have no reason to be in the game if Sera isn't such a ridiculous difficulty jump compared to the rest of the game.
I guess Legends 2 is a good place to mark where Capcom stopped being good at making Megaman games, even though Legends 2 isn't really like any Megaman game, and its shortcoming is more like it's just not a very good game.
Megaman Legends 1
It's pretty impressive for a first shot at the 3D Megaman game that lasts longer than 2 hours. The Bonnes actually show up enough to be rivals, as opposed to someone you meet twice that's supposed to be your nemesis. I get that pure Megaman games have only like 12 stages total, but a guy has to show up more than twice to be considered a persistent threat. The story balances the main plot, which is digging up stuff to uncover the mysteries, versus the side plot of fending off the Bonnes quite well. The hard difficulty for beating the game is a meaningful extension of the game, since it adds a pretty significant dimension to the game that's not just more stats. On Hard, Roll is no longer totally indestructible and in fact she'll often get taken out long before Megaman runs out of health, so you need to find the more powerful weapons for the battles where you've to defend Roll. Megaman Juno can no longer be beaten by just going in a circle while shooting, and requires either some pretty decent footwork or a decent amount of grinding to have enough firepower to beat him before he beats you.
Even the cheesy romance quasi love triangle between Megaman, Roll, and Tron is kind of cool. I mean, none of the girls blew themselves up or got stabbed to death or turned out to be responsible for crime against humanity while having some importance, and that probably put it well above what Capcom or its spiritual successor Inticreates can do for a romance story for the next 25 years.
The Misadventures of Tron Bonne
This is clearly a filler game and it's got no business of actually being good, but it is quite good. This game is basically a bunch of random stuff but it works. The Bonnes are kind of the underdogs even when they're supposed to be the bad guys, so it's kind of cool to see they actually sort of win at least against other characters.
Megaman Legends 2
I'm under the impression that this game is rated highly by influential guys that talk about Megaman, but there's a reason why there is no Megaman Legends 3. It's kind of like Megaman Legends 1 but bigger, and that's the problem. There isn't really anything central to tie the game's extended length since the Bonnes end up being a sideshow so you're often just going into random ruins and finding stuff that apparently has no reason except you need to go to 4 or 8 or whatever number of them. The new characters they introduce are pretty careful other than the Master who is probably supposed to be Zero but he has like 5 lines and since that was the height of the Megaman X series they obviously didn't want to actually tie it in because they're probably thinking they'd make 10 X games at that point and don't want to get stuck with something mentioned in Legends 2.
Now the game is already artificially inflated to be bigger, but it's particularly nasty when you get to the end when Sera's first form has like 10 times the health of any boss you fight before even though you don't have a corresponding firepower increase, and her second form has like 10 times the health of her first form and most of her attacks will take at least half of your health off even with a Kevlar Vest Omega. I honestly doubt most of the people who talk highly of this game ever beat the game, because you either need to be an action gaming god or you need to grind for like 20 hours to have enough money to get the equipment that can make a dent on Sera's insane HPs. There's probably a hard mode after that too but who would be crazy to do that? I think if you ignore the final battle MML2 is playable, but I can't rate highly for a game that is literally too dumb to finish without cheating. I got one of those PSX game genie equivalent things for infinite money, and it took like half an hour to have enough money to upgrade Shining Laser because the only cheat you can do is make you not lose money and not lose inventory when you sell stuff, but to have enough money to upgrade Shining Laser you got to sell whatever the most valuable item you have continuously for 30 minutes. Maybe you don't need to have it maxed out to beat Sera but it's still dumb. Overkill is part of the fun of the series. In MML1 you can have a maxed Active Buster against Fokkerwolf and a maxed Shining Laser against Megaman Juno with like at most 2 hours of grinding, and that'll literally kill them before they get to move on what's normally the hardest battle in the game. It's actually quite satisfying for a battle you barely squeak by that you can demolish by grinding. But in Legends 2 the difficulty is just completely unrealistic and it only exists so that you can have another 15 hours of gameplay to grind and do some of the stuff like the license upgrade that's needed for more money that'd otherwise have no reason to be in the game if Sera isn't such a ridiculous difficulty jump compared to the rest of the game.
I guess Legends 2 is a good place to mark where Capcom stopped being good at making Megaman games, even though Legends 2 isn't really like any Megaman game, and its shortcoming is more like it's just not a very good game.
