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Too slow, Mega Man...

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    Mega Man (Classic series) 

Mega Man

  • The opening of Guts Man's stage has earned infamy for the platforms on tracks that drop when the tracks thin out, requiring precise jumps. Because of the way that Mega Man's downward momentum works in the first game when standing on sprite-based platforms, you may not even know that you've missed your jump until Mega Man disappears from the screen and the death sound plays.
  • Ice Man's stage gets rough after the checkpoint. It introduces two infamous gimmicks, one after another: Yoku blocks with specific patterns that need to be memorized, and Foot Holders, moving platforms that double as enemies that shoot at you. Not only are their movements random (you may have to wait a while to jump from one to the next), but they're also quite glitchy: if you land on one at the wrong time, you'll take damage and fall into the Bottomless Pits below. If you have the Magnet Beam, you can completely ignore having to step on them, but you still have to deal with their shots as well as the Pepes flying in sine wave patterns.
  • Elec Man's stage starts you off with a room full of Gabyoalls: enemies you can't kill with your primary weapon but only stun temporarily, that also move very quickly and unpredictably, charging you the moment you're on the same floor as them. Thanks to the way the platforms are placed (they're solid with a low ceiling and line up perfectly with each other, so that you have to jump off the very edge of each to make it to the next so you don't hit your head on the ceiling), you're almost guaranteed to take a few hits before getting out of the room, and newer players can struggle to even accomplish that. If you have the Hyper Bomb, Rolling Cutter, or are playing the stage again with the Thunder Beam, Once you've passed that point, you have the real meat of the stage, which is ladder-climbing. This is not a good thing to be the meat of a stage, as it locks Mega Man into slow, vertical movement where he's bordering on a sitting duck. It also leads to the stage having an almost completely vertical "tower"-like design, where missing a jump can lead to Mega Man falling through several screens, erasing prior progress. There's also a second fork where you can take the easier right path, only to end up stopped by a block in the ceiling ''at the end'' and not the beginning of the pathway that forces you to use Elec Man's weapon and the Magnet Beam to pass. Add in the infamous placement of the Magnet Beam requiring you to have the Super Arm or Thunder Beam (requiring you to come back to the level) to obtain, and you have one poorly-regarded level: it, along with Guts Man and the Yellow Devil fight, formed the inspiration for the fan song and animation "I Won't Sleep Until I Clear It."
  • Dr. Wily Stage 1 has an opening sequence of dodging three of the game's Boss in Mook Clothing enemy Big Eye with no helpful stage geography to use against them, the return of the Foot Holders from Ice Man's stage, now in a room with a spiked ceiling that they will arbitrarily fly you up into if you don't fall onto the spikes on the floor, a required Magnet Beam section that can send players all the way back to Elec Man's stage if they didn't know the item was necessary, and it's capped off with the very first instance of the Yellow Devil.

Mega Man 2

  • Quick Man's stage. The signature gimmick of this level is two long vertical drops full of One-Hit Kill lasers known as Force Beams. While the first one isn't particularly bad and can even get you a bunch of power-ups if you go the right way, the second one is much longer and requires high amounts of precision, where even one mistake can cost you your life. Even afterward, you still have to deal with two Sniper Armors that you can accidentally spawn more of if you're not careful. You can use Flash Man's Time Stopper to freeze the Beams, but it only has one use, and once it's gone, you won't have any to use against Quick Man himself.
  • Heat Man's stage starts out easy and short but then becomes an absolute pain after the checkpoint, there's an EXTREMELY long Platform Hell of Yoku blocks, most of which is over Bottomless Pits. There's first a bunch that appear above each other and are needed to climb walls and hop over pits while Tellys try to knock you into them. At two points in the very long last stretch, the next block appears directly over your head, forcing either a well-timed and prepared jump or a fall to your death, which really doesn't help when this level in particular has two different speeds at which blocks show up. You WILL die the first time you encounter this (since you can't see it coming when most of this section is hanging over a floor of lava and BottomlessPits, so you have to memorize its placement and the timing for when it appearsnote . If you don't have the Item-2 acquired by defeating Air Man so you can fly under the entire thing, things can get ugly.note 
  • Air Man's stage is a pain, too. For the first part of the level, you have to jump on Goblins. When you are standing on one of them, the constantly spawning Petit Goblins combined with the drills coming out of the sides of its head means that jumping off unscathed is hard. What's worse, later in the level, you have to jump from one to another consecutively. Then there's those Kaminami Goros that you have to kill and then ride on their very small cloud platforms, and all those Pipis and their Copipis. Finally, there's a few big Matasaburo enemies that push you away or suck you closer, forcing you to move to resist the current, and destroying one can send you slipping to your death.

