Anatomy of VGM #26 – Mega Man 7 (SNES)

Of all the twists promised by the writers on the Earth project, I’m guessing more Mega Man coverage on Invisible Blog wasn’t the hardest to predict. In my defense, it’s a huge franchise, and tons of talented people have worked on it. Some of the games are actually good, too! Last I checked, people seemed to like classic Mega Man’s second outing on the SNES (this time, as a standard platforming installment!), probably because it makes the same type of enhancements as the X series and otherwise expands to fill all the extra cartridge space. The question here, mind you, is what Capcom’s Capcomposer of the day could do with a game that’s just bursting at the seams with Saturday morning cartoon energy. You know, outside the bit at the end where Rock insists he’s going to actually kill Wily, thus endangering his creator’s profits…

It seems that Mega Man 7‘s music was written by committee. There are nine sound personnel credited for this game, and even if they didn’t all contribute music, it’s evident that a lot of folks had a say in these sounds. Mega Man 7 mostly eschews the metal moments of the X games in favor of synth rock that’s admittedly easier on the ears. It helps that the sample quality is much better – that’s admittedly easy to do when you’re not relying heavily on sampled guitar or otherwise realistic instruments. The end result is bright and cheery – recognizably Mega Man, to the point that it even quotes previous games in the series on occasion (Slash Man and the “Robot Museum” seem to be the obvious examples).

Anyways, this is a late generation SNES soundtrack we’re dealing with. Capcom’s ability to extract musical gold from the SPC700 was hit or miss, but the strong sample quality and established musical language of the Mega Man games gave this one a fighting start. The jump to 16-bit hardware helps give these tunes a very strong aesthetic, just like what was happening contemporaneously with the X-series. Needless to say, I got a promising first impression from these tunes. The composers here were particularly on point during the first half of the game, taking the standard Mega Man songwriting formulas and expanding them to make some of this series’ most refined Robot Master themes! Later on, though, things start to fall off. There’s an awkward combination of weirdly shrill samples (including an odd MIDI guitar, if admittedly not as clunky as the MMX guitars) and phoned in melodies later on. It’s been a while since I played or watched footage of this game, and I realized that outside the surprisingly metal final Dr. Wily theme, the fortress levels felt pretty… limited in terms of what they did musically? I’d argue Mega Man 3 (and Mega Man 5, to be honest) had the most effective endgame music overall, though my biases may be showing.

Falloff aside, you’re still getting a good chunk of mega rock for your troubles. I’d also argue that Mega Man 7 is just a good game in general; definitely more imaginative and interesting than some of the later NES installments. Definitely worth playing and performing… with caveats.