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.

When it came time to make the jump to sixteen bits, Megaman had an awkward transition. I hope she feels more comfortable with herself now though. Anyway, you can't really just stick a series that's still known for being in 8-bits onto more powerful hardware and not have it be jarring to some extent. Especially since megaman made very minimal changes to its formula since the first few games.
This means no more classic mega man sprite, it's a very different style than we had seen in the series before, and it is a lot to get used to at first. Something you'll find is that not only is every sprite higher resolution than before but they're also much bigger than before, like everything actually takes up more space on the screen. Reminds me a lot of, as you can imagine, the Megaman X games on the snes. Both of them being on the snes means they share a variety of similarities, and i'm sure there was a lot of overlap in developing this and Megaman X1. It really does feel like I'm just playing Megaman X1 some of the time.
Also, after switching to a console that allows more than three colors per sprite, i think they took that as an obligation to use every single one of those colors. each one of the bosses uses orange at least once. the designs are really all over the place in general, they remind me of how if you bought more than one bionicle set they would have instructions to combine them together into a larger one, but the parts all had completely different color schemes, so they would have the color harmony of a sonic oc. they kind of look like they're made of Playmobil.
Something I like in particular about megaman 7 is that every time you die, the entire game just completely pauses for several frames in which megaman's face is contorted in the purest expression of agony and suffering that you can possibly imagine and i just really enjoy that part, i just think it's a nice little detail there.
What this game excels at is its weapons: they're all fun to use, and the game actually encourages you to use them by letting the environment respond to them- like, for example, how you can use the flame weapon to set trees on fire. this is also how you can find most of the secrets in the game, which are also a great touch. There's also a few gameplay differences it shares with megaman 8: the bosses being split into groups of four, an intro stage, and the ability to switch weapons with the side buttons. cool! it seems like they actually put thought into this, i sure hope these gameplay features stick around in future entries and they don't cut it out two games later for no reason.
Unfortunately it is rather unimaginative in some other respects, for example, Cloud man's entire stage is literally just air man's stage again. Apparently the designers ran out of ideas there. as for the story, it's very simple: shoot the eight robot masters, do the wily stages, commit homicide, and youre done, thats it, hurry it up please i got somewhere to be at nine ok? i guess there is bass, a character whose sole purpose is to kill you, which means i can relate to him a lot. i will find you
I think that most people who have played mega man 7 agree that the final boss (the wily capsule) is just way too fucking hard. It deals way too much damage and some of its attacks are borderline impossible to dodge, so it's mostly up to chance whether you live or die. Something a little lesser known though, is that this wasn't a situation where they just didn't playtest it enough or something. no, it was a purposeful choice to make it like this. They decided to make the final boss "insanely hard" for no reason, because, they just must've thought it would be funny i guess. to be honest i respect it.
overall, mega man 7 is really good, especially when you consider that it was made by like two dudes in one afternoon

this is one of the most story-heavy megaman games you can find. it has a real story, not just a different letter before the boss door (although it does also have a different letter before the boss door) all the strongest robot masters have conveniently gathered in one place, but oh no! they were unexpectedly reprogrammed by mr. x, the owner of the x corporation formerly known as twitter.
for the robot masters there was a very interesting idea here. you see, the developers took a look at mega man 5, in particular napalm man, and they noticed that napalm man's stage had gotten the game banned in vietnam for being unfathomably insensitive to vietnam war victims, and so they thought: well, what if we got banned in every country? - and thus the racial caricature genre of robot master was born. consider flame man: the developers wanted to make a middle eastern stage, so they did a brainstorm and the first things they wrote down were: "turban" and "oil". i'm just really glad they hadn't figured out they could make female robot masters too yet or we would've gotten Burqa woman. and of course tomahawk man is pretty self-explanatory.
