DzNutsKong
2015
Atmosphere and map design both are way better than future games. Game is horrendously unbalanced which is a mixed bag for me. Most specials are just used for invincibility which can make it feel like you're at a bigtime disadvantage if you want certain things that are otherwise normal to have in later entries. On the other hand it's really fun throwing a Disruptor at someone that can't see you and just mowing them down afterards. Ultimately a very fun time that I think is about on par with 3 for me.
1989
Not bad, but extremely overrated in all areas except the soundtrack. Most weapons absolutely suck and the Metal Blade completely breaks the game's design. I'd actually argue the level design and boss design are just as bad as Mega Man 1 even if there are things to like in both.
2016
Game has mechanics that are good on paper but executed poorly, bad level design, very ugly graphics and horrible optimization. I don't know how you do this badly with a million dollar budget.
2011
Very simple, but fun platformer with a unique concept. Exactly what a flash game should be.
2022
This gets more than half a star because it was kinda novel being able to play one of those awful mobile game ads for a few minutes. Levels feel procedurally generated and structureless and there's a lot of little parts of certain game mechanics that are misleading or not very obvious.
If you think this looks fun for any reason then you should spend maybe like five minutes on it tops. If you spend any longer then I seriously recommend looking into some other free indie or fan games instead of burning your time here. There's so, so many good ones out there.
If you think this looks fun for any reason then you should spend maybe like five minutes on it tops. If you spend any longer then I seriously recommend looking into some other free indie or fan games instead of burning your time here. There's so, so many good ones out there.
1994
This review contains spoilers
Since this game is now free for anyone with Nintendo Switch Online, and since I had a great time with my first playthrough of the game, I figured now would be a better time than ever to replay Mega Man V GB. I only played the Robot Master (if you can call them that) stages before dropping the game and moving onto something else, so why not take the opportunity to completely finish it, you know?
A couple of years ago I bought Mega Man: Dr. Wily's Revenge for my GameBoy Advance. Not a perfect game by any means, but it was pretty cool! There were some very clear limitations they had to give it as a GameBoy game but it was a fun time. Hearing that people didn't like this game was kind of a shock to me, but hearing that people DID like the fifth game in its little mini series was an even bigger one. Surely I would absolutely love it at that rate, right?
The game's basic setup is that there's a group of robots called the Stardroids that are threatening humanity and Mega Man needs to stop them. Huh. The rest of the GameBoy games here based their basic level themes and boss fights off of main series stuff and this completely strays from that. It's definitely for the better, as this is basically an invitation for the series to make completely unique levels and boss fights instead.
When you actually start the game, if you've only been playing the main series up until this point, you'll notice Mega Man is a lot floatier and moves more slowly in general. This is an unfortunate limitation of the GameBoy not having much screen estate, but the developers were very cautious about this when making the game. Everything needs to be put more tightly together so it can feel like a classic Mega Man game where you have time to think about most situations the game throws at you. To compensate, they made Mega Man slower, but they also made all of the enemies and stage gimmicks slower as well. You don't really end up feeling the difference for the most part.
Another thing about the game speed. This game will sometimes lag because of how ambitious it was for its console. I played a little bit of Mega Man IV GB and it was substantially worse there but it's still very noticeable here as well. I did have a death or two that was caused entirely by the game stuttering at just the wrong time for me but it would have been a frustrating problem even had I not.
Overall the level and enemy design both are very fun and the stages themselves are pretty long which is great for a game like this. You could argue that there are too many levels with low gravity gimmicks but it wasn't enough to bother me personally. They present a lot of pretty creative ideas here and if it weren't for the changes to the game speed and screen crunch, this would fit right in with the main series games. There are a few spike pits and things you can't react to super well but it's probably just a skill issue for the most part since I played this while pretty tired. I'd actually go as far as saying I prefer this game's overall design to any main series one which is a pretty big feat considering the limitations they were working with.
The boss fights are very good as well. Jupiter is one of the most unreasonably easy boss fights in the franchise and there are a few in the endgame that I have some gripes with, but it's a very good package altogether. This game actually manages to have a pretty fun and interesting set of minibosses too which is pretty rare for me with this series.
