If Mega Man 9 was a stunning return to form, this was demonstrative of the trap of making Mega Man. It’s good, it’s still very good, but when it’s so similar to MM9 it often feels like a needless sequel, more of the same, et cetera. The exact sort of accusations that got thrown at the later games in the original NES six!

I think what it does well it does VERY well. It’s precision-platforming with twitch reactions to myriad threats, capped off with a boss fight at the end of each section. The balance is a little different to MM9, in that the levels feel easier and the robot masters harder, putting them about level, but I much preferred MM9’s method of hard levels and robot masters as a twee little reward at the end. But then I often find what I want and what the developers and more general fanbase want to be at odds.

Which brings me to the story. It’s unobtrusive, which is all I ever want, but also daft as a bag of hammers. The threat of roboenza is the sort of Saturday morning cartoon stuff that the animé-oriented direction of many Mega Man games strives for, but… I dunno, I actually kind of like it. It’s that step beyond serious, into knowingly absurd. A flu for robots. A virus? But literally the sniffles. That’s brilliant, and being kept to the sidelines it was just a goofy little thing to smile about while my poor brain recovered from whatever challenges I’d just faced.

The Wily castle run is possibly an all-timer, held back only by those pods containing abilities from earlier robot masters. I know people hated Doc Robot (more fool them I loved it), but at least that had personality, and moved about and stuff! Watching orange squares slide about summoning tornadoes and doing mysterious slashes is just… nothing. But yes those aside it’s a delight, pushing me just enough to need to get up and walk around, or maybe squeeze my controller until the plastic creaks a little, but never enough to throw a great big wobbly. That’s the difficulty I want in video games.

I don’t know if I’d have been satisfied if this was it. If MM9 was the end it would feel like a triumphant retro celebration. If this was, it’d feel like getting a little more juice out of the lemon (ha), nothing more.

Good thing there’s one more game to go. Review 100 approaches. Mega Man 11 approaches.

Inti Creates, right? When Mega Man 9 came out they were ten years deep in the game, and had made some 18 games and (two hidden psx gems aside) had mostly seen success in the seven Mega Man games they'd made alongside Capcom, especially the legendary GBA series Mega Man Zero. So it makes sense that these were the guys to be trusted with the 9th entry in the classic series, which had been lying dormant for a good while. You'd expect them to be a safe bet, as long as they didn't do Battle Chip Challenge again.

It was, indeed, safe. Mega Man 9 is every bit a classic Mega Man game with the fat stripped out. Forget the charge shot, forget the slide (I miss the slide), forget the anime leanings, this is Mega Man as it suits ME, a gameplay-first experience that highlights the things that made the first couple of games as brilliant as they were, with only a few shiny new level gimmicks lumped in along the way.

It's not particularly original. Robot Masters and their weapons rarely surprise, and some weapons are just slightly more busted versions of fan-favourites, but it's game 9 in a series! Originality is optional at this point! We're all getting old and we just need Mega Man to jump, shoot, kill, and for Wily to appear and disappear in a little pod for the final battle. That'll do, just this once.

What we get instead of originality is polish, and MM9 has this in spades. Everything feels good, everything is clear, understandable, interacts cleanly and does what you want it to do. This shines most in the actual level designs, the real stars versus the robot masters, challenging but not unfair jaunts through enemy territory where you can use the robot master's weakness to progress easier, but YOU NEED THAT FOR THE BOSS. Elegant. Simple. Choices.

If I had three criticisms, and I do, it's that the designers love spikes too much, that I have no idea how I was supposed to know to use concrete on lava, and that the store is more pointless than ever.

Instant death is miserable, and Mega Man having it via endless spikes is just an admittance that the designers couldn't build ample threat elsewhere. It betrays a lack of diversity of thought, that no-one was bring enough ideas to the table to lessen their presence.

Seriously, why does concrete temporarily freeze lava. How does that work? What's supposed to prompt a-ha style seratonin here? Concrete. Sure.

The store is just wank. The energy balancer should be a default option. E Tanks should be in more stages as side challenges. Lives do not matter in this game at all thanks to the save system. Everything else feels like so much fluff (sorry Eddy and Beat) and it just leads to you going into Plug Man's stage, standing under a pipe or two, and leaving your game an hour or so it can grind endlessly with the power of diamonds. Get rid of it, or get ideas for more fun shit to do with it beyond taking your helmet off a bit or Roll looking a bit different. Awful thing.

But those are petty complaints. I genuinely love this game and would rank it up with the best in the series. Well, not up with Mega Man 3, but as close as it can get to that without its wings of wax melting.

Four stars, and don't you forget it.