Brief context: in the early 90s or so Capcom decided to outsource some… ports? of the early Mega Man games for the original Gameboy. I say ‘port’ with a question mark because… these are fairly heavily changed from the original — even putting aside obvious technical limitations — and… stand out for the worse in doing so. Like, beyond the technical stuff of your super large hurtbox and how the small screen means you have much less room to maneuver… look I know even the NES games lean towards the ‘cheap’ side of difficulty but at least there it doesn’t feel as brutal as this does, between the stone walls that are some of these enemy placements, the required leaps of faith you have to take, and just how much damage some of the bosses can do to you. Almost feels like some sort of Kaizo Mega Man, except without much of the charm that a lot of Kaizo games tend to have with their difficulty. Combine that with how the structure of the stage order… directly kind of makes half the weapons you select useless right as you manage to get them all, and… this series of ports as a whole isn’t exactly great. I’ll confess that this is probably the best of the three I’ve played so far — the initial weapons aren’t as useless and there’s some moments of fun stage design — but, like, I’ve already played through the original Mega Man 3 (and Mega Man 4, given this game is a partial port of that, too) several times, what’s there here other than a budget version for the gamers who didn’t have an NES back in the day? 5/10.