YMMV / Mega Man Powered Up

• Audience-Alienating Premise: The game itself has a strong following, especially in retrospect, but it's widely believed that the main reason it didn't get enough sales to justify further sequel remakes is because of it being a PSP exclusive. In addition to the console itself having a rough start, it seems that a chunk of the console's audience looking for more realistic games didn't have much overlap with Mega Man in general (not helped by the game's cutesier artstyle and being followed up by the Darker and Edgier Mega Man: Maverick Hunter X), many arguing that it would've found a better home on the Nintendo DS.
• Awesome Music: Some of the soundtracks, though remakes of the first game, are actually very good. Especially Cut Man's Stage Music which is now considered to be MMPU's Main Theme Music and the epic remix of the Robot Masters' Battle theme.
• Breather Boss: Using a Robot Master against the boss weak to them. Copy Robot can also fall under this in some cases, whether it's Guts Man and Oil Man negating their own auxiliary effect (Tremors and oil slicks, respectively), or Bomb Man curiously and Elec Man not-so-curiously only taking 1 damage from anything they get hit with. You'll still have to lay 28 shots to put it down in any case, so it's not a short fight, but compared to the hell described below, Oil Man's Copy Robot in particular is a breeze.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Out of the new personalities for the Powered Up cast, many people love this game's incarnation of Fire Man, thanks to his Southern accent, hammy superhero-esque personality (special mention to his "FLAMES O' JUSTICE!"), and generally having some of the funniest dialogue in the game.
• Fanon: Fan takes on clones of Mega Man tend to integrate the red eyes, scarf and triangular indentation on the helmet from Mega Man?, to differentiate them from the original.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Mega Man C has all the abilities of the normal Mega Man, in addition to the slide and charge shot. In fact, the charge shot here can break enemy guards at half power and at full power can go through walls. Proto Man subverts this, as his Proto Strike can't rapid fire or shoot through walls, but is just as powerful as the charge shot and hits as a weakness on every Robot Master. And while he takes double the normal damage, Proto Man runs faster and jumps higher than the rest of the cast, and can use his shield to block a few projectiles.
  • Guts Man, while clunky in the actual stages, is capable of exploiting oversights in the AI for the other Robot Masters, such as trapping Time Man in a box or, even worse, rendering Elec Man completely incapable of harm short of running right into him.
    • It gets even more ridiculous in the final battle with Dr. Wily. Just build a 2x2 fort (2x3 in the second phase), with Guts Man on the left side of the topmost layer. That will make it next to impossible for Wily to damage you at all.
• Goddamned Boss: Yellow Devil isn't exactly difficult (except on Hard, where its floor laser is hard to dodge), but the fight takes an annoyingly long time due to having to go through the long process of its pieces moving across the screen and reforming between attacks, and you can only get two hits at most on it per pass. The fight is still incredibly long with its weakness, as there's no pause bug like in the original. In context, fighting him Buster-only in Hard mode takes at least twelve minutes.
• Good Bad Bugs: There are a couple of glitches in the level construction mode, including a bug that lets you drop through the boss room into the room below, and fight the boss there instead.
• Fridge Brilliance:
  • When Proto Man fights his Evil Counterpart, Proto Man's shield doesn't fly away from him when hit.....Why? He's the one who has the weapon; chances are, he knows how to defend against his own weapon.
  • Another bit of interest is that when Proto Man fights his counterpart, he shows a dislike of Joes. This is weird, until when you remember that the Joes are based on him. He hates Joes because they're essentially him without freedom!
  • Time Man's weakness is Thunder Beam. That's weird. What does electricity have to do with time? Fluctuations in an electrical current can affect a digital clock's accuracy; and a strong enough surge can force it to reset.
  • And with Elec Man's weakness to oil via Oil Man, in case one should wonder; it's simple: Oil is an insulator, like rubber or stone thus cannot conduct electricity.
  • For Guts Man, as a Robot Master Foreman, he expects all those working under him to be efficient and on time; Time Man obviously subverts this, though he himself is time-sensitive as his namesake he will not subject himself under Guts Man's time standards as he thinks of himself as the Master of Time itself which explains Guts Man's weakness to his Time Slow attack.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • Oil Man is generally considered the worst Robot Master to play as since the weapon he is limited to, the Oil Slider, is already pretty terrible, firing a short-ranged shot that will stay on the ground for a few moments if it misses an enemy and cannot be shot again until the blob disappears a few moments later. Oil Man can ride on the oil blob as a snowboard and ram into enemies but is likely to hurt himself if he does. Oil Man's special ability to not slide on oil is pretty much useless outside of his own stage and is redundant with Ice Man's ability to not slide on ice, only without a useful weapon and its abilities to work off of.
• Moe: A lot of the characters can be seen as this, due to the chibi redesigns of the cast, but both Mega Man and Roll are especially adorable in this regard.
• Never Live It Down:
  • This game attempts to remove the Dumb Muscle image that had been commonly (and wrongly) associated with Guts Man since the Mega Man (Ruby-Spears) series. In challenge mode, all his stages are puzzles showing that he can be rather clever.
  • Roll's pre-fight dialogue with Copy Roll has a lot of Incest Subtext regarding her and Mega Man's relationship. Never mind that Mega Man and Roll are both designed as children and siblings. This also goes for her interaction with Oil Man, who weirdly makes a pass at Roll, made worse as it's implied Oil Man is meant to be a bit older.
• Questionable Casting: Jonathan Love's performance as Proto Man is noted to be unfittingly deep, as while Proto Man is designed as a bit older than Mega Man, the former is still rather boyish in appearance. Funnily enough, Mega Man himself would undergo a similar situation in 11.
