Growing the Beard: The first game's engine is very noticeably buggy, a fact that sometimes actually impacted the quality of certain levels, and very little was done to streamline the game for less patient players, except in the case of City War. The sequel features a refined engine, the ability to skip some of the much worse or longer levels, more user-friendly features, and many of the levels even have bosses, something that was mostly reserved for the end of the tiers in the first game, with the exception of The Weapons Archive. Features were also added to encourage replayability, such as Noble Nickels and extra costumes, to give much more content to the player.
Not-So-Cheap Imitation: The first game was intended to imitate Make a Good Level X, but with a Mega Man theme. While the source of inspiration is only comprised of two games (as of this writing), Make A Good Mega Man Level Contest became so successful that it spawned a number of sequels and spin-offs and quickly eclipsed the former in notability.
Unexpected Character: Due to the number of characters, many of whom come from different sub-series and in some cases entirely different continuities, it's bound to be surprising who shows up.
All of the Robot Masters from the Challenger from the Future and DOS games show up in the sequels, with Komuso Man and Volt Man, respectively, being devkit bosses in 2.
One of the devkit bosses for MaGMML3 is Honey Woman, the prototype version of Hornet Man from Mega Man 9, and the basis of Vesper Woman's design from the Archie Comics. Also present is the Mega Mech Shark from the same game; not just a Wily Castle boss, but a massive, multipart boss with three health bars!
Beck and Rokko Chan are both playable skins in the sequel, and the latter's cast make some appearances. The Wiki also confirms that they exist in the same setting in the MaGMML universe.
Invoked with "Zero", who simply slides back and forth firing a simple projectile at you, and nether it nor colliding into him deals any damage to you. And his sprite is a badly drawn MS-Paint style sprite that doesn't even animate. Justified, though, as the fight was simply a diversion for Wily to escape from Mega Man yet again.
Mega Man Unlimited's Yoku Man is infamous for being fiendishly difficult due to being hard to hit, aggressive, and dishing out insta-kill attacks in his home game. As the boss of Tier 3 in the original MaGMML however, he's a lot less scary. His attacks are easier to read and dodge, he's incapable one-shotting the player, and he spends a surprising amount of time just standing around and letting himself get hit. His Yoku Attack is still incredibly powerful and can kill you fast... but thanks to being incredibly slow and easy to dodge, you pretty much have to let it hit you for it to be any sort of a threat. He loses this status in the remake where he's still easy, but more aggressive and a bit trickier to hit.
The titular boss of the first place level, Glass Man, got some fame among players since they enjoyed fighting him and considered him an authenticMega Man boss.
The "Research Facility" boss also got a lot of love from players for putting a new, unexpected spin on a gimmick from the classic series. It's in the style of the Weapon Archive from Mega Man 10, but for Wily stage bosses.
Best Level Ever: All the levels in the final tier are there for a reason, with many players wishing they were part of actual fangames and not just one-offs. To elaborate...
The fourth place winner Citadel Basement revolves around creative platforming challenges with the Guts Man platforms. The difficulty hits just the right balance between tough and fun, and as a result it feels genuinely satisfying to complete. The excellent remix of Cossack Stage 2 from Mega Man 4 just makes it even better.
Neon Gravity, the third place winner looks gorgeous, and makes use of a unique gravity gimmick where shooting at black holes and certain enemies causes them to orbit the target, leading to a lot of creative puzzles and fun bosses. And the music? An excellent 8 bit remix of A-ha's Take on Me.
Second place winner Mega Man World is a level based off of Super Mario World, and manages to feel incredibly charming thanks to the way it captures the spirit of a Mario game. The biggest highlight is all the unique, well-designed Mario enemies that manage to translate well into the style of Mega Man.
And Glass Man's stage is an incredibly beautiful stage that perfectly captures the feel of an official Mega Man level with interesting gimmicks that don't wear out their welcome, and a fun boss that feels like he stepped right out of a classic Mega Man game. It's not hard to see why the judges voted it as the game's best level.
Breather Boss: The Gravity Capsule and Glass Man aren't particularly tough bosses, but they at least put up a little bit of a fight. The same cannot be said about Birdo, the boss that's sandwiched between them. She doesn't move at all and lacks invincibility frames, allowing the player to absolutely shred her while she ineffectively shoots them with easily-dodged eggs as her only attack. Ronrez, the mini boss of her stage is far tougher than she is!
Game-Breaker: This game's weapons are great in general, but there are a couple of standouts among the pack. Funnily enough, the Metal Blade doesn't qualify: it's still a good weapon but greatly nerfed from how brutally powerful it was in its home game.
Magic Card is basically a discount Mega Man 2 Metal Blade in the sense that it's an incredibly powerful weapon that shreds even the toughest enemies, uses very little ammo, and can be aimed directly upwards. It can also bring out-of-reach objects over to Mega Man, giving it a bit of extra utility.
Pharaoh Shot is even more powerful than it was in Mega Man 4, and is so strong that it can one-shot plenty of the tougher, bulkier enemies, as well as a few minibosses.
If Mega Man dies or escapes from the level while a Black Hole Bomb is active, the player will still be able to hear the bomb going until it naturally fizzles out.
If the player pauses the game after killing three of the four Ronrez minibosses, the remaining Ronrez who's already spinning at ludicrous speed just shoots himself off the stage and dies automatically.
Harsher in Hindsight: Jolt Man's cheeky inclusion, given that the majority of planned references to Mega Man Eternal in the sequel would later be removed at the creator's request. Jolt Man himself would later be replaced by "Him" from Mega Man ARM 2 in MaGMML Remastered.
Obvious Beta: The Blyka's Engine version of the game suffers from a few flaws due to shoddy programming at best:
Sometimes, when you summon Rush Jet, he sometimes teleports out just as you jump onto him, potentially resulting in a cheap death. This was fixed in Remastered.
