Every time I have a hankering to play some mega man, and i think "i haven't played mega man 9 in a while, maybe i should give that one another try", i spend two hours trying to beat one of the robot masters or dealing with the unbalanced stage design and pretty soon i'm remembering why i haven't played mega man 9 in a while.
The megaman series had six games on the NES, for eight years the franchise operated within NES limitations, and it changed very little about each new game. Finally with Mega man 7 the series actually changed the gameplay up slightly, and then megaman 8 and mm&b made even wider changes. but when the series finally came back after a decade with megaman 9, the only progressions that it offered was to remove all of the progressions that the past seven games had already made. i will hold this opinion to the grave that megaman 2 did not need to have a spiritual successor, and megaman 9 didn't even understand what megaman 2 did right anyways - half the robot masters here are clones but yet they still failed to clone a weakness order that actually makes sense.
we also need to talk about splash woman. before this point, every robot master ended in "man", which to be clear implied "human", not emphasizing anything about the characters being masculine- most of them lacked gender characteristics completely, which makes sense because they're fuckin robots. Does top man scream 'masculinity' to you? maybe that's a bad example (top man is the pinnacle of masculinity) but after splash woman came out, retroactively they all became male. now we know for a fact that ice man has a penis, shade man has a penis, needle man has a needle shaped penis, ground man has a drill shaped penis, which actually we knew already because that one was visible in-game but the point is that i wouldn't be thinking about this before splash woman existed. now i'm not saying it's reasonable to make a mermaid robot master male, but to be fair spongebob has already proven mermaid man to be a successful character
apparently the old megaman games had gotten a reputation for being 'difficult' at some point between the 90s and 2008, which to me doesn't make much sense because that's kind of just how all NES games were. but megaman 9 tries to live up to it by being needlessly difficult; in fact, far more so than the actual originals were, and in far less forgiving ways. only about half the deaths here truly feel deserved - especially in the boss battles, which are extremely unbalanced, especially in mega buster runs.
fortunately the music bangs enough that it completely makes up for it. nobody tell NicoEvaluates that I didn't rate it 5 stars though.
The megaman series had six games on the NES, for eight years the franchise operated within NES limitations, and it changed very little about each new game. Finally with Mega man 7 the series actually changed the gameplay up slightly, and then megaman 8 and mm&b made even wider changes. but when the series finally came back after a decade with megaman 9, the only progressions that it offered was to remove all of the progressions that the past seven games had already made. i will hold this opinion to the grave that megaman 2 did not need to have a spiritual successor, and megaman 9 didn't even understand what megaman 2 did right anyways - half the robot masters here are clones but yet they still failed to clone a weakness order that actually makes sense.
we also need to talk about splash woman. before this point, every robot master ended in "man", which to be clear implied "human", not emphasizing anything about the characters being masculine- most of them lacked gender characteristics completely, which makes sense because they're fuckin robots. Does top man scream 'masculinity' to you? maybe that's a bad example (top man is the pinnacle of masculinity) but after splash woman came out, retroactively they all became male. now we know for a fact that ice man has a penis, shade man has a penis, needle man has a needle shaped penis, ground man has a drill shaped penis, which actually we knew already because that one was visible in-game but the point is that i wouldn't be thinking about this before splash woman existed. now i'm not saying it's reasonable to make a mermaid robot master male, but to be fair spongebob has already proven mermaid man to be a successful character
apparently the old megaman games had gotten a reputation for being 'difficult' at some point between the 90s and 2008, which to me doesn't make much sense because that's kind of just how all NES games were. but megaman 9 tries to live up to it by being needlessly difficult; in fact, far more so than the actual originals were, and in far less forgiving ways. only about half the deaths here truly feel deserved - especially in the boss battles, which are extremely unbalanced, especially in mega buster runs.
fortunately the music bangs enough that it completely makes up for it. nobody tell NicoEvaluates that I didn't rate it 5 stars though.