literal peak megaman if you disagree you already drank the koolaid bro... wonderful level design (tornado man's platforms, the birds in concrete man's stage are megaman screen scrolling chaos incarnate and plug man's arduous disappearing block section all come to mind) a point of contention i see is megaman not having a slide or a charge, to that i say play proto man and quit crying. a slick gaming challenge and what migfht be the best game in the classic series (cant decide between this 8 or 10) just because a game is unfair or challenging does not make it bad

I'll be honest, I replayed this because I did want to see if my old verdict on the game held up. As a reminder, I really didn't respect that the game got rid of the slide and charge shot, and I did not like the level design like at all. I thought it was cheap and frustrating, but doable with Mega Man at least. All of which sucked because I really liked a lot of other things about the game. I liked the robot masters as characters especially, I liked their weapons, I liked the wily bosses, I loved the music, I especially really liked the story, or at least the nugget of lore about robot expiry dates that I think they should've done more because it was compelllllling.

Coming back to it now, not in the midst of a megaman marathon that burned me out of playing games for a week after failing to get past Megaman X5's second level, I like it a lot more.

I don't think it's what I would call that outstanding for a Mega Man title, but the level design certainly wasn't as frustrating as I remembered. It still can be, I really did not like Hornet Man's, Plug Man's, and especially Jewel Man's stages, and some of the WIly Stages (mainly stage 2), but you know what, it is whatever. Weapons still are really fun, was a lot smarter idea starting with Hornet Man though so I got the Hornet Chaser and could just deal with annoyances from a far. It was a lot cleaner of a playthrough.

I'm still not jazzed about the lack of charge shot and slide, those I think make the level design like more interesting or potentially at least, but I do think this game completely doable without it, it can just be kind of tough.

Alright game now, I will go back to MM10 when I feel like dealing with it, but I don't know if I'll think much better of that one.

Every time I have a hankering to play some mega man, and i think "i haven't played mega man 9 in a while, maybe i should give that one another try", i spend two hours trying to beat one of the robot masters or dealing with the unbalanced stage design and pretty soon i'm remembering why i haven't played mega man 9 in a while.
The megaman series had six games on the NES, for eight years the franchise operated within NES limitations, and it changed very little about each new game. Finally with Mega man 7 the series actually changed the gameplay up slightly, and then megaman 8 and mm&b made even wider changes. but when the series finally came back after a decade with megaman 9, the only progressions that it offered was to remove all of the progressions that the past seven games had already made. i will hold this opinion to the grave that megaman 2 did not need to have a spiritual successor, and megaman 9 didn't even understand what megaman 2 did right anyways - half the robot masters here are clones but yet they still failed to clone a weakness order that actually makes sense.
we also need to talk about splash woman. before this point, every robot master ended in "man", which to be clear implied "human", not emphasizing anything about the characters being masculine- most of them lacked gender characteristics completely, which makes sense because they're fuckin robots. Does top man scream 'masculinity' to you? maybe that's a bad example (top man is the pinnacle of masculinity) but after splash woman came out, retroactively they all became male. now we know for a fact that ice man has a penis, shade man has a penis, needle man has a needle shaped penis, ground man has a drill shaped penis, which actually we knew already because that one was visible in-game but the point is that i wouldn't be thinking about this before splash woman existed. now i'm not saying it's reasonable to make a mermaid robot master male, but to be fair spongebob has already proven mermaid man to be a successful character
apparently the old megaman games had gotten a reputation for being 'difficult' at some point between the 90s and 2008, which to me doesn't make much sense because that's kind of just how all NES games were. but megaman 9 tries to live up to it by being needlessly difficult; in fact, far more so than the actual originals were, and in far less forgiving ways. only about half the deaths here truly feel deserved - especially in the boss battles, which are extremely unbalanced, especially in mega buster runs.
fortunately the music bangs enough that it completely makes up for it. nobody tell NicoEvaluates that I didn't rate it 5 stars though.

I think if 2 is your favorite, then 9 is definitely a perfect game. This feels like a direct sequel to 2. But in many ways, this game frustrates me. Both because a handful of the stages are often really challenging in a way that annoys me, and because this game had so much potential to be more than what it is.