The rising Cossack platforms also suffer from this, in that they sometimes fail to spawn properly, and in one level, kills you when you're walking under a spiked ceiling after coming off of one because the game still registered you as being on the platform when you weren't.
YouTube user SuperMetalSonic360 found several out of bounds glitches with a few stages in his playthrough of the game, and in one case, he jumps off of the side of the screen at the end of the level "Hard to See Land" and after a few seconds, he promptly dies multiple times to the point the lives counter goes completely haywire. He also ends up clipping through a wall during an auto-scrolling segment during the first Wily Castle stage.
Placing enemies in the wrong spots can cause tiling to be messed up (e.g. solid tiles removed by accident, resulting in invisible pits). This was mainly a problem in "City War", but even the better levels could have this problem.
And if all that wasn't enough, it's possible for Zero Soul at the end of the Arena to glitch himself out of the screen entirely, rendering the fight Unintentionally Unwinnable and ruining your hard-earned run. This has been turn into an Ascended Glitch in the remake, with Zero Soul teleporting back on-screen after the attack ends.
Weak weapons such as Top Spin, Thunder Wool, and Gemini Laser have been buffed considerably from how they were in their home games. Gemini Laser is now a multi-hitting segmented weapon that breaks into smaller pieces that can shred through enemies, Thunder Wool is stronger and activates faster, and Top Spin now gives the player invincibility frames while in use.
The remake's better engine improves a lot of levels, but perhaps the level to benefit the most is Hard to See Land, as the fixes to the behavior of Top Platforms make the level much, much less of a hassle to deal with.
Wily Stage 3/Do No Harm wasn't exactly a hit with the playerbase due to its aggravating pacifism gimmick and obnoxious usage of conveyer belts and death spikes. The new version made by ACESpark in the remake takes the pacifism gimmick and runs with it, exploring it in more interesting, less aggravating ways: instead of never killing your enemies, there's a lot of emphasis on destroying them at the right time, which comes to a head in a few timing puzzles focused around either quickly clearing a room before an enemy's death gets rid of the pacifism platforms protecting you from spikes, or killing an enemy in order to eliminate a pacifism platform that would otherwise block your way forward and cause you to fall to your death. Helping matters is the fact that the boss is now a proper fight instead of an endurance test, enemy placement is more forgiving, and the level's visual aesthetics have been greatly improved.
Scrappy Mechanic: The buggy nature of the original game lent itself to a few of these, all of which are lessened or negated entirely in the remake:
If you lose all your lives in the first game, it kicks you all the way to the very beginning of the hub. It isn't even kind enough to put you outside the level you died at, which means if you died at one of the higher tier levels, which are further from the hub's starting point, it can be a long walk back again. Fortunately not the case with the Wily Castle, where losing all your lives just restarts whatever level you were on.
Rush Jet feels absolutely awful to use thanks to the game engine making it buggy to the point of near-uselessness. Incredibly wonky hitboxes usually lead to Rush vanishing as soon as he appears, and he often abandons the player out of nowhere mid-flight, leading to completely unfair deaths when flying over pits and spikes. Unsurprisingly, the toughest levels tend to focus a lot on Rush Jet usage.
The Top Man platforms are also horrible for the same reasons as Rush: the unstable game engine turns them into death traps with inconsistent collision detection that lead to Mega Man falling to his doom during what should be a safe jump.
Dagger Man in the original is a good deal tougher than just about every non-bonus boss in the game thanks to his teleport spam, fast attacks, and absolutely brutal, aggressive rain of shockwave daggers.
Justice Man is upgraded to one of these in the remake. His attack pattern is rather simple on its own, but when his health gets low enough, he splits in two, which makes the battle much more chaotic. Not helping matters is that his new weakness, Thunder Wool, can be a pain to hit him with depending on what attack he decides to use.
qazcake's level, "City War", was not designed properly note In Game Maker, collisions with the terrain have to be set separately from tiles, resulting in invisible holes and blocks strewn across the stage. Some gaps are also impossible to cross without using Rush Jet. It was so bad that it was near-unanimously voted "Least Favorite" by the judges (Duvi0, the lone exception, reserved his hatred for the enemy-spam happy "Chroma Key" instead) and was the only level to be made outright skippable. The bugginess of the stage was so infamous that its "remix" in the final Wily stage was basically a Take That!.
Zyglrox Odyssey's level "The Quickening" is an inverse of Quick Man's stage where you're going upwards instead of going down. However, the Force Beams are absurdly fast here, both in timing and movement. It's quite telling when Skull Man even warns you of the stage's difficulty just outside of its entrance teleporter. Fortunately, there's a huge stockpile of extra lives at both the start and the checkpoint, you can reset each screen by climbing back down and up again, and you can disrupt the beams somewhat with Black Hole Bomb. Thankfully, the remixed version in the final stage is far more forgiving. And while the Black Hole Bomb no longer disrupts them in the remake, the devs put in a level skip teleporter as a fair trade-off.
Many people have considered ParmaJon's level "Hard to See Land" to be their least favourite, and it's not hard to see why. There's two parts which require you to platform on the Spinning Tops from Top Man's stage, the latter part being a vertical section going upwards... except the tops' broken programming often leads to you sinking through them and often falling to your death. The final section is a punishing platforming section involving the falling crystals from Crystal Man's stage... which are no less random than they are here. And if you die there, the last checkpoint is before the aforementioned vertical climb. And to top it off, you can encounter by far the game's biggest Game-Breaking Bug if you try to use Rush Jet at the top of the final rainbow shaft to cross over to the other side... which eventually then leads to you to doing the whole level all over again.
