For this month's "Maps Of The Month" featurette, I wish to draw your attention to TerraEsperZ's Mega Man V (Game Boy) maps.
It's May... or should we say "Mega May"? For the fifth month of the year, we look at the fifth Mega Man game in the "Rockman World" series (as it is known in Japan) on the Game Boy. This month also marks the seventeenth anniversary of the Maps Of The Month featurette, and this game is the seventeenth Mega Man game released - if you count the two odd PC games, the pinball game "Panic Shot! Rockman", and the first Mega Man X game on the Super NES (even though X is considered a sequel series - just go with it here). And if we exclude the five April Fool's jokes, this is the 200th map set recognized as the Maps Of The Month (the first being also an odd-numbered Mega Man game mapped by a longtime VGMaps contributor)!
The stars may have aligned to recognize this game now - and stars (and planets) are the theme here. While the first four Mega Man Game Boy games had a pattern of taking four Robot Masters from the same-named NES game and four from the next one, Mega Man V instead has a completely new set of bosses: the Stardroids, named after the planets in our solar system. Conveniently, the Mega Man formula is retained here, by having eight main bosses to take weapons from - though this group includes Pluto (as it would be years before being reclassified as a dwarf planet), and Earth is represented by Terra (Earth's Latin/alternate/mythological name), who is a special boss, unsurprisingly. As if we're not out of connections here, on the subject of Terra, TerraEsperZ is the veteran mapper who has taken on this unique Mega Man game. Use these maps to hunt down Terra and the Stardroids, and see if Dr. Wily is once again responsible for threatening the world... well, if so, that's not new, but the Super Game Boy palettes are, which help this handheld Mega Man adventure to be more vibrant, at least.
So to recognize the effort put into mapping this mighty Mega Man game for this major milestone, TerraEsperZ's Mega Man V (Game Boy) maps will be known as VGMaps.com's Maps Of The Month for May 2021.
