this is one of the most story-heavy megaman games you can find. it has a real story, not just a different letter before the boss door (although it does also have a different letter before the boss door) all the strongest robot masters have conveniently gathered in one place, but oh no! they were unexpectedly reprogrammed by mr. x, the owner of the x corporation formerly known as twitter.
for the robot masters there was a very interesting idea here. you see, the developers took a look at mega man 5, in particular napalm man, and they noticed that napalm man's stage had gotten the game banned in vietnam for being unfathomably insensitive to vietnam war victims, and so they thought: well, what if we got banned in every country? - and thus the racial caricature genre of robot master was born. consider flame man: the developers wanted to make a middle eastern stage, so they did a brainstorm and the first things they wrote down were: "turban" and "oil". i'm just really glad they hadn't figured out they could make female robot masters too yet or we would've gotten Burqa woman. and of course tomahawk man is pretty self-explanatory.
so now half the robot masters are themed around countries instead of pokemon types, making the matchups make sense is understandably a little bit more difficult than usual. Although they did cheat and make a handful of them pokemon types anyway, corresponding to the classic stereotypes that in canada it is cold, in the middle east it is hot, in brazil there are plants i guess, and in china there is wind. the classic stereotype that everywhere in china has wind in it. Since the robot masters are all based on countries, figuring out the weaknesses requires a strong knowledge of world history. for example, take yamato man and tomahawk man, representing japan and the united states. which one wins? well, i don't know if you folks know much about world war 2, but japan was actually, involved, and, well, the united states actually (history buffs will know this) threw a tomahawk at them.
i've heard one of the main criticisms against the gameplay being that you now cannot do a slide and then press the jump button before the slide has finished occurring. apparently that's the biggest gripe with megaman 6, as if the average person gives a shit about that or would even notice. personally i think there are bigger issues.
in terms of gameplay, megaman 6 does bring something actually new to the table - in lieu of Rush The Dog we now have a set of bodily augmentations. now your first instinct upon using these might be to say "these look exactly like the regular rush adaptors". and you'd be close: they are the same, but they don't drain ammo and they also have a six-second unskippable cutscene every time you try to switch to them. the other difference is that you no longer get one for free at the start of the game like rush jet, but each one comes with beating either flame man or plant man, along with their actual weapons. so the game leans heavily on incentivizing you to get these bodily augmentations. especially the wily stages really do not go ten seconds without making you use one, and it gives me body dysmorphia. there are power blocks absolutely everywhere, including several in flame man's stage (which is completely pointless considering you get the power suit by beating flame man's stage) and all of the enemies are now way stronger in comparison to all the normal weapons, which basically makes those all useless. i mean the weapons are extremely uncreative anyway, i don't think there's even a single one this one that isn't a clone of an older weapon. it also makes the game way too unforgiving if you don't have the suits. you basically have zero chance of beating any of the levels without getting these things, which ruins the difficulty curve, and ruins the main attraction of a megaman game, which is to actually use the fucking weapons.
and think about how the gameplay is actually like once you do get them. the power suit allows you to beat most of the minibosses and enemies basically instantly by just walking up and spamming punch at them, and the jet one allows you to just fly past all of the platforming parts, effectively removing platforming from the game. so what's the point of even playing? Megaman is an action-platformer. if you remove the action and also remove the platformer, then the only thing left is - .
the wily stages, including the mr. x stages thanks elon musk, are entirely unremarkable and last way too long. they're basically half the game and they shouldn't be. almost every one has several new level gimmicks, and that is not the purpose of a wily stage. another issue with having eight original wily stages is that the actual robot master stages are noticeably shorter, since there is a finite amount of space on a NES cartridge. the whole game suffers.
anyway i know you're not playing a NES game for the graphics (thats what atari is for) but this one really works within its limitations. Parts of this game look like they'd be more at home on the sega genesis than an 8 bit console. all you have to do is compare the stage select screens between mm6 and the blank blue void of megaman 1 and it becomes clear that the designers were working from years of experience with nes games by this point.