This game is actually one of the single easiest Mega Man games I've played so far. Maybe not the absolute easiest but it's definitely up there. The game being slower makes it much easier to react to what the game throws at you. Instead of counterbalancing this, the game actually buffs your Mega Buster by quite a lot.
In place of your Charge Shot is the Mega Arm, a new upgrade from Dr. Light you get at the start of the game that fires your arm in a punch when you charge it. This does prevent you from firing until the arm returns to you, but it gives you access to an upgrade that lets you deal repeated chip damage to enemies. None of this damages the game for me at all except for a few boss fights that would be tough, but became total jokes because of this. If anything though this makes this a good game for me to recommend to friends who are looking to get into the series.
On a similar note as the Mega Arm, the new weapons in this game seem really cool. I'm not going to pretend like I use Robot Master weapons often in the first place but I did use them a handful here and I liked them a lot. The Grab Buster is basically just a buster shot that drains health which is awesome, the Electric Shock is a melee weapon which are rare for these games and always fun, and the Break Dash is like Mega Man 5's Charge Kick but you can use it in the air. I could go on about most of these but the only huge duds for me are Bubble Bomb seeming very situational and Deep Digger literally just being a rehashed Super Arm, which most would argue isn't the best.
Another cool weapon is the Spark Chaser, a tracking weapon like Hornet Chaser or Dive Missile that can target multiple enemies on screen. I didn't use it but it seemed fun...until I realized I had exactly one stage to use it. And if the Break Dash or Deep Digger sounded cool to you then you can't use those for any of the first four stages as well. This game is divided into two sets of four and then the endgame levels just like Mega Man 7 and 8 which I'm not a huge fan of. A lot of the appeal of a game like this can come from choosing the main levels in whatever order you want and limiting that is kinda lame.
That's not even the only pacing-related issue I have with the game! The endgame itself is kinda awful. You have a boss fight with Terra, the last major Stardroid. Cool. Then you have a space shooter level that was honestly kinda lame followed by a boss fight with the side of a fortress. Then you go through the only Wily Stage in the game. Within it there are fights with the three Mega Man killers and Quint sprinkled about, which is all pretty cool. Then you do the refights with the 8 main Stardroids, which I've never been a huge fan of but it's par for the course at this point.
Then the final gate opens in the refights room, all of the buildup as you go to face Dr. Wily, only for there to be a climactic fight against...a robotic arm. Okay, so I imagine this is just part of a mech and you fight the head next. No, you have to fight another arm after the first one. Then you fight what looks like a trash compactor, then it sinks a little and you fight the Wily Capsule. Only after that does Wily escape and you have to fight Sunstar, the true final boss of the game.
But let's get this straight for a moment. There are two stages in this endgame sequence. The first is a space shooter level but otherwise is fairly straightforward. In the second, you fight SEVENTEEN different boss battles. This is the worst part of the game for me. By the time I was onto the second arm I just wanted the game to end. There was so much buildup, followed by buildup, followed by buildup, followed by...well, Sunstar, who was actually a super cool boss fight. I absolutely love how they handled it and I really wish the game just jumped to him instead of the four-stage Wily fight, or at the very least split the Mega Man killers and everything else into different stages.
It's a shame too because I was gearing up to say this was one of my absolute favorite Mega Man games. It's not even like the repeated boss fights are very hard because each individual boss fight still is very easy. It just is absolutely horrid pacing and I sincerely hope that anyone reading this just ends up using every boss's weakness at that point. It may not even fix the issue but it certainly would help.
At the end of the day, this game is still very good. If I end up replaying it then I wouldn't be surprised if I just ended up dropping it at some point after the first eight stages. Those eight stages are absolutely fantastic, some of the most fun you'll have with a Mega Man game, but it falls off very hard the further you get past there until an admittedly very cool ending. I'd say the game's worth trying out regardless because there's still a lot of fun to be had, but man, it could have been so much better.
A couple of years ago I bought Mega Man: Dr. Wily's Revenge for my GameBoy Advance. Not a perfect game by any means, but it was pretty cool! There were some very clear limitations they had to give it as a GameBoy game but it was a fun time. Hearing that people didn't like this game was kind of a shock to me, but hearing that people DID like the fifth game in its little mini series was an even bigger one. Surely I would absolutely love it at that rate, right?
