After Mega Man World was only okay, and after reading reviews for Mega Man World 2 that called it the worst of the Game Boy games, I went in pretty skeptical. People generally don’t like this game, but I think people often struggle to articulate why. That’s pretty frustrating to me, because I think this game is far and away better than the first Mega Man World game, and while it’s not an unsung masterpiece, it’s certainly not terrible. I’ll get into this more in the next review as well, but ultimately Mega Man World 2 and 3 are both games that blend together and are almost exactly equal in quality. Both are good, but neither is great.

Read the full review for free here: https://medium.com/@QueenEmilysCourt/mega-man-world-2-mega-man-ii-a-step-in-the-right-direction-74cba166a30b

The Game Boy Mega Man games tend to have a reputation of being nothing more than remixes of their NES counterparts. Barring Mega Man World 5, they’re often seen as nothing but poorly put together remixes slapped on inferior hardware to make a quick buck, and I really don’t think that’s very fair to those games. From what I’ve played of the Mega Man World games up to this point, they’re probably some of the most ambitious Mega Man games I’ve ever played, especially coming off hardware as limiting as the Game Boy. Sure, they use elements from the NES games and that can leave them feeling a bit samey if you’ve played the NES games a lot like I have, but they use these enemies and gimmicks in new and creative ways that still make them feel unique from the entries on NES. Hell, they even opt to go out of their way to add completely new elements to these stages, like, Cut Man’s stage in Dr. Wily’s Revenge is practically unrecognizable from its NES counterpart. And a lot of the time, I end up preferring the decisions made in the Mega Man World games, because there’s a good amount of thought put into the levels designs, especially for a remixed Game Boy game. What I’m saying is that the Game Boy Mega Man games don’t deserve the less than stellar reputation they end up getting, as they have a ton of passion and heart poured into them. At least… the ones made by Minakuchi Engineering do.

Despite doing a pretty decent job with the first Game Boy game, Minakuchi Engineering did not make the 2nd Game Boy Mega Man. Instead, development of this entry was outsourced to a different company, Thinking Rabbit. Upon looking them up on Wikipedia, they’re most well known for publishing the original Sokoban, a puzzle game where you push blocks around. On the surface, this change in developers doesn’t sound like a bad thing. I’m all for giving different developers a chance to craft their own take on a well-established franchise, while giving the main development team time to work on other projects. However, while a lot of Minakuchi Enginerring’s dev team (particularly the lead developer) happened to be huge Mega Man fans, Thinking Rabbit knew next to nothing about the Mega Man franchise, and hasn’t developed another Mega Man game since this one. This, along with the lukewarm at best reception towards the game and music (which I’ll get to later), made me a bit skeptical about this one going in. However, I still wanted to give this game a fair chance despite all the things seemingly going against it, and hey, it’d be interesting getting a look at Thinking Rabbit’s take on the Mega Man franchise. So after all is said and done, what did I think of it?

Yeah, I’m sorry, but this ain’t it. Mega Man World 2 didn’t click with me at all. None of it felt engaging or really that fun to me, and Thinking Rabbit’s lack of knowledge or care about the Mega Man series really showed in this one. But before I get to why I feel that way, I actually want to highlight some of the things that I feel like Mega Man World 2 does better than its predecessor. As you can already tell from the 2 star rating and from what all I’ve said so far, this review isn’t going to be very positive, so I figured I should at least give the game some merit and talk about what I think it does right before going into what it does wrong. The first thing I quickly want to highlight is the fact that they FINALLY gave the Mega Man 3 Robot Masters proper stages. This was one of my biggest criticisms of Dr. Wily’s Revenge, and I’m so glad to see that they fixed it in this entry. In Dr Wily’s Revenge, the Mega Man 2 Robot Master fights were kind of just shoved into teleporter rooms at the end of Enker’s stage, which not only made the game feel way too abrupt, but gave you next to no time to use any of their weapons, as you only got to use them for one stage. Adding the Mega Man 3 Robot Master stages near the end fixes all of these problems, not only by making the game feel more complete, but also by giving you more opportunities to use the latter half of this game’s weapon roster. And while it probably would be better to have all 8 stages available from the get-go, this is certainly a massive improvement over what Dr. Wily’s Revenge did. Another cool thing that Mega Man World 2 did (or, I guess, didn’t do in this case) was that they removed a lot of the spike drops present in Dr. Wily’s Revenge. In the first game’s endgame, you’d have a lot of situations where you’d drop down a screen, and then immediately get killed by a pit of spikes you couldn’t react to because you happened to be in the wrong position. While you could mitigate this with the Carry item, it’s something that you shouldn’t have to do if you don’t know the game. Thankfully, these were a lot less frequent in Mega Man World 2. There was one from what I recall in, I think Metal Man’s stage? Still, I didn’t die to it, and there weren’t any more death defying drops from that point onwards. So overall, Mega Man World 2 isn’t sounding so bad. I mean, it fixed my two biggest issues with Dr. Wily’s Revenge, so why do I feel like this game is so much worse?

