While Mega Man 3 felt like more Mega Man, Mega Man 4 feels like even more Mega Man. The addition of the charge blast is nice. I like the iterative nature of Mega Man's development, and here with the slide and charging blast, Mega Man finally feels complete as an action game character.

I realized this time around that I definitely prefer the latter half of the game—the two castles—to the first part where you take out the robots in their own levels, because the game requires you to use your special abilities to make it through the level. I feel like I tend to under use Mega Man's abilities in general, saving them for a challenge or an enemy type that never comes. You only really need to use robot abilities against other robots, which trivialize the fights with them, and that's always disappointing to me—I want to feel like I beat a boss, not like I found the right key to them. The non-robot bosses at the end of the game were pretty fun, and felt like they were designed to be fought rather than puzzled out.

All that said, I really got annoyed at the final boss, where you have to use a certain weapon to damage them—at that point, I was all out of ammunition for that weapon, and had to die and farm drops from enemies to fill that back up. It made me just not want to finish the game.

I'm going to put down the mainline series for now and swap over to X. I'm really interested to see how this series develops into the 16bit era.