Compared to the other bosses in Mega Man 2, Quick Man is a pretty good idea. Being able to do things a lot faster than anyone else is handy, and has plenty of practical applications for an evil super-villain. Considering that we’re talking about the guy who inexplicably built a robot out of a goddamn log, this is actually pretty brilliant by Dr. Wily’s standards. Of course, most of the inventions being advertised on infomercials at 2 in the morning seem pretty brilliant by Dr. Wily’s standards, too, so maybe we aren’t exactly setting the bar real high.
Either way, this great idea is ruined by the fact that Quick Man isn’t actually any faster than anyone else. And he has no idea.
When he created his eight robot masters, Dr Wily gave each of them a special power: Crash Man can throw bombs everywhere; Heat Man can set himself on fire; Bubble Man can create bubbles. The last one is almost completely useless, but it’s still more than anything the Q-Man’s packing. The only power Quick Man has is self-delusion.
In a weird way, you really have to give a lot of credit to Dr. Wily. Making Quick Man believe that he actually has this incredible super-speed can’t be an easy deception to keep up. Every time Quick Man and one of the other robots walk somewhere together and the others keep up with his pace, it has to put some doubts into Q’s mind regarding his quickness. And I can’t even begin to imagine what kind of logic must have been programmed into his brain that could allow him to continue believing in his superior quickness despite the fact that he’s the only one who can’t beat up Flash Man and steal his lunch money. Maybe that’s the real reason why Wily always made his robots hide in separate, isolated rooms.
On the other hand, this might also be the stupidest thing ol’ Doc W has done. There’s absolutely no practical use for a delusional robot — evil schemes don’t run on self-esteem and the power of dreams. Any other genius would have just named him Useless Man and used him for target practice, but not Wily. Instead, he gave Quick Man a costume that made him look kind of like the Flash and somehow convinced him that he was faster than anyone else. I have no idea why, unless maybe he thought he could trick the Arizona Cardinals into drafting Quick Man as a wide receiver.
Once you engage him in battle, things fall apart pretty fast. Quick Man spends the majority of the battle jumping around the room, desperately trying to make his nonexistent quickness kick in, but to no avail. Whatever attacks he has don’t do much damage, almost as if he’s just trying to buy some time until he starts going faster. It’s probably safe to say that the fight against Mega Man is the exact moment in time when Quick Man realizes that his would-be superpower doesn’t really exist. Do you remember how you felt when you found out Santa wasn’t real? Well, imagine that feeling, only combined with the knowledge that Santa was the only thing that could possibly keep Mega Man from killing you, and right at the moment you found out, Mega Man was chasing you around the room with a gun. That’s the fight against Quick Man.
Quick Man’s Stage: I don’t know what exactly Quick Man’s stage is supposed to be, but the faux “high-tech” background kind of reminded me of some of the electronics store chains from the 1980′s. I kept expecting to come across some old Tandy computers and stacks of cassette tapes. But even though the stage looks silly, it also features some “white lines of death”, which come out of the sides of the screen and kill you if you touch them. Those damned things are quite possibly the hardest part of the game. I have no idea what they’re made out of, but if Dr. Wily had made Quick Man a suit out of those things instead trying to convince of his non-existent super-speed, things probably would have gone a lot better for both of them.
Conclusion: The really incredible thing about Quick Man is that even though he’s delusional and doesn’t have any real special powers, he’s still tougher than most of the other Master Robots. That’s amazing. Apparently simply believing you can do something great is still better than actually being able to do something worthless.
