Excellent high octane action that never fails to get your heart pumping and makes your Super Nintendo feel like a Cool machine for Cool Kids. It's gorgeously animated, super responsive outside of the periods of pretty extreme slowdown (I welcome the chance to breathe the slow motion gives me, lol), boss weapons are distinct and satisfying to use, and the controls are perfectly tight with dashes and walljumps allowing situations that are pure frantic chaos. Rebind dash to L or R and dash jumping all over the place becomes entertaining in its own right. Boss encounters are usually as great as you expect from Mega Man, though there's a few that fall short. The bosses here fall more into the "manipulate their AI to force exploitable attacks" category rather than "learn their patterns" or "react like hell", which occasionally breaks down when it's not entirely clear how to do so, like on that damn chameleon.

Really, all of the problems I did have with this came down to me missing every cool upgrade. In particular, having the armor be very easily missable is a bit of a questionable design choice given the last few bosses seeming to be built around it, but that's pretty minor all things considered. Besides, I think I run into problems with things like that and levels changing to open new paths after you've completed them because of my wide access to games. I certainly don't rush, but I'm more inclined to complete things and check them off than I would be otherwise. I'm generally not going to open up a completed level I have no reason to think there's collectibles in after I've done some other stuff just to look around and experience it again, but I really should more often.