This is the most fun set of Robot Masters I feel, even if they have a pretty static weakness wheel. It's classic-themed but it comes with some modernization like having weapon switching on the L and R buttons, and an easy mode for accessibility's sake. Its one real problem is some of the Robot Master weapons are really lame or extremely situational. Just a bit like they're trying a bit too hard to be clever, so Triple Blade just ends up being the best shred-enemies implement.

I remember Bass being a lot of fun to use too.

This time I went with Bass (quite different gameplay tbh, I thought it could be easier than MM and my impressions are that it is indeed easier than MM).
The stages are just like 9, with some cheap deaths and traps that infuriated me (even with Tremble's fly!).
For some reason I think in 9 and 10 they did not do a great job with the stages graphics and backgrounds, I still think that 4, 5 and 6 had better presentation.
The bosses are fun to fight at least even if I did not find any of the weapons interesting.

The ability to play as MM, Protoman and Bass is really cool.

I started to get really frustrated with this game at first because I chose to play as Blues. Once I started getting enough screws to buy useful items from the shop and beat my first Robot Master, I had a much better time getting through the rest of the game. It's fun! But I think I played for 2 hours before I made any meaningful progress, resetting my playthrough at least twice because I wanted to see if playing as Rock would feel better, before I decided to go back to playing as Blues.

Rock feels EXTREMELY limited compared to Blues. In a similar way to how it feels like a lose:lose situation playing as Forte and Rock in RM&F, Blues gets better tools at the expense of taking double damage and double knockback, and vice versa for Rock. It feels rewarding dodging enemies and their attacks efficiently by forcing yourself to learn patterns rather than just boosting through everything, but I wish that double damage was just a Hard mode option rather than locking the Charge Shot and Slide behind the Hard mode character.

Blues taking double damage was a fair tradeoff in 9 because he was DLC. You were sticking new, powerful mechanics into a game not designed for it, so the tradeoff is that they expect you to be a master at the game if you want to abuse these mechanics. But why not just design this new game around the Charge Shot and Slide? Let Rock use them, and give Blues something else aside from his Shield move to differentiate him. I was thinking it'd be cool if they implemented Break Man as a "glass cannon" option into a playable iteration of Blues. You go Break Man to deal twice as much damage, while also receiving twice as much. Though considering that 10 doesn't dare risk or innovate much in the same way 9 didn't, I feel like that would be far too complicated an idea to put in this game.

My friend suggested I should try playing the Legacy Collection version with Extra Armor enabled. That way, Blues' double damage quirk cancels out and you only take as much damage as Rock. At this point, I've made too much progress to start over a fourth time, but I just wanted to include that in my review in case anyone happens to feel the same way as I do.

Despite being so excited for Mega Man 9 when I was younger, Mega Man 10 was so much less of an event (it was back to being "just another Mega Man") that this was the only one of this marathon I'd genuinely never touched and knew nearly nothing about. I had heard it was definitely not as good as 9, which is at least partly why it took us so long to get Mega Man 11, but I'd still been looking forward to tackling this total unknown the whole time I was playing through the other nine games. Well, now that I've seen it to its end, I can definitely see what all the lack of hype had been about XD. It took me around two and a half hours to complete the English version of the game.

In a pretty serious tone shift, Mega Man 10 goes for a much more serious tone in its story. A computer virus is ravaging the globe, and this Roboenza virus sends any robot who gets it into first a fever, and then into a violent rage. Even Dr. Wily has been put out by this, and he comes to Dr. Light and Mega Man begging for their help in both developing a cure and subduing some robots who stole the parts of his old cure machine. It's largely the plot of Mega Man 3 again, but there's a lot more dialogue to the story, especially when Roll gets the virus. But the more serious story isn't just super wild whiplash compared to the rest of the series (not to mention Mega Man 9), but it's also just not very well done since the visual still communicate something silly and happy despite the more heavy way the cutscenes play out. It's very sloppily done, and I'm not sure why they did it, and that sorta sets the tone for the rest of my issues with the game.

Mega Man 10's stage design is reminiscent of, if anything, Mega Man 5 in just how empty they so often feel. The gimmicks at play in them are often somewhere between frustrating or overly simple, and while they're not bad, per se, they're definitely far weaker than Mega Man 9's were. Now the reason for this, I believe, is that the game launched with not just Mega Man playable, but Proto Man too (and Bass came later as DLC). While Mega Man 9 also had Proto Man added later, what that game didn't have were easy and hard difficulty modes like this one has. These difficulty modes aren't like Mega Man 2's modes, however, and they affect the platforming as well, giving you more or less enemies to fight and platforms to land on depending on what difficulty you're on (instead of largely just damage rebalancing like Mega Man 2 had). This really restricted what the developers could do with level design, and it really shows in how plain and uninspired the stages feel compared to what came before. It was a noble attempt to try and add some accessibility features to the game like this, but this was definitely not the right way to go about it.

The bosses are thankfully still pretty solid, but also still not as well done as Mega Man 9's were. They're still technical and fun in a way most of the earlier games weren't, but they are much harder than 9's were, and often for not great reasons such as difficult to read patterns or requiring some pretty damn great reaction time. While they thankfully aren't outright bad, they are a decidedly firm step backwards from where the series was just one entry ago, and they really could've used some more polish.

