Megaman Legends and Hard Mode - A Retrospective

[Buster Cannon]

Ah Hard Mode, always alluring us by giving us the option to play our favorite games at an enhanced difficulty. Different games have different ways of designing this occasionally masochistic mode; some merely remove the player's options (weaponry/mobility), some upgrade the armor/damage/patterns/placement of enemies and bosses, and in some cases there will be a complete overhaul of the stage designs. The Megaman Legends series is no stranger to these varying difficulty levels, and it's worth looking back on.

In the first Megaman Legends game, Hard Mode was unlocked after completing the game normally. It simply upped the HP values of enemies and bosses along with making you take more damage. If I'm not mistaken zenny is worth less as well. Legends 2 made the difficulty modes a little more dynamic. The game's mode was directly tied to the new license mechanic, which gave the player the option of making the game harder (reavers and bosses have more HP) in favor of a higher zenny payout. You'd start off with a B-License, but taking some tests allowed you to bump the License up to A or S, represented as Medium or Hard Mode, respectively. You could also unlock Hard Mode through beating the game once, starting you off with an S-License by default. Very Hard Mode was a different beast entirely, essentially taking the difficulty of the S-License and ramping it up a few notches, also lowering the value of zenny dropped by enemies immensely.

I feel like the Legends games could have tackled the alternate difficulty modes a bit...smarter, especially in the case of Legends 1. MML1's Hard Mode doesn't really add any extra depth to the gameplay, it's just the same exact play through with different numbers in play. Legends 2's License system was actually pretty well-executed, because you had the allure of a harder game with a higher payout. The License Test forced you to essentially "prove your worth" as a digger that could handle this new challenge. The fact that you could upgrade the difficulty during a play-through as opposed to separately gave it a dynamic touch as well. Legends 2 does drop the ball with Very Hard Mode, however. It's a nice challenge, but like Legends 1, all of the parameters that are changed are simply artificial. Legends 2 already charges an arm and a leg for the weapons upgrade, so nerfing the zenny output just makes the game more tedious to play through.

I'd like to see more features like closed-off ruins that the player can access with a higher-level license (MML2 did this a bit), and other goodies that would make these new licenses attractive to players. Enhanced difficulties are a good thing, but they're even better when they offer the player something in return.

What's your opinion of how the Megaman Legends series did Hard Mode, and what (if anything) would you change about it?

[Dashe]

Zenny's worth half its usual value in Hard Mode, and a quarter its usual value in Very Hard Mode. Remember that time I counted while you were streaming?

Ditto on closed-off ruins for higher license levels...only instead of just one cookie cutter ruin design, with rehashed bosses, I'd like to see some optional fights and maybe even a major hidden ruin, now that technology's caught up with the sandbox adventure genre. They could even take it up a notch and not make certain parts or shops or sidequests available unless you've got a certain license rank.

[MegaTuga]

This is something that popped up in my last livestream: Legends is considered an RPG even if there isn't any leveling or experience system, however the customization and attack variety is still there, so how can we make our character evolve? In normal RPGs we get experience points, in MML we get money. So it's like the game is giving us less EXP/Zenny per enemy beat. That makes it a good change to an harder difficulty although it also means more grinding, which nobody likes.

I honestly believe that there were a couple things that could be changed in an harder difficulty besides enemy HP, Damage received and zenny drop. Like for example, enemies getting faster and having new attacks. Or increasing the number of enemies in certain rooms. You could also drop the Life Shield entirely and removing invincibility frames after falling.

And now I realized that I practically enumerated the changes in Normal->Hard settings in Megaman 9 and Megaman 10... uhh...

How about this? In Hard difficulty, enemies react to Lock-On, moving out of the way right after you fire. This would force you to not rely on the Lok-On unless you want to fire at a different angle.

[Buster Cannon]

Mar 8, 2014 19:59:24 GMT -5 Dashe said:

Zenny's worth half its usual value in Hard Mode, and a quarter its usual value in Very Hard Mode. Remember that time I counted while you were streaming?

Ditto on closed-off ruins for higher license levels...only instead of just one cookie cutter ruin design, with rehashed bosses, I'd like to see some optional fights and maybe even a major hidden ruin, now that technology's caught up with the sandbox adventure genre. They could even take it up a notch and not make certain parts or shops or sidequests available unless you've got a certain license rank.

Yeah, I remembered you counting, I just forgot if it was half or a quarter.  Thanks!

I really like the idea of shops not selling you stuff until you get a higher license. It makes sense that higher level diggers would have access to better equipment; a higher license would show that they have the experience to actually use it correctly.  Can't just hand out that super-deadly explosive to just any digger that walks into your junk shop.  Ditto on the hidden ruins with unique bosses.

[Kyle]

I've always figured that fractionating the player's Zenny pickups was a good idea in the harder difficulties. When you've got less disposable income on Kattelox, the game presents yo' ass with two options;

One, is to punish the player for attempting to take the lazy Zenny-farming route by significantly increasing the time required to turn a profit, and the second is to make the player itself get most accustomed with the tools they have at their disposal. For me, that's what Hard Modes are all about. You either master the game's mechanics, or fail miserably and never making past the first quarter.