While an overall solid level with a hilarious ending, "Spiky Meltdown" can be frustrating to play for a myriad of reasons. During the section where you navigate across death spikes on sinking platforms, there are multiple spots you can jump to that will glitch you through the floor and kill you. There's also a particularly brutal trek over a pit of lava that's constantly shooting out Tackle Fires thanks to the engine's problem with enemy spawners going crazy and overwhelming the player, and a hair-pullingly difficult run across a long bridge made entirely of falling platforms, where the smallest screw-up is a guaranteed fall to your death with the mob of annoying enemies hanging around not helping your situation at all.
Flashman85's level "Maze of Death" is polarizing, to put it lightly. While the level may not be as brutal as "The Quickening", it more than makes up for that with its length. And if you're unlucky enough to lose all your lives, all the barriers you destroyed throughout the maze regenerate, including the ones blocking the exit passage and the various shortcuts, forcing you to start all over again. Roahm Mythril's blind playthrough of the level took a full half-hour. The first recorded blind run of the level took a full two hours.
Duvi0's Wily Fortress stage in the original has a gimmick where destroying an enemy causes several barricades to spawn in the current room, complicating the path. However, due to the buggy nature of the barricades and the game in general, it's possible to get stuck in one if it spawns on top of you or worse. In addition, there's several conveyor belts and spikes, and the way the conveyor belts are visually designed makes it impossible to tell which direction they're going in from a glance note the conveyor belts are taken from Mega Man 2, specifically Metal Man's stage, which only has a two-frame animation and the only way to tell which way they're going in is the arrows at their ends, which the conveyor belts in this stage lack. There's also a corridor where the floor is made of said conveyor belts going in both directions with an occasional spike that requires precision to get through. And to top off the "pacifist" nature of the level, the boss is completely invulnerable to your weapons. You have to Hold the Line until his degenerating health bar kills him.
Haunt Man's last phase. He goes down fast (two charged shots should do him in pretty nicely), and his only attack is to swoop diagonally across the screen: while it's fast, it has some very obvious blind spots. Justified in that the prior two forms are the actual challenge of the boss fight.
The judges had this complaint about Cyber Man, due to his attacks all doing very low damage despite being fast and impressive-looking.
Arc Fatigue: MaGMML2 is pretty much Arc Fatigue: The Game. There are 81 entries and 19 developer-made stages for a total of 100 levels, and a large portion of that are levels that are exceedingly long, have multiple paths or exits, or are just flat out frustrating. There's also many side games, including a faux-Endless Game mode that spans roughly 2 hours of casual playtime, 3 arenas that touch on nearly every boss in the game and then some, and the Noble Nickels, which can range anywhere between incredibly difficult to obtain to nigh-impossible to get without a guide. Yet, almost every player feels compelled to collect that last lousy item to unlock the secret content, and doing so often leads to serious burnout.
Badass Decay/Flanderization: Parodied with the true final boss. Absolute ZERO starts out as a threat that clearly states his intent to destroy you, but as you defeat each form, he gradually falls apart and spouts out increasingly long-winded speeches, running out of ways to attack you all the while, until you end up fighting a drawing that can't even hurt you.
The boss of Wily 5, developed by ACESpark. You walk through a hallway, watching statues of devkit bosses get drained of their energy, there's a free E-Tank and Yashichi in the boss corridor, and you just get a glimpse of the boss flying away as you go through the main doors. But when you drop down to the boss room proper, the core tracks you down and transforms into the first phase of SevenForce, complete with a remixed version of its original tune. What ensues is one of the longest, most varied, and most spectacular boss fights in the entire game, with every force being completely different and having completely different strategies. Eddie gives you a large health refill between each phase. And if you die to any force after the first one? You can skip to the Force you died on if you don't want to redo them all at the expense of a Noble Nickel. It's long, frantic, and difficult, but it's not cheap, and it's never outright dull. And when you destroy it and see that sweet Stage Clear animation, you will feel like a badass.
The Wily Machine SWORD. It plays out like a traditional Wily Machine battle at first, but once its first health bar is depleted, it launches an unavoidable energy ball at you, turning you into Hornet Man and thus locking you into Hornet Chaser. What follows is a boss very reminiscent of the Final Boss from Mega Man: A Day in the Limelight; a multi-phase boss where you're forced to use a different Robot Master for each phase and have to figure out how to use him to damage the boss. Oh, and the whole fight is set to Ruby Illusions.
ACESpark's reworked Glass Man. His move set is more varied and difficult to dodge (with the exception of his glass globe attack, which is now less unpredictable), but it feels incredibly satisfying to outmanoeuvre his attacks and get through both his phases.
Btd'nhan in the second Wily stage, as well. Its attacks don't do much damage and are easy to avoid, plus it takes even more damage than usual from its weakness.
Breather Level: Metallic Ocean and So Good are notably easier than most of the other levels in Tier X.
Let's be honest, very few people understand why a grotesque-looking Megamanends up as one of the final bosses. And you can't just search up what he's supposed to be from until you see his name in the True Arena or Boss Gallery, since his name or origin isn't given anywhere else.
A common complaint with the Duwang level in Tier 6, where the instant death hands gimmick is a lot easier to figure out if you're a JoJo's Bizarre Adventure fan than if you're not.
Discredited Meme: The "i feel the need to ping @Garirrry" or "inner apocalypse" copypasta has become this. Initially written to mock people giving melodramatic complaints about Wily 4, it caught on and quickly got run into the ground with little variation. What really killed it was the MaGMML team agreeing that in retrospect, Inner Sanctum was a bad level and Garirry being distanced from the contest after their MaGMML3 entry was excluded for being deemed deliberately malicious by the judges.
Ending Fatigue: The tremendously long Wily 6 can cause this, capped off by a 3-part final battle with no breaks in between. Luckily, the player isn't forced to do the escape sequence afterwards.
For the entry bosses, Neapolitan Man, who got the second most amount of votes for the Inafune Award in the 2017 Sprites Inc. Awards. There's also Chomp Man who, despite being hosted in a low-placing stage and being mildly annoying to fight, scores points for having a quirky and fun design. He even had the honor of receiving an official illustration drawn by KarakatoDzo.