To really go into detail on why I don’t like this game very much, like always, we’re going to have to start with the level design. And this is definitely my biggest point of contention with this game. Like I’ve said so many times you all are probably sick of it by now, the level design in Classic Mega Man is one of, if not, the defining factor in making classic Mega Man so great, especially since this is where you’ll be spending most of your time platforming, fighting all the enemies, using your special weapons, etc. So when your game fails at its level design, you’re not going to be having fun for most of your experience. Mega Man 8 is a great example of how poor level design can ruin an otherwise great game. It has a lot going for it, like great bosses, cool collectibles, and neat weapons and environmental interaction. However, the frustrating and boring level design just completely ruined it for me, and I just didn’t end up having much fun with the game. Unfortunately, Mega Man World 2 doesn’t fare much better here. The first issue I have with this game’s level design is some of the absolutely GOD AWFUL enemy placements in this game. I swear, in nearly every level, enemies are placed in a way where it’s either really awkward to take them out, or in a way where it’s damn near impossible to get by without taking damage. Like, good luck doing a no damage run of Air Man’s stage in this game. All of the fan enemies in this game are placed in a way where once they show up, you’re going to be taking damage from the cloud enemies around you because you’re pushed back into their drills. Or in Crash Man’s stage, where the tellies spawn below you, meaning that if you’re riding on the platform, you can’t even shoot them, forcing you to take damage unless you play around it in a really awkward way. Mega Man World 2 is full of awkward enemy placements like this, however, this isn’t my biggest issue with the level design here. While the bad enemy placements are annoying, they aren’t too big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. No, my biggest issue with Mega Man World 2 as a whole is that it is boring as SIN, in more ways than just one. Remember at the beginning of the review, how I discussed the undeserved reputation the Game Boy Mega Man games get? Like I mentioned earlier, the Mega Man World games tend to deviate their level designs from their NES counterparts in really creative ways, either by adding entirely new gimmicks, adding enemies from different stages, or just by using their already existing enemies in creative ways. However, Mega Man World 2 is basically the only entry in this series that opts not to do this. There are very few instances in this game where the levels attempt to deviate from their NES counterparts in any way. The only two that I can think of off the top of my head are some of the Needle Man elements in Wood Man’s stage, and the underwater section in Top Man’s stage. Hell, World 2 will often just shoddily port over rooms and even entire sections from the NES games! And, I’d at least be a lot more forgiving of this, if not for the fact that the levels themselves are insanely unmemorable and boring. Mega Man World 2’s levels suffer from what I like to call “Seven Sirens Syndrome”, where the levels of the game feel like nothing more than going through the motions, without attempting to take any risks or exciting the player in any way. And unfortunately, even with its original rooms and ideas, Mega Man World 2 doesn’t make me feel anything with its levels. Like yeah, it’s certainly a Mega Man stage, but it feels like nothing more than just shooting at enemies used in the most mundane ways possible while occasionally jumping across platforms. It also doesn’t help that this game is insanely easy. Even when you do take damage from an unfair enemy placement, it’s not much, and you’re probably not taking damage from anything else. The frequent health powerups appearing throughout these stages don’t help matters here either. And look, I don’t mind an easy game at all. Pokemon Omega Ruby is one of my all-time favorite games. But when your easy game starts to border on mind-numbingly boring, that’s where I start to take some issues. Mega Man World 2’s levels are just a whole bunch of nothing. Like the reputation of the Game Boy Mega Man series as a whole, they unfortunately remain nothing more than shoddy ports of much better NES stages that you’re better off playing instead.

