I hate this game. The whole concept sucks to me. Instead of evolving the series in interesting ways, Mega Man 9 tries to replicate Mega Man 2 by removing features that made later games more fun, such as sliding and charging shots. The issue I take with this is that Mega Man 2 is not the perfect game everyone makes it out to be, but rather one that happens to be very good for it's time, which certainly isn't 2008. Although, considering the Legacy Collection's versions of Mega Man 1 through 6 include sprite flickering and slowdown (both caused by hardware limitation), being stuck in the past seems to be what Mega Man is all about nowadays. They actually went so far as to only have a few sound channels in this game, resulting in the music regularly getting interrupted by sound effects. This, too, is an artifact from the NES era. In addition, the game seems to be made by sadists for masochists who automatically find anything hard extremely fun. While the level design is generally pretty solid, it gets interrupted about every 2 minutes by some dumb trap the devs placed specifically to unexpectedly kill you. They are also way too comfortable with killing you for every single mistake you make. Wily Stage 2, an underwater hellhole full of spikes and multiple near pixel perfect jumps, exemplifies this quite well. Also, you can't save or visit the shop between Wily Stages, which, especially if you didn't know beforehand, makes going through them an absolute pain. In conclusion, this game is stuck in the past and bullshit hard to a degree that, to me, is only really acceptable in games without life systems. I never want to play it again ever.