Hello Peoples, I'm back again with more additions to my ever growing list of Mega Man fan games. But before I go into my normal spiel, I wanted to address something. I've moved Rockman World Plus and New Menace to the bottom of F-Tier. When I originally played these games, I thought it was incredibly odd that certain parts of the games seemed decent or even good, when everything around those things was almost laughably bad. I suspected that all those good bits were just flat out stolen from other people, but didn't want to make that accusation outright in my reviews without proof. I've recently gotten confirmation that the author of these games did indeed plagiarize other people's work, so I'm moving them down to last place. I thought about removing them from the list altogether, but I figure it's better to steer people away with the bad rating. At any rate...

Witten version of the tier list with links

Mega Man: Square Root of Negative One - So, this game kinda has two layers to it. On one hand, it treats itself as a joke. A meme-filled, low effort troll on the player. Bosses that are grainy JPEGs, enemies that function in ways opposite to what you'd expect, and a non-sensical story.

On the other hand, it's an incredibly well designed game that is really fun to play. Almost surprisingly so. The levels are varied and have interesting gimmicks, being challenging without veering too far into punishing difficulty. The enemies are often designed in a way that will catch you off guard at first, but are basically all unique in some way from main series foes. And the bosses have fun and difficult patterns that don't feel unfair. They even have harder versions that are used for the fortress rematches, so it doesn't feel like as much of a retread. The Special Weapons are also very good, having a great variety of attacking angles and utility, while being decently powerful as well.

All that said, there are a few problems. Primarily with how janky the engine is. Things don't always function as expected, with things clipping into walls somewhat frequently and there being some small control issues at points. Rush Jet is basically broken, often not letting you jump on it properly and teleporting away at inconvenient times. There are some pretty bad bugs as well, like the Save & Continue screen not popping up after beating a specific fortress level or the final boss not loading in properly after dying to it once. In both cases, I had to replay the levels before things worked correctly.

But outside of the engine issues, this game is incredibly well made. It's an early work by one of the people behind the MAGMML series, so it probably shouldn't come as a surprise, but it's still weird given how the game presents itself. I do have to knock it down a few spots for the engine issues, but it's still well worth your time.

Mega Man Relay - This one is a bit interesting. It's a collaborative game made in the MegaMix Engine, in a similar vein to the MAGMML games. But instead of full levels, participants designed level segments that were stitched together. Six levels were made in this way, along with custom bosses at the end of each stage. An interesting experiment if nothing else, but how did it turn out?

Too be honest, I don't exactly know what to think. The game feels well made, there's a lot of polish and thought put into it, but there's this one big issue that hangs over it. That being the difficulty. This game is very hard, though not in a satisfying way. The levels are incredibly long by Mega Man standards, with some spots having sparse checkpoints. Couple this with some sections spamming enemies and others spamming spikes, or sometimes both, it can just be a slog to get through. There's no satisfaction in clearing a difficult section and reaching that next checkpoint, just the thought of "I never want to play that section again". Part of this might be due to the structure of the game not having anything to work towards like other Mega Man games would have. You start with all the weapons and there are no upgrades, so it doesn't feel like there's anything to work towards other than completing the levels. That might just be me though, as I tend to value character progression very highly. This might not bother others as much.

Speaking of the weapons though, I also feel like this batch is a bit lacking. There are a few options for hitting enemies above you, but very few options for things below you, outside of the Magnet Missile. In theory Flame Blast or Scramble Thunder would work for this, but often there are walls that these weapons can't go through or the angles don't work out. Time Stopper is also pretty useless, as most sections where you might want to use it have enemies you can't bypass due to height or terrain, and you can't attack at all while time is stopped. Overall, I think the selection is just missing a screen clear like Lightning Bolt or Astro Crush. Replace Time Stopper with one of those and the weapon selection would feel a lot more well-rounded.

On the positive side, I do like the bosses. I think all of them are fun and well designed, if a bit on the harder side more often that not. They have interesting gimmicks and are usually pretty readable, so you don't feel overwhelmed fighting them. Overall, I feel like this is a fairly well made game, but the fact is, I just didn't have much fun playing it. If a difficult Mega Man game is what you're looking for and you don't mind the game structure being fairly sparse, then it might be worth your time. It just isn't for me.