[Servbot42]

Eh, that's a fair point. But I don't think people should be punished for wanting to pursue options that are available to them. But then again, I'm not a big fan of hard modes anyway. I prefer games for the story and I only go for the challenging modes on a few select games like Halo.

That said, I did beat MML 1 on hard...so I could unlock the easy mode with the buster that annihilated everything. (Is that what it was? I remember you got some sort of weapon on easy mode if you beat hard.)

[Kyle]

Mar 11, 2014 17:14:44 GMT -5 Servbot42 said:

That said, I did beat MML 1 on hard...so I could unlock the easy mode with the buster that annihilated everything. (Is that what it was? I remember you got some sort of weapon on easy mode if you beat hard.)

You get a Buster Attachment that more or less maxes out your offensive capabilities.

[Dashe]

You also get free Jet Skates from the beginning. I'm guessing the springs weren't an option because they'd break the game's sequence and let you into Cardon without getting a Class A license first. You'd go in to rescue the Junk Store Owner and come out with the yellow refractor before you even made it downtown.

[Buster Cannon]

Mar 11, 2014 17:14:44 GMT -5 Servbot42 said:

Eh, that's a fair point. But I don't think people should be punished for wanting to pursue options that are available to them.

Pretty much this.  I view the best Hard Modes as the game increasing what the player has to go against in terms of challenges, not nerfing the player's character.  Decreasing the worth of zenny just artificially increases the difficulty; the player can still access all of the equipment he could in the normal mode, all that's changed is that now the player has to spend extra time grinding for it.  It doesn't force the player to get better at using the game's mechanics; generally they're just going to either find the cheapest way out just so they can get by (i.e. Ground Crawler abuse for 2/3 of MML2) or struggle heavily with lackluster weapons/armor because they can't afford what would normally be available.  An ideal solution would be buffing the enemies and bosses (both placement and attacks/HP) to the point that they'd need to make the most of every available item/weapon.  Essentially you have a fully-powered player going against odds that are much tougher than the default difficulty.

[Kyle]

I gotta' disagree with you there, guys. For starters, Hard Mode is Hard Mode. Anybody who feels like they're being punished by its gameplay should either adapt, or drop down to a lower difficulty more suitable for their skill-set. It's why difficulty options exist, after all.

Secondly, I'm not a fan of making every weapon and upgrade mandatory. Sure, they exist to make your life easier, but a well-designed game would make it so that any character build is viable from almost beginning to end, no matter what difficulty one is playing on. Take Dark Souls, for example. Once you beat the game, you can repeat on NG+, with all your previous weapons and armour, but the enemy health and damage is scaled upwards to accommodate for it. This cycle can repeat upwards to NG+7. However, it is never necessary to level-up, or even get rid of your tutorial gear. I've seen people at Lvl. 1, bare-ass naked, and using nothing but a wooden club to beat the final boss on NG+7 using nothing more than their wits and skill. No gimmicks, and no tricks.

[Santa Melty]

An ideal solution would be buffing the enemies and bosses (both placement and attacks/HP) to the point that they'd need to make the most of every available item/weapon. Essentially you have a fully-powered player going against odds that are much tougher than the default difficulty.

I'm not sure I see how nerfing zenny drops is worse than buffing an enemy's health/damage more. They seem to me to be two sides of the same coin. Increasing enemy health/damage even more makes them that much harder to defeat, indirectly decreasing the zenny the player is likely to earn over a given period of time. Changing placement might be neat though.

I agree with the notion that increased difficulty shouldn't be at the expense of gameplay variety. But I don't believe that's what the practical effect of limiting the availability of zenny is. At least, not for the most part. There were a few weapon parts you needed to buy, but I don't believe there were many (a quick ctrl-f through the guides was not helpful on this point, so going off of memory here). So you'd still have access to mostly the same options as you otherwise would at any given point in the game; very little variety is forfeited. Your options are all less effective, but that's not the same as having less options. And I'm mostly with Kyle on this, the fact that they're less effective is sort of the point.

That said, nerfing the player is not my preferred way of increasing a game's difficulty either. My ideal option would be closer to what Tuga floated:

I honestly believe that there were a couple things that could be changed in an harder difficulty besides enemy HP, Damage received and zenny drop. Like for example, enemies getting faster and having new attacks. Or increasing the number of enemies in certain rooms.

Give enemies new attacks. Give them new movement patterns. Make them smarter. Vary their spawn locations. Vary the maps in which they appear, and the combinations in which they appear. Change the maps themselves to disadvantage the player. Add new hazards. Make corridors narrower. Add new areas, as was mentioned.

Give players the same options, but force them to think on their feet and use those options in more novel ways. Don't just scale the numbers up, expand the challenge laterally.

Secondly, I'm not a fan of making every weapon and upgrade mandatory. Sure, they exist to make your life easier, but a well-designed game would make it so that any character build is viable from almost beginning to end, no matter what difficulty one is playing on.

I find this to be a rather extreme view. It sounds like an indictment of RPGs as a genre, as most of them rely extensively on leveling systems of one kind or another. Almost nothing turn-based would pass this smell test.

I wouldn't entirely disagree with you though.