I understand that, at the time, the idea behind this game was to play it a little safe and go back to Rockman's roots as a franchise. Enough of the spinoff series and random gameplay changes that seemingly overtook the franchise for a while, just go back to NES Rockman style in gameplay and graphics. I used to dislike that this game used NES graphics instead of evolving with the hardware like 7 and 8 did. Seeing the game in motion now, I think it's fair to wish that maybe they could've done something a little different, but the game looks very nice as is. Retro nostalgia games then weren't as abundant as they are now, so this was very ahead of its time in that regard. With the sprite flicker option enabled, the game is almost indistinguishable from an actual NES title. Jewel Satellite's rotation being extremely smooth is the only thing that reminded me I was playing a WiiWare/XBLA game

My main issue is that this game takes away the Charge Shot and the Slide for literally no reason. I don't care if Rockman 2 is the most popular one in the series, stripping away the gameplay improvements later games introduced makes it feel like the devs only valued 2 as a source of inspiration rather than building upon the previous game(s). It's like if you took away Sonic's Spin Dash or Tails being able to fly in Sonic Mania. But what's weirder is that they still have Rightot & Roll's shop from 7/8/Forte, and they brought back the classic un-nerfed Rush Coil and Rush Jet. So the game seems to almost randomly pick and choose what it deems worth keeping from later titles. Where's Dr. Cossack? Where's King? Where's Forte (he has one cameo on a screen in the ending but nothing else)? I get this seems SO nitpicky, but the Slide and Charge Shot just add so much to making these games more fun to me that it negatively affected my enjoyment. I try to appreciate games for what they are rather than what I wish they would be, but this is such a glaring problem for me that I can't ignore it.

I still give it 3 stars because I'd argue this game has the most useful weapons in the whole series (so far). Out of all the ones I've played, I used all of the alternate weapons the most in this game, rather than just using them for weaknesses. Hornet Chaser, Black Hole Bomb, Jewel Satellite, and Laser Trident were all really fun to abuse.

Last thing I'll mention is that I loved the ending cutscene and the montage images during the credits. I'm glad that all the Robot Masters were redeemed at the end, because this is another set of bosses I love the designs of. 6, 7, 8, and 9 probably all have my favorites in the series.

Terrible. By far the worst classic Mega Man game and a strong contender for the worst game in any Mega Man series. The design choices in this game are profoundly stupid. All of them. The removal of charge and slide, the outrageously slow menus with the same texts being repeated endlessly, the overuse of spikes and jumps that require perfection, among other things.

When it comes to retro games, it's true that they're often associated with high difficulty, but also with well-crafted level design and overall good progression. This game lacks an interesting one. Instead it is repetitive, and excessively frustrating level design. It also amplifies the worst flaws of these retro games like terrible navigation menus. In some cases, it goes beyond that, EXACERBATING these issues. Mega Man 2, for example, was nowhere near as clunky as 9 is.

I'd probably give it an even worse score, but visually, the game has a charm and a few stages are decent. It's a game from 1986 stuck in 2008. But not from a competent developer like Capcom, but rather on the level of bad stuff like LJN games.

Esse jogo me deu uma nostalgia pq ele saiu em uma época onde tava surgindo muitos jogos indies/não indies de wii shop/xbox live arcade com estilo e gameplay retrô (Super Meat Boy, Castle Crashers), e tipo era MUITO jogo.

O maior ponto negativo desse jogo é o level design, pq sei lá eu não sei qual q é o fetiche que os devs desse jogo tem com espinho pq puta q pariu q level design de covarde.

Mas dos jogos de Megaman clássico que eu joguei esse aqui sim tem um puta arsenal de armas boas, em diversos momentos eu usava e montava estratégias com elas. É um jogo mto bom, até as fases do wily pq depois daí é só desgosto.

Thanks to my big brother's game collection, I was quite the retro gamer when I was little, so despite being only 12 when it came out, I was really excited for Mega Man 9 and bought it right when it came out back in 2008. It's been more than 12 years since I last played the game, so I had forgotten just about everything about it except for sorta what order to fight the bosses, but I was super pleasantly surprised by what I found. I knew people said Mega Man 9 was good, and I went in ready to be met with just a middling game, but heck am I glad to have been wrong. It took me around an hour and a half to finish the Japanese version of the game.

Eight robot masters are once again trying to take over the world, but this time it's allegedly Dr. Light controlling them! Dr. Light is thrown in prison, and it's Mega Man's job to help prove him innocent! Mega Man 9 was made some 12 years after Mega Man 8, and it was quite the event back when it was announced. The story is very well aware of the twisted, awkward road that Mega Man had stumbled through (such as the later Mega Man X games) and the somewhat Sonic-like reputation the Blue Bomber had gained over the years, so this game is quite tongue-in-cheek with its story quite often (down to the point where they even made deliberately awful box art for it just like the American game boxes for Mega Man used to have X3). The news anchor is dressed like Chun Li from Street Fighter, Wily uses a Swiss bank account, Roll rides around dangerously on the Rush jet, and the animations on some of the stills used for narration and cutscenes are hilarious. Sure it turns out that, of course, Dr. Wily is behind it all, but it's a lighthearted return to the good old days as you remember them being, and not just in the 8-bit graphical style.