The game's basic setup is that there's a group of robots called the Stardroids that are threatening humanity and Mega Man needs to stop them. Huh. The rest of the GameBoy games here based their basic level themes and boss fights off of main series stuff and this completely strays from that. It's definitely for the better, as this is basically an invitation for the series to make completely unique levels and boss fights instead.
When you actually start the game, if you've only been playing the main series up until this point, you'll notice Mega Man is a lot floatier and moves more slowly in general. This is an unfortunate limitation of the GameBoy not having much screen estate, but the developers were very cautious about this when making the game. Everything needs to be put more tightly together so it can feel like a classic Mega Man game where you have time to think about most situations the game throws at you. To compensate, they made Mega Man slower, but they also made all of the enemies and stage gimmicks slower as well. You don't really end up feeling the difference for the most part.
Another thing about the game speed. This game will sometimes lag because of how ambitious it was for its console. I played a little bit of Mega Man IV GB and it was substantially worse there but it's still very noticeable here as well. I did have a death or two that was caused entirely by the game stuttering at just the wrong time for me but it would have been a frustrating problem even had I not.
Overall the level and enemy design both are very fun and the stages themselves are pretty long which is great for a game like this. You could argue that there are too many levels with low gravity gimmicks but it wasn't enough to bother me personally. They present a lot of pretty creative ideas here and if it weren't for the changes to the game speed and screen crunch, this would fit right in with the main series games. There are a few spike pits and things you can't react to super well but it's probably just a skill issue for the most part since I played this while pretty tired. I'd actually go as far as saying I prefer this game's overall design to any main series one which is a pretty big feat considering the limitations they were working with.
The boss fights are very good as well. Jupiter is one of the most unreasonably easy boss fights in the franchise and there are a few in the endgame that I have some gripes with, but it's a very good package altogether. This game actually manages to have a pretty fun and interesting set of minibosses too which is pretty rare for me with this series.
This game is actually one of the single easiest Mega Man games I've played so far. Maybe not the absolute easiest but it's definitely up there. The game being slower makes it much easier to react to what the game throws at you. Instead of counterbalancing this, the game actually buffs your Mega Buster by quite a lot.
In place of your Charge Shot is the Mega Arm, a new upgrade from Dr. Light you get at the start of the game that fires your arm in a punch when you charge it. This does prevent you from firing until the arm returns to you, but it gives you access to an upgrade that lets you deal repeated chip damage to enemies. None of this damages the game for me at all except for a few boss fights that would be tough, but became total jokes because of this. If anything though this makes this a good game for me to recommend to friends who are looking to get into the series.
On a similar note as the Mega Arm, the new weapons in this game seem really cool. I'm not going to pretend like I use Robot Master weapons often in the first place but I did use them a handful here and I liked them a lot. The Grab Buster is basically just a buster shot that drains health which is awesome, the Electric Shock is a melee weapon which are rare for these games and always fun, and the Break Dash is like Mega Man 5's Charge Kick but you can use it in the air. I could go on about most of these but the only huge duds for me are Bubble Bomb seeming very situational and Deep Digger literally just being a rehashed Super Arm, which most would argue isn't the best.
Another cool weapon is the Spark Chaser, a tracking weapon like Hornet Chaser or Dive Missile that can target multiple enemies on screen. I didn't use it but it seemed fun...until I realized I had exactly one stage to use it. And if the Break Dash or Deep Digger sounded cool to you then you can't use those for any of the first four stages as well. This game is divided into two sets of four and then the endgame levels just like Mega Man 7 and 8 which I'm not a huge fan of. A lot of the appeal of a game like this can come from choosing the main levels in whatever order you want and limiting that is kinda lame.
That's not even the only pacing-related issue I have with the game! The endgame itself is kinda awful. You have a boss fight with Terra, the last major Stardroid. Cool. Then you have a space shooter level that was honestly kinda lame followed by a boss fight with the side of a fortress. Then you go through the only Wily Stage in the game. Within it there are fights with the three Mega Man killers and Quint sprinkled about, which is all pretty cool. Then you do the refights with the 8 main Stardroids, which I've never been a huge fan of but it's par for the course at this point.