For the judges, ACESpark, whose criticisms were so well-received that he was granted the co-host position for MaGMML3, alongside the former judge/contestant Mick Galbani (aka Blackmore_Darkwing).
As far as costumes go, the Karrot Man skin was a hit thanks to his goofy design, hilarious animations, and amusing replacements for Rush and the Mega Buster pellets.
Volt Man and Komuso Man were by far the most popular out of the devkit bosses and were used in a lot of stages. It mainly stems from the cool factor of having such obscure Robot Masters in the game, though Komuso's cool design and interesting fighting style give him a bit of an edge over Volt.
The Contest Weapon Data, comprised of new weapons based off the contest entries, completely trivialises much of the challenge in the game, mostly due to the fact that many of the stages were designed with the normal weapons in mind. Particular note goes towards two weapons: Force Beam, which could absolutely shred minibosses and shielded enemies (without Slash Claw's caveat of having to be close to the enemy), and Match Blast, which lets you skip over entire segments of stages. It was so bad that this needed a major nerf in one of the later patches.
After you obtain all 220 Noble Nickels and have defeated Knight Man, you gain access to a Super Mode yourself. All normal charge shots become mid-level charge shots, all mid-level charge shots become full charged shots, and all full charged shots unleashes a circular blast that hits the whole screen. Oh, and you can also fly. And all of this with no ammo costs. Naturally, all runs with it are labelled as cheat runs on the leaderboards, and it is banned from all Arenas and the Pit of Pits until you've cleared them at least once.
The Cursor. It spends the whole battle summoning enemies, which isn't bad by itself if it didn't seem to love Rounders specifically, which are ridiculously tanky for a normal enemy and will block out your shots as they orbit around Mega Man.
Before it was patched out, the Contest Weapons could be used alongside the original weapon set. It mostly had utility with Carry being usable at the same time as the Super Arrow, leading to some pretty daring escapes from bottomless pits.
Crusher Joe's treads can be destroyed if you apply enough force to them. This results in him doing nothing but spamming the spike press attack, which leads to either a pretty easy victory (if he's facing towards the wall) or a hellish dodging game (if he's standing by the wall facing inwards).
Missiles (like the ones featured in Shuttle Man and Launch Man as well as Wily Castle VR) were very buggy in the first few builds, doing things like not loading their sprite correctly or creating invisible blocks.
In Flashman85's results stream, the Tier 7 boss was supposedly Pepsi Man from the then WIP fangame Mega Man FU, before suddenly being slain by Future, the real Tier 7 boss. Several months later, Mega Man FU was cancelled.
ACESpark getting nauseous after going through Bouncy Castle is already unfortunate as it is. Then he became ill a few weeks into his Judge Let's Play for the game.
One of the Pit of Pits levels is a homage to the infamous fourth Wily Stage from Mega Man 2, and ends with a room filled with Beaks to fill in for the Boobeam Trap. Come MaGMML3 and the Megamix Engine that comes with it, and the Boobeam Trap itself is featured as a devkit boss.
Some of Quarantine Woman's attacks are very reminiscent of Acid Man's in Mega Man 11.
Memetic Loser: Both Quint and Toad Man are mocked in-universe. The latter in particular goes to great lengths to become more threatening in the Tier X level Hardcore Parkour.
The "i feel it◊" face.Explanation Earlier in the year, a fan project called Mega Man 2.5D got released and most members of the MaGMML Discord ended up liveplaying it. One of the moderators posted the above image, depicting a sprite of Bass on a Tornado Man platform, and from there it took off with the MaGMML community.
me_irl, the Mega Man head on-legs costume, has become popular in some circles of the Mega Man fandom rather than just the MaGMML community.
A few of the stages have been noted to give players motion sickness while playing them. Humorously, these stages always come with a warning from 'Motion Sickness Man', a joke Robot Master that hangs out just before these teleporters. Notably, one level was so bad about this that one of the judges couldn't review it because it made him too sick to finish the level.
Unfortunately, one such stage in Null and Voiddidn't get a warning, leading to an unpleasant surprise for those who went into it, as it notably happened to Roahm Mythril.
One-Scene Wonder: The Hall Master miniboss from NaOH's submission stage, Quarantine Woman. Its surprise appearance in the level's Boss Corridor is the only place you encounter it in; it does not reappear in Tier X, it's not included in the Mega Arena, and it's also one of the few bosses to even be excluded from the Boss Gallery (when the Boss Gallery featured bosses that were banned from the Arenas, such as the Yggdrasil trio).
Older Than They Think: SnoruntPyro admits that the idea for MaGMML was ripped from Make a Good Level X in the judge bios in the second game. The second game is also wildly more popular than MaGLX; Google autofill results for "Make a good _____" fill the blank in as "mega man level" before "level X".
Pandering to the Base: The only reason why ACESpark's fursona can be unlocked as a costume is because people asked for it, to ACESpark's puzzlement.
Pop-Cultural Osmosis: Occurs with the Yggdrasil level. It features characters from the obscure web comic Cutezome Mythos, which players are far more likely to recognize here than in their original comic.
While not hated on his own, Door Man's source game is seen as a disappointment. Once he got integrated into MaGMML2 as the tier 3 boss, he became popular thanks to an interestingly varied fight, as well as the dialogue ACESpark wrote for him.
This is overtly the entire point of The Stage Nobody Asked For (and successfully so, given it won second place), which consists entirely of infamous enemies and Scrappy Mechanics and seeks to actually make interesting and fun challenges out of them - even the noob tactic of placing a ton of one or two kinds of enemy on a screen gets the treatment! And on top of that, it invents a Scrappy Mechanic, just to redeem it, too!
