A fairly decent game that unfortunately for it, was overshadowed in the “eye-candy” department by Mega Man X1, which had
Graphics: Detailed and colorful, but maybe a little too colorful.
Animation: Most of the sprites look fine when they are still. But many of them—particularly Mega Man’s running animation—look pretty bad in motion. Also Mega Man can’t charge up in this game without sticking out his arm cannon...
Music: The music is memorable, and several tunes are quite nice, although all of the music has an overall sort of tingy ambience.
Sound Effects: A lot of the sounds are pretty awful; Mega Man’s arm cannon sounds more like a pea-shooter than a plasma cannon.
Plot: The plot is an interesting one, but there are several aspects (such as Bass’s initial involvement) which aren’t made terribly clear by the game.
Difficulty: (normal)
Generally fairly normal in difficulty, although as usual of Capcom’s later games, a lot of people get tripped up by the final boss.
Replay Value: Most items in the game can be found or built, which is a nice feature: if you like to hunt around, you can search for them, but if you just want to have the item and be done with it, you can just gather enough Bolts to build it.
Polish: Nothing really jumps out at me, although the hidden Street Fighter mode was a cute touch (though it could have used some improvement...).
+ Plus:
There’s a password which will take you straight to the final stage of the game.
- Minus:
Some of the sound effects (such as Mega Man’s firing) sound really cheesy.