Advertisement for Mega Man 7 by Capcom for the Super Nintendo from the November 1995 issue of EGM 2.
Source: Electronic Gaming Monthly 2 – Issue Number 17 – November 1995
Mega Man 7 was the first Mega Man game to be released on the Super Nintendo. It was released in 1995 but in game time it was set 6 months after Mega Man 6 which was published on the original NES in 1994. Mega Man 7 maintains the same basic style and game play characteristics as the previous Mega Man games but with the improved graphics and sound that came along with a 16-bit system.
It turns out that while Dr. Wily had been defeated and captured in the previous iteration, he had left several Robot Masters behind that would wake after 6 months. And wake they did attacking the city in which Dr. Wily was being held. Even if you do manage to defeat them, Dr. Wily has even more tricks up his sleeve.
Like previous games in the series, Mega Man 7 plays as a series of side-scrolling platform levels which typically end in a boss battle. Ultimately, there are 8 Robot Masters to defeats as well as additional enemies and obstacles. Defeating a Robot Master earns you that robot’s master weapons which it turns out you will need to use against one of the others.
Reviews of this game are mostly positive and there is no doubt that if you are a fan of other games in this series then you should enjoy this one. Complaints mostly centered around the fact that this game added very little that was new to the series. This may be in part due to the fact that the game was developed on a compressed schedule of only 3 months. It was generally seen as not quite as good as Mega Man X, another Mega Man game released earlier on the SNES that was not part of the main series. Still, if you like Mega Man games there’s no reason not to play this one. Mega Man 7 was the only Mega Man game part of the main series that was released on the Super NES.
In addtion grabbing an original copy or resorting to emulation to give this one a try, there were also a number of re-releases, including: The Mega Man Anniversary Collection for the PS2 (2004), GameCube (2004) and Xbox (2004), the Wii U Virtual Console (2014), Nintendo 3DS Virtual Console (2016), and the Mega Man Legacy Collection 2 for the Nintendo Switch (2018).
The ad above is from the November 1995 issue of EGM^2.