• Remade and Improved: To say that Powered Up is near-unanimously accepted to be superior to the original game is almost unfair. Mega Man 1, in addition to having its own idiosyncrasies to the rest of the franchise, was definitely made as a first effort limited by a very early idea of what the NES could do. Powered Up uses the much more advanced power of the PSP to beef up the graphics, music, writing, and overall presentation, and loads it with even more goodies such as playable Robot Masters, challenge modes, a robust custom level designer, and even the ability to replay a simulation of the original version.
• The Scrappy: Oil Man's weapon is situational and difficult to use, playing as him is similarly tricky, and his overall weakness is compounded by the fact that he looks like he has blackface, even in the international version that steers his color palette further away from the caricature.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • In the classics, Mega Man's buster shots pass through walls, which was sometimes needed or very helpful in the level design like in Cut Man's stage. The remake removes this, but usually compensates in its new level design — unless you're playing the Old Style game mode that recreates the original game design with Powered Up's engine, where the problem becomes much more apparent and forces Mega Man to be exposed to danger more often. Mega Man C(harge) can circumvent this quirk with charged shots in the main New Style game, but you can't play as anyone other than the default Mega Man in the Old Style.
  • Proto Man's shield can become more of a nuisance than an aid due to Proto Man losing it whenever the shield receives any shot. He has to retrieve it every time else he would have to solve the rest of the levels without his shield.
  • Completionists aren't fond of the game's insane requirements for 100% Completion, tasking you to clear every stage on every difficulty as every character for a grand total of a whopping 468 plays compared to the original game's 10.
• That One Attack: Wily's version of the Oil Slider. Not only does it shoot a lot of times, but each shot leaves an oil slick that your character will slip on instantly if they even try to walk on them. Also, the game experiences really bad slowdown once enough blobs get on screen. All that together means unless you're playing as Mega Man (who can knock Wily out of the attack with a Fire Storm), Fire Man (same reason as Mega), Guts Man (who can block the blobs with a well-placed block), or Oil Man (who at least doesn't slip on oil), your chances of winning can depend a good deal on how often he uses this attack. And if you're Elec Man, you're screwed.
• That One Boss: While not considered that hard overall (except on Hard), somewhat easier than the original (Good Bad Bugs aside at least), it has its Difficulty Spikes and certain Robot/Boss combinations are aggravatingly difficult. For instance:
  • Playing as any Robot Master and then fighting against whosoever wields their weakness is a recipe for pain. On the other hand, playing as a Robot Master against the boss they have an advantage against will be rather easy.
    • Fighting Fire Man as Oil Man is one of the worst among these, given Oil Man's already-nearly-useless weapon and Fire Man's relative unpredictability (compared to other Robot Masters). On Hard Mode, this takes the crown undisputed for the most vicious boss in the game with how quickly he can annihilate you, and how harsh the fire wave, which he LOVES to spam, is. It even has the effect of turning Wily Castle 3 into the harshest stage in the game as well, considering you have not only the devil himself to deal with, but seven other very real threats, with the only consolation being that Oil Man's Copy Robot fight is among the easiest, even on Hard, since the main threat is nullified with his ability to walk over oil puddles and not slip. Take all the lives you can and pray, or you will burn, or even worse, beat Fire Man only to wipe out dealing with the rest of them. It's a nightmare, in short.
  • Fire Man's flames go out in water, greatly reducing his combat effectiveness; therefore, fighting the CWU-01P robot, which happens entirely underwater, is bound to be annoying.
  • Oh, and this means Wily Boss Rush mode is borderline Unwinnable by Design for Fire Man, as he has no means of re-igniting himself afterwards. And guess which boss comes next? Yeah, good luck beating Wily with the de-powered Fire Storm.
  • CWU-01P in general is tricky, unless you're playing as Elec Man (who can stunlock it). It moves around the room in a circle, and you have to shoot its bubbles away before you can damage it. How big the bubble is also affects its Collision Damage hitbox. After it reaches the center, it'll fire a sweeping laser around the room, dropping Guts Blocks which are a One-Hit Kill if they crush you. This normally isn't so bad, except that the lower its health is, the faster it gets. On the higher difficulties, good luck dodging the fastest form's sweeping laser, which circles the room in less than a second. It doesn't help that its weakness is the Oil Slider.
  • Fighting Elec Man as Roll can be difficult, and not quite for the reasons you'd expect. It's not that his attacks are hard to dodge, more that due to Roll's swinging animation, it'll take a quarter second to move out of the animation, requiring precise aiming to consistently pile damage on him before he fires his fast lasers. It doesn't help she needs to get up close to a boss that is balanced around projectile attacks.
  • Expand that to Mega and his Mega Kicks for the exact same reasons as Roll's only that the Damage Risk is greater in his case.
• That One Level: The endgame Boss Rush is even more brutal in this game than the original, as the original game at least spread out the boss fights over multiple levels (the most you ever had to fight at one time was 4,) while Powered Up uses the traditional hub, but doesn't provide any health pickups whatsoever (in a game without E-Tanks, mind you, as well as a game where the bosses aren't as easily cheesed to death as in the original.) And then the level continues on for a while after the Boss Rush, as well.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • The remixed soundtrack took some flak for switching some of the tunes (such as Guts Man, Cut Man and Fire Man's stage BGMs) from minor key to major key.
  • Also, some people didn't like the addition of Desperation Attacks for the 8 Robot Masters, though the fact that they're invincible during these attacks and frequently spam them once they get access to them adds some irritation into the mix.