YMMV / Mega Man & Bass

• Awesome Art: Despite being on the Super Nintendo, it manages to look nearly as good as Mega Man 8.
• Awesome Music: As per usual.
• Breather Boss: Cold Man is generally seen as the easiest boss to take down with either character. His whole attack pattern is basically just "repeatedly toss out Ice Wall, occasionally spawn a cloud that is easily destroyed."
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Most players start with Cold Man first due to his stage being the easiest, and then fighting all the other Robot Masters with their respective weaknesses.
  • Similarly, many players prefer to play as Bass instead of Mega Man. While Bass lacks a Charge Shot, he's able to fire in diagonal directions and can double jump and dash, giving him better combat capability as well as much more agility. By comparison, Mega Man, with just his slide, feels plodding and sluggish.
• Contested Sequel: Fans tend to consider this game either an improvement over the other entries released around the same time for doing something different to freshen up the formula, or one of the worst games in the series due to its amped up difficulty^note And considering how hard many games in the series can be, that's saying a lot, and its levels being designed more for Bass than for Mega Man.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • The Rompers (toy soldiers) can latch on to you, immobilize you, and steal bolts.
  • Monopellans fire the instant they appear on-screen, and any power-ups they leave behind are attached to the propeller, which will carry it away very quickly if you don't grab it immediately.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • Speedrunners have found out that you can double jump with the Lightning Bolt^{How abusable it is}When Lightning Bolt finishes its animation, Mega Man and Bass go back to a "grounded" position for a single frame before falling, which allows the player to press the jump button for an extra jump, and it can be timed for multiple successive jumps. As falling speed also resets, Lightning Bolt also can be used to literally slow down descent and make longer jumps as long as you have energy for the weapon. You can also wall zip by jumping during the Lightning Bolt into a wall, as the wall will try to eject you. Great for Mega Man. It's also possible to glitch through walls using the Ice Wall. These two techniques are combined to skip huge parts of levels or get CDs without the required weapon (or even without having to use Bass) on speed runs.
  • The Wily capsule fight can be finished before it even starts by timing a well-placed Remote Mine in the wall just behind Wily before the capsule shows up. If the explosion hits Wily just as the capsule's life gauge starts filling, it'll set his life to zero and end the fight before the life gauge can fill itself.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: A game that was ported to the GBA to celebrate a famous blue mascot's 15th anniversary that suffered heavily from an overly zoomed-in screen? It would happen again four years later to another famous mascot.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: This game has received this complaint more so than previous entries in the series, as the level design is considered unforgiving and the bosses more aggressive despite the lack of E-Tanks or other similar Anti-Frustration Features found in other entries. It's even worse in the GBA version where the smaller screen makes it difficult to keep track of the action and results in unintentional Trial-and-Error Gameplay that wasn't present in the original.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Dynamo Man. The poor guy used to be a tour guide for school children, but after King modified him for battle, his Power Incontinence made him dangerous to be around, leading to people avoiding him, which he resents. Even his quote in the game's database has him wishing for the good old days. That One Boss he may be, but it's hard not to feel at least a little sorry for him.
  • To a lesser degree, Burner Man, who King tricked into thinking that if he doesn't burn a forest a day, he will die.
• Nintendo Hard: Probably the hardest game in the series:
  • Most of the boss fights outside of Green Devil and Cold Man are grueling to fight, especially if you fight them without their weakness. Dynamo Man is just a sample of how cruel the game can get — besides his annoying attack pattern, he can heal himself on a whim, and attack you while he's still healing. And if you do get his health low enough, he'll pull a Desperation Attack on you that is very hard to dodge. Unless you have super reflexes and a lot of patience with how often he regenerates, the battle will really feel like a Luck-Based Mission.
  • The second Wily level really takes the cake; you have to fight three bosses in a row, and the third one has a whopping three forms.
  • The Game Boy Advance port unwittingly makes playing as Bass, who already suffers from taking more damage than Mega Man and a weaker arm cannon, even harder due to his dash move not having a button mapped to it—that slight split second difference between the SNES dash button and the GBA "Tap left/right twice" will give you a lot of grief.
• Porting Disaster: The Game Boy Advance version suffers from a number of issues:
  • Bass' dash move does not have a dedicated button like on the SNES original; you must double-tap in the desired direction, meaning the move is slower to execute and easier to mess up. Unlike Mega Man X or Mega Man Zero, the dash cannot have a button since it is occupied with the change of weapons.
  • The music is of lower quality thanks to the GBA's sound chip being inferior to the SNES' chip. Basslines in particular suffered greatly from the downgrade as they're now rendered with an unpleasant buzzing sound, making most of the music borderline un-listenable.
  • The screen is zoomed in closer to Mega Man/Bass, making platforming more difficult than it was in the SNES version.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The absence of E-Tanks in this game where bosses are very aggressive and hit like a truck. This is made even worse in the final level where the traditional Boss Rush happens.