Then the final gate opens in the refights room, all of the buildup as you go to face Dr. Wily, only for there to be a climactic fight against...a robotic arm. Okay, so I imagine this is just part of a mech and you fight the head next. No, you have to fight another arm after the first one. Then you fight what looks like a trash compactor, then it sinks a little and you fight the Wily Capsule. Only after that does Wily escape and you have to fight Sunstar, the true final boss of the game.
But let's get this straight for a moment. There are two stages in this endgame sequence. The first is a space shooter level but otherwise is fairly straightforward. In the second, you fight SEVENTEEN different boss battles. This is the worst part of the game for me. By the time I was onto the second arm I just wanted the game to end. There was so much buildup, followed by buildup, followed by buildup, followed by...well, Sunstar, who was actually a super cool boss fight. I absolutely love how they handled it and I really wish the game just jumped to him instead of the four-stage Wily fight, or at the very least split the Mega Man killers and everything else into different stages.
It's a shame too because I was gearing up to say this was one of my absolute favorite Mega Man games. It's not even like the repeated boss fights are very hard because each individual boss fight still is very easy. It just is absolutely horrid pacing and I sincerely hope that anyone reading this just ends up using every boss's weakness at that point. It may not even fix the issue but it certainly would help.
At the end of the day, this game is still very good. If I end up replaying it then I wouldn't be surprised if I just ended up dropping it at some point after the first eight stages. Those eight stages are absolutely fantastic, some of the most fun you'll have with a Mega Man game, but it falls off very hard the further you get past there until an admittedly very cool ending. I'd say the game's worth trying out regardless because there's still a lot of fun to be had, but man, it could have been so much better.
Very, very short, as you'd expect from a Game Boy game from 1991, but still has alright level design even if the boss fights were not great.
1990
Fun game, but I can only enjoy it so much from my general disliking of arcade-style games like this.
2024
An interesting RBY hack that tries to build off of the ideologies that Game Freak likely had during Gen 1 rather than trying to modernize the game. There's a lot of content both from later gens and from RBY's scrapped ideas, adding things like Gorochu, the Fairy-type, and Bill's Lighthouse. It's extremely well-made for what it is, and if this blurb makes it sound at all interesting you'll absolutely love it.
2014
Probably the best flash game I've played. The base gameplay loop is really fun and there's a lot of content here.
2024
This review was written before the game released
Have admittedly yet to sink much time into 2v2 but it is not suited for 1v1 play at all, which no matter how hard you want it to be the devs should have paid more attention to this. 2v2s are fun but no matter how hard you push them you shouldn't leave 1v1s in this bad of a state. I don't like the game's physics very much but this is the only roster I expect to ever truly rival Smash's at what it's trying to do.
2019
If you want to play Pokemon I don't think any entry will disappoint you. You feel way too detached from the story and the game looks kind of ugly at times, but it's still perfectly fine. Dynamax Adventures from the DLC was a great addition.
2024
First full-on review I'm posting on this website! This is the first game I've truly sunk a good amount of time into that I hadn't played before getting this account so now's as good a place to start as ever.
First off, Pokemon Emerald Rogue is a game that I've put a ton of hours into. I've had kind of a weird relationship with Pokemon lately because I want to love it, but the games themselves make it kind of hard for me to right now. The gameplay loop of main series Pokemon games and anything similar is EXTREMELY boring to me because of how many mandatory fights there are that are just completely free. I've also had a lot of experience playing the game competitively but it's frustrating losing a fifteen minute long match to one bad RNG roll and it's really unintuitive to try and learn where you went wrong otherwise. I've been in need of something a little different from both of these, to say the least. A highly replayable version of a Pokemon game that's difficult enough to be engaging should be amazing for me even if it's still on the easier side. So, why not give PokeRogue a try too?
Just as a fair warning, most of this game's art and music are all from preexisting assets. This is going to be a bit of a weird review since I'll be talking exclusively about gameplay as a result. For what it's worth though, this game uses Gen 5's artstyle and pulls music from both Gen 5 games and PMD which means it's really nice on both fronts.
