What's Different/Mibibli's Quest/Megaman Series

The original Megaman has been around for over 25 years, and to this day, many platformers still take cues from the first six games in the long-running series. Fans have created their own takes on the Megaman formula, Capcom itself has continued to make games in the style of the original, and other seemingly unrelated games have learned from the mechanics that Megaman pioneered.

One game in the latter category is Mibibli's Quest: an independent game which (just to be clear) is very good (for those who enjoy platformers) and available for free or for any price you care to name.

It looks a little bit like this.

Mibibli's Quest has a lot in common with Megaman, and yet it also has some interesting differences (which gives me something to write about). I won't try to list every way in which Mibibli's Quest defies Megaman convention - I'll just pick some of the discrepancies that seem like deliberate design choices, and write about what those choices do.

Perfectly normal.

In a traditional Megaman game, each level generally has its own set of enemies, obstacles, and platforms, which appear only in that level and maybe in the endgame "fortress" stages. There'll usually be some generic enemies mixed in, but for the most part, the level will be built on its own "gimmicks", and will feel unique as a result.

Mibibli's Quest does the same, but takes it a step further. A level might contain eggs that hatch into miniature soldiers when you shoot them, or inverted red waterfalls that push you upwards - but that's normal. Those are just new mechanics that fit the game's strange aesthetic.

Less normal.

What's not normal is that a level of Mibibli's Quest might, with no prior warning, be a side-scrolling shoot-em-up instead of a platformer. Or it could be a non-level that you can complete in under a minute, with no real danger involved. Or it could seem normal until you reach the end, at which point you find that you now have to play through a modified version of the same level, while walking backwards.

Mibibli's Quest doesn't mess around when it comes to keeping things fresh. It's built to surprise, and not just because it has a habit of throwing a new set of levels at you when you think you're done.


When Mibibli's Quest isn't genre-busting, its mechanics feel a lot like those of Megaman: horizontal movement is very precise, and you can fire fairly quickly, but you can only have three shots on-screen at once. However, one mechanical difference is obvious (though quite minor.) Mibibli's normal shots travel straight forward for the most part, but when they approach the edge of the screen, they suddenly lose their momentum and drop down for a second, before vanishing.

They just sort of...give up.

So until you pick up one of the alternate weapons, you can't shoot enemies that are right at the edge of the screen, unless you run after your shots and scroll the screen forward. This doesn't come into play very often, but there are a couple of enemies that tend to end up at the edge of the screen whenever they're not jumping around trying to drop clods of dirt on you. Thus, it feels like they can only be hurt when their attack pattern leaves them vulnerable - but that's just a function of your weapon's limitations (and if you get really close, you can technically still shoot them).

On the other hand, you can occasionally use this "shot falloff" to your advantage. Megaman needs to be on the same plane as an enemy to shoot it with his buster, but if the screen is scrolled to just the right position, Mibibli can make shots drop on an enemy's head. This is particularly noticeable with some of the flying enemies in the Cave level, which, while resting on the ground, are short enough that Mibibli's shots would normally fly over them.

The shot falloff isn't exactly a core mechanic - it's necessary for shooting a couple of obstacles early on, but after a few levels, you can get weapons that don't suffer from it, and it seems to stop being factored into the level design. Still, it's interesting that the position of the screen (or the "camera") can be a factor in a game's mechanics. You could make a whole game around that concept if you wanted to.


The story in the traditional Megaman games mainly serves to give the player a heroic justification for their actions in-game. There are a few recurring side characters, each game's plot provides some variation, and sometimes there is some sort of mystery that gets solved partway through the game, but in the end it always comes down to Megaman needing to defeat the evil Dr. Wily and (maybe) save the world.

If you say so.

Mibibli's Quest doesn't bother with anything quite so coherent, but it doesn't entirely dispense with the world-saving narrative, either. The game makes it clear that YOU ARE HERO!!!! and that you are saving the world, but it never explains how your actions will lead to the world being saved. Occasionally, you might be treated to a scripted scene or some dramatic monologue. But in between, you're playing though levels like "Flying Crumbship", fighting bosses like "Violent Rock", and listening to NPCs talk about how much they love hats (if you bother to read their text as you walk past them.) The combination of epic and inane makes the game even more surreal.

Mibibli's Quest takes some cues from its predecessor, but it also ignores elements of the Megaman formula when it deems them superfluous. Like Megaman, it's more about the gameplay than the story. Unlike Megaman, it abandons all pretense of being plot-focused, and instead uses its "story" to build an unusual atmosphere. Like Megaman, it has a "lives" system - unlike Megaman, it refills your life total to three at some checkpoints, and never lets you stock up more (so you can't "farm" for lives). It's a great example of how to use a video game formula: cut out the unnecessary bits, keep the rest, and add your own flair to it. In this case, flair just happens to mean crystal cars, worms made out of planets, and a meditating crocodile with orange hair.