Yoshiatom's "Poorly Named Level" set out to do this with Tornado Man platforms. It wasn't a successful attempt, however, due to the MaGMML2 engine making the platforms' physics jankier than in their home game, and because the creator used them for some very precise jumps littered with death spikes and enemy spam.
Quint was given a few extra moves that made him less of a pushover; as a result, he ended up becoming the end boss of no less than three different stages. His weapon, the Sakugarne, also got some love, with several of the level designers setting up challenges that called specifically for it.
Force Beams (from Quick Man's stage) actually got treated fairly well in several of the levels they appeared in. At least three stages Forgotten Fortress, Force Man, and The Stage Nobody Asked For all telegraphed the places where they would appear, and the latter two put some interesting twists on them.
All of the skippable levels except Neon Man (which is instead skippable for health reasons) are this, with their difficulty (and in the case of Sector Upsilon 6, also being a really long Metroidvania level) being the reason why they're skippable in the first place.
Even by standards of the skippable levels, Yggdrasil is quickly gaining the reputation of being the City War of MaGMML2; it features force beams, Yoku blocks, an inconsistent screen wrapping gimmick, enemies with the ability to spam projectiles, and three energy elements, each of which is guarded by a different That One Boss. ACESpark's judging comments explicitly say that if you must skip one level in the contest, it should be Yggdrasil.
Holy Crap, Mega Man Can Airslide? in Tier 5 uses a lot of instant death pits, and has several moments where failing to move immediately will get you killed. It also has a brand new airsliding gimmick which is introduced well enough at first, but the double-jumping aspect is only abstractly explained through jump & slide signs from Mega Man 8, and sometimes it doesn't even work (especially if you prefer to use the down+jump slide). It gets especially irritating when you have to use the finicky double-jump while large fireballs are flying everywhere. Finally, compounding the issues with this level is a blank blue background that has absolutely zero sense of progression to it, making it difficult to know for sure if you're even getting anywhere in this level, let alone where you're supposed to go.
Spiky Situation in Tier 7 starts out easy enough, despite the spikes and the odd invincible enemy, but then you actually enter the so-called "Needle Castle". After that, the level is crowded with spikes with platforms that will drop you if you stand on them for anything less than a second, and starts using invincible enemies far more often. The final section with the brown wire-based platforms is especially spiky, and only has one checkpoint, meaning you'll be redoing large amounts of level if you die right before the boss gate. Finally, the Superboss is a timed boss fight where you can't attack, or pause to use E-Tanks, and the boss's firing patterns are almost completely random, meaning whether or not you survive is down to luck.
Escape Sequence in Tier 8 is framed as a level where you have to rush through it on a time limit. In practice, however, doing this is far more likely to get you impaled on the numerous spikes throughout the level, especially since you're moving a lot faster than normal, and since it's not actually timed it's much better to go through it slowly. The level is incredibly long, even with the super speed, and every section is crawling with spikes. It also has a Rush Jet section that requires you to be essentially perfect, otherwise it kills you outright, and a successful run of that section can take nearly a minute discounting deaths. Additionally, the climbing sections with the Wheel Cutter and Wire can also be really finicky. But the worst part is that every time you die, you have to wait several seconds for the level to reload, combine that with all the instant death in here, and you will be seeing that blank loading screen a lot.
Rad Gravity in Tier 9 introduces a new gimmick where you have to drive around on Nitro Man to perform physics-defying stunts on large curved expanses. However, the control scheme for Nitro Man is extremely unintuitive, and the level gives you little room to safely experiment with the gimmick by adding plenty of spikes almost immediately after giving you the gimmick to play with. There's also two different minibosses in this level, both of which are extremely annoying to dodge. It was bad enough that one of the judges playing the level went out of their way to avoid using Nitro Man altogether.
Wily 4, "Inner Sanctum". The level's main gimmick is forced weapon usage, with every weapon in the game except Flash Stopper and Rush Coil. It also has enough spikes to rival the more death-filled entries, very precise timing challenges, plenty of pixel perfect jumps, and 5 Noble Nickels with their own challenges, one of which even requires you to backtrack twice in order to complete three different separate paths. The level is also the second longest level in Wily Castle, and the boss is one of the harder fights in Wily Castle. Oh, and the music can get a little grating after awhile. This level was made slightly easier in a later patch following its negative reception (mostly replacing spikes in certain areas with electric tiles that aren't instant death), but still remains very difficult.
Wily 6 can easily become this. The level itself is a looping maze that uses snapshots from nearly every level in the 8-bit Classic games, dotting the maze are several different levels that each reference two entire tiers, several of which are crawling with spikes and all but require you to have played through their entire tier, including direct references to the gimmicks (and in one case a boss fight) from some of the skippable levels. This becomes a problem if you chose to tackle Wily Star immediately, instead of beating all ten tiers first. Additionally, the maze itself only has one checkpoint directly in the center, and it will cut off paths as you complete tier stages, forcing you to take more and more roundabout routes through the level. Finally, there's 9 different boss fights in the level, 6 of which are found in the maze, and the remaining 3 are fought as the final battle. And if you die at any point during the main loop (or the final, final boss), you have to sit through a long loading sequence before you can do anything again.
Mario Land in Tier X is extremely annoying if you're not a big Mario player. For starters, basically none of Mario's mechanics are taught to you, forcing you to figure out at least the running mechanic entirely by yourselfnote Holding the Fire button to run comes naturally to Mario players; Mega Man fans, not so much. They try to teach the spin jump to you through an Up + A sign, but not everyone has jump mapped to A, so it's plenty possible to misinterpret the instructions. Beyond that, Mario controls like a bar of soap in comparison to Mega Man's much tighter movement, which can make navigating the level a lot dicier. Even knowing his behaviors doesn't save you though, as the vast majority of the level's mechanics don't work properly. Enemies and fireballs have a tendency to just fall through the world, and the block train at the end of one route is prone to shunting you into the lava. The worst part of the level is Mario's inability to hurt enemies whilst under Mercy Invincibility. While not an issue for dealing with most of the enemies, this becomes a problem in boss fights. Finally, 2 of the 5 Dragon Coins (which are re-skinned Noble Nickels) in this level are hidden with absolutely no telegraph, one's inside a random ceiling pipe, the other requires you to hit an Invisible Block to create a vine ladder to the coin.
