It’s Mega Man 2 Day on The Gameological Society! In honor of its release in Japan 25 years ago, today we’re paying tribute to Mega Man 2—and all things Mega Man.

Your first move in Mega Man 2 is to put on a hat. The title screen of Capcom’s iconic NES action game depicts our hero standing atop of a futuristic skyscraper in blank-faced reverie. His curly locks twirl in the wind. The kid is at peace. Then you press “Start,” and Mega Man’s hair disappears under a blue plastic approximation of an early 20th-century football helmet. The boy is gone, replaced by a warrior. Time to fight.

It’s easy to forget this quiet prelude amid the ensuing flash. Even moreso than its predecessor, Mega Man 2 solidified the template for the series. You defeat eight robot bosses who are ensconced in compounds filled with evil bots and death traps. Then you enter the headquarters of Dr. Wily himself—a vast lair that places increasingly ludicrous demands on your reflexes. It doesn’t feel right to say that Mega Man 2 is violent, per se. Your default sidearm is a glorified pellet gun, and your foes’ best weapons include a compressed-air dispenser and a shower of falling leaves. But the game is certainly bombastic, and by the time you reach the inner keep of Wily’s techno-castle, the sensory overload is intense.

That excess is what makes the game’s climax so striking. After the first 99 percent of Mega Man 2 builds up tension and spectacle, the final moments quietly strip away the artifice, layer by layer.

Dr. Wily

Once you re-defeat each of the game’s eight “Robot Master” bosses—these recapitulatory showdowns are another Mega Man staple—you face off against the evil genius responsible for all the mayhem. The fight takes place against a stark black background, a presentation that focuses your eye on the hovering dreadnought that fades into view. Wily’s airborne tank is festooned with tubes, panels, and wiring. There’s even a small propeller on the rear end, which hardly seems functional. It has to be a touch of nostalgic vanity on the doctor’s part.

Indeed, most of Wily’s ship is there for show. It’s a masterpiece of psychological warfare. Yet once the sense of shock and awe fades away, players inevitably notice that the ship isn’t terribly agile. It wobbles back and forth, burping out an orb of energy every once in a while. For anybody who has made it this far in such a difficult game, Wily doesn’t provide too much of a challenge.

But then the first facade falls away—literally, in this case. When you drain Wily’s ship of energy, the front piece shatters and the mad scientist powers up again. Now the machine wobbles faster and burps more often, and you’re caught in a battle of attrition. It’s practically impossible not to get roughed up in this fight. You just have to outlast the bastard. (Note: The flickering and occasional disappearance of Mega Man in the video above is an artifact of the NES emulator used to create the footage—that’s not part of the game.)

The “megaboss revealing his true form” is an extremely common trope in video games, and Mega Man helped to establish it. As narrative devices go, it doesn’t make much sense. Even the most overconfident and deranged villain would be foolhardy to save his most powerful weapons for the moment when his back is against the wall. But the underlying idea—that an evildoer’s true form is even more fearsome than you would have imagined—has an obvious potency, so I’m not here to quibble with it. Especially because Mega Man 2 plays with this trope so beautifully.

This whole sequence—Wily’s ship appears, you defeat it, Wily’s TRUE ship appears—is an echo of the original Mega Man, which ended with a similar battle. In the first game, Wily falls to the ground in defeat after you dismantle his precious airship. Mega Man 2 gives every indication that it intends to reprise that drama, until it doesn’t. Here, you beat Wily, and he zips away in a flying saucer. The ground crumbles beneath your feet, and you fall into blackness. The stage is struck. The show’s over.

The Cave

Mega Man 2 has a superb soundtrack, with some of the catchiest “chiptunes” ever composed for the NES’ modest audio circuitry. Yet the game’s most effective use of sound may be the silence that accompanies this final area. The lights come up on Mega Man, still falling into an impossibly deep pit. This cavern has a different look from the rest of the game, dirtier and more organic. It feels like we’re backstage, in the part of Wily’s castle that we weren’t meant to see.