Mega Man 3

  • Hard Man's stage is fairly straightforward, but the last quarter or so is ripe with Platform Hell. It begins with an open era lined with Wanaans and a Have "Su" Bee with a Proto Man fight immediately after that. The next screen gives you a large energy powerup, but a Bikky is waiting for you right before the boss entrance. Unless you have an E-tank, you're not likely to face Hard Man at full health.
  • The four notorious Doc Robot stages taking place in between the last standard level and the Wily Stages. They're essentially the same levels skins and enemy sets with different designs and two boss fights each against a modified boss from Mega Man 2. The issue is the lack of checkpoints and how the only ones in each, like the regular level checkpoints, are just but a single checkpoint, placed immediately after beating the first boss and nowhere else. This means if you die anywhere before the first boss, you start at the very start, and if you die anywhere past the first boss, you end up at the midpoint. Not even boss rooms and hallways count. It gets even worse because said bosses have new weaknesses you need to figure out mid-battle. Some bosses have bigger health, and improved AI, and all of them have larger hitboxes to ram into you with. Still, some are particularly nasty.
    • Spark Man's version of this stage has big drops down multiple screens of spiked shafts and a lot of cruel platforming with too many bottomless pits and not enough easily farmable enemies.
    • Shadow Man's stage has a new mechanic in the form of opening platforms that will drop you if stood on for too long. You could easily skip this with the Rush Jet, granted that you think you could beat Doc Quick Man, who will very much likely send you back to the start of this section.
    • In the Doc Robot revisit of Needle Man's stage, right after killing Doc Air Man, you come across a long Rush Jet section with Parasyus and Yanbows coming from all sides trying to knock you off into the Bottomless Pits. If you die during it, you have to start back at the beginning of the section, and if your energy is too low, you may have to Game Over to refill it.

Mega Man 4

  • The final section of Drill Man's stage can be a nightmare about midway through: there are switches in the background that you have to touch in order to reveal the next ledge to jump on. This wouldn't be so bad, if there weren't a ton of flying Helipons and falling rocks whose sole purpose are to knock you into one of the many pits scattered about the area.
  • Ring Man's stage is a difficult gauntlet. It starts with a long vertical climb with Wall Blasters and homing Ring Rings trying to knock you back down. After that trial, there's four minibosses that need to be killed over the course of the stage: two Kabatoncues (hippos that fire homing missiles and need to be continuously shot down from a telescoping platform to be in firing range), and two Whoppers (stacks of rings that have a long attack range and an extremely tight vulnerability window). The platforming only makes things harder, with brown/rainbow platforms that quickly retract under your feet when stepped on, sometimes mixed in with homing Ring Rings and Bottomless Pits or pits of One-Hit Kill spikes.

Mega Man 5

  • Wave Man's stage might be rather irritating in its first half, but that's got nothing on its notorious jet ski section, which comes right after a checkpoint, but is ''much'' longer than the first half. You are autoscrolling across the water and have to shoot enemies moving at you while hopping durable barriers, which doesn't sound too bad until you realize: 1) You can't slide or charge shots, making dealing with beefier enemies like the miniboss more difficult, 2) The enemies are hellish Goddamned Bats, either being dolphins jumping from the right along the water in quick and unpredictable patterns, or Sniper Joes coming at you from behind that need a running start backwards to jump over, meaning you can't go to the far side to avoid the dolphins easily, and finally 3) ''you can't even pause the game to switch weapons from default or use E-Tanks, or take a break''. It doesn't help that the dolphins, being the most common enemy, aren't easy to shoot and the game gives you no merciful health power-ups, so farming for extra health is a chore.
  • The first half of Crystal Man's stage is no slouch, since one section is laden with crystals that fall from tubes in the ceiling, and they're always placed in large series over pits. It wouldn't be so bad on its own, but the crystals fall at completely random intervals, making much of the level a Luck-Based Mission unless you have good reaction time or Star Crash to get rid of them.

Mega Man 6

  • The second half of Plant Man's stage has a long, difficult section involving jumping over water-filled Bottomless Pits via springs. As it goes on, additional hazards are added into the mix: Gabgyos, robotic piranhas that quickly jump out of the water to knock you to your death, Tadahous, cannons that bounce on the springs as well, and "snapper" platforms that need to be shot before they can be stood on, all of which is made even harder by the fact that you're constantly bouncing up and down through the entire thing. To add insult to injury, after conquering this section and Plant Man himself, you get the Rush Jet Adaptor, which could've easily allowed you to fly over the whole thing.

Mega Man 7

  • Wily Stage 4 pits you against the boss rush and final boss back-to-back, which isn't unusual, but this particular Wily Capsule is That One Boss of the whole series. A first-time player will probably need all their E-Tanks to even have a prayer of beating it, which means they can't use any against the boss rush, and the robot masters aren't pushovers either.

Mega Man 8

  • Astro Man's level features a segment with a vertical Advancing Wall of Doom and two mazes both involving a Unnaturally Looping Location. But the worst part involves platforms that disappear and reappear over bottomless pits on a very rapid cycle along with constantly respawning enemies leaping at you from said pits.
  • While the two snowboarding sections of Frost Man's stage can be tricky, they're nothing compared to the one that primarily makes up Wily Tower Stage 1. It's much faster, it has a much denser enemy population, and has lots of very tight jumps and slides to escape certain death, with your only assistance being the infamous cues. The last jump in particular is especially nasty, as it's so wide that you'll need to move forward a good distance in midair to avoid just barely missing it. It's a common strategy to use Astro Crush to let yourself hang in the air and avoid doing risky jumps, but it only has 4 uses (6 with the Energy Saver), and if you use it at the wrong time, you'll get squished at the left side of the screen by a wall. After the snowboarding, you still need to go through a precarious series of Thunder Claw swinging over a Bottomless Pit to get to the (not hard, but still annoying) Goddamned Boss at the end, Atetemino.

