This is Maximalist Mega Man. Everything is turned up to near-excess, including the difficulty. This romhack is appropriately hyped up in the community but I was caught off guard with how difficult it was. Each of the eight opening levels is as hard as the Wily Stages of other Mega Man games and at least 50% longer, usually with a couple extra mini-boss fights.

By the middle-late game I was getting used to the challenge but the final couple levels (including the Wily fights) were too much for me. I was playing with save states thinking that I could never beat this romhack legit, at least not anytime soon. Seriously, this romhack is harder than Mega Man 9.

That said, the game does give you a lot of safety nets (and there are plenty of assist features). There are a couple moments in the game where the game hands you a bunch of pickups (weapon energy, lives, E-tanks) to refill your stocks although it all feels very inelegant. If this romhack has any flaw is that it's inelegant. The game likes to pit you against a lot of different obstacles at once, usually pushing the NES hardware to its graphical limit. To compensate, you often find pickups waiting for you on common pathways. It's the ballistic solution to ballistic difficulty: give the player lots of health pickups to keep their health bar up.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but even a single early level can be a trial. The good news is that there are plenty of mechanics that even the odds for you and are considerate to the playing experience (for example, weapon energy refilling a bit each time you die). The weapons are great, if maybe overpowered. I found myself using the Dive Man weapon– with its 8-way shooting ability– more than any other. Getting the traversal items was a nail-biting challenge although the items are very powerful if obtained.

What makes this romhack special isn’t just the impressive technical aspect, like all sorts of enemies and gameplay types packed into the game, it’s the fact that the creators made something that is distinctly Mega Man but also has its own identity. There’s swaths of creativity in how levels unfold and the kind of gameplay detours that Minus Infinity takes. The creators made decisions with this romhack that hadn't been made before my Mega Man proper and they had their own spin on it.

This truly is one of the best romhacks.

Although still one of my favourite games for the PSX, this latest playthrough of FF9 made me turn on the game. A little bit, anyway.

Everyone complains about the slow combat but the combat is not just slow, it’s janky. There are pauses between every little thing and attacks and effects can queue up so you can select Vivi to cast Fire and then have to wait for 7 other combatants to take their turn before he uses it and by then he might have been hit with an attack and got KO’d. The battles of FF9 are massively frustrating.

Zooming out, what hurts the gameplay of FF9 the most is that while the mechanics are neat, most of their substance is wasted. A lot of small factors come together to invalidate a lot of skills and strategy that FF9 offers like passive skills and special abilities. It’s simply not fun to sink one’s teeth into the details of FF9’s gameplay.

I like the story and the characters although I find Zidane a little annoying and many characters have their arc concluded by the time Disc 3 arrives so they don’t have much presence once they hit their climax. It’s weird. I love this steampunk fantasy world, though. Not just the aesthetics, but the world and it’s mysterious lands. It’s a very mysterious fantasy planet.

A very solid game, though. Has a lot of great moments and I’m glad to have played it. This might be the last time, though. It took me almost two decades but I beat Ozma and now I’m ready to close the book on this one.

A pretty solid venture for the franchise.

People will complain about the movement in this game but even if Mega Man feels slower, I don't think it hurts the game. There's never a point where Mega Man's speed was an issue for me.

The music is pretty great even if the soundfont is a little weird. The game has an 80s future synth sound to it which I've grown accustomed to although the soundfont is shared with the SFX and many of them sound weak.

The level design is pretty solid with some cool gimmicks and I like the shop system and the powerup system where there are a bunch of powerups hidden around the world beyond your boss weapons and you can buy them from the shop or find them. It's the perfect progression for a classic Mega Man game.

The bosses are either damn easy once you have their weapon weakness, or awfully hard. Slash Man and Burst Man some of the hardest bosses in the game. The Wily Stage bosses are not very hard.

Speaking of the Wily Stages, Mega Man 7 breaks the traditions of all previous mainline games in that you can take a break between Wily Stages instead of having to do them sequentially with no chance to visit the shop or even explore previous stages. I prefer the line of Wily Stages in a row but it's a nice change. The game is audacious in that it sticks the 8 Robot Master rematch right before the two-stage final boss, which the second stage of the final boss being one of the hardest fights in the franchise.

The boss weapons are pretty solid it feels like there are some holes missing in the arsenal. On the other hand, I was inclined to use a lot of boss weapons even with the S. Adapter powerup.

A solid final outing for the last Mega Man game. I prefer Rush being out there as a dog and not Mega Man's armour, but the Super Armour is a cool idea. The mega buster isn't as overpowered as it was in *5* and the boss weapons are very useful.

Maybe what makes the game so easy is that everything is very useful. It also helps that the X/Wily stages aren't very sadistic.

Most importantly, the music is great. This could be the best Mega Man soundtrack on the NES. It goes to show that even late in the NES's lifespan, people were still cranking out great tunes.