  • You cannot choose from all Robot Masters from the get-go. You have to beat a few of them to unlock the next "tier".
  • You must wait until you defeat three to six bosses in order to unlock all upgrades in Auto's Shop.
• Scrappy Weapon: Though most of the weapons have their merits, Burner Man's Wave Burner is held in pretty low regard, due to being a depressingly played-straight form of Video Game Flamethrowers Suck. Bass's version is even worse, because unlike Mega Man, he can't move when using it, but he can only jump, just like with his standard buster.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: Mega Man 8 had checkpoints, simple boss fights, loads of extra lives, and no penalty when you get a game over. It was widely considered to be the easiest game in the franchise. And then came this game.
• That One Achievement:
  • Ground Man's CD. Screen Crunch takes its madness Up to Eleven for the GBA. It requires the player to be Mega Man and acquire Rush Search to spot its glittering telltale indicator where it is hidden underground. Most CDs hidden in the game are simple to collect, but the location of this one is evil. It borders on programmer sadism, buried in a certain patch of dirt atop a lone Sniper Joe that gets drilled away if Mega Man ventures too close to it and causes a deviously placed Dig Mole, an enemy drill bot, to spawn among a swarm that tunnels through bedrock — including the place where the CD awaits, forcing the player to either willingly lose a life to reset the level or exit out and try again. This is made even worse as the CD has to be dug up with Rush Search in a place that forces the player to spawn the drill which will land on Rush and interrupt his long and drawnout digging animation before he finally uncovers the CD. The player cannot switch from this ability or Rush will disappear, and must use the Mega Buster to fire on the drill enemy before it strikes Rush and/or eliminates the chance to get the CD. But while Rush Search is active as Mega Man's primary weapon, his Buster shots actually grow weaker — it cannot charge and only fires pellets, with the damage potential reduced. ^However...By getting clobbered on purpose until your health is low, you can equip the C. Attack (Counter Attack) to gain a hike in your normal Buster Shots' power. This allows you to take the mole out in a single shot even with Rush Search active, making it a bit less of an ordeal to score the CD.
  • While not as fiendishly difficult, Heat Man's CD is also a humongous pain in the ass, as it requires the player to get Rush to teleport inside a space so small that Mega Man has to slide around just outside of it spamming the fire button until the teleportation finally sticks. And then the player has to fend off a horde of infinitely spawning, rapidly moving divebombing bird robots so that they don't hit Rush while he's digging.
  • Quick Man's CD spawns at the top of the screen and drops into a pit as soon as it appears. The only way to get to it in time is to play as Bass with the High Speed Dash power-up and try to grab it out of the air as quickly as possible. ^{There's an easier way, however.}You can also exploit the conveyor belts, bring them to maximum speed quickly and slide/dash through the last belt to reach it. Yes, it's doable with Mega Man as well.
• That One Attack:
  • King Jet will reveal its power crystal, begin charging up, then will blast the entire screen. Perfect King has this as well. Destroy the crystal before it finishes charging or you will feel raw pain.
  • King Jet's fists are the reigning champion of this in the game. Everything about King Jet can be dealt with with ease once you know how. The screen-filling laser can easily be destroyed with a single Remote Mine, and even the flashbangs are nothing more than an annoyance once you get the rhythm down on the platform hopping. But the fists can very easily just destroy the platform right in front of you and render it impossible for you to jump to the next one, and feel like the only part of the fight where if you die, it's because the Random Number God decided you should.
• That One Boss:
  • Burner Man. He has a charging attack that's tough to dodge and deals a ton of damage, his Wave Burner can block your shots and pin you in a spike-filled corner, and he sets beartraps that grab and hold you, leaving you wide open to attack. Also, there's the issue with his weakness; while most bosses in the series will let you get away with just spamming their weakness until they're dead, Burner Man will not. Fighting him with the Ice Wall turns him into a bit of a Puzzle Boss that requires you to push the wall into him, forcing him into the spikes on either end of the room, a task that's easier said than done (especially because Rule of Perception is in full effect — if the Ice Wall pushes Burner Man off-screen, he doesn't take damage).
  • The other major candidate is Dynamo Man. Unlike Burner Man, he is very vulnerable during most of the fight. The problem is he spends most of the fight in Beam Spam mode. He also forces you into a Sadistic Choice of forcing him to fire hard-to-dodge projectiles, or guessing where his Lightning Bolt will strike with no warning (there is a pattern to his Lightning Bolt, but it's incredibly hard to pick up on, requires split-second precision, and you can mess it up by walking just a few pixels too far). Finally, he will jump into a recharging station partway through the fight and will completely heal himself if you don't destroy it quickly. The Copy Vision will trick most of his attacks and let you focus on dodging the rest, though.