so now half the robot masters are themed around countries instead of pokemon types, making the matchups make sense is understandably a little bit more difficult than usual. Although they did cheat and make a handful of them pokemon types anyway, corresponding to the classic stereotypes that in canada it is cold, in the middle east it is hot, in brazil there are plants i guess, and in china there is wind. the classic stereotype that everywhere in china has wind in it. Since the robot masters are all based on countries, figuring out the weaknesses requires a strong knowledge of world history. for example, take yamato man and tomahawk man, representing japan and the united states. which one wins? well, i don't know if you folks know much about world war 2, but japan was actually, involved, and, well, the united states actually (history buffs will know this) threw a tomahawk at them.
i've heard one of the main criticisms against the gameplay being that you now cannot do a slide and then press the jump button before the slide has finished occurring. apparently that's the biggest gripe with megaman 6, as if the average person gives a shit about that or would even notice. personally i think there are bigger issues.
in terms of gameplay, megaman 6 does bring something actually new to the table - in lieu of Rush The Dog we now have a set of bodily augmentations. now your first instinct upon using these might be to say "these look exactly like the regular rush adaptors". and you'd be close: they are the same, but they don't drain ammo and they also have a six-second unskippable cutscene every time you try to switch to them. the other difference is that you no longer get one for free at the start of the game like rush jet, but each one comes with beating either flame man or plant man, along with their actual weapons. so the game leans heavily on incentivizing you to get these bodily augmentations. especially the wily stages really do not go ten seconds without making you use one, and it gives me body dysmorphia. there are power blocks absolutely everywhere, including several in flame man's stage (which is completely pointless considering you get the power suit by beating flame man's stage) and all of the enemies are now way stronger in comparison to all the normal weapons, which basically makes those all useless. i mean the weapons are extremely uncreative anyway, i don't think there's even a single one this one that isn't a clone of an older weapon. it also makes the game way too unforgiving if you don't have the suits. you basically have zero chance of beating any of the levels without getting these things, which ruins the difficulty curve, and ruins the main attraction of a megaman game, which is to actually use the fucking weapons.
and think about how the gameplay is actually like once you do get them. the power suit allows you to beat most of the minibosses and enemies basically instantly by just walking up and spamming punch at them, and the jet one allows you to just fly past all of the platforming parts, effectively removing platforming from the game. so what's the point of even playing? Megaman is an action-platformer. if you remove the action and also remove the platformer, then the only thing left is - .
the wily stages, including the mr. x stages thanks elon musk, are entirely unremarkable and last way too long. they're basically half the game and they shouldn't be. almost every one has several new level gimmicks, and that is not the purpose of a wily stage. another issue with having eight original wily stages is that the actual robot master stages are noticeably shorter, since there is a finite amount of space on a NES cartridge. the whole game suffers.
anyway i know you're not playing a NES game for the graphics (thats what atari is for) but this one really works within its limitations. Parts of this game look like they'd be more at home on the sega genesis than an 8 bit console. all you have to do is compare the stage select screens between mm6 and the blank blue void of megaman 1 and it becomes clear that the designers were working from years of experience with nes games by this point.
Riddle me this, liberal: yamato man claims to be "impregnable", but yet all i have to do is go to google, turn off safesearch, and type in "yamato man mpreg", and lo and behold!
i actually really like the around-the-world concept, but these robot masters need some revisions- i'm not saying i could do better, but i've workshopped some ideas here:
representing australia - clown man. clown man is actually canonically australian already, so i think this fits perfectly. it also reflects the activities of the average australia pretty well.
representing the united kingdom - margaret thatcher but a robot. personally, i think a robot master should be intimidating and scary (terrifying, really) so since this is one of the scariest things britain has to offer i think it works.
representing france - baguette man. this is a stupid joke
representing the united states - keep tomahawk man, but we change his design to be like that washington sports team and we also change his name to a racial slur
representing saudi arabia - burqa woman. it's hip, it's progressive, also traditional, and anti-progressive, it pleases everyone. im into it!
