Mega Man 11 / YMMV

Awesome Art: Many find the new artstyle fantastic. The 3D direction perfectly portrays that classic Mega Man artstyle, while taking advantage of the extra dimension and better graphical detail to do things that fit into the series' style that were basically not possible in the older games; such as Mawaru C, a very Classic-style enemy design that fanartists found nigh-impossible to draw in the NES style thanks to the number of small details and the angled perspective on its wheel.
Awesome Music: As is usual for a Mega Man game.
- The Wily Fortress theme is quite a standout track.
- The Challenge Mode theme is outstanding, with some fans wishing that it was a Wily stage theme instead.
- Fuse Man's theme (which was awesome enough to be used as the theme for the game's announcement trailer) will make you want to reach for those glow sticks and have a sweet rave party.
Broken Base: While Mega Man 11 was largely well-received by long-time fans, there were still a number of things that didn't sit well with everyone.
- The English dub, especially when it comes to Mega Man's voice. Either Mega Man sounds appropriately young without having an annoyingly high-pitched voice, or his newfound deeper voice is a blatant example of Vocal Dissonance.
- People either seem to love Bounce Man's stage or completely despise it, with almost no middle ground. Either it's a fun, cheerful romp with a unique gimmick (and a bit of a Breather Level compared to the likes of Acid or Impact Man's stages), or an obnoxious slog of a level that delights in making the player wrestle with the controls. Even the music gets a bit of this, either enhancing the fun, jovial atmosphere, or being grating and adding to the annoyance factor.
- The music. Either it's good, with the synthwave style approach fitting 11's approach of modernizing the Classic formula, and working well with the individual themes of the stages; or a bunch bland, boring, same-y sounding tracks that rarely get as good as the soundtracks featured on almost all the other games. Almost everyone agrees that the composition itself is fine though, with the former camp already being fond of it and the latter preferring fanmade NES-style remixes of 11's tracks.
Contested Sequel: Mega Man 11 initially received praise for being a non-8-bit Classic Mega Man game that properly updates the fast-paced gameplay with a modern understanding of game design and with no major hiccups like the other post-NES titles,^note in addition to looking goregous while still faithful to the series' artistic direction. On the other hand, it cuts a lot of corners at the end,^note is the first entry since MM&B to only have one playable character instead of two or three,^note and its scope of fully bringing design up to modern Mega Man fans' tastes hasn't been fully realized.^note Overall, it feels like a passion project that got rushed and pushed out the door at the end, and while still considered decent at worst, fans debate whether the game was a fantastic return to form for the then-suffering franchise or only good by comparison to the rush of cancellations the franchise suffered at the start of its long hiatus.
Demonic Spiders:
- Air Stones/Air Fires/Air Nuts are camouflaged enemies that can only be hit when unveiled, and are often strategically placed to knock you into pits or other stage hazards.
- Sniper Joes are way more dangerous than in past titles, as they act like they did in the first game. That means that, if you try to get past them, they will chase after you. Usually, this is not much of an issue — unless they appear in your way while you're being chased by an Advancing Wall of Doom.
- Tosanaizer V. These things only appear in Bounce Man's level, but are strategically placed in bottomless pits to push you back, which can lead to you falling down into it.
Disappointing Last Level: The Gear Fortress is rather lackluster in comparison to previous Wily Castles, almost to the extent of the one in Mega Man 5 ^note, with only two proper stages, then a stage entirely devoted to the usual Boss Rush, and then a short stage leading up to the Final Boss. To make it even more like 5's Wily Castle, all stages share the same theme song just like all the stages of 5's castle ^note, and one of the bosses, Mawverne, is even based on Circring Q9. Finally, the other fortress boss is simply another rehash of the infamous recurring Yellow Devil, and one that barely diverges from the first Devil (not that this is necessarily a good thing for the player). Plus, even 5's Wily Castle at least had a Wily fight during the Boss Rush, which Gear Fortress did not.
Ensemble Dark Horse:
- When Roll's new design was shown off, there was a lot of clamoring for her to be Promoted to Playable, as a step-up from the playable roster of Mega Man, Proto Man, and Bass in Mega Man 10.