I’m not going to go too in-depth on the bosses, because what did you expect? They’re, once again, exactly the same as their NES counterparts. I could go into detail again on how I’m not a big fan of the NES Robot Masters, but I’d like to take this time to discuss a change to one of the bosses that I liked. Specifically, Air Man and his tornado patterns. In the NES version, Air Man has a tornado pattern that is completely impossible for the player to dodge (unless they were to use, like, Item 1 or something). However, in Mega Man World 2, not only are all of Air Man’s patterns dodgeable without the need of a utility weapon, but they also make pretty great use of Mega Man’s slide. This is definitely a change I appreciated, as it makes Air Man’s fight a lot more fun to play than its NES version. As for the other fights, though, they’re pretty much exactly the same. And like their NES counterparts, they’re typically either way too easy to cheese, or rely on your inputs, making them way too hard if you don’t understand how they work. The overall selection of bosses is a bit better than Wily’s Revenge, but overall, I’m still not a big fan of them.

Mega Man World 2’s weapon roster is also not great, mainly because it suffers from a lot of the same issues that made Mega Man 2’s weapon roster pretty bad. I don’t feel like this is entirely the developers’ fault, as two of the weapons present in this game are Metal Blade and Mega Man 3’s Rush Jet, two of the most broken Mega Man weapons of all time. However, I do still feel like they should’ve at least attempted to balance these two weapons a bit, as they’re so overpowered, there’s basically no reason to use any of the other weapons. I did play the game without trying to use these weapons, as I wanted to give this game’s weapon roster a fair chance. Unfortunately, the other weapons are nowhere near as good, and only served to make the game’s weapon selection even more unbalanced. While there are some decent ones sprinkled in there, like Leaf Shield and Hard Knuckle, they’re situational at best and don’t see much use compared to your buster. What’s even worse is that they kept that dumbass immunity thing that 80% of Mega Man 2’s enemies had! Like, nearly every airborne enemy in this game is immune to the Air Shooter, and it’s like, where can I even USE this weapon then????? All this shitty mechanic serves to do is limit your experimentation with the weapons, which just doesn’t make any sense in a game series where you’re encouraged to do so. The weapon roster overall really did need some more fine tuning to make it actually balanced, because when you’re not using a weapon that breaks the game in two, you’re using a weapon that ranges from mediocre, to bad, to the Sakugarne. And let’s talk about the Sakugarne real quick. This is the weapon you get from the game’s special Robot Master, Quint, and it’s hands down the worst weapon in the game. It’s supposed to function like a pogo stick where you can bounce on enemies and traverse spikes, but not only can you NOT actually traverse spikes with this thing, but its damage output is laughably bad. Meanwhile, you’re still taking damage from enemies as you bounce on them while the energy gauge goes down faster than the short ass Wily stage where it’s your only chance to even use this weapon. Speaking of which, this seems like a good time to transition into the final part of the game, its endgame.

After beating the first four Robot Masters, like in Dr. Wily’s Revenge, you can move on to the Wily stage. After a cutscene with Mega Man and an oddly-chiseled Wily plays, you can actually get to the remaining 4 robot master stages from here, which is a pretty unique approach that hasn’t been done in a classic Mega Man game since. After you beat all 4 robot masters, you can finally face off against this game’s Mega Man Killer, Quint, a more powerful version of Mega Man sent from a distant future sent to destroy Mega Man. Oh man, this sounds so cool, I wonder how the fight is- aaaaand it’s the most miserable excuse for a Robot Master fight you’ve ever seen in your life. Like, I know I complained about the previous Mega Man Killers when talking about the other Mega Man World games, but at least their patterns are still well-designed, despite the less than stellar execution. But here, Quint just hops towards your location and just bounces on his pogo stick for like, 5 seconds. And that’s all he does for the entire fight! You might as well be handed Quint’s shitty weapon on a silver platter! It’s one of the most pathetic and lazily designed boss fights I’ve ever seen in a video game, and it’s over in like, 5 seconds on top of that. So much for a cool fight with your future self. Anyways, after Quint’s been defeated and you get his weapon, you can finally move on to Wily’s Space Fortress. Unfortunately, I don’t have anything positive to say about this stage. I don’t even have much to say about the stage at all. It’s insanely forgettable, because not only are all of the enemies and stage hazards just placed haphazardly with no real theme to them, but the stage itself is basically over before you know it. The same goes for all 3 Wily phases. They’re incredibly easy to dodge for a Wily fight, and forgettable to the point where I can’t even remember anything about any of the phases this time around. All I can recall about this fight is that after you defeat Wily, Mega Man chases down Wily’s ship and shoots him down with a missile, killing him and thus completely ignoring the very first law of robotics. And with that, the game’s finally over. I’m sorry, I know this part might feel completely anticlimactic to some of you, but this endgame has given me absolutely nothing new or interesting to say without repeating the same shit I’ve been saying about the stages for the whole review. Hell, I would’ve preferred the last stage be a little bit frustrating, or have spike drops like in Wily’s Revenge, because at least then it would’ve given me something, anything to talk about. Well, that technically is the end of Mega Man World 2, but I really don’t want to end off on a note as anticlimactic as this. So before we wrap this review up, I’m going to touch upon something that some of you have probably been clamoring for since the beginning of the review; the music.

