I've played a good bit of Mega Man 3 throughout the years. I played through this game on a Samsung Juke cellphone. Even on more ergonomic platforms it's always been a bit strange to me that this is generally considered tied with Mega Man 2 as possibly the best in the series.
There are some nice tunes here, most of the soundtrack is catchy at least, but in general I find the sound design more blaring, ear piercing. Most of the soundtrack feels more rhythmically frantic, more mechanical than previous entries; many songs sound to me like rejected versions of the Mortal Kombat theme.
Visually it's as good as ever, I genuinely wonder how exactly they did some of the effects in this game given the hardware (not in the sense that they seem "impossible", just unusual enough to be of interest). The wriggling serpents of Snake Man's stage whose segmented bodies make up the shifting terrain, the countless tiny eggs of Gemini Man's stage which each hatch into a tiny tadpole.
The major gameplay addition is the ability for Mega Man to do a sliding maneuver. Something that's always frustrated me is the sheer number of critics who seem to bring up Mega Man's inability to duck at any chance they get, which is annoying for a number of reasons, but chiefly here is the fact that the slide accomplishes the same purpose as ducking in a more interesting way. The amount of vertical space the character takes up is reduced, but only for a moment, and it comes with a required horizontal motion. The slide does have somewhat limited practical use, the most obvious situations for it are portions where the player must slide under low ceilings, and a couple of the non-Robot Master boss fights.
Break Man/Proto Man in particular is perhaps the most boring, though he seems to mostly exist purely as a skill check to see if the player understands the dash. The Yellow Devil fight in this game actually seems possible, due to the fact that the second from the bottom row of his blocks no longer have to be narrowly leapt over.
The stages themselves aren't anything worth complaining too much about but the bosses are odd. This game starts a trend that more or less continues throughout the rest of the Classic and X series of Mega Man games: almost none of the Robot Master weaknesses are things that the player could naturally infer, it's now pure trial and error unless you look up a guide. After beating the main 8 stages you have to go through 4 remixes of those levels and fight 8 visually identical bosses that all use movesets of Mega Man 2 bosses. Naturally, figuring out the weaknesses of these bosses is even stranger.
The platforms items from the previous games have been replaced by Rush Coil, Jet, and Marine. Rush coil is fine enough, a situational high bounce with limited use. Jet and Marine are terribly uninteresting. Marine is only useful, or even required, in a couple of areas. Jet literally just lets the player fly around whichever way they please. Between this change and the generally less impressive Robot Master weapons, there doesn't really feel like any reason to experiment; every tool you are given has a more clear time and place than in the second game.
The main factor that I think makes or breaks this game is whether or not a person appreciates the sort of philosophical shift that happened in the creation of this game, namely the fact that much of the Mega Man 1/2 team (including the original designer) did not work on this game. With the original Mega Man, Akira Kitamura practiced some restraint, doing the math to find what length the levels had to be so that an experienced player could play through the game in about an hour. Mega Man 2 was a bit longer, Mega Man 3 is nearly twice as long as the first game, and about a quarter of that length is recycled padding. In short, Mega Man 3 seems to have recontextualized the idea of a Mega Man sequel as less of a refinement, and more as simple iterative content.
I could only see this game as Mega Man 2's equal if one holds quantity in as high regard as quality.
There are some nice tunes here, most of the soundtrack is catchy at least, but in general I find the sound design more blaring, ear piercing. Most of the soundtrack feels more rhythmically frantic, more mechanical than previous entries; many songs sound to me like rejected versions of the Mortal Kombat theme.
Visually it's as good as ever, I genuinely wonder how exactly they did some of the effects in this game given the hardware (not in the sense that they seem "impossible", just unusual enough to be of interest). The wriggling serpents of Snake Man's stage whose segmented bodies make up the shifting terrain, the countless tiny eggs of Gemini Man's stage which each hatch into a tiny tadpole.
The major gameplay addition is the ability for Mega Man to do a sliding maneuver. Something that's always frustrated me is the sheer number of critics who seem to bring up Mega Man's inability to duck at any chance they get, which is annoying for a number of reasons, but chiefly here is the fact that the slide accomplishes the same purpose as ducking in a more interesting way. The amount of vertical space the character takes up is reduced, but only for a moment, and it comes with a required horizontal motion. The slide does have somewhat limited practical use, the most obvious situations for it are portions where the player must slide under low ceilings, and a couple of the non-Robot Master boss fights.
Break Man/Proto Man in particular is perhaps the most boring, though he seems to mostly exist purely as a skill check to see if the player understands the dash. The Yellow Devil fight in this game actually seems possible, due to the fact that the second from the bottom row of his blocks no longer have to be narrowly leapt over.
The stages themselves aren't anything worth complaining too much about but the bosses are odd. This game starts a trend that more or less continues throughout the rest of the Classic and X series of Mega Man games: almost none of the Robot Master weaknesses are things that the player could naturally infer, it's now pure trial and error unless you look up a guide. After beating the main 8 stages you have to go through 4 remixes of those levels and fight 8 visually identical bosses that all use movesets of Mega Man 2 bosses. Naturally, figuring out the weaknesses of these bosses is even stranger.
The platforms items from the previous games have been replaced by Rush Coil, Jet, and Marine. Rush coil is fine enough, a situational high bounce with limited use. Jet and Marine are terribly uninteresting. Marine is only useful, or even required, in a couple of areas. Jet literally just lets the player fly around whichever way they please. Between this change and the generally less impressive Robot Master weapons, there doesn't really feel like any reason to experiment; every tool you are given has a more clear time and place than in the second game.
The main factor that I think makes or breaks this game is whether or not a person appreciates the sort of philosophical shift that happened in the creation of this game, namely the fact that much of the Mega Man 1/2 team (including the original designer) did not work on this game. With the original Mega Man, Akira Kitamura practiced some restraint, doing the math to find what length the levels had to be so that an experienced player could play through the game in about an hour. Mega Man 2 was a bit longer, Mega Man 3 is nearly twice as long as the first game, and about a quarter of that length is recycled padding. In short, Mega Man 3 seems to have recontextualized the idea of a Mega Man sequel as less of a refinement, and more as simple iterative content.
I could only see this game as Mega Man 2's equal if one holds quantity in as high regard as quality.