Mega Man V

The fifth and final stop of the blue bomber on the Game Boy — and at the same time the one fans swear by. Mega Man V from 1994 did something the previous handheld entries hadn't dared: it stopped recycling and struck out entirely on its own.

The Game Boy Mega Mans up to then worked cleverly but cautiously — they always mixed bosses and ideas from two different NES entries and assembled a handheld game from them. The fifth threw that habit off the table. It brings a completely original gallery of bosses — the so-called Stardroids named after planets of the solar system (Mercury, Venus, Mars, and others) — so for the first time you play against enemies you'll meet nowhere else. This gives the whole game its own identity, its own level design, and the feeling that it's not an echo but a full-fledged entry.

The tools in hand are new too. Mega Man here gets a robot companion — a dog named Tango who can curl into a ball and attack enemies — and above all the Mega Arm weapon, a launching fist that replaces the classic buster and can be charged and upgraded with acquired abilities. This gives the gameplay a fresh rhythm, and the game feels as though it finally allowed itself to experiment with what Mega Man can do.

The level design is often praised as the best of the entire handheld five — carefully built stretches, readable and fair challenges, and the traditional Mega Man structure where a defeated boss hands over a weapon usable against the next one. Capcom (with development in cooperation with Minakuchi Engineering) demonstrated here that even on a small screen the series can maintain its famous balance between difficulty and fairness.

There is, however, one catch that turned the game into a collector's idol: it came out late and in small numbers, at a stage when interest in the monochrome Game Boy was already waning. Original cartridges are therefore rare today, and on the collectors' market their price regularly climbs high. For a long time it was one of those titles fans spoke of with reverence but few held in hand — until a later digital release made it accessible to a wider audience.

Why play it: The peak of the Game Boy Mega Mans with its own bosses and clever novelties — not only the best of the handheld five, but also a rightly prized rarity.