- Among the new Robot Masters, Tundra Man is quite popular thanks to his elegant and unique design, flamboyant mannerisms, incredibly useful weapon, and being a creation of Dr. Cossack.
Even Better Sequel: Mega Man 11 has dethroned Mega Man 2 as the best-selling game in the franchise.
Fanfic Fuel: With Mega Man's physical appearance changing when using this game's Special Weapons, fanart depicting similar transformations for previous games' weapons is a common sight. Notably, Capcom themselves encouraged this with an art contest to give a redesign to a past game's Special Weapon.
Fan Nickname: Bakugo for Blast Man, due to their use of explosions, similar designs and both being hot-blooded. It helps that not only does Blast Man sound similar to Bakugo's English VA, his Japanese VA also voices his classmate Denki Kaminari.
Game-Breaker: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
Genius Bonus: The acid pools in Acid Man's stage start turning from blue, to yellow, then to red as the acid dropper enemies drop more acid into them. Initially, this appears to be a warning to the player, but it's most likely based on a Universal Indicator that does change colors from blue to yellow to red as it gets more acidic.
Goddamned Bats:
- Mini Shpidy enemies take only one hit to die, but they're extremely small, which makes them hard to hit. They're also released in threes every time a regular-size Shpidy is hit, and both Acid Man's and Torch Man's stages have several areas where Mini-Shpidies litter the floor.
- Boyorns, the ball enemies in Bounce Man's stage, don't hurt Mega Man much at all (they only deal about 1 HP of damage) but they have a surprising amount of HP. They constantly bounce, making them annoying to hit, and each time they're hit, they bounce backwards, which can make it more irritating for you to hit them.
Goddamned Boss:
- Torch Man's attacks have a ludicrous amount of knockback that can easily leave you disoriented.
- The Thrill Twins, the mini-bosses of Blast Man's stage, require very precise buster shots, special weapons, or shooting their minions into their rockets to damage them. To make matters worse, once one rocket is destroyed, the survivor's movement patterns abruptly change.
- Sparkey (Torch Man's stage) has an absurd amount of health for a mini-boss and his back is protected by flames. He also moves and fires very quickly, and spawns a few annoying chicks to pester you. While his flames can be put out when he takes enough damage, it only happens once when he loses about 1/4 of his health, and a hard-to-reach enemy will spawn to reignite him in due time. You can use Tundra Storm to keep Sparkey extinguished or fire it off a few times in Power Gear to quickly end the fight, but if you need to save your energy for the actual battle with Torch Man or used it up on the walls of fire, it's much tougher.
- Dread Spark (Fuse Man's stage) and Cyclone W (Acid Man's stage) will subject Mega Man to Bullet Hell levels of electricity and cleaning robots respectively. Dread Spark in particular has one attack that sends electricity across the arena and requires frame-perfect timing to evade. Cyclone W can be taken care of with Power Gear Block Dropper, while Dread Spark is taken care of with rapid-fire Bounce Ball, though you will need it for the bosses, as they're also their weaknesses.
- Frog Balloon (Bounce Man's stage) is very good at stalling and defending its Pump Master with its Poyorns that it releases when it pops. Due to his high health and how he leaps to the other side of the room, it's very likely that the Pump Master will revive the balloon at least once. The balloon also has a tongue attack that the game doesn't explain how to escape from, and can easily take out a third of your health. The rematch has a floor made of balloons, making standing still an impossibility and some attacks become harder to dodge as a result of all the bouncing. Thankfully, Block Man's weapon plus the Power Gear decimates it, not to mention that the Pile Driver destroys the Frog Balloon and the Poyorn in one hit, and Pump Master K in two. Then again, you'll also want to save it up for Bounce Man, and the weapon has fairly limited ammo. And keep in mind you fight two of them during the stage.
Harsher in Hindsight: Capcom announced it with a hugely optimistic retrospective that practically ground to a screeching halt around 2010, as practically nothing had properly released in the past half-decade. Five years later, for the 35th anniversary?... It's not much better, and the other big anniversary celebration game, Mega Man X DiVE, stopped updating over a year ago, and the only thing Capcom have released other than X Dive were several compilation rereleases, with zero new games even planned in any of Mega Man's various forms.