    • If you're playing as Bass, you'll find his projectiles even harder to dodge (Mega Man can slide underneath two of them; Bass cannot) and the recharge station will take longer to destroy (unless you think to stand directly under it and fire the Bass Buster straight up).
    • His ability to heal is made worse by the fact that he can do it multiple times in a fight, and the fact that it ignores his normal attack pattern. Normally he will jump across the room, dash to one side of the room then the other, then use one of his projectile attacks; Dynamo Man can jump into the recharge station at any time during this, even while one of his projectile attacks is firing off.
  • Playing as Mega Man? Don't have the Spread Drill? Have fun against Tengu Man! Bass can just shoot upwards and double-jump over most of Tengu Man's attacks. Mega Man cannot.
  • Magic Man loves counter attacks, and all of his attacks require a different response. He also loves spamming out smaller enemies to get in your way, which require four shots to kill individually. The Tengu Blade must be properly timed so you hit him and not his projectiles. Sliding through him with the blade deals extra damage (and he drops his cards!), but you have to start it right in front of him or you'll take Collision Damage. Fortunately, if you're able to get into a good rhythm with the sliding Tengu Blade, you can pretty much paralyze him as you whittle away at his health.
  • The King Jet. You have to fight it on an Auto-Scrolling Level, having to constantly jump from one small platfrom to the next. The Jet itself does everything in its power to make you fall, including sending out flashbangs, a Rocket Punch that destroys any platform it collides with (often the one you just started to jump to...), and finally a Wave-Motion Gun, which can at least be countered by destroying its power crystal before it finishes charging. The Jet has no apparent weakness ^note It'll take considerable damage from a full-sized Spread Drill so there's that, and no lifebar so you can't even tell if you're doing much damage or not. At least the game was kind enough to make an infinitely spawning 1-Up appear shortly beforehand so you can retry the battle as many times as you need to.
    • The Jet is not any easier when you're Bass. The flying platforms are spread further apart, forcing you to double jump the whole time. In fact, the bigger gap between platform makes the flashbangs thrown by the boss even more dangerous.
  • Perfect King gives King Jet a run for its money if you're playing as Bass. With Mega Man, there's at least a platform to stand on to hit King's weak point and to stand under to avoid the falling mines, but Bass doesn't get one. You can hit King with a dashing double jump, but you have to be on the watch for the mecha's powerful attacks. What makes it worse is that its weakness is the Wave Burner. That's right, not only you have to reach its weak point, you have to get dangerously close to it.
  • The Wily Machine, even more so in the GBA version because Screen Crunch removes some of the room to dodge attacks. Wily Machine bombards you with all sorts of missiles and energy pellets, and a spiked saw wheel, that require you to slide under them or dash out of the way, while the mouth laser actually forces you to shoot into the mouth and stop the attack from being charged. The machine's only weak point is a window high out of reach without jumping. Bass's double jump remedies this, but Mega Man's jump arc barely lets you line up your shots with it.
  • Wily Capsule's weak spot is its glass dome, not the actual capsule, leaving another puny hitbox that is often impossible to reach. Magic Card is its weakness, a weapon that requires finesse to hit the capsule because of its small range. All of its attacks have no distinct tell and are very difficult to dodge so you either must have lightning fast reflexes to dodge them or abuse the invincibility of certain special weapons like Lightning Bolt (which don't refill if you die) to avoid taking damage.
• That One Level:
  • If you're doing any flavor of Self-Imposed Challenge, Burner Man's stage will prove as merciless as the boss himself. Even playing normally there are lots of threats that only give you about a half-second to process them before it's too late to dodge, leading you to take a bunch of cheap hits. Later on you have to avoid instant kill waves of fire along the ground, but the platforms are hogged by cannons that take several hits to destroy.
  • Astro Man's level already has tricky platforming sections and points where you have to deal with parts of the ground launching you into spiked ceilings, but it gets crazy once you get to the disappearing blocks. A particular vertical session becomes very tricky (the first block of the second sequence stands above a spike pit) if you're playing as Mega Man, who can't Double Jump outside of a very precise Good Bad Bug involving the Lightning Bolt, demanding you to have both timing and very quick reflexes to do the climb.
  • The second level of King's fortress could have been broken up into three levels easily. In fact, each section ends with a boss: King Tank, King Jet, and King himself. The King fight is also three phases long, just to add to your misery.
  • The third and final fortress level isn't much better. This stage includes the inevitable Boss Rush, but rather than fight the Robot Masters in a teleporter room as usual, it goes back to the Mega Man method of fighting each Robot Master one at a time throughout a Marathon Level which is particularly brutal for Mega Man due to some of the platforming segments (Bass can use Double Jump or Treble Boost to fly over most of it). Finally, there's the two-part final boss fight with Dr. Wily at the end, and by then you're likely hurting for health, energy, and possibly lives, due to few refill opportunities being made available throughout the stage.

---