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All of this is to say that Mega Man 3 Revamped fixes all of this and then some. All of the slowdown is gone. The Top Spin now has a hitbox that doesn't mean you'll take damage yourself using it, nor does it randomly have a chance of using up all its energy in one go (Spark Shock still seems to be a bit useless unfortunately). Hitboxes and damage values across the board have been tweaked for the better, making the Doc Robot fights in particular much more reasonable. The controls now feel more like the latter NES games, it might just be placebo but the original 3's controls always felt a bit light and prone to eating inputs to me. There's plenty of visual additions ranging from small details to new background elements to visual revamps for the Doc Robot revisits. The addition of an opening cutscene (with great spritework to boot!) helps make the whole package feel more cohesive. Assets that went unused in the original game have been restored, such as the extended versions of two music tracks. I could rattle on all the changes for hours, but the point is that anything that made 3 feel unpolished or even incomplete in comparison to say, Mega Man 4, has been fixed here.
Revamped's greatest triumph lies in its reworking of the original game's level design. Revamped is still Mega Man 3 at heart, almost all the setpieces you remember from the original are still here. However, many sections have seen tweaks to be more forgiving to the player or to make greater use of level specific gimmicks. There are also plenty of new screens that also serve to use level specific gimmicks more, as well as to introduce them in safer environments before the real test later on. Top Man's stage is a great example. Remember the spinning top platforms that only showed up at the end of the stage in the original? Here, they're on 3 different parts of the level. The first in a safe environment, the second soon after where you now need to use them to cross a spiked floor, and the third is mostly the same as the original, just with an added challenge just before the boss door. Stuff like this is all over Revamped. Sure, there are a couple parts that have been removed, like the screens with the Mets in Top Man's stage or the Hammer Joes in Hard Man's, but they're in service of what I consider to be genuinely better level design.
All of these level design improvements also apply to the Doc Robot stages, which are the most contentious part of the original Mega Man 3. The Doc Robot stages reuse assets from four of the standard Robot Master levels with revamped, much more difficult level designs. In addition, they feature two Doc Robot fights which are rematches against the Mega Man 2 bosses, now in a one-size-fits-all Doc Robot model and a new set of weaknesses to figure out. These were my least favorite part in the original, but they're much improved here. Just like before, the level designs have been tweaked to be more fair and to use stage elements in ways that surpass the original. The Doc Robot fights themselves are much more manageable largely thanks to their decreased hitboxes, as they felt nigh impossible to jump over in the original.
The Wily stages are where Revamped's level design shines the most. In vanilla MM3, the Doc Robot stages are where the difficulty peaked. In comparison, the Wily stages were a complete joke. They were way too short, and were more likely to throw energy refills and extra lives at you than any actual challenge. Here in Revamped though, they're completely in line with the Wily levels in the rest of the series. Now the Wily levels are the "final exam" that test you on all your skills and knowledge of previous enemies and stage hazards, mixing and matching them in ways that still feel fresh. Elements from the original stages are still here, like the water segments in Wily 1, but they're used in way more challenging and engaging ways than before. To anyone that might be afraid that Revamped softens Mega Man 3's difficulty, the Wily stages are here to disprove that. Ultimately, 3 is still a challenge, only now that challenge is more evenly distributed throughout the game.
I absolutely adored my time with Mega Man 3 Revamped. It took a game that I had conceded for a while wasn't the true best in the series, and put it right back in the running for that title. This is a must play for anyone that's ever tried Mega Man 3, from its diehards to those who couldn't stand it. I guarantee you'll come out of it with a renewed or newly found appreciation for it. I can't give enough props to the developer, TheSkipper1995, as well as the developer of Mega Man 3 Improvement, KujaKiller. I hadn't mentioned it until now, but Revamped is a hack of a hack, building on top of Mega Man 3 Improvement. I haven't played Improvement, but to my understanding it's the hack that focused on QoL improvements such as the opening cutscene and fixes for bugs and slowdown, while Revamped focused on the level design reworks as well as further QoL additions.
One more thing, shoutouts to Jay Eazy. If it weren't for January 7th becoming what I'm assuming will now be a Mega Man fan holiday I wouldn't have discovered this as soon as I did.