"Wood Man's Stage" from Mega Man II on the Game Boy (1991)
Composer: Kenji Yamazaki
Album: No Official Release that I could find.
Publisher: Capcom
Developer: Thinking Rabbit
I was a little leary about this music for Mega Man II because I had read that the music ended up being really tinny and grating on the ears. Still, if you happen to listen to a lot of music from the Game Boy sound chip, you become accustomed to what you can expect from that little 8-bit chip. Although, when you take the music along with the sound effects in the game and the game needs to cut out certain parts of the music to make way for the sounds of Mega Man's blaster fire, jumping/landing sound effects, and hitting enemy robots, I do admit that the music suffers far more than it deserves. I was also worried that I was going to have a negatively biased opinion towards the theme from Wood Man's stage because the theme originally written by Takashi Tateishi and Manami Matsuemae for the 1998 release of Mega Man 2 is not only one of my favorite themes from Mega Man 2, but the entire Mega Man series, and for music composed on the NES.
It ended up being a tossup between this and Top Man's Stage, but Wood Man won in the end if only to show myself that I can like a completely different take on music for a stage that I absolutely love. Like a lot of the music Kenji Yamazaki wrote for this portable iteration of Mega Man II, this track fits very much within the pantheon of Mega Man music. It has a driving drum beat, it has a bouncy that is also very catchy, all the while not drawing inspiration from the original Wood Man Stage theme. It is just a good stage theme from a Mega Man game, presented to you here without any of the environmental blips, purely for your listening enjoyment.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
My Captain's On His Way
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