Mega Man & Bass

  • Burner Man's stage has three different gimmicks that range from mildly annoying to downright lethal. In order of their appearance: 1) waist-high foreground walls that cover up the floors and can hide holes. At best, they can send you plummeting down to an earlier area, but at worst, they'll send you plummeting into spikes, making the only safe way to see where they are pushing an Ice Wall into the offending areas. 2) a long corridor of spears rapidly jutting out of the walls and floors. They only appear at predetermined spots, but are fast, easily get desynchronized, and hurt a lot. 3) The final stretch in the jungle where occasionally, a Big Telly will drop a firebomb, filling nearly half the screen with One-Hit Kill flames for several seconds. When this happens, you have no choice but to quickly scramble for elevated land, which is easier said than done considering the high amount of Dodonpa Cannoms inhabiting this section as well. After all that, it's the fated encounter with That One Boss, Burner Man.
  • It's hard to bring up the infamous difficulty without mentioning King Stage 2, the game's signature Marathon Level. This stage consists of three enemy-laden "mini-stages", each followed by a boss: the first being King Tank, the second being That One Boss, King Plane, and the third and final being King himself, who not only has two phases (he can't be hurt during the first, but then Proto Man hops in and destroys his shield), but still isn't the last boss of the stage - that honor goes to Jet King Robo, a fusion of King and the two previous bosses. The level suffers badly from Checkpoint Starvation - you only get a checkpoint after killing each boss, so die to King Plane and you're getting sent all the way back to right after you beat King Tank. The level also requires heavy use of special weapons, putting a high emphasis on resource management if you want to use the bosses' weaknesses on them. And last but not least, since the level is one, massive stage, if you Game Over, it's back to the very beginning. Even after you beat this stage, you may think the game's over, but in reality, it's far from it...
  • ...which brings us into King Stage 3, the Very Definitely Final Stage and second Marathon Level, which is equal parts Marathon Level and Boss Rush against the game's 8 Robot Masters, with none of your weapons refilled at all after the previous stage. Unlike most traditional Mega Man gamesnote , instead of fighting the bosses in a central hub in any order you like, you're forced to fight them in a specific order as you go throughout the stage.note  And what a stage it is, packed to the gills with Yoku blocks, Bottomless Pits, Spikes of Doom, and plenty of enemies as well just to make sure you're properly worn down between fights. And speaking of being worn down, the bosses don't drop large energy pellets upon death, only adding more fuel to this fiery test of endurance. And after this difficult struggle, there's still the two-phase final confrontation against Dr. Wily himself. It makes the fact that this game is the only game to not have restorative Tanks of any kind after they were introduced in 2 all the more painful. And of course, if you Game Over, you end up back at the very start.

Mega Man 9

  • Jewel Man's stage is arguably the most difficult of the main eight Robot Master stages. The main gimmick of the stage is large platforms on chains that need to be run on back and forth to get them swinging so you can make jumps. After the Goddamned Miniboss, Stonehead, which drops down countless rocks and can stun you to get a free hit, the stage quickly ups the ante with more and more Bottomless Pits and One-Hit Kill Spikes of Doom. A particularly infamous room requires a swinging platform to be swung out of the way of a pit so you can drop down, but the room is also full of spikes - one wrong move and you'll walk into the spikes trying to swing the platform, or have the platform shove you into the spiked wall during an otherwise successful drop.
  • Tornado Man's stage has two brutal segments where you have to navigate on spinning platforms that rotate Mega Man around vertically while running on a back-and-forth track over bottomless pits and near spikes. Surviving requires not just precise timing, but paying close attention to both the position of the next spinning platform you're trying to jump onto and Mega Man's current position on the platform he's on. Fans of the series will no doubt have flashbacks to Guts Man's stage from Mega Man.
  • Wily Castle Stage 3 has two sections with a gimmick that gets very punishing very fast. In these sections, you're constantly pulled upwards, and the only way to move left and right is to shoot in the opposite direction to build up your momentum. As you may expect, the game eventually mixes in enemies and One-Hit Kill Spikes of Doom during these sections, where you can easily try to avoid an enemy only to boost yourself into spikes if you aren't careful. In the very last room with this gimmick, an enemy called a Bunby Catcher can grab you if you go to the left side of the screen. Do it at the right spot? It'll shove you into a free M-Tanknote ! Do it at the wrong spot? It'll shove you into spikes and kill you. Even after this, you still have a dangerous Bottomless Pits section left, and the boss is yet another Devil, the Twin Devil.

Mega Man 10

  • Commando Man's stage about halfway through introduces sandstorms that sporadically cover the entire screen and push you in their direction while blinding your view of the spikes on the limited platforms and the gaps that drop you into the bottomless pit below. Later on, you'll need to deal with enemies during them as well.

