June's Retro Game Club pick! I have played this before but Legends is my favorite of the Mega Man series and it's always a pleasure to revisit. The art direction is completely off the hook with this entry especially. Capcom's PS1 teams were in a league of their own and the face textures in Legends and Legends 2 are incredibly expressive for the time, but Misadventures takes it to the next level by just, having illustrated portraits. This might sound strange after I just praised the 3D models, but playing modern anime games with high fidelity models that can be used as portraits in their own right without looking out of place has made me realize I really prefer actual portraits. They just look so nice on top of text boxes! Especially when models are still subject to some subtle cost-cutting measures and you end up with some mild sameface, portraits can help characters stand out a lot more. I dunno, I'm not an artist nor a game developer, so maybe I'm just rationalizing my preferences.
While I enjoy the shotgun approach this game takes to its gameplay loop, I do wish it were a little more balanced. The madcap larceny of the bank heist missions ends all too soon and the farm animal kidnapping missions are fun but those levels feel much emptier in comparison. And there's only one set of RPG dungeon crawling whereas it feels like there are approximately a hundred sokoban puzzles at the docks. They're good puzzles, don't get me wrong, but guiding your servbots through ruins without real weapons had some unmined potential. The misadventures sometimes feel like a compilation of unpublished mobile games, in like the traditional sense of little minigames. I mean that in a good way, of course, Misadventures' quirks are a key part of its charm. The series continual failure to sell well is such a tragedy because there's a lot of room to iterate here.
Game Number: 53
Year Played: 2025
Platform: PS1