Riddle me this, liberal: yamato man claims to be "impregnable", but yet all i have to do is go to google, turn off safesearch, and type in "yamato man mpreg", and lo and behold!
i actually really like the around-the-world concept, but these robot masters need some revisions- i'm not saying i could do better, but i've workshopped some ideas here:
representing australia - clown man. clown man is actually canonically australian already, so i think this fits perfectly. it also reflects the activities of the average australia pretty well.
representing the united kingdom - margaret thatcher but a robot. personally, i think a robot master should be intimidating and scary (terrifying, really) so since this is one of the scariest things britain has to offer i think it works.
representing france - baguette man. this is a stupid joke
representing the united states - keep tomahawk man, but we change his design to be like that washington sports team and we also change his name to a racial slur
representing saudi arabia - burqa woman. it's hip, it's progressive, also traditional, and anti-progressive, it pleases everyone. im into it!
representing antarctica - ice. theres not really people in antarctica so it doesnt really make sense to have a man type robot master, but theres definitely ice, so we can have ice
representing the country of vatican city - bible man. this guy is already an established hit, i think we can get the IP, and plus vatican city residents are a hugely underrepresented group in media, so we need to fix that.
representing the country of egypt - pharaoh man. this one is less resource-intensive too because you can just copy the megaman 4 stage with no changes.
representing the country of europe - metric system man. it represents the culture perfectly.
representing the country of latin america - goku.
i chose not to include any balkan countries because i'm pretty sure they already do this in real life, but if youll recall earlier when i said i couldn't do better, i have changed my mind; these are way better, and my ego is absolutely massive.
megaman 6 has the best presentation of any megaman up until that point. its music keeps the soundtrack quality from megaman 5 but also draws from so many genres and cultures while still combining them in a consistent way. it even has my third favorite boolean operator: nor! it would honestly be perfect if it was enjoyable to actually play. sadly, the great level design which it's full of is ruined by incompetent and gimmicky overall design choices to make one massive missed opportunity. now, this could all be fixed if they had just removed all the weapons and replaced them with more bodily augmentations. i want to see one where megaman's arms are replaced with ten new legs, like some type of lovecraftian, eldritch beast. how about one where megaman just has his nails done, and that's it. also there should have been more racial stereotypes.

this lineup of robot masters has absolutely zero rhyme or reason. and honestly i am fine with levels based on completely random bullshit, i think it's neat to see like umbrella man's weapon versus type-ii superconductor man. and in this game we finally get to see who would win in a fight between a train and a large boulder. the issue there is that, if youre gonna do that, the matchups still need to make sense. For example: a gyroscope is one of the least likely things I can think of to theme a killing machine around, a gyroscope is a mechanical device that uses physics tricks to balance itself perfectly when it's turned in different directions, regardless of gravity. You could say, that the purpose of a gyroscope is to beat gravity. If I tried to think of one thing that could beat a robot whose powers are manipulating gravity, it would be a gyroscope. unfortunately, the weaknesses here aren't based on logic, they're based on vague, loose word association, so gravity man beats gyro man instead, which is the the opposite of what it should be. so i dont understand what the point of making gyro man named that in the first place even is. neither his stage nor his weapon nor really his design actually have any relation to a gyroscope, it's just an airman clone.
i think there should be a robot master themed around my uncle ralph.
this is another game that has eight wily stages (too many) but half of them just have dark man as a boss, megaman's first PoC robot master! you can tell the boss fights are half baked with him, but he's such a cutie pie that i cant help but forgive him. the castle aesthetic is pretty neat but as usual there's way too much original stuff here, these stages could easily have been made into their own robot masters. the wily bosses that are actually original are pretty rad though.
megaman 5 has this unique ability to be completely uncreative in the most creative way possible. nothing is unique about the gameplay formula compared to the previous games at all, the matchups make no sense, the wily stages take way too long, and the weapons are completely phoned-in, useless, unoriginal, or all three, so the game forces you to use overpowered the charge shot the whole time. the music this time is great though. instead of strong melodies each song is kind of all over the place, but each song has this wonderful way of mixing genres together to indicate the robot master's theming perfectly. very reminiscent of a movie soundtrack to me.
It is definitely the same formula as the games that came before it, but perfected into the best version of that formula. sadly it's all plagiarized from Megaman for GameGear.