Mega Man 11

  • Torch Man's stage, a campsite, has sections of Platform Hell, Blackout Basement sections, and three pain in the arse instant death wall of fire sections, one of which requires precise platforming and sliding to get through the area. While the Tundra Storm can stop the inferno for a brief moment (if you have it), both Sparkey and Torch Man himself are most susceptible to this weapon, meaning you have to choose between getting barbecued and having to deal with That One Boss at full force.
  • Bounce Man's stage is riddled with bouncy balls that you, unsurprisingly, have to bounce off of to get anywhere. The balls have much larger hitboxes than their deceptively small round appearances would imply. Often you'll try to jump under or over one and unexpectedly hit it, only to be sent careening into an enemy or off a cliff, and other times you'll reel from an enemy's hit and not be expecting to suddenly be sent bouncing any which way by the ball you barely got close enough to sneeze onto.

Mega Man: Dr. Wily's Revenge

  • Players who choose Cut Man first, expecting a similar ride to his NES level, will be in for a nasty shock. His level contains some of the most unforgiving jumps in a game that already borders on Platform Hell, many of the enemies have unpredictable patterns and/or are located in inconvenient spots, and only one weapon is capable of damaging them — Cut Man's own weapon.

Mega Man II

  • Metal Man's stage isn't too bad compared to a lot of the other examples here, but it throws some nasty surprises at you early on, most notably three screens in succession that give you drops which can land you right on top of spikes, with almost no time to react.

Mega Man III

  • Dive Man's stage is filled with spikes, at one point making you jump between raised pillars of spikes. It also forces you to jump on a platform that's on top of rising and falling water, and of course, the platform is surrounded by spikes on both sides.
  • Dust Man's stage is truly terrible. It has pits with Upndowns coming out of them, and not one, not two, but at least 10 pixel-perfect jumps are required to make it through the stage. There is also the dust crusher section, which required Mega Man to slide through gaps with perfect timing or he dies. When you finally get to Dust Man, you find that he's a pathetic Anticlimactic Boss which really makes the stage feel even worse by comparison. Dust Man's stage really is the closest Mega Man has gotten to Platform Hell.

Mega Man V

  • Venus's stage, which has a section where Mega Man must bounce in between instant-death spikes.

    Mega Man X series 

Mega Man X/Mega Man: Maverick Hunter X

  • Armored Armadillo's stage if you're playing as Vile in Maverick Hunter X. It takes away the mine carts that made this stage enjoyable as X, leaving you to traverse the whole level on foot (you don't even get the Ride Armor for long). This replaces the leap of faith at the end of the level with a bunch of horizontally-moving platforms and enemies swarming you from off-screen. And the Heart Tank (located where X would find the Hadouken capsule) requires you to either take a leap of faith towards a not-synchronized platform or exploit a bug with Vile's midair movement that allows him to hover towards it.
  • Sigma Stage 1 can be a pain, with it being a very, very long stage starting with having to jump over moving platforms with enemies that can potentially knock you off into a bottomless pit. Then you have to fight a few bosses throughout such as Vile (which thankfully you don't have to beat again once you beat him once), an annoying area where you have to climb vertically with several enemies hugging the wall that can easily knock you down, and then you have to fight Boomer Kuwanger again. Each by themselves isn't that bad, but enduring through the rest of the level makes this a pain. Then you have to face the Bospider at the end. It's even worse in the PSP remake as an underwater section with an Anglerge was added and instead of Vile you fight Launch Octopus again.

Mega Man X2

  • The second X-Hunter stage, while mercifully short, is a long and very narrow winding passageway complemented by spikes and enemies. Halfway through you have to cling to the sides of slow-moving rockets to cross spikes, made much harder if you missed the leg upgrade that gives you the air dash. Just before the end is another spike bit which again, if you can't air dash, cannot be crossed without a pixel-perfect dash jump, using Crystal Hunter to turn some literal Goddamn Bats into platforms, or a charged Speed Burner. And at the end of it all is the hardest boss in the game, Serges Tank.

Mega Man X3

  • Doppler Stage 1 is probably the hardest of the final levels. There are several difficult jumps, walls that close in to crush you, and insta-death spikes that can suddenly descend from the ceiling and kill you mid-jump. And then the stage ends with you having to face one of the game's two harder bosses, either the Godkarmachine O Inary or the Press Disposer, depending on whether you were able to destroy both Bit and Byte using their weaknesses.

Mega Man X4

  • Jet Stingray's stage is a pain due to the level being a Ride Chaser level. Moreover, it's a fast Autoscrolling Level which makes it a level that is nothing but trial and error without proper reaction time. The game also expects you to do precise jumps at pinpoint accuracy. Bottomless Pits are everywhere in the first half of the stage. Getting scrolled off the screen at any time is also instant death. Both the Sub-Tank and the Heart Tank are in areas that are very easy to miss the first time around.