If you've never played PokeRogue, I'll give a basic rundown of how the game works. You'll first pick a few starters from a list of every existing starter Pokemon as well as every unevolved Pokemon you've caught or hatched during a run. From there, you'll be sent off to do 10 battles. Most of these will be with wild Pokemon but there will be some trainers mixed in. When you win a battle, you will be rewarded with a choice between one of a few random items to enhance or heal your team members as well as the ability to buy items from a shop before moving onto your next battle. The wild Pokemon and Gym Leaders you fight will be determined by the type of biome you're currently in. Your 10th battle will always be against either a stronger Boss Pokemon or a Gym Leader and once the fight ends, you can move onto a different biome for the next 10 battles. Rinse and repeat until either your team wipes or, in the case of Classic Mode, you make it through 200 floors.
Despite how the gameplay is quite literally using main series Pokemon's formula, I think this game has a more similar appeal to Pokemon Mystery Dungeon from a pure gameplay standpoint than the main series games. I promise it's not just because 90% of the music in this game is from PMD, hear me out. Most individual battles in this game are very straightforward and will end in only a few turns. The biggest problem scenarios in this game come from your team being whittled down too much or not being prepared enough for a certain situation as opposed to the strategy that goes into each individual battle. Ultimately, big draw here is resource management, exactly like PMD. There's a lot of evaluating risk and planning for the far-off future and I do think this is to the game's benefit. The middle portion of the game might seem like it'd drag on for a while on paper but it ultimately is fine for reasons I'll talk about soon. It kind of needs to be longer so you can prepare for the endgame anyways.
The general speed of the game is very nice. There's no overworld so immediately after you're done with one encounter you move onto the next. You can also set the game speed to move five times as quickly as the average Pokemon battle in this engine. This might not sound like much but it is a huge deal when so many battles in this game are unimportant. Things change quickly and you're brought up with a lot of choices because of the item rewards you get for winning each fight. It's nothing too crazy, especially during the easier parts of the game, but it's enough to fill in for a bunch of the battles themselves being simpler. This is why the middlegame being longer is fine with me, by the way - you still do have things to focus on that keep you engaged enough.
My biggest problem comes from the unreasonable difficulty curve. This game is completely ridiculous at the very start, really calm during the middle, and just kind of ridiculous at the end. For the first 30 floors or so you can get screwed over bigtime by the game throwing something completely impossible for your team to handle at you. My team's levels are still below 20 and none of them have evolved. I should not be put up against a random trainer with a Paldean Tauros, a Spiritomb, and some third fully-evolved Pokemon that currently slips my memory. Literally nothing I could do. Is it normal for roguelikes to be this unreasonable at the start?? I had spent a solid hour or two bashing my head against the wall before I made it through the first part of a run.
Before anyone says this is a skill issue I proceeded to get 3rd place on the Daily Leaderboard a few days after this. I'd like to think I shouldn't be the type to struggle this badly here. The solution is with the Egg Gacha system. If you defeat a Gym Leader or get lucky with an item pull you can get a ticket to roll a gacha machine for some eggs. These eggs have no impact on any current runs, but whatever they hatch into will become usable as a starter from there on out. You can get a majority of all Pokemon from this, including legendary and mythical Pokemon, and a lot of the Pokemon you get from this may have an Egg Move as well that you can choose to add to your starter before a run. The main consistent way past the early game is to either get something with very good stats without the need to evolve or to get a Pokemon that gets very good Egg Moves. Otherwise it feels like it's luck of the draw whether or not you get checkmated early on.
Some ~100 floors of planning for the endgame later and the game throws a ridiculous trainer battle at you. A lot of people I talk to have had issues here but I don't think it's so bad mainly because the AI is VERY exploitable. They do arguably go a step above the main series games and make the trainers switch their Pokemon under certain conditions but these conditions are very easy to pick up on and exploit. You could just put up Stealth Rock and either switch repeatedly yourself or switch until you happen upon an ideal situation to use a setup move like Swords Dance on a Pokemon with a decent Speed stat and these fights become completely free. It really doesn't help that whatever method they use to decide each Pokemon's current moveset isn't very good. There was one point my active Pokemon was below half health, the opponent sent out Greninja against my Ground-type, and it proceeded to use...Water Gun... I ended up tanking the hit and knocking it out afterwards.