One of the levels in Tier X is a direct sequel to The Quickening from MaGMML1, down to being made by the same guy and just being called "The Quickening 2". Instead of being a huge vertical climb with instant death lasers, it's a rush forward with draining lasers that uses Wheel Cutter and Super Arrow. It also has the single fastest autoscroll in the entire game, which can be extremely difficult to keep up with. Fortunately, if you bring full E-Tanks, you can take advantage of the less skill demanding routes by chugging down a tank any time you need it. But if you're going to go this route you really need to bring a full set, and the autoscroll can still crush you if you aren't on top of things.
The level "Deep Thoughts" in Tier X is an Impossible Quiz-themed level that requires near-encyclopedic knowledge of the entire MaGMML series. Answering a question wrong will kill you, and in between each question is some kind of enemy challenge, as the blurb at the start suggests. What the blurb doesn't tell you is that several of these challenges are upgraded boss fights, including a souped-up Cheat Man with more projectiles and a One-Hit Kill that isn't stopped by the Skull Amulet. Combined with some remarkably specific questions in the endgame, and this level is painful if you don't have a top-notch memory for the entire series.
One of Zieldak's rooms in Null and Void is a huge non-Euclidean maze in the vein of Mega Man Star Force's infamous Bermuda Maze, that's very easy to get lost in. There's several paths that land you back near the beginning of the maze with no way to double back, and to top it off, there's a fake exit while the real one is down a hidden path whose entrance is a fake wall that you have to slide through. The level was nerfed in the 1.4 release, the fake exit was blocked and the correct path was made more obvious, but the non-euclidean layout remains.
While most of the built-in dev-kit bosses are not so bad, Chill Man especially stands out. The devkit had the option of giving him his Hard Mode pattern from his originating game, and every single level he appears in uses this pattern. While the attack where he throws out several Chill Spikes from mid-air in the middle of the room can be avoided with ease, the attacks where he shoots his Chill Spike shots three times in a row are nearly impossible to predict. Oh, and his shots can still freeze you. Fun!
If you were expecting the Arena to just be all bosses from the dev-kit (and thus possible to have practised them), the game suddenly throws a curve-ball by including Quick Man in the line-up. He's more predictable than his original counterpart, being the original AI minus the tendency to get stuck in the outer walls of the arena (AI is: three jumps of a randomized height, boomerangs thrown at the peak of the second jump, then running at the player after the third jump; lather, rinse, repeat), but he also is tankier than the original, taking only 1 damage from buster shots instead of 2. This adds up to an unpleasant experience for the player.
The three unique bosses of Yggdrasil, Crator, Cream, and Kichona, are all this. Crator's attacks have a wide range of effect, he frequently blocks your shots, and he uses a lot of similar attacks to Maverick Zero, including his instant kill Genmurei attack (in general, all of his attacks are blatantly lifted from Zero in some form). Cream's axe attack sprays projectiles randomly everywhere, and she otherwise attacks constantly and randomly with various bullets. Kichona has the highest health value of the three, and she can heal herself with her dash attacks, can also block your shots, and she has a machine gun that sprays bullets everywhere much like the level enemies do. Or she could just decide that she doesn't want to play anymore and jump or fall out of the room, forcing you to hit the suicide button. Fortunately, all three of these bosses are barred from the Arena.
The boss of Tier 5, Lord Elewoofro, uses a final boss theme for a reason. He spends most of the fight out of your reach, hits really hard, and takes little damage. His evil power-ups cover a wide range of attack and need to be destroyed so you can dodge his Master Weapons. His evil 1-ups will dodge your shots by jumping. His skull tanks explode into 8-way spreadshots. His Thunder Beam is very large. His Leaf Shield has a spiralling spread that can be difficult to read. And his Ice Wave comes out unexpectedly fast. If you can't keep the enemy count low, he will overwhelm you.
The boss of Tier 6 is none other than Cheat Man, and while easier than in CX he's still a painful fight. He immediately begins the fight by launching text from the dialogue box at you. His bouncing projectiles move fast. He has a barrier in front of him that will warp shots above your head. And he has no problems warping you into the ceiling to hit you with his attacks. The worst of it is his Cheat Cannon attack, which has an HP to One effect if it connects, and he always pauses a split second before firing it, trying to catch you off guard. The game fully expects you to die to him many, many times, even changing the intro dialogue the first few times you die.
The boss of Tier 7, Future, is just as brutal as he was in his original game. While he's much easier to hit, his attacks are less predictable and often desync with his sickles. He also has an attack where he slows you down, making most of his other attacks near impossible to dodge. When you kill him, he throws fire everywhere for several seconds before he explodes. If this kills you, you have to do his entire fight again.
The boss of Wily 4, Autobounce, is a Barrier Change Boss that's only vulnerable to the weapon it resembles, and changes its weakness every time it gets hit. Each of its forms has a different attack, and what form it changes into is completely random. If it's in Sakugarne form, be prepared to take a hit trying to damage it. If it's in Grab Buster form, it fires an arcing spread of three shots that steal your health. If it's in Slash Claw form, it will speed up every few seconds until it's near impossible to hit safely. Finally, as the boss loses health, it gets faster and more aggressive on its own, making it harder to both dodge and hit.
