Mega Man Star Force Legacy Collection Review: Scraping the Barrel of Mega Man's History

At this point, nearly every single Mega Man game in existence is in some form of remaster compilation. I'm not complaining, although I'm still a little bitter that Mega Man Legends remains without a collection, but that's a story for another day. The latest in Capcom's efforts to catalog the Blue Bomber expansive library is Mega Man Star Force Legacy Collection.

If you haven't heard of the Star Force games, I wouldn't feel too bad about it, as it's a spin-off of Battle Network, which is itself a spin-off. Aside from Mega Man Soccer, there may not be a more niche, forgotten part of his history than the DS era. This was a time of relative uncertainty for Mega Man, as the last mainline, home console entry was ten years in the past. He had found a home on handhelds, but the results were rather mixed.

Zero and ZX were fantastic, which you can see for yourself in the spectacular Mega Man Zero/ZX Legacy Collection, but the other games of this era were reliant on creating something a little different. Star Force followed the same logic as Battle Network, built around redefining Mega Man for a new generation. The tone was a radical departure, but the biggest changes came in the gameplay itself.

Like Battle Network, Star Force relies on tactical, card-based combat. It's a far cry from Mega Man's roots, but it was able to produce some pretty fun experiences along the way. The Star Force games really felt like something of a downgrade from Battle Network, but there was still a lot to like, and if you've never experienced them, Capcom's latest compilation is a nifty entrance point.

Oh, One Last Thing

The end result of a compilation always relies on the quality of the games being packaged together, and Star Force is certainly not Mega Man at his best. It's not Mega Man at his worst, either, but these games were fairly average back in the day, and not much has changed. After six Battle Network games, it was always baffling to me how Star Force managed to take a few steps back.

Despite shrinking the grid to create a faster pace to battle, going from 3x6 to 3x1, combat felt a bit sluggish back in the day and feels even worse now. Movement speed feels fine, but the smaller grid and behind-the-back perspective makes the scale feel smaller and the pace even slower. It was always rather underwhelming back on the DS, and feels even worse today.

I consider myself something of a fiend when it comes to card-based combat in games, and while the action seen in the Star Force games feels a lot less satisfying than Battle Network, it's still quite fun. Selecting cards feels breezy, and being able to stack effects by linking them together does add some fun to the experience. It's not quite as deep as one might hope, but there's still a lot of fun to be had just by the virtue of being Mega Man and seeing classic enemies in 3D space.

This collection brings together all three of the Star Force games, each of which contained multiple versions similar to Pokémon and were released over a three-year period from 2007 to 2009. I hope you liked Battle Network, by which I mean I hope you liked it a lot, because this is essentially more of that style, but just a bit worse.

Unlike Battle Network, the Star Force games are perhaps the worst-aged Mega Man games of all time. Everything feels so restrictive and untrusting of you as a player, with NPCs explaining how to do a simple task, re-explaining and then begging to explain it one more time. It was all I could do not to laugh when an NPC said, "Oh, one more thing" deep into one of these games.

The stories themselves are also rather wordy. This isn't a bad thing necessarily, but I was surprised at how little I remembered of the stories in each game. There's a lot of dialogue, which sometimes borders on bloated. It also has a lot of unbearably cheesy and corny dialogue, which may be your thing. It certainly is mine, but it can feel like a bit much after a while.

The story and writing aren't all bad, of course. Some of the dialogue is genuinely sharp and funny, as both Battle Network and Star Force leaned into more of an anime style when it came to the writing. There's a lot of quirky, silly charm to it that is hard to come by these days.

The unfortunate part of this whole affair is that the Star Force games have just aged incredibly poorly. There is a literal cascading mountain of Mega Man games to choose from on modern platforms, and this is sadly scraping the bottom of the barrel for the franchise. After playing six Battle Network games, coming into a spin-off with similar systems that feels just a bit worse is fairly disappointing. Worse yet, the games don't do a lot for each one to not feel the same. By the time I got to Star Force 3, I was feeling pretty strong fatigue.

Preserving a Legacy

Capcom has been doing a remarkable job preserving Mega Man's long, storied history over the years. Each release in their Legacy Collection line has done well not just to keep the games available for all audiences, but to maintain the historic significance of each game. The Star Force compilation is no different. Concept art, the complete soundtrack from each game and card galleries are all present. It's fairly common these days in compilation games, but it's always nice to see it.

Mega Man Star Force Legacy Collection also includes some of the worst aspects of modern compilation games. Poor, low-quality CRT filters and rather unattractive pixel smoothing are on by default, but can obviously be turned off. The fact that you can turn it off is good, but these things continue to be standard is always very disappointing.

Thankfully, each game in the collection looks and runs like a dream. These are just bog-standard DS games from roughly three generations ago, but it's always nice to see them running well. Considering how poorly optimized some compilation titles have been by other developers in the past, it's not always a guarantee that old games will run as they should on contemporary hardware.

Some would argue that Mega Man's spin-off games are actually far better than the mainline games. And in some ways, I would agree, as the X and Legends series continue to be my favorite Mega Man games. Star Force isn't quite on the level of other Mega Man spin-offs, but if you've never played these, there's likely to be something here that will catch your attention.

Mega Man Star Force Legacy Collection brings three of the iconic Capcom mascot's most niche titles. Star Force continues the tradition that started with 2001's Battle Network, combining card-based combat with light RPG elements and exploration. The games themselves have aged rather poorly, with somewhat basic combat and a game world that is determined to tell you what to do at every turn. So long as you don't mind dealing with some oddball design choices and long-winded stories, you could get a lot of enjoyment out of this unique, albeit flawed, Mega Man card game.