Charge Shot is very appreciated, but apart from that, this game is kind of just... okay. I have no idea why they felt the need to make boss HP fill up way slower.

I'll do the same format as my other Mega Man reviews and go game by game.

Toad Man Stage: The water gimmick is okay-ish; I don't like the instant death pits. Other than that, this stage feels shockingly short, and a really... really... REALLY mediocre boss doesn't do it any favors.
Bright Man Stage: I love the brightness/darkness gimmick with the darkness enemies and then having to light the area back up with a firework enemy, super creative stage. The optional pendulum platform section was also a highlight. Bright Man himself isn't too fun to fight; bosses that can just freeze you in place with no real counterplay aren't fun to fight. Fun stage, bad boss.
Pharaoh Man Stage: Love my Egypt, so this stage is... just ok. Sand is an interesting gimmick and the platform enemy section is fine. Pharaoh Man's fight itself is kind of lame if you use the weakness, it's more of a mash test than anything. Kind of a letdown, but at least Pharaoh Shot is a cool ass weapon.
Ring Man Stage: The platforms that disappear are just an okay gimmick, you can kind of tell they didn't have much for Ring Man. The hippo minibosses are a little annoying to deal with but nothing compared to the ring minibosses that are a royal pain in the ass and I honestly just ran into them and skipped them with I-Frames. Ring Man himself is actually a kind of interesting fight, so it's the opposite of Bright Man funnily enough. Bad stage, fun boss.
Dust Man Stage: Interesting stage with the trash presses and the forming platforms, definitely not bad. Dust Man is a pretty fun fight and it's fun to figure him out.
Dive Man Stage: It's a water stage with semi-interesting enemies and the whale miniboss is ok, but it's not really memorable. Dive Man is just like, one step above Toad Man and that's not really saying much.
Drill Man Stage: Interesting aesthetic, but otherwise a kind of boring stage. Drill Man's fight is also not really that good, you're mostly just waiting around until he pops back up to shoot him.
Skull Man Stage: I like the diverging paths in this stage, but that's about it.

Cossack Stage 1: First stage isn't really too memorable, though it is reminiscent of the first Wily Stage in Megaman 2. Boss is cool, love sliding under the boss.
Cossack Stage 2: The Rush Jet part is neat, game gets pretty generous and gives you a lot of free stuff here. The boss is also really cool, and it reminds me of the boss in Megaman 2 that was just the stage. Very nice.
Cossack Stage 3: You can do a funny Wire bug on the autoscroller parts which is fun. Other than that, not a big fan of the autoscroller section, and the boss is just really mediocre.
Cossack Stage 4: Not much to say about this stage. Cossack himself is a fun enough fight.

Alright, onto the Wily Stages.
Wily Stage 1: This stage is full of so many fucking Mets man. There's also a really cheap blind drop into water where there's a set of asshole spikes placed purely to spite the player. Kaizo blocks reappear and are kind of pointless since the player can just use Wire. And oh, the boss of this stage is a giant Met. Thankfully it's pretty easy.
Wily Stage 2: Fun platforming, otherwise not terribly memorable. The boss isn't really great either.
Wily Stage 3: Classic Robot Master rematches. Not much else to say until Wily Machine, where it took me an exorbitant amount of time to figure out I was supposed to hit him with fully charged shots. This fight sucked big time, I'm not going to lie.
Wily Stage 4: From a bad fight to a really fucking hype fight. This is probably my favorite Wily Fight? It's easy but it's so fucking cool and is a great victory lap.

Colorblindness Rating: A
By now, Megaman's menus are no longer confusing for the colorblind with much clearer labels. Thanks, Capcom.

After seeing a general increasing improvement in the Mega Man games, I am severely disappointed in this entry, borderline hating it.

I want to say a few of the things I like about it first. The weapon select screen is the best seen so far with actually detailed icons that make it so I know immediately what I am selecting. The soundtrack is still great with plenty of classic tracks and the sprite work is also a continued improvement. Also, the upgrade to the mega buster was a very nice addition, allowing you to charge your gun for increase damage. That's pretty much it.

Now on to my frustrations, for starters, I would say I only liked about half of the stages in the game. Most of the stages felt like a severe test of patience with countless trial and error jumps, sections that require specific upgrades, or extremely annoying enemy placements. I never really felt the sense of level of mastery I experienced in previous titles with certain runs also resulting in me taking a lot of damage. I'm almost sure that there are a few sections that are nigh impossible to get through without just tanking the hits. I can forgive some of these difficulty spikes in the levels since they generally do not take me too long to get through, if only for the fact that these are some of my least favorite robot masters I have fought so far.

Generally with these fights, there is a surefire tactic one can employ that makes the fights significantly easier. That is still the case for some of these fights, what I don't understand is why each boss takes nearly a quarter of my health with each hit! Seriously, these bosses take so much health off of you that having to fight them all again at the end was nightmarish. It also doesn't help how some of the fights are very RNG-dependent. Bosses like Bright Man, Drill Man and Ring Man you can't hit reliably sometimes depending on what their move set decides to do. Bright Man in particular I think is just horribly designed with no reliable way to dodge his attacks and with an unavoidable stun attack that leaves you defenseless. I have my qualms with each of the fights but none compare to that of Bright Man.

