Mega Man 9 had the best powerups

Mega Man 9 has some of the best-implemented powerups in the series!




The Mega Man games have a system that has been relatively unchanged from game to game:
Mega Man can jump and shoot.

Jump n shoot!

At the beginning, you select a Robot Master, go through their level, defeat them, and gain their ability as a new weapon you can use whenever you like.

The idea is that each Robot Master is a difficult fight, but they have a weakness to one of the other robot’s weapons.
So with a little bit of knowledge, you can choose the order you fight them in, giving you the chance to beat the more challenging ones after obtaining the weapon they’re weak to.

Of course, it’s not possible to know or understand the boss’s weakness before fighting them for the first time, so each boss is also designed to be entirely possible to defeat with skillful use of the default Mega Buster.
Some of them are more challenging than others, though. If the player is struggling to complete one of the levels, they can select a different one and come back to the other one later when they are more equipped.

After defeating all of them, the player goes through the final few Wily stages in a linear order. The game designers will know that by this point the player has all the weapons, allowing them to design scenarios based around a fully-equipped player.

Mega Man 9 was released in 2008, 12 years after Mega Man 8. Rather than going with modern graphics and gameplay, the game was purposefully designed to resemble the NES games entirely. Graphics, sound, and gamplay – all of it resembles a NES game to a very high degree of accuracy.

There were six Mega Man games on the NES.
(Mega Man 7 was on the SNES, and Mega Man 8 was on the PlayStation)

Mega Man 3 introduced the sliding ability, Mega Man 4 introduced the charged Mega Buster shot, and Mega Man 6 introduced the Rush Suit.
Mega Man 9 contains none of these additions, making it most similar to the fan-favourite Mega Man 2 in terms of its main gameplay style.

I felt that Mega Man 9’s powerups were much, much better implemented than the ones found in Mega Man 2 and other games, however.

In most of the previous Mega Man games, the weapons were of variable usability. Usually it turned out that one of them was clearly more useful than any of the others – the most infamous case being Mega Man 2‘s Metal Blade, an attack that dealt good damage, used up very little energy, and could be aimed in eight different directions.

This weapon was pretty overpowered. It could basically do everything you needed.

In the older games, a Robot Master would take more damage from the weapon it’s weak to, and normal damage from most other weapons. (in some cases, there were weapons that did no damage to them as well)

In Mega Man 9, this is still the case, but with a brilliant twist: each weapon’s traits are helpful in their own unique way in directly countering the Robot Master’s attack patterns.

This is what I mean:

 

The Magma Bazooka‘s three-way shot pattern is perfectly aligned to remove Hornet Man‘s bee attack.

The Laser Trident‘s wallphasing property is useful in bypassing Concrete Man‘s concrete blocks.

The Black Hole Bomb is useful for removing Jewel Man‘s main defence.

The Plug Ball‘s wall roaming is useful for reaching Tornado Man when he goes up towards the ceiling.

The Jewel Satellite is useful for completely blocking Plug Man‘s otherwise tricky-to-dodge projectiles.

I really like this because it feels as though the boss’s weaknesses can actually be intuitively figured out based on the properties of both the boss and the weapon, rather than the previous games’ trial and error of using every weapon on them to see what does the most damage.

In addition to being very cleverly-designed in regards to the Robot Master fights, the abilities themselves are also all equally useful in conquering the stages as well. In Mega Man 9, it is not the case where there is only one useful weapon, such as Mega Man 2‘s Metal Blades

This is a part where the Jewel Satellite helps immensely.

 Here, the Plug Ball is great for reaching this enemy safely.

The Tornado Blow can help with these big guys.

and so on….

I feel like Mega Man 9 has the most cleverly-designed weapons of the classic Mega Man series.

I also got this feeling with Mega Man & Bass for the Super Famicom, but I’ll not go into detail about that game in this post.

So that’s all I have to say. I think Mega Man 9 has my favourite abilities in the series.