Mega Man X5

  • Tidal Whale/Duff McWhalen's stage doesn't go all-in on the difficulty, but what it does go all-in on is being incredibly annoying and tedious for X in particular if you want all the items for him. While Zero can, provided he's already laid out Volt Kraken/Squid Adler, snatch the Heart Tank on the first pass through and just ignore the Armor Capsule since it doesn't do him any good, X has to pass the Heart Tank and Armor Capsule on the first pass through because his version of Kraken/Adler's weapon won't destroy the weak ceiling that Zero's version can, and the Armor Capsule cannot be obtained without Goo Shaver. The very weapon that Duff/Tidal distributes. Then after backtracking for the Armor Capsule, he'll have to backtrack again since he needs either the Falcon Armor or Gaea Armor to get up a spike chute to reach the Heart Tank. Also, the stage is a rather pokey Autoscrolling Levelnote , so that just drags out the time it'll take to get all this done even more.
  • Squid Adler/Volt Kraken's stage is even worse. Much like Jet Stingray from the previous game, the stage starts on a very fast Ride Chaser (fast enough that you need to be ready to jump before the "READY" text even leaves the screen), with lots of bottomless pits to fall in and breakable walls to shoot through (that will crush you against the screen if you don't). To make matters worse, there are eight glowing things to get if you want the head parts of the Falcon Armor. Even if you survive that, there's still plenty of annoying switch puzzles to go through. If you want 100% Completion, you're going to have to revisit it, in a game that punishes revisiting levels unless you have the final set of stages unlocked already.
  • Zero Space Stage 1. Capcom feels the need to keep revisiting Quick Man's stage in later games. Here, in particular, they managed to make it even harder: it's bad enough that X-series characters slide slowly down walls, making it harder to fall past the lasers quickly enough, but unlike Mega Man 2, the screen scrolls down with your character at all times, requiring much faster reaction time. And at the end of the stage? You fight That One Boss, the Shadow Devil. The X Legacy Collection even has a medal for getting through this without the Dark Hold, which only freezes the lasers for so long even if you do use it.

Mega Man X6

  • Blaze Heatnix's stage, the Magma Area. Though the shafts full of highly-damaging lava fountains can be annoying, the real threat is the many separate rooms in which you fight a miniboss known as a Nightmare Snake, a giant Ouroboros (commonly given the Fan Nickname of "Donuts"). They're only vulnerable on the small green orbs on their corners (which constantly shoot at you), and all four of them need to be destroyed in order to kill them as it constantly moves around. Just fighting one of them is annoying, but in order to reach Heatnix himself, you'll need to fight no less than five of them, one after another, with absolutely no health or weapon energy refills in between. Five.note  The further you get, the more brutal the battles become, as the orbs continuously become more obnoxious to hit. The second to last one deserves special mention, as it is not only a vertical Autoscrolling Level on small platforms infested with Nightmare Viruses, but the Snake pops up at random for only a few seconds each time, and its bottom two orbs are extremely close to the pink One-Hit Kill magma below. Things quickly escalate when you realize this is a Time-Limit Boss - if you don't kill it in time, you'll reach the top of the shaft and the magma will kill you by flooding the room.
  • Rainy Turtloid's stage, the Inami Temple. This stage's signature gimmick is that nearly every room has a weather machine that generates a downpour of acid rain that constantly drains your health at a slow rate, and will kill you if it fully depletes. However, all of the weather machines are protected by a shield, and the only way to progress is to destroy all of the pods scattered around to bring down said shield, return to the machine, and destroy it. This essentially turns the level into one giant Timed Mission, where taking damage only reduces the "timer" further. It starts out rather simple, but quickly gets very malicious, as one very long section requires you to ride on very small moving platforms over Bottomless Pits while destroying pods in mid-air, dealing with flying enemies, and rushing to collect health laid out afterward. Things worsen in the sections afterward, where you have to rapidly search for the pods in vertically-stacked passageways full of enemiesnote , where even one wrong guess can cost you the attempt. It can become a Vicious Cycle: you rush because you're losing health, but rushing makes you get hit a lot, and getting hit a lot makes you die a lot, and dying a lot makes you impatient, causing you to rush. The frustration is taken up to eleven if Infinity Mijinion's Nightmare Phenomenon is active, where the stage becomes shrouded in darkness, except for an oscillating diamond-shaped spotlight in the center. Good luck!
  • Metal Shark Player's stage, the Recycle Lab. The entire stage revolves around a giant Descending Ceiling that unsurprisingly is a One-Hit Kill if it squishes you. The first section is relatively harmless because the Ride Armor is completely immune to being crushed. This even allows you to ditch it at the beginning of the section and leave it under the crusher so it can't do anything. The same luxury isn't in the second section, where you also start having to deal with Nightmare Viruses heading to infect helpless Reploids that you can't immediately save due to the "stop-and-start" gameplay enforced by the crusher. The third section takes the problems of the first two sections and brings them up to eleven, as you have to deal with spikes, a Conveyor Belt of Doom that constantly works against you, and depending on what Nightmare Phenomenon is active, icy ground or nigh-indestructible blocks that restrict your movement even further. Some sections even make it so that your only refuge against death is ducking, but if something damages you, you'll un-duck and fatally smash your head into the ceiling. Even after that Herculean task, you still have to fight the miniboss, Nightmare Pressure (which spends most of its time invulnerable) before confronting the Player himself.
  • Gate's Laboratory Stages 1 & 2: One-Hit Kill spikes everywhere, a sequence of rising instant-kill lava and slippery ice slopes, totem pole fights on moving platforms that rise into spikes, and an area for X that is all but impossible to traverse if you entered the stage with the Shadow Armor for it (you can only go back to switch armors once you enter Gate's domain after you either Game Over or defeat the stage's boss, and the Shadow Armor is ironically a surprisingly viable way to beat the previous level's boss, the Nightmare Mother with).note . The second half of Gate's Laboratory 2 varies on the section before the boss fight depending on whether you chose X or Zero. If you go with X, you have to push through acid rain. Gradual damage, but not as bad as Zero's, who has to go through a compressor that will squash you flat if you don't get to a safe zone. And several of those "safe" zones are bottomless pits, so you need to be careful to not to fall into them while you wait for the thing to go up and proceed.