Hilarious in Hindsight: This isn't the first time the Battle Theme Music of the Wily Stages' bosses is reused for the Boss Rush rematches. RosenkreuzStilette did it first, 12 years before Mega Man 11 was released.
I Knew It!: After a promotional image was released showing the Stage Select screen with the Robot Masters' names blurred out, fans were correctly able to deduce all of the names that hadn't already been revealed at that point. ^*
It's Short, So It Sucks!: One of the main criticisms of 11 among veteran fans. The Robot Master levels are all decently long enough, but the Fortress stages have very much been shafted in terms of this; Wily 3 is a short platforming segment and a boss rush sans a unique boss at the end of the level, while Wily 4 is a long, windy corridor that only serves as a short buildup to the final boss. Also unlike the three previous games, there aren't any playable characters besides Mega Man to enhance the replay value. And unlike the fourth to sixth games (which had the same amount of Wily Stages), 11 doesn't benefit from having another set of Fortress stages. All of these combined with the game's rather high price point for its sparse content^note leave a sour taste in fans' mouths.
Memetic Mutation:
- Upon its announcement, quite a few people were quick to sling back some of Mighty No. 9's infamous memes back at it, most notably was that this game would "make Inafune cry like an anime fan on prom night", that "it's better than nothing" ^note and praising the game for its lack of "pizza explosions." More cynical fans joke about the game being the result of Equivalent Exchange: for one franchise to live, the other had to die (Mega Man stays dormant while Comcept develops MN9, then Comcept gets absorbed before 11's announcement), though these memes died down somewhat after the latter's more favorable portrayal in Mighty Gunvolt Burst.
- One Twitter user couldn't resist making a joke comparing Block Man to Hideki Kamiya ^note, which quickly caught fire and led to other humorous variations like "Your Mom Man" ^note. Notably, Kamiya himself retweeted the light jab.
- Wily's "Plan B" on its own is pretty funny, but some Mega Man fans on Twitter took to replacing it with him doing the Fortnite dance.
Moe: With her new design, Roll is as adorable as ever, if not more so. The cute voice helps too.
Most Wonderful Sound: Roll adorably says "Ta-da! All ready. Good luck out there, Mega!" when you purchase things that you'd want to get in order to beat the game more easily.
Older Than They Think:
- One of the minor complaints about the game is that Mega Man can no longer jump through boss gates. This was also a problem in the other 2.5D Mega Man (Classic) game, Mega Man Powered Up.
- Having dedicated slide and Rush Coil buttons was played up as a minor quality of life gameplay change in early pre-release writeups. However, the Rockman Complete Works Japan-exclusive re-releases of the first 6 games on PlayStation already had a dedicated slide button, and in a slightly similar way to 11's Rush Coil shortcut, Rush adapters could be navigated separately from boss weapons with the R2 button.
Questionable Casting: Mega Man's English voice has received a bit of flak, with many fans commenting how oddly and inappropriately deep it sounds, especially since he's generally had a much younger and boyish-sounding voice in games like Mega Man 8, Marvel vs. Capcom, and Mega Man Powered Up (which wasn't as deep by comparison). While the Ruby-Spears cartoon had done the same thing, it matched Mega Man's appearance as a muscley robot teen. Mega Man: Fully Charged also has an adult male voicing the child-like Mega Man, but he does a good job at convincingly sounding like a kid. Averted with his Japanese voice, which sounds younger and closer to that of the three aforementioned games.
Ron the Death Eater: Anti-Dr. Light sentiments increased with this game's release, with several fans seeing Wily as The Woobie whose research is lambasted and stolen and seeing Light's objections to the Gears as baseless.
Scrappy Mechanic:
- While getting hit normally doesn't cancel a Mega Buster charge, getting hit while charging with the Power Gear activated does.
- While it's less of a hassle to summon Rush's forms now, both of them share an energy meter instead of having separate ones, so you lose access to both if you use one too much.
Scrappy Weapon: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
Shocking Moments:
- After years without a new entry, Keiji Inafune leaving Capcom, and the cancellation of a few high-profile games in the series, few were expecting the announcement of a new game, especially one with a new art style compared to the earlier games in the Classic series.
