This may be the best mega man game ever.
Okay so:
1. The levels are godly they're so well designed and are an absolute joy to play, they're brutally hard but never feel very unfair which always makes me have fun with them and they really help shine a light on how good the weapons are in this game
2. This game has the best selection of weapons in the classic series except for maybe 11 but I'm split on which one is better. They're all (except like Magma Bazooka) in my experience amazing and have so many different situations where they're useful. My preferred way to play is always to do Galaxy Man first since his weapon is insanely useful for like every other level.
3. The bosses are amazing. Every robot master feels fun to fight (shoutout to Tornado Man I love that fight) and the other bosses are great and a super fun challenge to beat
4. THE MUSIC IS SO GOOD just listen to it okay shoutout to Galaxy Man's theme specifically
5. Weird point but I love this games use of colour. It fills out a really nice colour palette in my head with all the robot masters having a distinct colour and their levels having really nice colouration. This is something I get very particular about I don't know why but this game NAILS it
It's peak...

Amazing Mega Man game, I don't care what anyone says! This used to be my favourite classic Mega Man game but Mega Man 7 really jumped up on replay, I do still think purely design wise this game is the best by far.

I don't love the NES style so I'm not super glad they went back to it for 9 and 10 but I at least think it really works for 9 due to the big focus on tight platforming. The levels are amazing, the boss weapons are really fun to use and I usually never use them. There's a girl robot master... for the first and only time... so that's something. This game is just pure arcady fun. It is really challenging but I firmly disagree with people who think the difficulty is cheap, actual skill issue.

the best one

dr. wily was kinda right too but only kinda because he still sucks, but then again him sucking and being manipulative is probably what spared these poor robots

splash woman rules

I don't like this one.
We lost the slide and the charged buster, i can live without the charged buster but i LOVE using the slide so that sucks.

The stages are mostly very annoying, the difficulty reminds me of a Dark Souls 2 situation were the previous games difficulty was hyped, inflated and memed SO much that the next game feels like a parody of itself, what people THINK it was instead of what it really was.

I've beaten this twice, once with Mega Man and once with Proto Man, i just don't have fun playing this.

At least the soundtrack is great.

Mega Man 9 is often described as a game that started the retro boom in the industry. It's not the first game that decides to go for a retro look, but it was one that proved that such revivals can be successful.

When playing it, it's hard not to commend Inti Creates on how far they were willing to go with this game. It feels, looks, and sounds like an NES Mega Man title. In the context of 2009, it was a joy. Classic Mega Man was effectively dead, and Mega Man 7 and 8 weren't exactly the games people remembered that fondly.

Now, however, it starts to feel dated. Its incredible devotion to 8-bit aesthetics is a bit harder to appreciate amidst hundreds of similar titles that did the same, but, arguably, much better.

Mega Man 9 stands proud as a Mega Man game, having a fun roster of bosses and their stages and featuring some truly great music. However, it's hard to look at it and not see some of the missed potential.

This game feels like a mish-mash of ideas at times. Not in the worst way, but it certainly left me with plenty of questions about its features.

Mega Man 2 is undoubtedly the most popular game in the classic franchise, but I'm not sure you can find a single person who can blame later Mega Man NES adventures being bland on the quality of life features introduced in later games. Despite that, the game goes WAY back, removing the ability to not only charge your shot but also slide.

The removal of slide in particular hurts the game a lot. It was never a particularly great feature when used in level design, but it allowed for more maneuverability, and, what's more important, speed. Without it, Mega Man feels naked, as it was present in basically every platformer Mega Man game.

Lack of quality-of-life features also affects one of the best things Mega Man got in its 16-bit days: changing weapons without opening the menu. You're stuck with the Zelda 1-like inconvenience of opening the menu each time you want to switch the weapon, which is necessary quite often in the later stages.

The level design is amazing, and is more akin to later Mega Man titles, with each stage being completely unique. Aside from enemies, you get different platforms and mechanics which make every stage a blast. However, while music and level design are pretty damn great, the graphics aren't.

The game, unfortunately, mostly looks like early NES titles, again taking more inspiration from Mega Man 1 and 2 with its often barren backgrounds and lack of detail.

There is one part in Splash Woman's stage that is, for some reason a nearly 1:1 copy of a fairly long section from Wave Man's stage in Mega Man 5. Strange, but what's more questionable is that if you compare how the two look, this game from 2008 looks more dated than even Mega Man 3!

While not every screen has a one-tone background, it's present often enough that it becomes a little annoying.

The game feels stuck between knowing full well what it wants, but not quite being able to achieve it. Unfortunately, this also applies to gameplay.

Mega Man 9 is hard. It's a pretty good challenge which makes the game easier as you get more familiar with it, but when returning to this game after ~10 years, I couldn't shake the feeling that some of the difficulty was yet another retro throwback reference. "Nintendo-hard was a phrase, let's do that!" says Mega Man 9, and in addition to completely competent and great level design adds quite a few "gotcha" traps.

I'm pretty sure this game has more spike traps and pit-jumping enemies than any other Mega Man title. While those aren't new to the series, I feel like the enemies especially were a stupid addition that should've stayed in Mega Man 4. This isn't a quarter muncher, after all.

Overall, Mega Man 9 is weird. Its presentation and design make it one of the better in the classic series. It's not as janky as early titles and not as bad as some of the later ones. However, I also can't help but feel the missed potential oozing out of every corner of this game. Is it enjoyable? Yes. But it could be so much better!

