In a similar vein to how Mega Man 2 had caught me by surprise on how competent it was on my revisit, I had forgotten just how unpolished this game was.

If I was rating only the 8 first stages, and ONLY their level design, this would probably be a 7 or an 8, but that would require one to ignore just how baffling the hitboxes are, how the game sometimes eats your inputs, the massive amount of lag this game has even for NES standards, the lack of actual patterns on certain bosses, and the absolute nonsensically designed second half of the game that genuinely is on the running for some of the worst this franchise can provide.

If this game HAD the time to be developed it could've been great, there's clearly a lot of potential here and a lot of passion by the development team, but as you can clearly see by the stage select visual glitch that has never been fixed in any version of this game, it seems that Capcom didn't and doesn't care, after all, we still have people to this day arguing if this hot mess of a game (that unironically can be compared to Sonic 06 at times) is the best Mega Man up there with Mega Man 2.