- With the announcement itself, Capcom did an atypical retrospective of the Mega Man series, with Mega Man picking up parts of the anniversary logo over the period, even highlighting the dearth of content over the past half-decade, until they got to Dr. Wily's chamber. Wily does his usual fake-out, Mega Man entering a room with a unknown pick-up, only to teleport out of the retrospective... and into the Mega Man 11 trailer. The fandom went NUTS.
Take That, Scrappy!: While Auto is still in the game, the writing turns him into an overworked Butt-Monkey with nobody really showing him any respect.
That One Attack:
- When in his Power Gear form, Block Man's overhead smash does an obscene amount of damage, and is nigh impossible to dodge if he does it while he's got you backed into a corner.
- Good luck dodging Yellow Devil MK-III's Speed Gear attack without resorting to your own Speed Gear...and even with it, the mini-Devils occupy so much of the screen that it's easy to get stuck and take damage anyway.
That One Boss:
- Blast Man's bombs eat up a large portion of the screen, and it doesn't help that he occasionally jumps across the room while firing them. His Chain Blast bombs takes up about a third of the screen and is very unintuitive to dodge his pattern when he uses it. Finally, his Power Gear further increases to the size of the explosions massively, further decreasing the amount of space you have to avoid his attacks. And to top it all off, he's incredibly mobile and can be hard to hit thanks to his love of jumping out of the way of your attacks.
- Torch Man is absolutely brutal thanks to his aggressive fighting style. He'll often protect himself from damage by shooting fireballs that absorb your shots, zoom towards you and kick you with little time to react, and pull off brutal dive kicks that are difficult to dodge. To make matters worse, his attacks have a lot of knockback, and he tends to get locked into a pattern before catching you off guard with a sudden dive kick. And while his attack pattern while using the Power Gear is predictable, the enormous size of his flame wheels makes them no easier to avoid, even with Speed Gear to slow them down.
- Everyone's favorite boss, the Yellow Devil, returns as the first Wily stage boss. It's just as hard as it was in the NES games, with heavily-damaging pieces that can wipe you out in 5 hits, a VERY tight time window to hit its eye (with the eye itself shooting lasers and bombs that make it even harder to hit while dodging), and a Speed Gear boost that splits it into nine miniature copies of itself, which run and jump around the room in hard-to-avoid patterns before reforming. Even having its weakness, the Chain Blast does little to help matters since its slow movement makes it hard to hit the Devil when he's open, and the Power Gear variant goes through a ton of ammo which makes missed shots costly.
That One Level:
- Torch Man's stage has walls made of fire that kill you in one hit. During these sequences, it's very easy to get hit by an enemy and have the stun effect from getting hit making you unable to get out of the way of the wall. Not to mention you have to do this THREE TIMES!
  - In particular, the second sequence can be very tough. Unlike the other two, it's full of tight areas with many obstacles in the way and require as much movement and jumping precision as possible. It isn't help by all of the Air Fires and Tatepakkan in the way. There's also a point after the sole Tatepakken where you'll have to make a quick jump on a small ledge. The problem is that the jump is to the left, which is where the fire is advancing from. This is made even more difficult in a Double Gearless Run.
- The underwater sections of Acid Man's stage love their Spikes of Doom, as they're absolutely covering the place, not to mention that you have to dodge them all with a current pushing you backwards or forwards. If you have the Pile Driver, most of these sections become a cakewalk since you can use it as a midair dash that can even cancel your vertical movement, but ironically the Robot Master you get it from, Impact Man, is weak to Acid Man's weapon.
- Wily Fortress 1 is the hardest of the Wily stages in the game. Lots of rotating platforms over Bottomless Pits with enemies placed in extremely-awkward-to-deal-with locations that make traversing the stage a nightmare. Even with the Speed Gear being abused, it's still hell because it's designed in such a way to cause the gear to overheat at the worst possible moments. And at the end of it all is the Yellow Devil, who's as tough as always. Fortunately, careful use of the Acid Barrier can get you quickly through the most projectile-dense areas.