Yet the cave is just another put-on, another facade, and Mega Man 2 hints at this reality with a poetic flourish of level design. You advance into a hallway dotted with puddles of acid that drip from the ceiling. More traps. As seen in the video above, they demand careful timing if you hope to make it out unscathed.

Or so the designers would have you think. In fact, the cave poses no challenge as long as you just keep moving (as seen in this video). Until now, the best policy has been caution. Think before you move. Wait for your moment. Here, you ought to surge headlong into the void. The acid drips are a mirage—they only become death traps if you perceive them as such. There’s a lesson here.

The Alien

The radio actor Ed Gardner once joked that if you scratch beneath the phony tinsel of Hollywood, you find the real tinsel. The Alien is the “real tinsel” of Mega Man 2. After you emerge from the cave, you burrow deeper into the bizarre truth of Dr. Wily’s existence. The backdrop falls away, dumping Mega Man into outer space. You’re somehow weightless, hurtling through the stars, yet still grounded to the bottom of the screen (the first hint that something is amiss). Wily jumps out of his flying saucer and morphs into a creepy green extraterrestrial with a glowing red rib cage. This, at long last, must be the madman’s really truly true form!

Capcom’s designers play another nasty trick here, as players discover that their weapons are useless against the Alien. This otherworldly specter invites you to use overwhelming force—the proverbial “nuking from orbit” is the only way to be sure, right? But the usual go-tos in Mega Man’s arsenal are no use here. Whether it’s the fireworks of the Crash Bomber or the razor-sharp barrage of the Metal Blade, your attacks don’t faze the alien. Only the puny Bubble Lead, which sputters out of Mega Man’s arm cannon like so much regurgitated baby food, does any damage. It’s probably the last weapon that many players would try. Your fancy guns are not what you thought they were.

Neither is the Alien. Deliver the final blow and the stars vanish, revealing that the whole Alien fight (and possibly more of your quest, and possibly all of it) took place in Dr. Wily’s holodeck. His true form isn’t more fearsome than you imagined after all—it’s much less. In the end, he’s an overzealous coward who hides behind his machines. Your victory isn’t just in defeating him, but in peeling away his artifice to expose and humiliate a small man.

The Walk Home

Mega Man 2’s epilogue has earned it a spot on countless “best game ending” lists, and you only have to watch it to see why. The composition and refinement of the animation are startlingly modern for a 1988 NES game. On the right side of the screen, we see Mega Man calmly walking, presumably toward the bucolic village depicted on the left. As Mega Man strolls along, the seasons come and go. He changes color to match the weather, observing a profound passage of time. (Mega Man’s color changes when he switches to a different weapon, so it’s moving to see the effect used here for aesthetic harmony rather than for combat.)

It strikes me that Mega Man walks. Whenever he finishes a level, Mega Man typically teleports back to home base to recover and to be outfitted with new weaponry. But when his quest is over, he walks. Perhaps his masters forget about him just that quickly—now that he’s done his duty and defeated Dr. Wily, they don’t see any reason to beam him home. (Defying quantum physics must make for one hell of an electricity bill, after all.)

I believe, though, that our hero chooses to walk. The fancy teleportation trick is something he uses when there’s a war to be won. Once the fighting is over, his overwhelming urge is to be human again, or as close as he can come. He doesn’t want to be Mega Man, the warrior, any longer than he needs to be. So he walks home on his own two legs, even if it takes the better part of a year. It’s ascetic, and it’s honest.

This interpretation is borne out by the closing shot of the epilogue: Mega Man’s helmet on top of a knoll, its wearer nowhere in sight. Bookending that first moment of the game, in which Mega Man straps on his helmet and set to work, this is one of the most powerful images of the NES era. It recasts Mega Man as a reluctant hero. By placing the helmet where we can see it and removing himself from the picture, Mega Man is peeling off one last bit of stagecraft.

The scene creates a poignant distance between the player and the hero. It gives Mega Man a soul of his own, apart from you. All that fighting and destruction were the product of a role we had the kid play, a role represented by the warrior’s helmet. In other words, Mega Man 2 was a show for your benefit, and now the kid wants his privacy. We had our fun together, he says, but you don’t get to know the real me—that final truth is mine alone. You can keep the hat.