Mega Man 2 is a game that's really tightly designed for the time, but it's got a lot of problems when you look back at it with some two or three decades of hindsight. However, Mega Man 9 is how good you REMEMBER Mega Man 2 being. Mega Man is back to only his pea shooter and Rush (no ground dashing or charge buster), but despite that this game is still just so well made. Traps and enemies are almost always in places they can be reasonably dealt with, and though there are a couple places where things feel less than fair, just how well put together the rest of the game is makes the odd blip in fairness that much more noticeable. It might take you a bit of trial and error to get enemy or platform patterns down, but every challenge can be gotten through with the right timing, patience, and use of special weapons. The special weapons in this game are especially worth mentioning because so many of them, like the concrete shot, have uses outside of combat for getting rid of enemy platforms, grabbing out of the way items, or just a little boost to get you through a tough spot. It's hard to put into words exactly how Mega Man 9 is so tightly designed, but those wizards at Inti Creates only heckin' went and did it.

Another place the quality of the design extends to is the boss design, and they're easily a handful of the best fights in the series. Again, despite having no charge shot or ground dash, you always feel super well equipped to take on these bosses with only your mega buster, and I had a blast taking them down without their special weaknesses in a way I've never had in the older entries. All of the bosses are really well designed, technical fights that vary in difficulty (Concrete Man is definitely the hardest out of the first eight bosses) but never in quality, and it makes the boss rush time attack mode a blast as well.

The presentation is also top of the line. Sure, the graphics are great and in a very 8-bit style (though they're of a quality that they probably wouldn't've run on an actual old NES), but plenty of Mega Man games are pretty. What plenty of Mega Man games are NOT is full of awesome music, and that is where Mega Man 9 shines. It's like we're back to the old days of Mega Man 2 and 3 with just how heckin' great basically every track in the game is, and I am all here for a return to basics like that.


Verdict: Highly Recommended. Throughout my marathon of playing Mega Man, I was thinking a lot about which entry in the series was my favorite, but that thinking stopped with Mega Man 9. This takes all the best things of the old games and of games made since and uses them to absolutely masterful effect. As far as the classic style is concerned, this is the Mega Man game without peer. Perhaps someday Capcom will put out a better one (and I haven't played 11 yet, so perhaps they've already got something good going on), but damn if they haven't set themselves a VERY high bar to clear.

Remember Mega Man 2?

A game too nostalgic for its own good, Mega Man 9 tested the waters to see if anyone was interested in a new Mega Man game after a while. It was also seemingly made for those Mega Man fans who had played so much Mega Man that the previous 8 games were Too Easy. I'm not sure if they wanted people to jump right into 9 as their first Mega Man or they wanted them to go back to the first one, but considering how bare bones this game is, it's a strange approach no matter what.

Mega Man 9, in an attempt to be like only a quarter of its past, removes Mega Man's ability to slide or charge his buster (two things i'm very fond of doing in a Mega Man game). This makes traversal and combat a more pure and challenging experience, but also, potentially, a pretty limited one. Your jumps have to be Perfect.

Your movement is not entirely limited though. While a whole lot more clumsy and scarce than the Mega Ball, the Concrete Shot allows you to scale walls and quickly jump off of frozen enemies, and the game demands you use it in some pretty creative ways. I love the Concrete Shot, i would love to have infinite ammo for it. Speaking of ammo, Magma Man has more health points than you have ammo for Tornado Blow, his weakness. What were they thinking.

I have beaten Mega Man 9 twice and hated it the first time because i was young and dumb. The second time, as a wizened sage, I appreciate it so much more. It's a decent time that rewards a really (emphasis on really) skilled player. There are better Mega Man games out there.

I can really only recommend Mega Man 9 for people who like Mega Man and have played the previous games in the series, and know full well 9 takes all your toys away and still expects you to play.

yes yes, Splash Woman is cute.

In my opinion, the best classic series game. The only problem is that the game design will deliberately to things to kill you when you don't know they're there rather than giving you any chance to react or deal with it, but even then I understand that because this was a "return to form" and most people think of Mega Man as the kind of game that did that. Level design is otherwise fantastic, the enemies are really fun, the boss fights are the best in the series, the music is great, and this is the best set of weapons the series has ever given us. The endless mode existing is just icing on the cake.