I got as far as the second to last stage where I had to repeat the 7 rematches over and over again just to get a chance to fight Wily who is also a badly designed boss. The second to last Wily fight is entirely dependent on the drill that if you run out of, you can not finish the fight so you'll have to restart the stage and fight the 7 rematches again! It again, does not help when you CANT DODGE HIS ATTACKS!

I wish I could talk about the final boss as well but I did not beat this game despite me having like 10 minutes left. The thought of having to refight all of the poorly designed robot master fights again makes my skin crawl and I would rather do anything else with my time. I generally like to be positive when writing reviews but this was just such a headache to play. I would not be as critical if every other game that came before I enjoyed more. I don't know how I enjoyed the first game over this one, especially given its reception.

In due time, I might cool down on this one a little bit and give it another shot, but for now, this was one of my least favorite games I have played in a while. God willing, I hope the next one is better.

The Mega Buster is an immensely appreciated addition to the series. This title also adds some optional branching paths within the stages. Some contain goodies such as E-tanks and extra lives, while others reward you with entirely new tools for your arsenal. Stumbling upon the Balloon upgrade by complete accident, and gaining the option to utilize it during the final stages during the game to make some platforming challenges easier felt incredibly rewarding.

Mega Man 4 contains both some of the easiest and the toughest Robot Masters I've fought as of yet. Toad Man for example is a complete joke, while Ring Man was a tough nut to crack, even with the weapon he's weak to.
Once again, I feel like the conclusion of Mega Man 4 falls flat due to some incredibly poor boss designs. Wily phase 2 almost made me rage quit until I found out that you can detonate the Drill Bombs on command. This made the fight much easier, but you are still forced to play the waiting game due to the boss's movements being random, and you have to wait for the optimal opportunity to strike if you can't afford to take any hits. Meanwhile, Wily's final phase was so easy that I question why it even was there to begin with.

With the ability to both slide and charge shots, I feel like Mega Man is starting to resemble Mega Man X, which I think is a great thing to see. Experiencing the progression of the series myself is a great time, and I can't wait to see what Mega Man 5 has to offer.

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.

I last played most of the original Mega Man games on the Anniversary Collection on my GameCube when I was much younger, and it's been way too long since I've played them. A friend of mine in the UK asked me to pick her up a few Famicom games, and I figured it wouldn't hurt to indulge in a couple of them before I sent them off to her X3. Rock Man 4 is one such of those games. I didn't remember damn near any of this game, having only played through it once so long ago, but I ended up being quite pleasantly surprised (especially by how much I love the rightfully lauded dog bone-style Famicom controllers I used to play it X3). It took me about 4 hours to complete the Japanese version of the game.

Most Mega Man games don't really have a terribly important narrative, at least in the original series, and this is no exception. The bad guy this time isn't Dr. Wily, but a new evil inventor: Dr. Cossack! Of course it's revealed that Dr. Wily was really behind it all in the first place, but the fact that there's such storytelling at all in a Mega Man game at the time is sorta neat, and it really caught me off guard when text suddenly started appearing on screen once I'd beaten Dr. Cossak XD. It's a neat twist to the formula as it'd been done up to that point, and it sets up the action at play more than well enough.

The action at play is, predictably, Mega Man as it'd been up to that point, but with a bit of a twist. In addition to his dash he gained in Mega Man 3, this is the first game in the series that allowed you to charge your main weapon: the mega buster (or "Rock Buster", as it's called in Japanese). Like the dash, the ability to charge the mega buster is an addition to Mega Man that is pretty divisive among fans on if it's actually a good change, but I at least love it. The mobility and lowered height that the dash gives you combined with this new ability to charge one big shot makes boss fights so much more fun than they were in the past. Instead of it being a choice of a quite hard fight with only your normal pea shooter or demolishing the boss with their weakness, now you have a middle-road option via the charged mega buster. There was only one boss I ended up not fighting with only the mega buster as a result (Dive Man, who was just too hard for me XP), because it was just so much fun fighting them that way.

There are of course eight robot masters to fight, and they're all pretty good fights. My personal favorite was Pharaoh Man, as he makes for a really great fight if you're fighting him with only the charged buster (though I did use their weakness when fighting them in the boss rush. I'm not quite THAT gung ho about it ^^;). The level design is really solid as well, with only really Bright Man being the one I thought had a pretty unfair part or two. It's what you'd expect from a Mega Man game, and it's a very polished version of that experience.

The presentation is again what you'd expect Mega Man 4 to have. The enemy and robot master designs are fun and interesting, and Mega Man himself is as iconic as ever in his traditional 8-bit look. The music is also predictably excellent, with my favorite track being Dive Man's stage. He may be the hardest robot master in this game, but his stage's music is really good~

Verdict: Highly Recommended. This was only the first of what has proven to be quite the dive/re-dive into retro Mega Man stuff, but it was one I enjoyed a lot! It's a very polished experience that brings both old and new together in a really satisfying and fun way. If you've got it on one of the loads of collections its been released on over the years, or can somehow find an original copy, this is absolutely a Mega Man game not worth skipping.