I don’t normally ever mention the music when reviewing a Mega Man game, because good music is kind of a given when it comes to this series. Nearly every classic Mega Man track from 1-11 sounds amazing to me, on top of being extremely memorable and having a tendency to get stuck in your head quite easily. Because of this, I kinda find it redundant to mention the music when talking about this series because I mean, all of it sounds good! HOWEVER, Mega Man World 2 might be the only game in the series where this is not the case. You see, unlike the Minakuchi Game Boy games, Mega Man World 2 opts to create original tracks for its Robot Master stages as opposed to remixing them. And while this sounds like a good thing, man, these tracks sure are something. Nearly all of them “bless” your ears with incredibly jarring high pitched sounds that completely ruin the tracks, not at all helped by the awful high pitched sound effects that accompany you throughout the whole game. The thing is, the compositions themselves aren’t actually that bad, as composers like RushJet1 and Tpcool have made them sound great before. However, they’re completely ruined by the awful instruments that they’re cursed to be accompanied with. And with this, I feel like this is a perfect note to end this review off, because in a lot of ways, Mega Man World 2’s gameplay is a lot like its music. Because while Mega Man World 2’s great compositions still manage to sound like shit, its promising elements from Mega Man 2 and 3 still manage to be used in a way that’s both boring and frustrating at the same time. This game shouldn’t have been as mediocre as it ended up being, but it’s very clear to me that Thinking Rabbit put next to no care into this entry before releasing it onto store shelves. The stages are beyond bland and unmemorable, the weapon roster is unbalanced as all hell, and all the promising ideas it does have fall flat on their face. It kinda saddens me to say that out of all the Game Boy entries, this one really is nothing more than shoddily ported elements from the NES games with little thought or passion put into it. And while Minakuchi Engineering thankfully returned to do the rest of the Game Boy entries, there’s next to no reason to invest any time into this one. (4/10)

Barring the grating, off-key tracks in this game, this game plays a lot smoother than Rockman World 1 and your Rock Buster pellets shoot a lot faster too. This does a lot to make this experience more bearable than its predecessor. But where RMW1 was exceedingly difficult (for better and worse), RMW2 its exceedingly EASY. I got to max lives by the second level not even trying to grind for drops, lives were simply that abundant in the drop rates of enemies (unless I just got REALLY lucky?) Even after I quit the game for a few hours to play other games with my friends, I came back and got back to 9 lives and no game overs by the end of Wily Castle.

The game benefits the most from the addition of the Slide and Rush powerups. It's the most satisfying thing ever to finally be able to slide underneath Air Man's tornadoes lol. In some ways, I like this game more than its console counterpart for this reason.

Like with Enker, you get a pretty cool weapon from beating Quint in Wily Castle: Sakugarne. And similarly, you really don't get to utilize it that much, unfortunately. It's Wily's weakness, but you take contact damage from using it against him in a three-phase fight, so it's not a very fair tradeoff. And any situation you might want to use Sakugarne in, Rush Coil is just better.

Also I thought it was cool that Quint is apparently Rockman from the future. I'm curious how Quint fits into the storyline if he's from 32,000~ years in the future with a Rock that's reverted back to a house-keeping robot when the Rockman X series shows that Rock is nowhere to be found only 100 years into the future. I've been told that the World games are all canon somehow, and that I should play them before 10, so I'm curious to know if Quint ever makes/will make a reappearance in future games to explain this.

I ran into a funny glitch that, because the game doesn't pause to refill Health or Weapon Energy, if you pause and switch weapons while Weapon Energy is refilling, your other weapon will stop filling up and the new one will continue filling up from where the other one stopped.