Mega Man X7

Mega Man X8

  • Burn Rooster's stage starts out going down an auto-scrolling series of platforms. After that, there's a large spike-filled room. Next, another auto-scrolling section, and then the boss. Finally, in the ultimate cheap shot, even after beating the boss, you have to escape in yet ANOTHER auto-scrolling section, this time going up. Fortunately, you only have to do the final auto-scroller the first time you beat the level, which is good because getting 100% Completion requires beating the level at least twice in order to collect all the Rare Metals.
  • Another example: Gravity Antonion. It's easy until you get to the minigame (@ 1:42 in the video). There are six blocks on the ceiling. Suddenly, they sprout spikes and fall on you. You then hide on the walls, while they sprout spikes from their top and fly up at you. Repeat ad nauseam.
  • Dark Mantis's stage, Pitch Black. Not only is it Exactly What It Says on the Tin, the only way to collect half the items involves turning on the power, which requires you to first defeat Gigavolt Man-o-war and bring Axl along in order to copy one of the Guardroid enemies to get into the power room. Outside of that, there's also spotlights, which seal off exits if you're caught in them and summon more enemies.
  • Speaking of Gigavolt Man-o-war, his stage. May heaven have mercy on your sanity if you try to Perfect Run this thing, as it involves chasing the titular boss through a city in a driving/shmup segment and shooting him down. Sounds simple, right? Not only do you have to deal with him firing back at you (not to mention being ahead of you most of the time), there's also oncoming traffic and signs to deal with, that can slow you down substantially. The cherry on top is that you fail the stage if Gigavolt's not defeated in three laps, which will likely happen quite a few times if the hazards don't take you down first. Mercifully, the boss himself is not so bad compared to his level.

    Mega Man Zero series 

Mega Man Zero 2

  • Power Room, filled to the brim with lava and exploding Telebombs and not much room to maneuver. And to top it off, the boss is an absolute nightmare who can only be hit at certain points even with the right element; if you attack, he'll dodge and counterattack, and his counterattacks are damn hard to avoid. Worse still, one of the Cyber Elves hidden here is pure Guide Dang It! material. You essentially have to play Space Invaders in one section, kill every enemy while being blocked by moving platforms that hurt you if you touch them, and after that have to hit the fast-moving UFO in the three seconds from when it emerges to when it leaves.
  • The Bombardment Aircraft. You start off leaping between moving shuttlecraft which shoot at you while you're using them as platforms, on top of Pantheons shooting at you on top of them, requiring perfect timing so as to not to be knocked into the massive Bottomless Pits. Once past that section, you have to fight a miniboss who fires fast-moving, area-damage missiles at you until you hit it. When you hit it, it drops a row of bombs which can only be avoided by standing exactly where it was previously hovering. Then you navigate through a series of timed stage hazards that will eat right through your tiny lifebar and require expert timing to pass unharmed. Then you have to do a Hold the Line section protecting Ciel for 90 seconds, which counts for basically your entire mission score. If she gets hit, goodbye A or S rank. Naturally, this is a Bullet Hell sequence plus the Pantheons who you have to hit while blocking every bullet. Finally, you have to face a boss battle which becomes nigh-impossible on Hard Mode if you have an A or S rank. His A/S rank attack is literally undodgeable. Not hard to dodge, impossible to dodge. He has to be deflected, in-flight, to avoid taking damage, and the series of moves necessary to do this is not something the designers could reasonably expect people to figure out on their own, much less actually accomplish given that it takes precision timing to pull off.
  • There's also the Shuttle Factory, which is also long, contains lots of lava and other stage hazards, and a tough fight against Fefnir at the end.
  • Even the last level goes beyond what you'd expect for a final mission. Not only do you have to revisit the boss from the Power Room (who you can't partially nerf like the first time), they introduce an entirely new boss fight during the boss rush. What's worse, said new boss fight consists of the beetle boss from this game (mentioned above) and the beetle boss from the last game fighting you together in an arena that does not scroll, with attacks that cover nearly the entire screen and take split-second timing to dodge, and a Kaizo Trap ability for added measure.