Then you reach the final boss. I went into this game blind and had no idea what to expect here but I'm going to be honest, this is one of the most poorly-designed boss fights of any video game I've ever played. After the absolute slog of throwing myself into the early game repeatedly in hopes that things would be different next time, and after the next 100+ floors of nothing of note happening, the final boss was quite literally completely unbeatable for the way my current team was laid out. I knew exactly what to expect the moment the final boss appeared on screen and despite the best spur-of-the-moment planning I could give, despite playing this game competitively for over a decade and sitting on the top of a Pokemon Showdown ladder for around six months straight, it just wasn't enough and I had to watch my team slowly crumble as the hours of time I spent getting to that point would need to be started all over again.
Despite all of that this boss is exceedingly simple to prepare for. I have not lost this fight even a single time since that very first run where I made it that far. You do need to prepare for it, but a lot of the time my preparation has come down to dedicating two moveslots to it and avoiding using certain items and that's just been enough. I can't even call this boss fight hard. It's just really, REALLY dumb, and I wholeheartedly believe that anyone looking to play this game should spoil themselves on the final boss before playing. The alternative is repeatedly using the built-in feature to retry the fight (which didn't exist when I first played) enough times to get good enough RNG to cheese it out.
So I think I've made it pretty clear that my first day's worth of experience with this game was dreadful. After you get enough gacha pulls to get a decent lineup of starters and know what the final boss's deal is you can definitely start to have a lot of fun with the game. Keep in mind this review started with me saying a lot of good things about the game's systems. I did go on to beat Classic Mode and try out the other modes the game has to offer.
There is an Endless Mode that removes all trainer battles from the game, adds a boss every 50 floors instead, and gives you certain debuffs after you clear a certain number of floors. This mode is fun to try out once or twice but isn't as good as Classic in my opinion. There's nothing super wrong with it except for the hardest fights here being very cheeseable once again but experimentation feels a lot more limited here and it feels much harder to run an actual team as opposed to one mon that hard carries you and a few "supporters" in a sense. It doesn't even feel like you can be super expressive with that one hard carry if you want to go super far either.
Then there's a Daily Run which is pretty cool. This game's RNG is deterministic and what Daily Run does is give everyone the same seed every day with a random starting team and random encounters for 50 floors. There's no shop and there will usually be around two Gym Leaders and a little boss fight at the end. Beyond just clearing the 50 floors, there's also a score system that will award more points the more Pokemon you defeat and the less turns it takes to defeat them. The pre-set RNG makes it very fun to go through with whatever route you feel like would be best and optimize each fight for a high score. It's a really fun change of pace that I'd recommend everyone try at least once.
The game unfortunately does have an issue with freezing and needing you to reset from what presumably is their servers being overloaded since it is a free browser game, and not all of the moves and abilities are finished unfortunately, but it's getting basically constant updates. It's really cool signing on and seeing that an ability you wanted to try out works now or that a new feature was added that improves the game. Oh, and when I say it's a browser game, I mean that this game works on ALL browsers to my knowledge. I've played it on mobile and it's been perfectly fine. Great stuff there.
As unfortunate as it is though, the fact that this game was as rough to start out as it was makes it hard for me to think too highly of it. I've had a lot of fun with it and I'd suggest everyone at least give it a shot with everything I've said in mind. I know the developers are actively changing things and they could totally make the early game easier but I doubt they'll change something as big as the final boss. I'm on the fence about bumping it down to 2.5 just for how brutal that first day of playing was but I need to be honest with myself and say that I did have a lot of fun with it still.
First off, Pokemon Emerald Rogue is a game that I've put a ton of hours into. I've had kind of a weird relationship with Pokemon lately because I want to love it, but the games themselves make it kind of hard for me to right now. The gameplay loop of main series Pokemon games and anything similar is EXTREMELY boring to me because of how many mandatory fights there are that are just completely free. I've also had a lot of experience playing the game competitively but it's frustrating losing a fifteen minute long match to one bad RNG roll and it's really unintuitive to try and learn where you went wrong otherwise. I've been in need of something a little different from both of these, to say the least. A highly replayable version of a Pokemon game that's difficult enough to be engaging should be amazing for me even if it's still on the easier side. So, why not give PokeRogue a try too?