representing antarctica - ice. theres not really people in antarctica so it doesnt really make sense to have a man type robot master, but theres definitely ice, so we can have ice
representing the country of vatican city - bible man. this guy is already an established hit, i think we can get the IP, and plus vatican city residents are a hugely underrepresented group in media, so we need to fix that.
representing the country of egypt - pharaoh man. this one is less resource-intensive too because you can just copy the megaman 4 stage with no changes.
representing the country of europe - metric system man. it represents the culture perfectly.
representing the country of latin america - goku.
i chose not to include any balkan countries because i'm pretty sure they already do this in real life, but if youll recall earlier when i said i couldn't do better, i have changed my mind; these are way better, and my ego is absolutely massive.
megaman 6 has the best presentation of any megaman up until that point. its music keeps the soundtrack quality from megaman 5 but also draws from so many genres and cultures while still combining them in a consistent way. it even has my third favorite boolean operator: nor! it would honestly be perfect if it was enjoyable to actually play. sadly, the great level design which it's full of is ruined by incompetent and gimmicky overall design choices to make one massive missed opportunity. now, this could all be fixed if they had just removed all the weapons and replaced them with more bodily augmentations. i want to see one where megaman's arms are replaced with ten new legs, like some type of lovecraftian, eldritch beast. how about one where megaman just has his nails done, and that's it. also there should have been more racial stereotypes.

this lineup of robot masters has absolutely zero rhyme or reason. and honestly i am fine with levels based on completely random bullshit, i think it's neat to see like umbrella man's weapon versus type-ii superconductor man. and in this game we finally get to see who would win in a fight between a train and a large boulder. the issue there is that, if youre gonna do that, the matchups still need to make sense. For example: a gyroscope is one of the least likely things I can think of to theme a killing machine around, a gyroscope is a mechanical device that uses physics tricks to balance itself perfectly when it's turned in different directions, regardless of gravity. You could say, that the purpose of a gyroscope is to beat gravity. If I tried to think of one thing that could beat a robot whose powers are manipulating gravity, it would be a gyroscope. unfortunately, the weaknesses here aren't based on logic, they're based on vague, loose word association, so gravity man beats gyro man instead, which is the the opposite of what it should be. so i dont understand what the point of making gyro man named that in the first place even is. neither his stage nor his weapon nor really his design actually have any relation to a gyroscope, it's just an airman clone.
i think there should be a robot master themed around my uncle ralph.
this is another game that has eight wily stages (too many) but half of them just have dark man as a boss, megaman's first PoC robot master! you can tell the boss fights are half baked with him, but he's such a cutie pie that i cant help but forgive him. the castle aesthetic is pretty neat but as usual there's way too much original stuff here, these stages could easily have been made into their own robot masters. the wily bosses that are actually original are pretty rad though.
megaman 5 has this unique ability to be completely uncreative in the most creative way possible. nothing is unique about the gameplay formula compared to the previous games at all, the matchups make no sense, the wily stages take way too long, and the weapons are completely phoned-in, useless, unoriginal, or all three, so the game forces you to use overpowered the charge shot the whole time. the music this time is great though. instead of strong melodies each song is kind of all over the place, but each song has this wonderful way of mixing genres together to indicate the robot master's theming perfectly. very reminiscent of a movie soundtrack to me.
It is definitely the same formula as the games that came before it, but perfected into the best version of that formula. sadly it's all plagiarized from Megaman for GameGear.