Mega Man Zero 4

  • Popla Cocapetri's level when faced on Normal Mode upward features moving blocks that can instantly crush Zero to death, no chance of recovery. You have to be extremely good at getting through because the blocks are set up in a way that forces you to keep advancing and coupled with the added threat of spikes as a nasty surprise for the overly hasty player who doesn't look where they leap.
  • The first section of Tech Kraken's level is a Wrap Around maze with a time limit. At one point you're supposed to make a vertical jump that is pretty difficutlt even with the underwater physics, then you add the constantly-respawning Needballoon enemies that will ruin your jump either with their pin missiles or mere collision damage.

    Mega Man ZX series 

Mega Man ZX

  • Area K. K-1 with its boiling geysers isn't so bad, but then we go underground to find K-2 and a Goddamned Miniboss*, then back to not-so-bad with K-3, then the horribly annoying lava chase segments in K-4 with really annoying enemies (good luck avoiding damage!) before you finally reach the boss, who is actually somewhat of a breather after the crap his level put you through. (Unless you're going for a Level 4 victory against him, in which case...hope you have some blood pressure medication handy.) And if you decide to take an alternate path to make the lava wall move slower, you must also go through K-5, with its shaft full of rising lava that requires memorization and precise jumping (and probably vertical air-dashes)...and then go through a different area of K-1 and fight the miniboss all over again. And then comes the collection of the Sub-Tank...which makes going through the level normally seem easy in comparison.
  • Area L. While its satellite dishes that reverse left and right and disable your dash or prevent you from attacking, plus its constantly falling bombs are annoying, the main problems it presents are its location and being the center of an extremely tedious chain of side-missions. It's slap in the middle of a different area (Area H), one of the only two actual stages in the game to not have its own trans-server that you can warp to by the way, so in order to get there in the first place you'll have to pick the front or back of that area and go through there, possibly having to knock over a mid-boss or the area boss depending on your route and whether or not the latter is currently respawned (the former always will be). As for that chain of side-missions, they revolve around going into the area to recover an item, then bringing the item back to the NPC who asked you to get it. Problem is the first of these is in L-1, so you'll either need to go through half of Area H again or backtrack through nearly the entirety of Area L to get it, and there are five more round trips waiting for you if you want to get the main prize of this back-and-forth, that being a Sub-Tank. The Sub-Tank if you're in Hard Mode since the other three don't exist. How strange that it shares the aspect of having an awkward Sub-Tank with Area K.

Mega Man ZX Advent

    Mega Man Legends series 

Mega Man Legends

  • The Clozer Sub-Gate in 1 becomes this if you don't know what to do. At a particular part in the dungeon you find a cracked ceiling that has to be demolished using two specific special weapons. The problem is that 1) you may not have those weapons if you haven't gone exploring the dungeons well; 2) it isn't immediately obvious you can break that ceiling because this is the only time in the game you encounter a destructible ceiling; and 3, there's only a single hint in the game that you have to use a certain special weapon to break the ceiling, given in the description of the Grand Grenade. Players who don't know what they're supposed to do here can get stuck forever pondering how to proceed.
  • Glyde's base in 2. Several areas of powerful enemies that unleash Bullet Hell, the walls are lined with regenerating turrets, and running away to Data to recover your energy and save is a bit of a trip.
  • The Nino Ruins in 2, which isn't surprising considering it's a Down the Drain area and has all of its trappings: most of it has you moving veeeeery sloooooowly through water (which also messes with your jumping physics, making it harder to dodge enemies), is labyrinthine and very, very long, and it's packed to the brim with some of the more tedious and/or annoying Reaverbots in the game. At least it's got some good music for you to listen to. By extension, the Kimotama Caverns fall into this category as well, just without the cool music (you instead get the Clozer Woods ruin music from the first game, which is more Nightmare Fuel / Hell Is That Noise than anything).

    Mega Man Battle Network series 

Mega Man Battle Network

  • All of Internet Area 4, which is full of Goddamned Bats.
  • ElecMan's stage has invisible floors, trial-and-error battery puzzles, and infected programs which you can't tell from the regular ones until you talk to them, at which point they attack. However, the real problem in the stage is the timer — once it runs out, Mega Man stops healing after each battle, and the random encounter difficulty is usually balanced around you having regular after-battle healing. The Operate Shooting Star remake relieves frustration by marking the invisible paths with flickering dots, and giving you infinite retries on the trial-and-error puzzles instead of needing to backtrack to recharge every so often.

Mega Man Battle Network 2

  • Quick Man has a horribly annoying stage, because you can't jack out of the detonators once you jack in, meaning you can't restore your health. It is even possible to get into an Unintentionally Unwinnable situation because while you can't jack out, there's nothing stopping you from saving...
  • Freeze Man's chapter forces you to backtrack all across the Internet to get the right items to melt the right variants of ice.

Mega Man Battle Network 3: White and Blue

  • The Internet Fire mission forces you to backtrack across the entire Internet and put out every single fire in each affected area by sacrificing Aqua chips. To pour salt on the wound, the virus encounters don't change for the occasion, so you're forced to sidetrack to replenish your Aqua chip stock.

