Game Center CX Season 11 – Back to Contents
#83

The Conclusion!? "Rockman 3: The End of Dr. Wily!?"

Chousen

After a hell of a time trying to beat Mega Man 3 for 13 straight hours, Arino finally reached the final stages… until he was told it was time to go. With still so much to do, he couldn’t simply end it there. So now, after some time later, Arino returns to the challenge room to try his best to finish the game. Waiting for Arino are ADs Ito and Emoto. They’ve put him where he left off at Wily Stage 1, with four valuable energy tanks (E-tanks), to boot. The maximum is nine, but oh, well.

Arino gets right to it. It’s not long before he finds another E-tank behind some barricades, though things get worrisome when he enters a room with disappearing block that are right over a pit of spikes. He slides into a space with energy capsules, but then must slide out at the right time to land on the blocks. Thankfully, he does it perfectly.

Then, Arino meets the first Wily Stage boss, a machine that releases robot turtles, while small whilrlwinds in the water come up to try and hurt him even more. He tries using the Rush Marine sub for added mobility, but by then he’s nearly dead, and a moving turtle shell hits and destroys him.

Arino just needs to hit the main unit, but none of the obvious weapons work. He tries the Top Spin, though, and that immediately destroys the turtles, and after several more turtles are wiped out, whaddya know — the machine vanishes! Arino’s confused, but he’ll take it.

Onto stage 2, which ramps up the difficulty by starting with a series of snapper traps and robot bees, as seen in Hard Man’s stage. It’s nothing if not annoying, and within seconds, Arino’s pushed down by the bees into a bed of spikes. He pauses out of panic, and wonders what the hell to do now. He tries summoning the Rush Coil, but it’s no use — his brief invincibilty ends, and he dies on the spikes.

Arino is more patient on the next try and gets past the bees, then picks up two more E-tanks in the next section. Then, it’s on to the next boss. The room is empty for a while, and then, yellow blocks start flying toward Arino. "Ah! This guy?!" Yes, it’s the Yellow Devil again — the infamous boss from the first game that tortured Arino for over three hours last time. Will this fight be as excrutiating?

Arino dies the first time due to the surprise, but lasts a little longer on the second. But when the Devil transfers over to the other side of the room, it then uses a completely different pattern to re-materalize, throwing Arino for a loop and once again killing him.

On the 11th attempt, Arino finally finds a weapon that hits the Devil hard; almost literally — it’s the Hard Knuckle. However, it’s much too slow, so his timing has to be absolutely perfect… which it isn’t. He does hit the boss enough times to get it down to a little bit of health, but then, he also runs out of Hard Knuckle power. And he’s almost dead, so he spends another E-tank. This time, he tries the Needle Cannon.

Success! The Yellow Devil is defeated, and with at least 50 fewer attempts than last time! Onto stage 3, then, which, despite some sections with tricky moving platforms, doesn’t so so badly at all.

Arino engages the next boss, or is that bosses? He’s immediately fired at by three Mega Man clones. Only one can be harmed, but they’re all the same color, and they teleport around the platforms in the room, so Arino is just plain stumped.

Arino uses another E-tank as he continues to figure this out, and though he lucks out and hits the real robot and gets it down to a little bit of life, the clone immediately stops appearing at the bottom rung (where Arino continues to camp). Arino just sits there, getting hit, waiting for the vulnerable clone to appear, and uses up his last E-tank in the process.

More attempts go by as Arino is repeatedly pelted by the clones. AD Emoto reappears and helps Arino get some more E-tanks, then it’s back to the battle. The sixth attempt goes by much like the others, but this time Arino lucks into hitting the vulnerable clone more frequently. He almost dies, but VE Suda yells for the E-tank, and Arino saves himself. After a brief moment of bad luck, Arino steps onto the middle platform just as the vulnerable clone does, and immediately fires the last few shots to defeat the boss.

Stage 4 brightens the light at the end of the tunnel, but Arino falls victim to a number of rock-tossing robots. Soon, he reaches the end of the stage, and what is there but a Dr. Wily capsule! Where does it lead? To the boss gauntlet, of course! Arino counts the boss capsules — eight, of course — much to his chagrin.

With little health left, he goes ahead and starts in the top-left capsule, where Needle Man awaits for a second round. Arino’s immediately jumped on and killed. He tries again, and this time goes to Shadow Man’s capsule. He uses the Magnet Missile to put some dents in the boss, but it runs out, so Arino goes ahead and uses Shadow Man’s own weapon against him — and it surprisingly works well. An energy capsule is the prize, and Arino moves on to the next boss.

Arino continues to die repeatedly, though, especially against Magnet Man. Things aren’t looking good, so AP Nakayama steps in with a laptop. Like last time, he’s going to show a video clip to Arino to help out. The footage shows how Arino beat the game’s bosses last time, and what weapons he used. Emoto writes down the boss/weapon combos on the whiteboard. Certainly this is all Arino needs?