Megaman 4 is notable in the franchise because it was the first game in the series that's actually finished. That being said, the difficulty curve is still mildly fucked. every robot master is still extremely difficult (albeit not as much as mm3) unless you have the weakness weapon. the one exception to this is toad man, who telegraphs his only attack like five seconds in advance and then just doesn't do it if you shoot him, so you can pretty just not stop shooting him and win easily with any weapon. i think a generally simple and predictable fight is a good thing to shoot for in a megaman boss, but there is no challenge there.
the end result of this is that pretty much the only good order to play the stages in to start with toad man's and then follow the weakness order exactly without deviating. so yes, you CAN play the stages in any order you want, there's like forty thousand possible orders you can choose, and they all suck ass except for this 1. That just makes it the same as another game with linear levels, except with the extra work added of googling which order to play them in first, and you do have to google them because you will not guess otherwise. there are zero clues in the stages, in the boss patterns, in the names of the bosses. Oh well of course the only weakness of a vacuum cleaner would be a giant comically oversized floating ring, it would be ridiculous if they made it anything else!
back in megaman 3 they added the slide, and it revolutionized the core moveset. now with megaman 4 they want to do it again, so the idea is to make holding down the shoot button squirt out an even bigger, fatter shot. and this completely changes the entire gameplay loop. Some would say "ruins"; i would say, changes, in a very "ruin-esque" way. to be fair there are pros and cons, especially in the context of where the series was at megaman 3, because that game had very standard difficulty levels but extremely difficult bosses. this absolutely solves the boss difficulty issue, at least helps, but charging still exists when youre playing the levels themselves.
the issue is that all the enemies can't have the same amount of health, because then you'd blast through them all easily, so they all have to be harder to kill now, but that makes all the actual boss weapons less effective in comparison, and since they're harder to kill, you pretty much have to be holding down the shoot button constantly. and since youre holding down charge all the time, it's making this really irritating warbling sound the whole time, which drowns out the music. you can see how this one change to make the boss fights easier has so many ramifications, even for things like hearing the music properly. and you want to hear the music in this game, it's one of the best megaman soundtracks there is, same main composer as megaman 3, which is also one of the best.
fun fact! if you combined guts man, skull man, and skin man, you could create a working human!
the plot trope of an evil genius mad scientist trying to take over the world, is simply too cliche, too uncreative, even, for megaman 4, so in lieu of dr willy we now have dr Cock Sack, who is literally exactly the same. these are just wily stages with a different name.
so there's three wily stages which is actually four wily stages, plus those four cossack stages which were also actually four wily stages - thats eight wily stages total, equal to the actual core game's length, and it kind of feels like an eternity honestly. plus, a lot of these stages are using actual new stage hazards instead of reusing the robot masters' assets. the point of these levels is to be a combination of previous assets in new ways, so if its all new assets then: just make a new robot master level. like, most of the first cocksack stage would make a fantastic snow themed stage. and the side scrolling one after that, well, ideally that one just never gets made. sorry bad example. but you get the point.
and dont tell me "oh but that would make there be more than eight robot master stages, everyone knows it's illegal for a megaman game to have more than eight robot masters, it's scientifically determined to be the optimal number" no it's not, you just think that because all of them do.
overall this is a pretty good entry, good level design, good weapons, great music. i think the five hour sex scene with dr cossack was a little strange (i wouldve preferred closer to six or seven hours) but besides that definitely a banger. no, it is not the best megaman game ever, there's still a few loose ends here and there, but i think it definitely was the best at that time.

A lot of missed potential here - mostly due to how dated the design is, partially due to technical limitations, but there are some weird choices on top of that. For one, it's kind of hard to take the disturbing imagery seriously when the scenarios take place in what are basically just stock adventure game settings - like, the characters are supposed to be being tortured by this massive AI but at the same time they're traveling through ancient Egypt and learning magic from a witch and whatnot. The only one that can conceivably be grounded (ha) in reality is Gorrister's story, and that one still had a magic talking jackal. The game is also extremely buggy- I had to stop playing at the endgame because the game just spontaneously softlocked and stopped from progressing. I wish the game had a remake or remaster or something, because the voice acting, art, and music here are genuinely phenomenal here, they're just stuck in the package of an esoteric 90s PC adventure game. Still makes worthwhile additions to the original short story, but sadly can't quite compare in general quality.