This was the first Mega Man GameBoy game I played after the first game, and I was expecting something more like Mega Man 2 had been when I was a kid. I figured that since the first GameBoy game was so difficult, the second game must set the trend for a generally easier experience than their NES counterparts. Hooooo boy was I in for a very rude awakening with just what a tough bastard this game is ^^;. Capcom returned to the company that made the first GameBoy Mega Man game for this one, and after criticisms (like I'd had) that Rock Man World 2 was too easy, they cranked the lever HARD in the other direction for easily one of the toughest Mega Man games out of all the 8-bit entries. It took me about 2.5 hours to get through this trial of a handheld Mega Man game.

Once again, the conceit here is that Dr. Wily is back again with two sets of four robot masters plucked from two different NES games. In this case, it's four from Mega Man 3 (the four who weren't in Rock Man World 2) and four from Mega Man 4. For the first four, they flow pretty well and do a good job of recreating the feel of their NES stages without outright copying them. They're like a remix made for the smaller resolution that the GameBoy offered. However, it's once you get past those first four stages that Rock Man World 3 really starts to show its true colors.

The second set of stages are filled with instant death spikes, very painful enemies that rush you out of nowhere, and bottomless pits that require absolute precision to get past safely. You also don't get Rush Jet until you've beaten the most demanding of these stages, so there won't be much help for you in that regard either. These stages are consistently frustrating in how demanding their difficulty is, and they are rarely actually fun. Wily's final stage is also similarly designed and mercilessly long, and gods help you if you need a continue during that level.

There are a couple of mini-Wily stages in between the two sets of robot masters as well as Wily's stage himself, and they hide the unique bosses of Giant Suzy (a giant version of the normal enemy) and the new Mega Man Killer: Punk. Giant Suzy shakes the ground in an annoying way that bounces you around slightly and makes it difficult for you to jump, but Punk is the cherry on the pie of bad boss design in this game. He has a lot of health, he can kill you in three hits, and his attacks are so fast they're nearly impossible to dodge without a lot of luck. The rebalanced versions of the old bosses are generally a bit too hard and tough for their own good in this game, but it's the unique bosses that really take the cake for just how miserable they are to fight.

While you do have E-tanks, the slide dash, and even Mega Man 4's chargeable mega buster to help you out, they'll never do much good to help you against the game's biggest enemy: the slowdown. Rock Man World 3 is a very ambitious game in how it tries to recreate the backgrounds and highly animated platforms of the NES games, but they work to the severe detriment of the actual product. All of those luxurious animations go a long way towards making the framerate jump around a ton as you kill enemies and transition from screen to screen, and it makes getting past all of those instant-kill traps that much more frustrating (especially in sections with platforms that disappear the moment you step on them). The slowdown issues compound all the other mean design decisions found in this game, and make it just that much harder to actually learn your way through the levels.

The presentation is actually pretty good, but it comes at the cost of that slowdown mentioned earlier. While there are some pretty darn good GameBoy renditions of classic themes like Dive Man and Snake Man, and their stages as well as their gimmicks are quite well portrayed here, those pretty graphics just make the game feel so much less nice to play that it would've been much preferred if they'd just been toned down for the good of the experience.


Verdict: Not Recommended. This is the only game out of any of the 8-bit Mega Man games I'd actually call an actively bad time you should avoid. If you play the other four GameBoy Mega Man games, you'll likely be tempted to try this one out, but it is a game better forgotten. The mean design piled onto the terrible slowdown make this a slog from beginning to end that will do nothing but make you wish you were actually playing the much better NES games this one is based on.