judging this game by its “hard” content is kind of a wash because there are only 3 good dungeons, it is extremely easy, and it is blatantly a shell of a much more ambitious game. however every aspect of the visual design from the environments to the character design and animation is totally immaculate and that gives it charm and mood still unmatched in this series. hell even the cutscene direction is unusually good.

btw anyone who says the hd version is better belongs in jail. it looks like a bad reshade plugin it is so ugly

It's honestly kind of amazing how this game even exists. The first game wasn't successful, so this was made during the developers' free time while they worked on other projects, it only had 3-4 months of development time, and still somehow managed to be better than Mega Man 1 in every way, be considered the best Mega Man game on the NES, and is arguably the best game on the console. It's one of those game design miracle stories that are really crazy to think about.

As for the game itself, it's just as surprising. Basically everything has been improved, to the point where the game is actually fun to play now. Like even separated from the original game, Mega Man 2 is just really fun to play. The core gameplay is solid, the weapons are fun to play with, it looks really good, it performs flawlessly for NES standards, and the music SLAPS. Easily the best part of the game is the soundtrack; I listen to it all the time.

Give this one a shot. I think it's one of the few NES games that's actually worth your time nowadays, and it's easily my personal favorite.

This game represents the worst practices of video games as an industry and the most mediocre vision as a media.
The main experience revolves around getting characters and then leveling them up in an endless repetitive farming cycle as with any soulless Diablo derivative successor (as Diablo III). You get those characters via a bullshit gacha system, you level up using a bunch of currencies you use to take part in some events that are crucial to getting that leveling up, limiting your freedom of action for an amount of time unless you pay. You get the deal, right?
And besides all that the game offers a vast world to be explored filled with adventures, or that's what one could think at first glance because it only serves to players recreation with a dull and mediocre little puzzle here and a repetitive mindless fight there.
As a final note, I'll say I find it shameless how it takes a lot of things from other games added so mindlessly and only to work as fanservice, as with the character design or narrative.

As someone who doesn't appreciate the original that much nowadays, this made me retroactively reconsider the qualities of the first game.

Comparisons are odious, but not only this is (partially) a remake, the game keeps throwing references to past entries, so ignoring the context would really need a lot of will. The weird thing is that the game seems to take the worst from the first entry and throw out the good stuff. I didn't notice until playing this one, but the original Ratchet and Clank had some genuinely funny dialogues, every scene managed to add a bit of flavor to the overall adventure. In the new game it seems like nobody wanted to develop this, everyone sounds bored, the infobots videos are all forgettable, you'll curse the guy who invented dialogs during gameplay. Hell, I don't think that Ratchet and Clank actually talk between themselves more than 4 or 5 times, do they even know each other by the end of the adventure?

I would try to keep the visual aspect on the "personal" terrain, I still think that the original game made environments that suggested more life beyond the game horizons than this generic sci-fi filtered look, but that may be memories from when I was a kid. What is not a trick from nostalgia is how the new visual style is straightforward eye-painful. Especially in the night levels, the led saturation makes the game really hard to look at for a few minutes, like trying to read a scenary oversaturated with junk wasn't hard enough.

What ends up bothering me the most is how the game shows briefly some good qualities in ways that never dares to take seriously. Using an unreliable narrator could bring up some nice variety and surprises, it is hinted in a joke where Quark says: "and then a dinosaur appeared" but is quickly cut. Why not show a dinosaur? Traveling between planets should already give enough freedom to put whatever funny nonsense comes to mind. I was also surprised with the level where you can freely fly and explore (I think the exploration is what I liked the most). It's a nice reinterpretation of Clank's whateveriscalled rocket power up, but then the game goes and shuts that idea into a single planet and a few more punctual exceptions. When some fun is accidentally added there is always a quick response with an apology.

I gave it a good fifteen hours but was bored. It's not terrible or anything, there's just nothing that feels new or interesting for me.

Feels like another game that's a variation on the same open-world "narrative epic" I've played a thousand times before. Picking shit up and crafting. Pinging my radar thing to find items, climbing big shit to unlock map stuff. Repeat.

No thank you.