I'll be playing the entire collection at some point, and I'm usually the type to play by release order barring a few special series. Can't be understated how awful and cryptic some of the puzzles are, even when they built in a help button to one of the buttons on the controller at all times. Sometimes it's just "check literally every checkable thing you can, no hints on what it is without a guide" like finding the WWW Metro, how are you supposed to know that it's behind the school statue of all things? There's a real tendency for the game to have you go do something, then go "I need to go see dad!" and then you go to see dad and then you go exactly back to where you just were. Dentown might be the worst designed area of its type I've ever seen, to the point where my mental map failed me after 10 minutes of looking around for one objective and I looked at a map of it, and it was entirely different looking of an area than I thought it was supposed to be! It's entirely pointless backtracking because it's also entirely real world navigation, there's not even any netbattles to do. The netbattles are basically what all 4 of this 4/10's points come from. I think they're really fun but the devs clearly didn't consider what some of the enemy combinations would be like to fight while in the same fight as each other. It's real satisfying when you pull a bunch of chips at once that work together and you can pulverize your enemies. You restore HP after battle, so as long as you don't die, you won't get a game over usually. I focused on building my chip deck around the A, C, and F codes and found most of the story bosses fair and balanced. The final boss feels like a damage race at a certain point but because of how upgraded your buster is there, it makes it fine if you can tank some hits. Some of the bosses, namely Shark Man and Number Man, are godawful and I wonder how they even got put to code, and ironically, both of those are the complete opposite end of difficulty. Number Man is so easy that you just... pick the small number and shoot it, and Shark Man is RNG if your chips you picked are good enough to hit Shark Man past his 2 fake fins that block all damage and attack at a near undodgeable speed. Maybe they just expected me to constantly spam the chip that makes you invincible for a few seconds there? The plot is pretty much nothing, it's basically cartoon villain wants to destroy the world, the only wrench thrown in is right at the end with Mega Man being Lan's deceased brother, digitized. I've always heard this series had a rocky start and that 2 and 3 are actually some of the better in the series, so I'm looking forward to continuing the games even if my enjoyment of this one wasn't that great. I doubt I'll go back and fight Bass in this one, since it requires every single chip other than the one you get from him, and I doubt any generous donors online want to give me their full collections so I can fight him. Cause I'm not grinding for that. Maybe in future games I'll enjoy things far more and feel much more like going for a completion.