This was the last of the GameBoy games I played, and I was ready for a pretty good time. I'd heard for many years from other sources that this was the best of the GameBoy Mega Man games, largely due to how much genuinely new stuff it had, and I was ready to see which between this and the fourth entry was actually the superior game. It took me about 2.5 hours to reach the end of Mega Man's space adventure~.

In a change from the other GameBoy Mega Man games, this one actually has a more involved story than the others outside of breaking the trend of having robot masters from the NES games. In addition to canonizing the other four GameBoy entries as their own series, rather than as mid-adventures of the NES games, this game sees you fighting not robot masters, per se, but invading alien robots known as the Space Rulers, who hail from and are named after the 8 planets in the solar system, along with their mysterious leader simply named: Earth. Earth actually hecks Mega Man up pretty bad in the opening scene, so Dr. Light repairs him and gives him a new weapon to fight these new foes with. It's not quite the mega buster, but it's more like a mix between the mega buster and the melee-focused Rush transformation from Mega Man 6. The shop from Rock Man World 4 even returns, and Mega Man also gets a new companion for this adventure: a weaponized robot kitty named Tango~.

The punch weapon doesn't knock you back like the weapon from Rock Man World 4 did, but it does mean you can't fire while the fist is traveling out and returning, and it makes for a game that seems to want to be different simply because it can. It's not just a different way to play, but it feels like an actively negative change. The bosses themselves range from pretty good to sort of messy, and the stages range from pretty fun romps of action to longer, repetitious journeys that feel more like a slogs. Overall, I do like the new robot masters a fair bit, but this game's boss and stage design feel like it's often closer to Rock Man World 3 than 4, and that's not a good feeling. While it is nowhere near as messy as Rock Man World 3's downright vindictive stages and bosses, bosses like Mercury who have weapons that steal your money, weapon power, and even E-tanks leave a very rotten first impression that gets reinforced from time to time with other bosses who feel more cheap than they have any right to.

The presentation is arguably the best in the series. The new boss designs look great, and the music is also most certainly the strongest out of all of the GameBoy games. Unfortunately, another feature this game shares with Rock Man World 3 is that you do occasionally get slowdown that affects gameplay to the point of making things needlessly difficult, but it's not nearly as constant a problem as it is in the third game.


Verdict: Recommended. This game did annoy me quite a few times with how mean it is sometimes, but it's still a very solid game. It tries a lot of bold things, and while I don't like it as much as the fourth GameBoy game, it's still a good time that's well worth giving a go (if you can find a way to play it that doesn't break the bank too badly).

I quite enjoyed playing through all these GameBoy Mega Man games. I'm not sure I like many of them better than the NES games, but I don't think the best of them are outright worse than those games. At the end of the day, I just prefer the larger resolution of the NES and the stage design it allows for compared to the more cramped experiences offered on the GameBoy entries. My ranking of the GameBoy Mega Man games is: IV > V > I > II > III