Despite being so excited for Mega Man 9 when I was younger, Mega Man 10 was so much less of an event (it was back to being "just another Mega Man") that this was the only one of this marathon I'd genuinely never touched and knew nearly nothing about. I had heard it was definitely not as good as 9, which is at least partly why it took us so long to get Mega Man 11, but I'd still been looking forward to tackling this total unknown the whole time I was playing through the other nine games. Well, now that I've seen it to its end, I can definitely see what all the lack of hype had been about XD. It took me around two and a half hours to complete the English version of the game.

In a pretty serious tone shift, Mega Man 10 goes for a much more serious tone in its story. A computer virus is ravaging the globe, and this Roboenza virus sends any robot who gets it into first a fever, and then into a violent rage. Even Dr. Wily has been put out by this, and he comes to Dr. Light and Mega Man begging for their help in both developing a cure and subduing some robots who stole the parts of his old cure machine. It's largely the plot of Mega Man 3 again, but there's a lot more dialogue to the story, especially when Roll gets the virus. But the more serious story isn't just super wild whiplash compared to the rest of the series (not to mention Mega Man 9), but it's also just not very well done since the visual still communicate something silly and happy despite the more heavy way the cutscenes play out. It's very sloppily done, and I'm not sure why they did it, and that sorta sets the tone for the rest of my issues with the game.

Mega Man 10's stage design is reminiscent of, if anything, Mega Man 5 in just how empty they so often feel. The gimmicks at play in them are often somewhere between frustrating or overly simple, and while they're not bad, per se, they're definitely far weaker than Mega Man 9's were. Now the reason for this, I believe, is that the game launched with not just Mega Man playable, but Proto Man too (and Bass came later as DLC). While Mega Man 9 also had Proto Man added later, what that game didn't have were easy and hard difficulty modes like this one has. These difficulty modes aren't like Mega Man 2's modes, however, and they affect the platforming as well, giving you more or less enemies to fight and platforms to land on depending on what difficulty you're on (instead of largely just damage rebalancing like Mega Man 2 had). This really restricted what the developers could do with level design, and it really shows in how plain and uninspired the stages feel compared to what came before. It was a noble attempt to try and add some accessibility features to the game like this, but this was definitely not the right way to go about it.

The bosses are thankfully still pretty solid, but also still not as well done as Mega Man 9's were. They're still technical and fun in a way most of the earlier games weren't, but they are much harder than 9's were, and often for not great reasons such as difficult to read patterns or requiring some pretty damn great reaction time. While they thankfully aren't outright bad, they are a decidedly firm step backwards from where the series was just one entry ago, and they really could've used some more polish.

The presentation is quite conflicted in the graphics department, as was discussed earlier in the story section, but thankfully the music helps make up for it a bit. One area where this game is just about on par with Mega Man 9 is that the music is pretty damn good the whole way through. While it certainly doesn't make up for all the other problems I have with it, it's a nice consolation given every other way this is a step back from Mega Man 9.

Verdict: Recommended. At the end of the day, Mega Man 10 is far more disappointing than outright badly done. If this had been Mega Man 9, I think people would've been relatively happy with it and it might've gotten a sequel, but being a disappointing sequel to SUCH a strong revival just wasn't what the doctor ordered at the time. I definitely don't think there's much reason to pick this game over something like even Mega Man 4 or 6, let alone Mega Man 9 if given the choice, but it's certainly a nice addition to round out the second Legacy Collection.

Now that my marathon is over, I guess I'm ready to give my overall ranking on the series.
While some of these could change depending on how I'm feeling on the day, today's particular ranking is:

9 > 4 > 6 > 8 > 3 > 2 > 10 > 5 > 7 > 1

I really enjoyed playing through them all, and am looking forward to the GameBoy games (or rather at this point, reviewing the rest of them, as I actually played through the other two I hadn't gotten to yet earlier today, at the time of writing ^^;) as well as the X series~. If I've learned anything from this, it's that at the end of the day, even the worst of the classic Mega Man games are still pretty good games, and each one has something to make it stand out from the crowd with its own appeal (even if that particular thing might not actually be all that appealing to a lot of other people XD).

One last special shoutout once again to my friend DogStrong, but also to my friend Fii, for sticking with me and sharing in the celebration of Mega Man as she watched me play through all of these ^w^