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.

you know how in mario maker you sometimes come across those stages that like 7-year-olds will make where they just dump every enemy into the stage and add nothing else? thats what it feels like to play mega man 8

At first glance it seems like we're finally out of the woods with the duplicate robot master types- we've got some more unique ideas with Clown man, Sword man, Tengu man, etc. Wow I bet we'll get some cool weapons based on those right? No: clown man is actually electric, sword man is just fire, and tengu man is just wind. Tell me, please, what the actual fuck electricity has to do with clowns. Is this just the only thing they could think of? There's plenty of creative weapons that a clown could wield. Also I'd just like to point out that even though I brought up Tengu Man, a japanese-themed robot master, as being an example of creative idea, he is actually one of three Japanese-themed robot masters in the series, and one of them is another one of him

I wish every megaman game had cutscenes like this game. megaman and roll sound like they were voiced by the cast of "rugrats" and everyone else was just voiced by a random guy they found on the street.

mm8 isnt a bad game, and it's not really a boring game either, in fact, much of the time it's a quite fun game, it's just that for the majority of that time it's not a mega man game. A recurring issue with the megaman franchise before and since mega man 8 is sameness. But megaman 8 is when they finally tried to switch it up a little, change the gameplay somewhat, make it new and interesting. and sure, some of the time they failed at that (maybe most of the time they failed) but at least they tried this time, and it makes mega man 8 one of the more interesting games out there.

The plot of this game is "Wily commits domestic terrorism again, but this time it's sponsored by gears. just the general concept of Gears."

The only core feature that's been added is the Double Gear System, which is a blatant gimmick. I emphatically don't give a shit about it. You can play through the entire game without even realizing it exists, and for the majority of the time you probably will. This is supposed to be megaman's big leap onto modern consoles, so where is the modern? I'm looking for the modern, and I don't see it. Where's the different waves of robot masters? Where's the interesting storyline or premise? Where's any bit of creativity in the gameplay changes at all? Where the fuck is Proto MAn? Proto Man is probably the second most important character besides megaman himself and he's simply just not in this.

And why does the music sound like that? It sounds like the composer was trying to make it sound like NES music but obviously couldn't actually make it 8-bit so they just used four of the same instrument for each part of each song. It's So Retro music. It's absolutely the instrument choice that ruins the songs, which I know because there were two separately released Arranged/Instrumental versions of each song, which use big boy instruments, and sound perfectly fine.

The movement in this game feels very slightly wrong too, even once you get used to it. I think for megaman 7 and 8 I got used it because it told my brain I was playing megaman X, but in megaman 11 it's close enough to the original games that it feels wrong that it's completely spot on. Also, it's fucking stupid that enemies re-appear if they scroll off screen. It's not a NES game, and they're not supposed to do that anymore. It genuinely raises my blood pressure every time.

To be clear, megaman 11 doesn't really have anything significantly wrong with it. It just doesn't have very much particularly right about it eihter.

E3 ended because there's nothing left to show when Megaman DOS already exists.

it's the Thinking Man's megaman game: none of the stage hazards are communicated to you in any way. theres a door that you have to shoot several times to destroy but you have no way of knowing it's not a normal wall like the rest of the stage. It really tests your puzzle solving abilities. And your reflexes as well, all of the enemies either move at the speed of light or are impossible to hit. or both!

The music is amazing too, best in the series probably. There's this amazing remix of the wily stage 6 theme from mega man 2. It's a little weird that it plays in every single one of the stages, but worth it considering how great a track it is.

Normally the wily stages take place in a giant skull castle or something but this time it's just a regular sized door but with a skull on it. What's actually behind this door we have no way of knowing, for all we know, the wily stages take place in just, like, a house.

I'm waiting with baited breath for Megaman TRES.