It’s hard to say just how much of a contribution Heat Man could have made to any of Wily’s plots to take over the world. He has the ability to harness the destructive power of fire, but it’s limited to tossing a few sparks around or setting himself ablaze, and even that isn’t very impressive. If Mega Man is as tall as a person, and Heat Man is as tall as Mega Man, then by the rules of logic, Heat Man on fire is also about as tall as a person. That might make for a decent-size bonfire, but we’re not exactly talking about face-melting levels of heat. At best, the people near him might get uncomfortably warm, and anyone standing more than 15 feet away probably won’t be affected at all.
At least Heat Man had a practical use, though. He could keep Wily’s lab warm and cozy whenever it got cold outside. Guys like Metal Man and Crash Man were better fighters, but they still weren’t good enough to defeat Mega Man and they had no other skills to offer. They only thing they could ever provide Dr. Wily with was false hope. By contrast, it must have been pretty nice to have a robot who could help out a little. Actually, with Heat Man heating the place in the winter, Air Man cooling it in the summer, and Flash Man providing light, Dr. Wily was probably saving a fortune on his utility bills. It’s amazing the next game didn’t have you fighting against Phone Man or Cable TV Man.
Who knows? Maybe Heat Man was really never meant to be anything more than Dr. Wily’s furnace. Let’s face it, Doc W had an inexplicable need to make sentient robots out of everything he ever laid his hands on, and Mega Man never really needed much more motivation for killing something other than “Dr. Wily made it”. If Dr. Wily installed a door opener on his garage, Mega Man would come to his house, blow it up, and absorb its power. Then, he would use this newly acquired ability to control garage doors to crush Dr. Wily’s lawnmower and steal it’s grass cutting ability. And knowing Dr. Wily, he’s probably already working on a robot called Grassman.
Heat Man might not have been anything more than a really unsafe source of warmth, but he looked like a giant walking cigarette lighter. I’m sure he reeked of butane, too. That’s probably why Dr. Wily never came up with a coherent “take over the world” plan — whenever they got together for a meeting, everyone just ended up getting bad headaches and dizziness from sniffing lighter fluid. And if that wasn’t distracting enough, Heat Man would occasionally burst into flames without any warning.
Heat Man’s Stage: Heat Man had the requisite lava pits that all fire-themed bosses in NES games had to have. But what made them harder than normal lava pits was that the blocks you had to jump on to cross them disappeared after a few seconds, and the next one often wouldn’t appear until the exact same time the one you were standing on vanished. This was hard almost to the point of absurdity. In fact, there are only two kinds of people in the world: people who use the flying surfboard to get through Heat Man’s stage, and people who have gotten through without it once, just to see if they could. Nobody has ever done it twice — not even the “Macho Man” Randy Savage, and that man can do anything.
Conclusion: Is being the master of heat really even a special ability? The thermostat in my house does the same thing, and can also turn on the air conditioner if it gets too warm. That essentially gives it twice as much power as Heat Man has. Yet even with so much awesome power at my fingertips, I still know enough not to strap a gun to my furnace and try to use it to kill Mega Man. The end result would ultimately leave me both defeated and cold. Sorry Dr. Wily, but if you’re really serious about taking over the world, you’re going to need some robots that can do more than just cook your Hot Pockets for you.