Just as a fair warning, most of this game's art and music are all from preexisting assets. This is going to be a bit of a weird review since I'll be talking exclusively about gameplay as a result. For what it's worth though, this game uses Gen 5's artstyle and pulls music from both Gen 5 games and PMD which means it's really nice on both fronts.
If you've never played PokeRogue, I'll give a basic rundown of how the game works. You'll first pick a few starters from a list of every existing starter Pokemon as well as every unevolved Pokemon you've caught or hatched during a run. From there, you'll be sent off to do 10 battles. Most of these will be with wild Pokemon but there will be some trainers mixed in. When you win a battle, you will be rewarded with a choice between one of a few random items to enhance or heal your team members as well as the ability to buy items from a shop before moving onto your next battle. The wild Pokemon and Gym Leaders you fight will be determined by the type of biome you're currently in. Your 10th battle will always be against either a stronger Boss Pokemon or a Gym Leader and once the fight ends, you can move onto a different biome for the next 10 battles. Rinse and repeat until either your team wipes or, in the case of Classic Mode, you make it through 200 floors.
Despite how the gameplay is quite literally using main series Pokemon's formula, I think this game has a more similar appeal to Pokemon Mystery Dungeon from a pure gameplay standpoint than the main series games. I promise it's not just because 90% of the music in this game is from PMD, hear me out. Most individual battles in this game are very straightforward and will end in only a few turns. The biggest problem scenarios in this game come from your team being whittled down too much or not being prepared enough for a certain situation as opposed to the strategy that goes into each individual battle. Ultimately, big draw here is resource management, exactly like PMD. There's a lot of evaluating risk and planning for the far-off future and I do think this is to the game's benefit. The middle portion of the game might seem like it'd drag on for a while on paper but it ultimately is fine for reasons I'll talk about soon. It kind of needs to be longer so you can prepare for the endgame anyways.
The general speed of the game is very nice. There's no overworld so immediately after you're done with one encounter you move onto the next. You can also set the game speed to move five times as quickly as the average Pokemon battle in this engine. This might not sound like much but it is a huge deal when so many battles in this game are unimportant. Things change quickly and you're brought up with a lot of choices because of the item rewards you get for winning each fight. It's nothing too crazy, especially during the easier parts of the game, but it's enough to fill in for a bunch of the battles themselves being simpler. This is why the middlegame being longer is fine with me, by the way - you still do have things to focus on that keep you engaged enough.
My biggest problem comes from the unreasonable difficulty curve. This game is completely ridiculous at the very start, really calm during the middle, and just kind of ridiculous at the end. For the first 30 floors or so you can get screwed over bigtime by the game throwing something completely impossible for your team to handle at you. My team's levels are still below 20 and none of them have evolved. I should not be put up against a random trainer with a Paldean Tauros, a Spiritomb, and some third fully-evolved Pokemon that currently slips my memory. Literally nothing I could do. Is it normal for roguelikes to be this unreasonable at the start?? I had spent a solid hour or two bashing my head against the wall before I made it through the first part of a run.
Before anyone says this is a skill issue I proceeded to get 3rd place on the Daily Leaderboard a few days after this. I'd like to think I shouldn't be the type to struggle this badly here. The solution is with the Egg Gacha system. If you defeat a Gym Leader or get lucky with an item pull you can get a ticket to roll a gacha machine for some eggs. These eggs have no impact on any current runs, but whatever they hatch into will become usable as a starter from there on out. You can get a majority of all Pokemon from this, including legendary and mythical Pokemon, and a lot of the Pokemon you get from this may have an Egg Move as well that you can choose to add to your starter before a run. The main consistent way past the early game is to either get something with very good stats without the need to evolve or to get a Pokemon that gets very good Egg Moves. Otherwise it feels like it's luck of the draw whether or not you get checkmated early on.
Some ~100 floors of planning for the endgame later and the game throws a ridiculous trainer battle at you. A lot of people I talk to have had issues here but I don't think it's so bad mainly because the AI is VERY exploitable. They do arguably go a step above the main series games and make the trainers switch their Pokemon under certain conditions but these conditions are very easy to pick up on and exploit. You could just put up Stealth Rock and either switch repeatedly yourself or switch until you happen upon an ideal situation to use a setup move like Swords Dance on a Pokemon with a decent Speed stat and these fights become completely free. It really doesn't help that whatever method they use to decide each Pokemon's current moveset isn't very good. There was one point my active Pokemon was below half health, the opponent sent out Greninja against my Ground-type, and it proceeded to use...Water Gun... I ended up tanking the hit and knocking it out afterwards.