Mega Man Battle Network 4: Red Sun and Blue Moon

  • In Red Sun:
    • Search Man's scenario, in which a sniper takes shots at you periodically. The shots do 100 HP, are hard to dodge, and you've probably got around 400 by the time you've reached this stage. You're also traversing the Undernet, which is rife with Demonic Spiders, and the damage from the sniper shots aren't helping.
    • Thunder Man's scenario, in which MegaMan is cursed, causing his health to drop at twenty points per second, even during dialogue, and it doesn't stop until you find memory chips and bring them to a specific spot.
  • Blue Moon players have Metal Man's scenario, in which you have to play an annoying minigame that requires a lot of precision timing, and Proto Man's scenario, which is a PIXEL HUNT through the Undernet that misinforms you on one of the keys.
  • VideoMan's scenario has you running through the Internet to pick up tapes with your controls reversed and panels that will send you back to the beginning of an area.
  • ColdMan's scenario requires you to sacrifice four specific chips of specific codes. If you have no idea where to get those chips, you can get stuck for a long time.

Mega Man Battle Network 5: Team Colonel and Team ProtoMan

  • Ship Comp, a water dungeon which you have to guide your current Navi through. While underwater, the Navi's "cyber-air" will gradually deplete, after which their HP starts dropping rapidly until you either hit a cyber-air pocket or exit the water. Besides the annoying random encounters the whole way, there are also currents that push you back and whirlpools that drain your air. One of the areas was Dummied Out in the international release so your journey is a bit shorter, but it's re-introduced in Double Team DS.
  • The Gargoyle Comp receives flak due to the large numbers of twists and turns needed to get the correct Progs to progress. And that's assuming you've already figured out where you need to go. Like with the Ship Comp, it's shorter in the international release but put back to its full glory in the DS compilation.
  • End Area 1, 3, and 4 are absolute hell to navigate. They consist mainly of labyrinthine passages that all look the same and have almost no landmarks (save the pagoda in the third area). On top of that, they're all notably larger than any area so far, and the third and fourth throw in one-way conveyors. Additionally, End Area 1 has an invisible path, which is the only way to get to Optional Boss LarkMan.

Mega Man Battle Network 6: Cybeast Gregar and Cybeast Falzar

  • Aquarium Comp where you have to solve fish riddles via escorts. Not only do you have to figure out the correct key NPC for the very vague riddle, you have to escort him as well! And when you pick him up, sharks appear and you had to avoid them via a Pac-Man-ish minigame and some of the sharks more very quickly. If one of them catches your escort, he gets eaten and you'll have to run all the way back to him and start over, all with lovely Random Encounters with some annoying viruses. And to top it all off, you have to repeat this minigame (with a shorter length this time) at the end of the game as part of the Boss Rush!

Mega Man Network Transmission

  • The bank stage and the final area. Incidentally, the Bank stage happens to be, unsurprisingly, Quick Man's level. Right down to the insta-kill lasers.

    Mega Man Star Force series 

Mega Man Star Force

  • Scrap Comp, which basically requires you to use the Res-Sonar to find this Hertz's coworkers in order to regain control of the bulldozers. Of course, they're buried inside the junk hence why you have the Res-Sonar. This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the radar being frustrating to use, being attacked by bulldozers (though you are warned) and random encounters still happening despite the mission being hard enough as it is. Further still, you have to face a Jammer at the end of each section (aside from the last one). Yeah, and don't think Gemini Spark is a walk in the park...
    • What's worse, whenever the bulldozers prowl the field the sonar loses its signal, meaning you have to search a different area. This is problematic enough, until you learn the randomized signals are completely false. You're better off consulting a guide because the Hertzes' locations are fixed.

Mega Man Star Force 2

  • Loch Mess has you swimming around, digging for golden Mr. Hertzes. The clues as to where they're buried are painfully cryptic. And if you're even a fraction of an inch off on your digging spot, you're thrown into a virus battle with no reward.
  • The Whazzap Ruins are also extremely annoying. You have to direct Flame Hertzes to their pedestals, which is easy enough, but there's a robotic condor that will knock them away, forcing you to go BACK to get them again, unless you can duck into the shelters in time. And in the second area, you have to direct THREE of them at the same time.
  • The Bermuda Maze, which can only be properly navigated through with hints given from Hertzes. If you go the wrong way, you'll either end up where you started or you'll enter a virus house (i.e several enemy battles in a row) It's all fun and games until they start outright LYING to you and you have to check the colour of the stars displayed in the sky, making things even more jumbled and confusing. Worse still, you're required to memorize a set of directions from an NPC just to get to Mu. It also doesn't help that you have to traverse this place again to find Vega's Lair if you want to start the post-game.
  • Finally, there's Mu. You have to go through the wave road to collect runes that allow entry to the next part. After you get the runes, however, walls come up to keep you from going on, and some Murians are summoned. If you come into contact with one, you have 3 seconds to draw a specific pattern on it that appears for less than half a second. Fail, and you have to fight two at once. Oh, and you need to memorize the patterns on the runes you collected and put them into a specific order, otherwise it's Murians for you again.

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