Of all the fights against the Chimerabots throughout Wily 6, Chimerabot 4, Match Force, definitely stands out. Not only does it have the highest damage output out of all of them, but it inherits both of it's component Robot Masters' most annoying traits; Match Man's speed and unpredictability and Force Man's hard-to-time attacks. It also retains Force Man's ability to jump out of the room for several moments to rain waves of instant death Force Beams from the ceiling. Hope you've got that Skull Amulet handy!
Thought the Wily Capsule 7 was a bitch in Megaman 7? Well, its far worse in the hands in Wile E. Coyote in the form of Coyote Man. The elemental orbs zoom back on screen this time and fly back into Coyote Man, causing him to launch one of three attacks, each untelegraphed. Besides the orbs, all of Coyote Man's attacks come out extremely fast and can easily corner Megaman, leading to many moments of unavoidable damage. Also, just like Wily Capsule 7, Coyote Man's weakness deals almost no damage and is almost impossible to hit him with.
Both fights with Air Man in Mario Land are this, mostly because you're playing as Mario. Mario's inability to hurt opponents while invincible makes fighting Air Man without fireballs extremely difficult, and outside of the pattern you can duck under, Mario's controls means he has a much harder time dodging the tornadoes compared to Mega Man. On the bottom route, this isn't the worst thing since it's just Air Man on his own. But if you take the top route, then after draining half of his health Air Man will drop you into another room and become much larger. In this form, he fires all of his attacks at random locations. His vulnerability times are lower. And he has two health bars. Making matters worse is when he's low on health he adds extra tornadoes to the floor, and then Mario's invincibility quirks make hitting this giant Air Man a Luck-Based Mission with how his attacks work.
Getting all 220 Noble Nickels can fall under this. A couple of them are hidden in excessive hiding places (case in point; Just an Ice Level has a Noble Nickel that can only be reached by climbing an invisible ladder with no indication that this is the case), while certain other ones require incredible skill and patience (Spiky Situation requires you to survive a Hold the Line superboss with the ability to use E-Tanks disabled, while the infamous Wily 4 requires you to do all three routes during the first half—and if you get it wrong, you're locked out from getting the nickel).
Certain challenges can also fall under this. Notably, one of them is doing most of the True Arena using the Mega Buster only note the only exceptions being against Autobounce and the Wily Machine SWORD, as those bosses require weapons usage, and there's a group of challenges that require the player to do a No-Damage Run of one level from each of the Tiers, the Wily Star, and Tier X retrospectively, and it doesn't count if you use a Skip Teleporter. Oh, and they're all required for full 100% Completion.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Several lower-ranking entry levels have potentially great concepts ruined by bad execution. The Shovel Knight level, in particular, makes use of gimmicks from that game in superficial ways and doesn't even have a boss fight with the man himself (even though Super Fighting Robot clearly showed that it is possible). Similarly, the judges docked a lot of points from Cursor Curse because the Cursor gimmick was an amazing idea that ended up being mostly dropped after the early screens of the level.
ACE in particular gets quite annoyed at Boss Corridors leading to an empty room with nothing but an Energy Element, saying the designer should at least put a devkit boss in the level if they went through the trouble of designing a corridor.
Some of the judges felt that the fight against Combust Man was disappointing. Surprisingly, ACE was fine with this one, since it showed more thought than most and did make for a good punchline to the level.
24 Hour
Best Level Ever: All the contest levels have noticeable flaws due to short amount of time the creators had to make them, but two of them manage to be great fun in spite of their shortcomings.
Flooded Temple by ACESpark is a beautiful level full of satisfying platform challenges and creative use of the jet ski from Mega Man 5's Wave Man levels.
Breaking Ground by NaOH uses the destructible blocks from Chill Man's stage to great effect, using them as floors and barrier againt annoying enemies that the player has to get creative to play around. They make for fun and interesting puzzles and never get annoying (save for the Quick Man fight at the end).
Breather Level: Nauseous Greenhouse by ThatOneEnder is incredibly short, devoid of challenge, and ends with a boss fight against Top Man.
Disappointing Last Level: Wily 3 is generally seen as a low point for the fortress stages. The stage consists of little more than digging your way through Super Arm blocks, with most of the enemies going down rather easily. The level also tends to lag a lot, which makes it even more of a drag. Fortunately, the Wily Machine Arc fight isn't quite as poorly-received.
Game-Breaker: The unlockable weapon sets. On top of including every Special Weapon and support weapon from MaGMML2, they also include Match Blast, which is just as powerful as before, and Skeletup n' Pakkajoe, a screen-wide weapon with infinite ammo.
Goddamned Bats: While Spring Heads were already somewhat of a nuisance in MaGMML2, often taking multiple hits from Slash Claw to defeat, the 24 Hour contest makes them even worse by having their only weakness be the often unusable Super Arm, making them borderline Invincible Minor Minions. Aside from that, you're either going to have to temporarily freeze them with Chill Spike (which can make them fall off the screen in one room of Breaking Ground), or simply accept that you can't do anything to stop them from trying to ram into you at top speed.
Scrappy Weapon: All four special weapons tend to get flak for either being too ineffective or too situational. It's not a good sign when the much-maligned Water Wave is one of the better weapons. Of course, this just makes the unlockable MaGMML2 weapons even more satisfying.
Quick Man, the boss of Breaking Ground. As if fighting him wasn't bad enough on its own, you now have to fight him in an arena with a floor made of Chill Man blocks, which can be broken not only by your jumps, but also by Quick Man's jumps. This results in the arena's layout constantly changing, making the battle incredibly confusing and frustrating regardless of whether or not you end up falling into the Wanaan pit at the bottom. What's worse, Quick Man and the Energy Element can end up despawning, forcing you to start the battle over. On top of all this, the boss corridor is littered with Space Metall spawners and Wanaan traps, which can easily take off chunks of your health before you even reach Quick Man.