Both Mega Man 10 and 11 build on its legacy, ironing out some of the imperfections while keeping good ideas, so I suppose in a way it was a necessary game.

And hey, I don't want to sound too negative. It's pretty fun, and it gave us Galaxy Man!

I honestly don't know what people see in this. It is a retrogression for the series, not a 'return to roots'.
Instead of keeping the mechanics and QoL features that made the game better (slide, charge shot, quick weapon switching, being able to fire the mega buster and the other weapon using two different buttons), they just made the game as frustrating as possible for frustration's sake.
I'll admit that some of the bullshit sections can be bypassed by clever use of weapons (mostly the Jewel Satellite), but still the game is littered with spikes and other instakill obstacles.
This would've been excusable if it were an NES game, but this is just stupid.
For fairness' sake, I had some good time and there were a couple of stages that were genuinely good like Galaxy Man, Tornado Man and Splash Woman.
I just hoped for more out of this game, especially considering how everyone says that this is the best Mega Man game.
I can see why it is regarded as such; it maybe has the best bosses in the series, but the issues as mentioned make me reluctant to accept that.
A good Mega Man game nonetheless and I can't really stay mad at the blue guy.
I also liked the inclusion of a female Robot Master and hope they continue to do so.

This is a good game, but a damn frustrating one. The game asks a lot of you execution wise. You often know the answer to a platforming challenge, its just pretty precise so you'll die a fair amount. Its annoying since it just kind of feels hard just to be hard. The weapons are all pretty great. Once I got the laser trident, I pretty much never used the normal buster since its just a straight up upgrade in almost every situation. Mega Man games before this had a charge buster and slide, which aren't in this one for whatever reason. They compensated for the charge shot by having normal buster shots be really strong and move really fast, though not having the slide is just odd since it doesn't really take away from anything. Bosses are fun, though I don't think they're very interesting compared to bosses in 7, 8, and Bass. The game likes to call back to older mega man's but also doesn't really take the great parts of all of them that it could've. The music is great. The levels are fun, if a bit frustrating with the precision required for some parts. The Wily levels are just kind of exhausting since they're so long and you can't save between them. The final boss is super long and right after a boss rush, so that's also a lot. The music is quite incredible. Mega Man feels very fast and powerful. My main problem is that it feels like its hard for the sake of it and not really anything else. Otherwise, great game, but its very exhausting for me to play.

I still don't get this one tbh. It's meant to be a throw back to MM2 which is why the slide and charge are gone, but at the same time they decided to include the store/screws and at least 1 item from 3-MM&B. So like if they're willing to add all those extra things that weren't in MM2 why not the slide and charge, which are far more iconic to the series then all the items? The "costume" and "hair" items are also such a waste of space that could have been given to some other items like the Rush Adapter or something.
I didn't really get the story either. The robots having "expiration dates" that by law they have to be shut down makes some sense, especially with the museum in previous games. But by the end they seem to have just forgotten this plot point? The credits do show art of the robot masters hanging out with the main cast, but the text never address if they were still being scrapped after or not???
All that being said it's far from a bad game (not a MM8 lol) but definitely not the best classic-style game imo (MM5/7 are still my favorites). I like that the game has built in achievements and while I probably wont check them all out I also liked all the extra modes and challenges, gives the game more replay value.

Played through Mega Man Legacy Collection 2

WOW! For a game I didn't care that much when I first beat it, mostly because of the lack of the slide and the charged shot, Mega Man 9 really surprised me after replaying it, it has a certain level of creativity that is pretty rare to see in the franchise, one of the best selection of weapons in the entire series, a banger OST even for MM standards, great levels, very memorable and fun bosses (except for you, Twin Devil!), and a high difficulty while still being very rewarding and fair to beat... At least most of the time, the game still has some questionable design choices here and there, but not nearly as much as some say, and I only saw 2 troll moments during my entire gameplay, while other games in the series like Mega Man 2 has way more. Overall, I had an amazing time playing Mega Man 9, and it's possibly my new favorite game from the classic series.

It's far past time that we all admitted it. Inti Creates has ALWAYS been better at Megaman than Capcom ever was.

The common sentiment that I've heard is that Megaman 9 is "the best one" and while I'm not quite willing to commit to such a claim, it's absolutely in the highest tier of Classic Megaman. The only things holding it back are things consciously done to assume parity with the old games. I would rather just not repeat what I consider to be mistakes, but it does complicate the criticism somewhat when everything I can complain about is clearly intentional.

I don't think we needed to get rid of the charged shot or the slide. I don't think that there needed to be (admittedly hilarious) player traps sprinkled throughout, and I don't think the game needed to be tuned Too Hard on purpose. There are some screens in Megaman 9's Wily stages that are more satanic than anything else in the whole franchise. They are things that an experienced player CAN respond to, but even if you know what you're doing, certain things just feel like too much to ask from a player who is trying to have any kind of good time. The shop is back, which is something I've never been terribly fond of, but it's very inobtrusive here. It's mostly just a way to pile up consumable E-tanks and lives.

Megaman 9 also has a somewhat surprising amount of content, with a bunch of challenges included, some of which are... rude to even SUGGEST to the player if I'm being honest. Suggesting that somebody beat the hardest Megaman game without ever once taking damage is either going to get you laughed out of the room or make you an enabler of someone's complete self-destruction.