Then you reach the final boss. I went into this game blind and had no idea what to expect here but I'm going to be honest, this is one of the most poorly-designed boss fights of any video game I've ever played. After the absolute slog of throwing myself into the early game repeatedly in hopes that things would be different next time, and after the next 100+ floors of nothing of note happening, the final boss was quite literally completely unbeatable for the way my current team was laid out. I knew exactly what to expect the moment the final boss appeared on screen and despite the best spur-of-the-moment planning I could give, despite playing this game competitively for over a decade and sitting on the top of a Pokemon Showdown ladder for around six months straight, it just wasn't enough and I had to watch my team slowly crumble as the hours of time I spent getting to that point would need to be started all over again.
Despite all of that this boss is exceedingly simple to prepare for. I have not lost this fight even a single time since that very first run where I made it that far. You do need to prepare for it, but a lot of the time my preparation has come down to dedicating two moveslots to it and avoiding using certain items and that's just been enough. I can't even call this boss fight hard. It's just really, REALLY dumb, and I wholeheartedly believe that anyone looking to play this game should spoil themselves on the final boss before playing. The alternative is repeatedly using the built-in feature to retry the fight (which didn't exist when I first played) enough times to get good enough RNG to cheese it out.
So I think I've made it pretty clear that my first day's worth of experience with this game was dreadful. After you get enough gacha pulls to get a decent lineup of starters and know what the final boss's deal is you can definitely start to have a lot of fun with the game. Keep in mind this review started with me saying a lot of good things about the game's systems. I did go on to beat Classic Mode and try out the other modes the game has to offer.
There is an Endless Mode that removes all trainer battles from the game, adds a boss every 50 floors instead, and gives you certain debuffs after you clear a certain number of floors. This mode is fun to try out once or twice but isn't as good as Classic in my opinion. There's nothing super wrong with it except for the hardest fights here being very cheeseable once again but experimentation feels a lot more limited here and it feels much harder to run an actual team as opposed to one mon that hard carries you and a few "supporters" in a sense. It doesn't even feel like you can be super expressive with that one hard carry if you want to go super far either.
Then there's a Daily Run which is pretty cool. This game's RNG is deterministic and what Daily Run does is give everyone the same seed every day with a random starting team and random encounters for 50 floors. There's no shop and there will usually be around two Gym Leaders and a little boss fight at the end. Beyond just clearing the 50 floors, there's also a score system that will award more points the more Pokemon you defeat and the less turns it takes to defeat them. The pre-set RNG makes it very fun to go through with whatever route you feel like would be best and optimize each fight for a high score. It's a really fun change of pace that I'd recommend everyone try at least once.
The game unfortunately does have an issue with freezing and needing you to reset from what presumably is their servers being overloaded since it is a free browser game, and not all of the moves and abilities are finished unfortunately, but it's getting basically constant updates. It's really cool signing on and seeing that an ability you wanted to try out works now or that a new feature was added that improves the game. Oh, and when I say it's a browser game, I mean that this game works on ALL browsers to my knowledge. I've played it on mobile and it's been perfectly fine. Great stuff there.
As unfortunate as it is though, the fact that this game was as rough to start out as it was makes it hard for me to think too highly of it. I've had a lot of fun with it and I'd suggest everyone at least give it a shot with everything I've said in mind. I know the developers are actively changing things and they could totally make the early game easier but I doubt they'll change something as big as the final boss. I'm on the fence about bumping it down to 2.5 just for how brutal that first day of playing was but I need to be honest with myself and say that I did have a lot of fun with it still.
1987
Not perfect but it's really not bad for a series's first entry, especially considering how early it released. Some of the weapons are really fun to use even if they hit similar spaces or outright suck. Game feels a bit slidy, there's some horrible jank and the level design and boss design both are far from perfect.
1990
The first classic Mega Man game I thought was alright. Some people say the endgame is horrible but I don't think it's so bad. The weapons, bosses, and stages are all designed way better than the first two games for the most part. Still nothing too crazy though.