  - There's one especially devious area of Wily Fortress 1 that deserves special mention; after the section where you're first introduced to the series staple reappearing-disappearing blocks, and following a short section of dealing with wall turrets (easily disposed of via your special weapons) you come to a gauntlet of jumps surrounded by Air Nuts. Now, if you've been paying attention throughout the game, you'll notice that whenever you come upon a gauntlet of jumps, you can always succeed if you never stop moving and just keep going forward; the challenge is quickly making the jumps, not staying still to fight the enemies between each jump. The game breaks this philosophy for this jumping section without any warning, as there is one Air Nut deviously placed near the end of this platforming sequence that, if you keep moving, will hit you with its projectile. You'll likely not even notice the projectile is coming since the screen is already incredibly bursting with enemies and platforms. You have to stop on one of the last platforms (one of the ones that falls down if you stand on it too long, by the way, inspiring you to want to jump off it as quickly as possible) and wait for the Air Nut to fire. The complete change in gameplay flow can be like whiplash for some players. Once again, careful use of Acid Barrier can make this trivial, but the game will once again mess with you; since the Acid Barrier takes a moment to set up, there are only four solid sections of this sequence where you have time to activate it. If you activate Acid Barrier on the first or second solid platform, it will turn off in the middle of the platforming section where you have to stop and wait, and you will get hit by that Air Nut and fall to your death.
- If you beat the game, you unlock Dr. Light's Trial in Challenges. Boy, do they stack 30 stages on you. You only get 1 life (and 1 extra life later) to complete this trial. Hope you know ever enemy's weakness by this point. Various rooms are filled with spikes of doom. Oh, and did we mention that 3 of those rooms are bosses? Yes, the dreaded Yellow Devil Mark III appears early on.
  - Endless takes this to whole another level.
They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
- Being unable to jump through the boss doors. While for most, the lack of this is itself only a mild annoyance at worst, the truly controversial part is where Capcom couldn't be bothered to patch it in despite all the demand for it. Given that it's such a small thing, it strikes many as a sign of bad faith for Capcom to be unwilling to make such a small update that so many wanted.
- Wily also never does his trademark Eyebrow Waggle even once. The chimney pipe on his fortress is another little detail that goes forgotten.
- The Fortress stages only have a single stage song, unlike previous entries (starting from 7) which had a different track playing on each Wily stage.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
- Several people have noted how the Double Gear system could have been far more developed for the Robot Masters and enemies in this game, allowing for more climactic and difficult battles. Only Mega Man (and Wily) uses both Gears while the Robot Masters can only use one. Not even in the Boss Rush rematch is this acknowledged. The character bios in the gallery explain the fortress bosses: Dr. Wily didn't have the time or budget to outfit them with both gears.
- With how dangerous the Double Gear system is played up as, you'd expect it to start having some negative effect on Mega Man as the story progresses, not unlike the previous game's Roboenza outbreak. Nope! Mega Man is no worse for wear than he was when he started the game. Though Auto does break down after overusing both gears at the end of the game.
Win Back the Crowd: The game's announcement itself was this to longtime Mega Man fans who had turned on Capcom after seeing no official releases (barring compilations and rereleases) since Keiji Inafune left the company nearly a decade prior, leading many to write the franchise off as dead. The fact that the game has a modern graphical style and a higher budget as opposed to being an NES-style retro throwback like Mega Man 9 and 10 also did a lot to get people excited.
- Downplayed after release however. Some were disappointed with the game's Wily Castle^note as well as Proto Man and Bass's absence for Continuity Lockout prevention reasons. The fact that the previous three games had two or three playable characters (with divergent stories in 2 of the cases) to this game's one didn't help. Some fans overlooked this at first, assuming DLC would come along and fix the problem, at least partially. However, Capcom hinted that would only happen if the game sold well, but remained silent once it did.
The Woobie: Dr. Light really needs a hug during the game's events. When you come back from a stage, he sounds genuinely relieved that you made it home safely, and then there's his bits in the story. He laments that Wily's fall was essentially his fault, wondering if it all could have been avoided if he'd tried to work with him instead of saying he was wrong. When Mega Man goes to face Wily, Light appeals to his old friend and offers to collaborate with him, but Wily refuses and vows to have the world kneeling at his feet. The game ends on that note, as Light realizes his former friend is long-gone.

YMMV / Mega Man 11

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