This is my favorite one so far. It keeps all the cool stuff from 3 (the better, tighter level design, the SICK MOVEMENT TECH, generous item spawns), but it’s got a much smoother difficulty curve and basically no blatantly unfair stuff going on. I was also pleasantly surprised at how little the addition of the mega buster really changed how the bosses felt tuned, and I liked it more than I was expecting to. The pacing in this game is so good I don’t even mind that there are TWO castles lmao

The music never quite reached the highs of 2 and maybe I should stop hoping it ever will, but what is here is REALLY solid, probably the most consistent score in the series so far. The graphics are slick, I think the addition of an actual pause menu is probably for the best, and holy shit there’s a real cutscene in this game??? Just the one lol but it’s fun to see things develop even as the hardware is the same and the presentation is ostensibly identical

Mega Man 4 slaps i really like this one!

Honestly I'm really starting to doubt that I'm playing the same series as everyone else if they get supposedly easier as they go along because goddamn, this one kicked my ass. As is the be expected by a classic Mega Man game, MM4 is another game very much set in tradition for the most part, same basic formula, same gameplay loop, just a lot of similarity all across the board. What changes there are feel rather small and don't provide any major shakeup but are still welcome additions, and this also did admittedly fix a few painfully glaring issues that Mega Man 3 introduced, but even with these additions and alterations, Mega Man 4 still ends up feeling pretty lifeless in a lot of respects.

I feel a big reason I feel this way can be seen in the level design, both mechanically and visually. While this feels like yet another step up in terms of graphical fidelity, there's something missing from the art direction, with very few levels really bringing forth any memorable setpieces or ideas and instead feeling more like a mishmash of different concepts from the first 3 games, all without doing anything to distinguish themselves. The settings more than ever feel closer to being populated by ideas solely to benefit gameplay rather than having the much smoother mix from previous entries, where even though there were many times in which you'd see "standard game blocks or platforms" floating in the air, additional steps still were taken to have them feel that touch more nicely integrated into things in order to further elevate the sheer creativity of some of the settings shown to the player. The lack of this appeal ends up resulting in most stages losing that excitement and intrigue that makes them somewhat bearable to potentially have to go through again if you game over or have the wrong weapons with you, and ends up killing a key part of the replayability angle that these games go for.

Uninspired is really the word I'd personally use for quite a few other aspects of this game, especially in terms of boss weapons being almost universally underwhelming to use, with their use cases feeling largely interchangeable and not even really doing something unique with them. Even those that are a bit more useful tend to lack a certain punchiness in their feedback to feel truly satisfying to use either, meaning that it often feels more worth it to just keep your buster out until a particularly nasty situation arises and then you just use your screen nuke ability and go on your way. The boss fights continue this trend of not really doing anything too special and also have the weakest designs for the most part. While you've got some exceptions, like the truly badass Pharaoh Man, these designs feel as if they don't take full advantage of their concepts and end up feeling more simplistic and bland than some from even Mega Man 2, to the point where there are never even any interesting arena gimmicks to add some more depth.

While I'm glad that this game did stuff like remove the atrocious Doc Robot stages and the borderline unplayable amount of lag from MM3, Mega Man 4 still feels like the most bland of the games in the classic series so far, feeling as if they replaced almost any semblance of charm with some painfully generic platforming challenges littered with just enough unfair nonsense to make it feel somewhat frustrating. While this is definitely far less involved than what I've had to say about any other Mega Man game, I find it hard to say anything more when I basically played all of this entirely stone-faced because there was so little that stood out to me in any way.

Not much to say here. This game's just better than the previous 3. There's good variety in the levels. No boss is unnecessarily cheap, but they're mostly all challenging. The music slaps like always, and the arsenal of weapons is varied.

If I had to gripe about one thing, I'd say the weapons aren't all too balanced. In a level, all of them are good except for the skull barrier, which is easily the worst shield in the series so far. Just try using it as Dive Man's weakness without wanting to die. Overall though, most weapons are decent or great.

My issues lie in the endgame bosses. Of all 9 non-robot master bosses, 7 of them are weak to one of three weapons: the Ring Boomerang, Pharaoh Shot, or Dust Crusher. One of the outliers is weak to the Drill Bombs and the other to the Mega Buster. This may seem nitpicky, but it ends up feeling like the other 4 weapons were afterthoughts outside of being a weakness to a robot master. 3 weapons wreck everyone's shit and the other 5 don't. I feel like some bosses could've been cleverly designed to be weak to the other weapons while still being tough. It's really disappointing, but a nitpick. This game's still really great.

8/10 - Really good, but with a flaw that, to me, keeps it away from excellence.