One of my favorite shooters.

Love the weapon system and how much depth there was to routing the stages out thanks to it. I love all the little changes they made to enemy and boss patterns in Hard! Really felt rewarding to understand the game's systems well and kick it up to finish that difficulty.

1CC'd it once, will 1CC it many more times, it's just a great time all around.

This one's really hard for me to go back to. I feel like every time I replay it, I like it a little less.

The main thing that gives Mega Man lasting appeal to me is its weapons. Being able to choose any boss in any order and try different strategies out in different stages, to me, is the entire core of what makes these games so special.

So if I whip out Air Shooter, which exclusively fires upward, and those little clown dudes that only ever spawn above you are immune to it, what the fuck am I supposed to do? When I whip out Crash Bomb thinking it'll wipe out a big enemy, and not only does it not explode but it doesn't deal any damage... why would I ever bother with Crash Bomb again? If I swap to Time Stopper, press the button at the wrong timing, and now I just literally cannot move past an enemy until it runs out.... and I can never use it again...... what's my conclusion going to be? "Oh, damn, better luck next time?" No, I'm just not going to bother.

I want to use the weapons, I want to experiment. So why is the game actively punishing me for having "a-ha!" moments and making enemies immune to the perfect firing arc to deal with them? It just discourages me from wanting to try anything else, makes it feel like there is a "right" way to play it. It goes against the entire idea of nonlinearity if trying a different strategy is actively punished.

Just doesn't make any sense. I don't actually want to use Metal Blade for everything.
I can appreciate what this game did for the series and what it did uniquely at the time, but that doesn't make it any more fun to play through...

This was actually my introduction to KOF. I swear, I liked it way more when I had no idea what the rest of the series entailed; if I did not have that perspective, this would probably be a higher rating.

The names were confusing to me, not having followed any of the entries until very late; I interpreted it kind of like a sports game type deal where they're all basically the same thing but with a few fighters added every year. I didn't know there were multiple arcs worth of story and gigantic mechanical changes along with characters literally getting killed off and being unable to participate in the next.

So.... now that I know that, and I've actually played the rest? This game's kinda bunk in comparison. The backgrounds and music are very drab compared to the previous games (although at LEAST a step up from 2001 and 2002) and the tag mechanics are half-baked. Matches feel like they go by WAY too quickly, and the sound design feels a lot less.... punchy than every game predating it. I'm also VERY not okay with how they got rid of C+D attacks- with only four buttons, removing an entire extra dimension of offense just makes the game feel stripped down. Tagging doesn't add anything of meaningful value to change up fights to make up for that omission, so it just makes every character feel like they can do less...

It really is a shame, because I wanna like this more than I do. Every newcomer is fucking awesome! The new arc felt more immediately gripping to me than NESTS did! The roster has a lot of unexpected newcomers and returning characters that SOUND like they should be great! All the voice acting is incredible too!

But it's just..... I dunno..... alright. Not great. Not bad. It's alright.


Anyway there's this dangerously 2000s combo video I had saved and I just think you all should see it.

I really do love the tracklist in this game. Even with Empress + Premium Best, I find myself going back to this one a lot. It got me more seriously into the series, so maybe there's a little bit of bias there?

This game (this series, really) is fucking impossible to recommend to people though, so I'm really not sure how I'm supposed to rank this... May not be perfect in execution in an "objective" standpoint, but objectivity in game design is kinda bullshit anyway so for me it may as well be perfect at what it does.

All I know is that I love the Virtual Insanity and Toxic mixes wayyyyyy too much. Hitting keys is fun. It's a very surface level thing to enjoy, but feeling challenged and wanting to overcome seemingly insurmountable tasks only adds to that.

Of any Beatmania entry, this is one that I have a very focused intent to finish one day. I don't think the other ones are within my realistic skill level, but this one never beat me down so hard that I felt like I couldn't recover.... so I don't care how long it takes. This is the one for me. Having seperate tracklists in 5key and 7key modes is also a very nice treat that I wish more entries would've had.

Getting my first AAA rank in this was probably the most accomplished I've ever felt in a rhythm game. Guitar Hero could never.

I dunno. I love this game. I love all the little gadgets and weapons and fun little side things it has. It's on the easy side, but I've always been of the opinion that a game doesn't have to be difficult to be engaging and fun; as long as you maintain some modicum of mechanical depth and allow for a player to experiment, you'll have something really special.

Say what you will about the game, but the sheer amount of ways it allows you to play it through its weapons and its adaptors will always be what elevates this game to my favorites of the NES Mega Man entries.


Also, use the Power Adaptor! There's an awesome trick with it; the fully charged punch will plow through shields and knock back bosses, right? But the more precisely-timed half charge will deal more damage. If you get the timing and spacing down exactly right, you can just absolutely annihilate anything in your path, fuck using a weakness.

It's lovely. I wish the later games in the series still had stuff like that.

I love this game too much to have any type of unbiased review for it. So I'm not gonna bother, I'll just tell you some cool tricks I've learned after replaying the game 50000000000000000 times. I've finished it on Mania in one credit, for christ's sake.


There's a 1up in the bottom left corner of the screen as soon as you start stage 1. You can't see it because of the sign in the way. Just walk down there and grab it, it's free!
There's another one behind the truck in stage 2, and another one under the alien head in stage 3. Remember where they are and you're GUARANTEED to make it to the end.... you know, unless you suck or something.

If you're ever thrown, you can land directly on your feet if you hold down Up + C. You can abuse this in multiplayer by intentionally setting up the second player for a back throw to clear out a bunch of enemies (unless you're Max; he'll just suplex them and they'll lose a huge chunk of HP!)

Speaking of multiplayer exploits, there's a TON, but the most notable to me are relatively simple.
Accidentally hitting your co-op partner is not actually that big of a deal. They only take 1/8th of the normal damage from friendly fire attacks, so what that means is... if you interrupt their special attack with a jab, they will actually take less damage than they would've from just doing it. If you synergize well, you can get some impossibly high damage combos for less than half the normal cost.

There's also this weird bug where, if two of your hitboxes overlap, the game will freak out and repeat it over and over again for every frame. If you and your buddy jab a guy at the EXACT same spacing, he'll just die instantly and not be able to do anything about it. Goofy!



Play the game some more! Try it on harder difficulties! Melt healthbars with Axel's Grand Upper! Pummel people's heads in with Skate! Knock 'em dead with Max's backswing pipe! Be REALLY LAME and spam Blaze's jump kicks, I don't care, you do you!

Play Streets of Rage 2!