I loved the Wily Station level with the Salvadore Dali background. I can only imagine how great this would look in full color (really wishing Mega Man Mania wasn't cancelled).

Overall, if I was a kid with a Game Boy dying to play Rockman on the go, I think I'd be happy to own both Rockman World titles I've played so far for theoretical car trips in the 90s. They're not spectacular, but they're serviceable.

You ever wind up being the B-Team to a B-Team and have to make a Mega Man 2 demake for the Game Boy in roughly 6 months?

Imagine if you were in that circumstance, and proceeded to only demake half of Mega Man 2, because that first B-Team already used the other half of the game's bosses in their Mega Man 1 demake. But god help you, you need to pad the game out, so you then throw in half of Mega Man 3 for no fucking reason other than some weird ass sense of tradition, before having you fight the easiest boss in the entire franchise who gives you a weapon that will literally kill you for using it, and will kill you faster than the boss that's supposedly weak to it. Also you've inexplicably made a Mega Man game thats braindead easy for 90% of its runtime, and has a Sonic Chronicles tier soundtrack to top it off.

Honestly, the only point the game made my neurones fire off anything at all was when I walked right onto the second screen of Metal Man's stage and immediately fell onto a pit of spikes, probably the single worst first impression a game has given me.

How to counter Mega Man II bossfights:
Metal Man: Quick Boomerang/Metal Blade
Air Man: Leaf Shield
Wood Man: Atomic Fire
Crash Man: Save State/Load State

This was the only one in the series that was a replay for me. These games (as I'm sure many reading this are aware) are quite a bit harder to find in the States, and they go for quite a heftier price tag over there as well, so this was all I had for GB-based Mega Man when I was younger. I remembered it being fairly easy, which is why the difficulty of the first entry in the series had caught me a bit off guard in how difficult it was, but after all that other Mega Man, it was quite jarring to go back to something quite so easy as this. It took me around an hour and a half to beat the Japanese version of the game.

Most of these GameBoy Mega Man games don't really have much of a story beyond "Wily is back, go beat him", and despite the fact that it wasn't made by the same company as the first GB Mega Man game, this one is no exception. Like in the first Rock Man World game, Wily is back and he's brought four robot masters from the NES game that this shares a number with, and four from the next one. In this case, that means four robot masters from Mega Man 2 (the four who weren't in the last game), and four from Mega Man 3. However, unlike the first GB game, the second group of four robot masters actually have their own stages instead of just filling the void of the boss rush. That makes for eight robot masters stages, one big Wily stage, and a special boss unique to this game: Quint.

This game isn't just easy, it's way too easy. And not in the way that NES Mega Man 2's normal mode is quite easy compared to a lot of the other NES games, but it's so easy it's often downright boring. It has the same "Mega Man is just too big" stage design as the first GB game, but things just mostly feel a bit too empty and slow as a result. The gameplay isn't terribly snappy because there just isn't much to fear for your death other than falling into the pits littered about the place. But those slow stages give way to very simple boss fights that are for the most part pretty easy with the mega buster and comically simple with the boss's weakness. Even Quint is a pretty underwhelming boss fight. Add in that you also have the slide dash from Mega Man 3 and E-tanks from Mega Man 2 and you have a game that is super duper forgiving to the point that it really fails to make much of an impression at all.

The presentation is fine, but really not that memorable in any particular way. It's a good recreation of the sprites they're going for, but it still feels very simplified and "NES Lite" in its presentation. That extends to the music as well, which delivers a few less than inspired new tracks as well as just adequate iterations of the included robot masters' themes.


Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. If you're in the mood for an easier Mega Man game, this will certainly fit the bill. I don't really have much all to say about this game other than that it's too easy for its own good. That isn't inherently a flaw, but for a series like Mega Man, it means that a lot of veterans will likely come away from this game not feeling terribly satisfied. Rock Man World 2 succeeds in being a competent action platformer, but it fails in delivering what most fans would probably want from their 8-bit Mega Man.

Pretty good! I had a little moment with this one outside of the intended game, as I realised retroachievements had an achievement for beating each robot master buster only, and decided that sounded really fun, and you know what? It was! The mega-compact boss areas lend themselves really well to a tight back and forth combat that’s more engaging than just cheesing it with the correct weapon, and it forced me to be a better player and survive longer. And by freeing up my weapons I got to use them more in stages, which made those feel less limited. A winning strategy that I might do again in the future.