The presentation is quite conflicted in the graphics department, as was discussed earlier in the story section, but thankfully the music helps make up for it a bit. One area where this game is just about on par with Mega Man 9 is that the music is pretty damn good the whole way through. While it certainly doesn't make up for all the other problems I have with it, it's a nice consolation given every other way this is a step back from Mega Man 9.

Verdict: Recommended. At the end of the day, Mega Man 10 is far more disappointing than outright badly done. If this had been Mega Man 9, I think people would've been relatively happy with it and it might've gotten a sequel, but being a disappointing sequel to SUCH a strong revival just wasn't what the doctor ordered at the time. I definitely don't think there's much reason to pick this game over something like even Mega Man 4 or 6, let alone Mega Man 9 if given the choice, but it's certainly a nice addition to round out the second Legacy Collection.

Now that my marathon is over, I guess I'm ready to give my overall ranking on the series.
While some of these could change depending on how I'm feeling on the day, today's particular ranking is:

9 > 4 > 6 > 8 > 3 > 2 > 10 > 5 > 7 > 1

I really enjoyed playing through them all, and am looking forward to the GameBoy games (or rather at this point, reviewing the rest of them, as I actually played through the other two I hadn't gotten to yet earlier today, at the time of writing ^^;) as well as the X series~. If I've learned anything from this, it's that at the end of the day, even the worst of the classic Mega Man games are still pretty good games, and each one has something to make it stand out from the crowd with its own appeal (even if that particular thing might not actually be all that appealing to a lot of other people XD).

One last special shoutout once again to my friend DogStrong, but also to my friend Fii, for sticking with me and sharing in the celebration of Mega Man as she watched me play through all of these ^w^

It's still unnecessarily antiquated and ignores all the progress that happened from Mega Man 5 to Mega Man 8, but at least it's a much less unfair game and also does have functional menus, L-R function for weapons, and overall better flow than MM9. It also doesn't have the unnecessarily slow shop like in 9. That said, these two games were overall a disaster for Mega Man's natural evolution, but I would be much more forgiving with 10 if it had come out after 4.

Releasing it after 8 is like trying to use candles instead of light bulbs. Looking at it this way, it almost seems like a miracle that 11 turned out as good as it did.

Unlike MM9, this game has an easy mode, which means I can actually play it.

But really, everything that I liked in 9 is back in this game, with great levels, really fun weapons, and some nice spritework and music. And on top of that, a lot of the level design, plus the aforementioned easy mode, make it more palatable for a filthy casual Zoomer like me. It does suck that there was on-disk DLC in the original release, but I played the Legacy Collection which includes all the DLC anyway so none of that really matters to me.

The tenth time around, it’s still more of Mega Man, rather than more from Mega Man. I like Mega Man, so that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

If Mega Man 9 was a cautious return to form, then Mega Man 10 is a comfortable product made to capitalize on the positive reception to its careful predecessor. It’s a slightly more enjoyable time, despite including the hang ups I had for the previous one.

There’s less annoying mini bosses eating your attempts on your way to each Robot Master. The new Bolt economy lets the shop be useful earlier on. Bosses have shorter i-frame duration, making Mega Man’s lack of a charge shot not seem so bad.

They still coulda given my man Mega Man that slide and charged shot though. Proto Man coulda been the Hard Mode.

They also coulda given us a real movement-enhancing weapon like the Mega Ball or even the Concrete Shot but all we got is the wall-climbing Wheel Cutter. Its usefulness isn’t in as nearly as many instances as the Concrete Shot or god forbid the Mega Ball.

The Bass DLC is a fun addition that rounds out the character variety, but I feel like his dash could have just been a separate button instead of the down+jump combo we’ve been using for the slide for years now. Bass moves too fast for it to be comfortable to do it with that combo input. Classic Mega Man by and large completely ignores any steps forward that the X series took, but this is one time they should have paid attention to it. Just give Bass a dash button.

I have beaten Mega Man 10 twice and it’s pretty alright. It’s tricky at times, and I would have liked a more unique presentation, but it’s a fun enough experience that Mega Man Enjoyers can snack on.

I like that you can finally swap weapons with the shoulder buttons again : )

Gamers, I do not like Mega Man 10 very much. Big disclaimer for my opinions on this one, I played this after playing the previous 9 games over the course of a few months or so, and was beginning to feel some burnout. Because of that, I chose to play as Proto Man in this one, in hope to change up the gameplay a bit. Holy fuck, was this a mistake. I hope that my problems with this stem from the increased damage taken while playing as Blues, but I really do not want to replay it for a while. The robot master stages are alright, but once I hit the castle stages this became nearly unplayable. I recognize that I am likely being dramatic about this one, and when I think about it it probably isn't as bad if you play through with Mega Man first, and the design isn't really bad per se, but every time I picked it up I dreaded it. It'll be my least favorite entry until I decide to give it another shot, and I'll probably like it then, but until then, bad review!