The Wily Stage 1 boss, Giga Count, is a real pain in the tail. When he's actively attacking, it's usually through summoning minions that fire a salvo of bullets at you with annoying accuracy, but even when he isn't he's hard to actually hit because the timed bomb platforms you climb will deflect your shots if they're in the way, and can instantly crush you to death if you're trapped between them in a wall. Even his weakness to the Water Wave doesn't take much pressure off you, because its poor vertical range means you have to wait for the rare moments he's on the ground to use it, and that in turn opens you up to get hit by his quick-traveling explosive shockwaves.
Wily Machine Arc is brutal, even by Wily Machine standards. It's a 4 phase marathon of a boss, with each phase making him invincible to all but one of your special weapons. Thankfully despite their Scrappy Weapon status they aren't hard to use against him, but Wily himself is relentless, with difficult to dodge, hard-hitting attacks that eat through your HP like nothing. His second and fourth phases in particular are really nasty, because the surplus of projectiles he fires makes it difficult to get a clean hit on him without getting nailed by an attack in the process.
Unexpected Character: Quick Man certainly wasn't expected as one of the devkit bosses, especially since his only prior appearance in the series was as an Arena-exclusive boss in MaGMML2.
Episode Zero
Anticlimax Boss: The final boss of the main story, Trio, is this by design. After a lengthy run through Null and Void, a rematch against all four members of SRARA (with upgraded boss fights), and the sheer craziness that is Unununium, the developers wanted to dial back what might easily be beyond the sixth boss in a normal play session, so his damage numbers are a bit... underwhelming.
SRARA Shield Attacker is a lot less tough than the rest of SRARA, using a very simple attack pattern and being weak to the Cutter chip — which the player is guarenteed to have by the time they're fought. Even during the SRARA boss rush near the end, they don't change up their strategy much and their new attacks are still simple compared to the techniques the rest of SRARA obtained, if the player even sees them before melting down their health.
Giga Kuwagata, Neopolitan Man's Wafer Wagon, and Giga Picketman are this in the harder arena challenges, where their simple attack patterns make them a refreshing break from fighting most of the game's harder bosses in one go.
Ensemble Dark Horse: Pirate Man, whose personality as a loveable scallywag with a hilarious radio show endeared him to the playerbase.
Sequel Difficulty Spike: Episode Zero is fairly more difficult than the other games in the MaGMML series. Aside from the Early Game Hell mentioned above, bolts and Emergency Energy Tanks are far harder to come by, and unlike the other games, a shop doesn't become available until the conclusion of the first chapter, which consists of several long stages and some challenging boss fights towards the end.
Shocking Moments: In the very final level of the game, Trio appearing out of a reaction from the Energy Elements took many players by surprise. And then you get to fight him in a free-floating arena alongside Duo.
Take That, Scrappy!: Cursor Corruption has a miniboss version of Internet Explorer, allowing you to finally blow up this crappy browser.
That One Boss: Doc Robot Overloaded is one of the harder bosses in the game, being 3 phases long and using some tricky combinations of Robot Master attacks. The first phase is tough enough, but the second has it split in two, doubling the amount of projectiles (and hitboxes, as per Doc Robot tradition) that need to be dodged. Meanwhile, the final phase is a survival gauntlet against Quick Man's AI minus the boomerangs. This wouldn't normally be too bad, except the boss comes near the end of chapter 1 — a time when Zero is unlikely to have more than one or two E-Tanks, is unable to access the shop, and definitely won't have any chips besides the Z-Chip and Cutter Chip.
That One Level: While there aren't really any bad levels due to the game's quality control team, some are more difficult than you'd expect for their point in the game.
Offshore Hangar Cluster is focused around grabbing keys in mini-levels, then running an obstacle course to escort the keys to the end without wasting any on useless doors. The first half of the level isn't too bad, but the second starts off with a frustrating course on the wave bike from Mega Man 5, where one hit is likely to make you miss the key. The final stretch of the level has no obstacle course, but the mini-level is large, full of tough enemies placed in positions that make them hard to deal with, and is free-scrolling.
Cursor Corruption is more difficult than you'd expect for a fourth level in a path. While most of the level is fairly easy, the snake block sections throw plenty of Chromers and Moz 6604s at you, creating a storm of projectiles, and require some platforming skill to not get left behind. The second section in particular is tough, as there are white Cursors that destroy the ground, albeit without harming Zero. Unless you can keep up with the Cursor drawing the blocks and quickly take down the Chromers blocking the way, expect to either fall into a pit, or get knocked into one.
Wicked Waterworks has lots of tight underwater maneuvers with annoying enemies like Shield Attackers. The last stretch of it is the worst part, as it adds a current that constantly pushes Zero to the left slightly, requiring you to adjust your jumps accordingly. Additionally, the last CD in the level is extremely difficult to get without dying, thanks to the aforementioned current, a low ceiling and bottomless pits, and an invincible enemy placed right to the CD.
Out of all Mega Man characters, many players didn't expect DuoandTrio, the Evil Robot to actually make an appearence, let alone be plot-important characters.
Boomer Kuwanger and Fighting Fefnir make surprise appearances as early-game bosses, way before they'd canonically appear in the official games' timeline. Kuwanger is explained to be a mysterious simulation that has yet to become a proper robot, while Fefnir's presence is sort-of explained by Knives claiming he's from another dimension — presumably a result of the Wargate shenanigans occupying the game's lore.
48 Hour
That One Level: Celestial Resort, as befitting a level that draws heavy inspiration from Celeste. In addition to Checkpoint Starvation, it has very difficult setups involving moving platforms that fall the moment Mega Man steps on them, and the level pairs this with moving fires and keys that you need to collect. The final section is the worst of it, as you need to collect several keys over bottomless pits (while still contending with the moving, falling platforms) while 100 Wattons rain projectiles down on you. And if you accidentally kill one of them and turn the lights out, you have to do the entire section blind because there's no enemy that turns the lights back on.
, and in one case, he jumps off of the side of the screen