The 4 plus 4 approach to Robot Masters feels stronger here for the second wave all getting stages (and passwords, thankfully). It substantially fleshes the game out over its predecessor and gives the new dev team more space to work out what the hell a Mega Man game should even be. I feel like they do a fairly decent, if limited, job on these. Like none of these levels are memorable, and they all sound terrible, but they feel like Mega Man in a way that satisfies enough to keep you playing.

Wily is… too easy in this, and bizarrely small, though not as easy as Quint, a sub-boss so easy that he doesn’t even get a health bar. Still, you get a hilarious pogo stick/piledriver, which is a fun reward that late in the game.

Finally, a shout out to Rush, who once again gets to be good AND not be clothing, which is every dog’s dream. I enjoy seeing him next to Mega Man on the weapon get screen, one of the cutest in the franchise. I don’t want to keep judging these games by how they use Rush, but I’m quickly realising that he’s the canary down the coal mine for Mega Man. Happy dog, happy life. Three stars.

A definite step forward from the first Mega Man on Game Boy, but still not a huge leap. The stages and Robot Masters are designed a bit better, the music is way less grating, and the game is quick and eminently playable. I’m also a big fan of the weapon from Quint (the second of the “Mega Man Killers”), which is a… bladed pogo stick named Sakugarde? Unfortunately, you only get to use the Sakugarde for a single level, and then you get what might be the lamest Wily fight that I’ve seen in ANY Mega Man game.

Mega Man II is fine, but there’s a good reason why it’s a footnote beneath the NES’s stellar Mega Man 2.

Maybe it's just relief to actually enjoy Mega Man again after coming from Dr. Wily's Revenge, but Mega Man II was a way more enjoyable experience than I was expecting. Nothing flashy, or even anything amazing. But just coherent, well put together levels and action platforming that you've come to enjoy from the Mega Man series. The focus on vertical stages instead of the typical screen scroll was much appreciated, and even the traditional screen scroll sections felt much better by comparison.

Still it's a Game Boy Mega Man title, so it's nothing spectacular. The music is actually...worse somehow from the previous game, which blows. Also sucks there's no original Mega Man Killer in this game. But outside of some minor level design gripes, this is a title much more respectful of your time.

This game fixes a lot of the issues of the first game like the screen crunch and (mostly fixes) the unfair screens. But in exchange, this game does several things worse.

The issue that this game is most well known for is every single sound being an octave too high. This makes all the sound effects and especially BGM hard to listen to, but listening to the corrected soundtrack it's okay. I did miss the arranges of the NES music the last game went with as here they are all original tracks, but songs from Mega Man 2 like Metal Man's theme, wood man (very nice) and Top 27 Anime Boobs (aka Crash Man) are iconic tracks that I would have loved to hear in a Game Boy style arrangement.

These versions of the GB stages feel closer to their NES counterparts, which is a little less exciting as when playing the previous title I only had half of an idea of what to expect and would be surprised by what other elements (or even unique elements) would be thrown in. Now it feels like portable versions of the NES stages, for better or worse, which made me wonder why I wasn't playing those games instead. The fall into spikes and die rooms from Wily's Castle were moved to Metal Man way earlier in the game and the Yoku Blocks feel far less consistant here than in the previous game. Despite this the game as a whole is overall notably easier than the first since everything else is much more fair, but really that translates to blowing through it a lot quicker. The bosses are copy-pasted from the NES so expect to take hits on some bosses, but E-Tanks are in abundance in this game so you'll never really have an issue.

The stage count increases from 6 to 9, as the game handles its Robot Master roster in an interesting way: the first 4 you'll know who you pick, but in the second half you won't know who's stage you're going to in a blind playthrough until it's already begun. This also allows you more time with the second half of the weapon roster (which pulls from Mega Man 3) allowing them to actually see practical use.

Speaking of Mega Man 3, the slide and Rush parts are also here which are a welcome addition. They're all their MM3 counterparts except Rush Marine controls worse. This means you have the busted Rush Jet that never gets used up if you spam jumps while on him! Don't forget the Metal Blades are in this game, meaning you have all the tools you need to blast through the stages with reckless abandon once you get those two.

In some ways it's a better experience than the previous, but I think I prefer that game to this, as its challenge at least justified its short length while here you get both the best weapon and transport item in Mega Man history in an already fairly easy game.

Does the game not stopping when you heal/grab energy feel uncanny or is it just a me thing?