He goes for Magnet Man again, and from the board, he sees that he used the Spark Shock, then moved to the Shadow Blade when it ran out. Well, the good news is he only needs to use the Spark, because Magnet Man is destroyed in seconds. Arino then moves on to Spark Man, who is also blown away quickly, then to Snake Man. Arino’s surprised he has to use the normal Rock Buster to beat Snake Man, so he tries the Shadow Blade instead — but then he’s killed from Snake Man’s tiny snakes.

The deaths continue to rack up as Arino fails to properly avoid the bosses’ weapons. After he gets a Game Over for the zillionth time, Arino slips, and chooses "Stage Select" instead of "Continue" at the menu. It’s a few tense moments until he finally sees that yes, for the love of god, it’s started him all the way back at the first Wily Stage.

The ADs walk over, and Emoto says this may not be a total loss: If they look at the tape, they might be able to get the last password Arino got before losing. They have Suda rewind the tape and get the password, then Arino puts it into the game.

Same thing. It can’t be! But it can, and is — and that’s three hours of progress down the drain. On the bright side, it doesn’t take as long for Arino to get back to the boss gauntlet — he even gets rid of the Mega Man clones faster! Back to business, then. Unfortunately, after he beats Needle Man, his timing was so that he fell right onto the exit, missing the energy capsule prize. As such, he goes to the next boss with little health and dies instantly.

After having to die a few more times, Arino gets into the groove, and wipes out the rest of the bosses with a quickness. Unfortunately, he ends up with only one E-tank left, and Magnet Man is still being a jerk, getting Arino down to a sliver of life. He beats Magnet Man, but Shadow Man is the one left, and Arino has to make sure he hits him every time with the Top Spin. The battle is quick, but insane — Arino keeps getting hit, and the staff keeps yelping, but Arino just keeps jumping and spinning, and before you know it, Shadow Man is destroyed!

And then, the final stage, with the final face-off against Dr. Wily. The Wily Machine 3 is a weird crablike thing that drives spikes into the ground, but also shoots weird wavy beams that confuse Arino and, of course, eventually kill him.

On the next try, Arino uses the Rock Buster to destroy the little turret on the bottom of the Wily Machine, but he’s almost dead, and the second phase begins, where the boss again kills Arino. 10 more attempts go by. By the 12th, Arino finally tries another weapon and sees that the Hard Knuckle really damages the dome Wily sits in. But the Knuckle moves slow, after all, and it doesn’t always connect.

Many more attempts go by. It’s not until the 25th try that Arino decides to try something else. He uses his head a little and goes for the Rush Jet — by lifting himself up, Arino gets a clear shot at Wily, and stays relatively safe. He gets on the Jet, floats up, and starts hammering away.

It works! The Wily Machine is destroyed, and Wily himself falls to the ground. Mega Man goes up to Wily, but it’s a fake — a robot Wily. The real Dr. is in yet another boss stage, much to Arino’s disappointment.

The final boss is a humongous robot head with a little turret up top. Arino uses the Hard Knuckle from a "safety zone" platform to destroy it, but then, Wily crashes down on top of the head, activating it for real. But the Hard Knuckle doesn’t work on this new phfase, and the robot, Gamma, starts sending out its giant spiky fist from the side of the screen. Now what?

Arino tries other weapons, but they just bounce off the head. And the beam that Gamma shoots every couple of seconds isn’t a great help, either. Arino continues to die and die as he tries weapon after weapon, but still nothing works, not even the Rush Jet.

But then, on the 15th try, Arino figures it out. He equips the Top Spin. He jumps back up to the head, and rubs up against it with the Spin. It takes a second to realize it, but Arino (and the staff) see it’s taken off just about 98% of Gamma’s life! It’s so crazy, it works. But Arino has to jump back up, and his nerves keep him from getting there — and in fact, nearly killed when Gamma’s beam gets him down to just a bit of health.

Thankfully, he has five E-tanks. And that’ll do it — after 2 days and more than 20 hours, Arino’s Top Spin defeats Gamma and Wily once again. And Arino finally learns that the mysterious red robot is Protoman.

TamaGe

Arino is once again in Itabashi, but to visit a different kind of attraction this time: The 10-Yen Game Museum, a room inside another shop that’s full of old amusements that are, of course, only 10 yen to play.

Stepping inside, Arino notices the Kunitori game that he attempted to play on an earlier show — where you have to "take over" feudal japan by earning higher numbers. Arino keeps getting the "princess" icon, which greatly increases his score, enough to get all the way to the end. His prize? A badge good for 70 yen. Now that’s profit. He shows his prize to a little girl, who claps and congratulates him.

Arino and the girl become fast friends, and she gives him advice on the next coin-flipper game, though he only comes close to winning. He then tries another flipper game that’s a little more like pachinko, in that you have to get the coin into a goal in the middle, and after a couple tries, he makes it! It’s a day for miracles, I guess. He gets a 30-yen coin as a prize.

Everything I Need to Know I Learned From Strategy Guides

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Game Collections: 1989: May – July