For this month's "Maps Of The Month" featurette, I wish to draw your attention to Geminiman's Rockman & Forte (J) (Super NES) maps.
Mega Man and Bass are the titular heroes in Rockman & Forte, a Japanese Super Famicom exclusive, before getting a worldwide release on the GBA a few years later. According to producer Keiji Inafune, after the release of Mega Man 8 on the PlayStation and Saturn, Capcom felt there was still interest for a new Mega Man game among younger players who couldn't afford current-gen consoles. Despite this skew towards younger players, it is still a challenging game, even by "Mega Man" standards!
It doesn't stray far from the usual Mega Man gameplay formula, and its most unique feature is in the title itself - being able to play as Bass, who has different abilities than Mega Man, as well as a different story. Whoever you play as, you'll still be up against eight Robot Masters, though two of them - Astro Man and Tengu Man - are strangely reused from Mega Man 8, though with different weapons. The other six - Dynamo Man, Cold Man, Burner Man, Pirate Man, Ground Man, and Magic Man - use similar weapons and have the same weakness order as the original six Robot Masters from the first game - Elec Man, Ice Man, Fire Man, Bomb Man, Guts Man and Cut Man - so there's some interesting trivia, especially if it was, indeed, intentional! And it does reference past games, with the legacy of characters featured in the Data Base that you have to find CDs for - a whole 100 of them, scattered across the game.
Despite being a solid Mega Man game, it doesn't have a number in its title, and is omitted from Mega Man: Anniversary Collection (2004) and Mega Man: Legacy Collection 2 (2017). This team-up is often considered a spin-off (like the Fast & Furious film, Hobbs & Shaw, which also comes between the eighth and ninth installment of the main series), but that undersells it. If it must be considered a spin-off, then it's the best Mega Man spin-off there is. It's certainly worthy of more attention than it gets.
So to recognize the effort put into mapping this underrated Mega Man gem, Geminiman's Rockman & Forte (J) (Super NES) maps will be known as VGMaps.com's Maps Of The Month for December 2023.
