(Also played via Legacy Collection)
Damn, much better than I remember! Amazing visuals and probably my favorite soundtrack out of the 6 NES Mega Man titles. The levels are all-around pretty great and make some neat usages of the Robot Master weapons, as well as Rush. I love the weaknesses for the Robot Masters, they're pretty bonkers but they make sense in this series' absurdly comical and over-the-top logic.

Some hiccups here and there keep this from being a top-tier Mega Man game, the charged shot doesn't feel as polished as in later games and there is a few bullshit moments that Mega Man games (especially the classic series) insist on doing for some reason, like stupidly precise jumps and enemies that unexpectedly rise from the bottomless pits. But overall this is an incredibly solid game and a huge improvement from the messiness of Mega Man 3. I might actually like it as much as Mega Man 2 honestly.

I really enjoy that a narrative is added, however slight. The length in this one is just right, solving the tedious retreading of robot masters from 3 by adding Cossack's castle. The weapons overall feel more useful than 3 but still don't live up to the fun or memorability of 2's. Bright Man's power is totally useless outside of draining it on Pharaoh Man. The UI finally got it down though, as switching weapons is smooth and quick (you can finally do it while jumping!).

Then there's the charge shot. This really hurts the pacing of classic MM. You can tell enemy HP is designed around it, and it makes most of the other weapons pointless to switch to. I'm not sure if it's due to charge shot, but the level design also really lacks the sense of urgency the series had before (i.e. Gemini Man's level). Levels are slow and honestly, frustrating to plow through with endless spikes and pits.

The series has always punished players for jumping before looking, but the enemy placement in 4 has virtually every enemy aiming to drop you straight into a pit. There are also some ridiculous enemy design's/counters (Whopper on Ring Man's level) that ended up making me feel frustrated in an unfair "this is a bullshit simulator" kind of way for the first time in the series.

My other main qualm is with the design choice of the final level. After the boss gauntlet, Wily's 2nd form is an absolute slog to power through without drills. For the first time in the series, it HEAVILY punishes you for not playing conservatively with your weapon's against the robot masters in the gauntlet. Wily's 3rd form has a similar issue where you have to farm Imorm's to refill Pharaoh-shot to full if you used it in the Ringman fight. Difficulty is fine, but these decisions are baffling since they weren't in place before and would easily be remedied with a couple large Weapon Energies.

I ripped into it, but I did still enjoy this one. Toad Man and the acid rain is awesome. The length here is PERFECT due to having 2 castles and new characters. The OST is still enjoyable but imo the worst in the series up to this point, except for Skull Man's theme which slaps.

The series finally reaches a point of such industrially blended slushiness that a sequel to Mega Man is like a sequel to Tetris.

Each is similar enough that it's really just a new version of the same game, but different enough for people to have preferences. Similar enough that anyone other than a serious fan could not tell apart screenshots from one game to screenshots of another. Similar enough that at this point, I'm having to get out a journal and make handwritten notes in front of the television, because any meaningful differences I want to address are so small that I'm concerned I'll forget them by the time I walk to my keyboard.

Art and music are more stellar than ever before, with plenty of the space on the cartridge being used for cutscene graphics, or character sprites that serve no gameplay purpose (Kalinka, Proto Man, and really Cossack himself). Eddie exists. Why don't they just put a power-up on the floor in the rooms where Eddie shows up? Because they liked the idea of a friendly little robot. Though, ironically most Mega Man enemies already have wide bright eyes, so he looks about as hostile as anything else until you realize you can't damage him.

I'll admit I haven't gone through any kind of serious frame by frame analysis, but most of the menus and GUI elements seem a bit more sluggish; this is the first Mega Man game where pausing to switch weapons brings up a menu that covers the entire screen and obscures all game environments and action. It feels like it takes a Robot Master's health bar just a little too long to fill up before the fight starts. It feels like it takes a little longer for the screen to scroll. There's an auto-scroll level.

The Rush abilities are the same as they were in Mega Man 3. I literally never used Rush Marine. There was only one section in the fortress stages where I even considered it, and I opted not to.

When a platform moves or materializes it displaces Mega Man vertically upward rather than horizontally as in previous games. This makes the disappearing block sections a good bit more forgiving than in previous titles, but there are other platforms where collision can feel a bit janky.

Halfway through the first fight with Dr. Wily, the skull on the front of his floating cannon falls off, and he grows a second health bar; this was the absolute peak of the game's difficulty. This was the only boss fight where I used an E-tank, and it probably accounted for 90% of the time that I spent using the Legacy Collection's rewind feature.

It made me realize more than ever before just how miserable playing Mega Man without any kind of cheat, accessibility feature, or specialized controller really is. Even before rewinding, emulators had save states, the PS2 releases added in the turbo firing that many players once bought a third party NES controller for. Playing an original cartridge exclusively on the hardware that it was intended for is not only more difficult, no doubt inspiring in most players either irritation or apathetic discouragement, it is also less interesting.

The charge attack is not, on its own, an interesting addition, especially not in this particular entry. Attempting to use it adds another rhythm to the fight, on top of the movement, attack patterns, and post-damage invulnerability frames on the boss, but it is the least important of these rhythms. It doesn't deal enough damage (to bosses or regular enemies) to be of frequent use, not to mention that the player will likely spend most bosses wielding other weapons anyway. As a counterpart to an extreme rapid fire of an aftermarket turbo feature, it at least gives Mega Man's default arsenal some much needed variety.

Similarly the rewind feature allows greater appreciation for boss design. Seeing a boss do something, waiting through the death animation after it kills you, walking back into the arena, watching the bosses health bar fill up again. It's not long, but it's long enough. Respawning is a multistep process that takes enough of the player's time that they probably aren't even really thinking about what just killed them anymore, or why. A deeper understanding of bosses' patterns used to be reserved for super fans, walkthrough writers, and speedrunners. With the rewind feature, you can see a boss do something, die, rewind a few seconds. At this point you may be able to simply dodge what you think you know the boss will do, but likely they won't do the same thing at all. The removal of consequence and the lack of temporal detachment allows any player to experiment with how their own actions might influence the bosses' behavior.

But none of this really has to do with Mega Man 4 specifically, it's applicable to plenty of these games. Mega Man 4 is only the game that made me realize them.

What Mega Man 4 itself brings to the table is mostly a more lavish reproduction of its predecessor. Its luxurious introductory cutscene serves mostly to retell the Mega Man story, which thus far was only present in the Japanese manual. I found myself occasionally just standing still, appreciating the visuals: the palette cycling fire and mechanic rot of Dust Man's stage, the light show of the endgame teleport chamber. The Robot Master designs in this game are incredibly refined, either in much greater bodily complexity than the plain humanoids of previous games, or simply in the precise placements of each of their pixels managing to create greater illusions of space, depth, and motion. Mega Man himself, originally drawn up by a game designer rather than an illustrator, almost appears out of place.

In short, Mega Man 4 is consistently more impressive, but rarely more satisfying, than the previous games.