Mega Man 1/YMMV
- Anticlimax Boss: Both phases of the Wily Machine battle are almost insultingly easy after the hellish boss rush that comes before, not to mention how hard the game is in general. He only has one method of attacking in both phases, and both are easily dodged (phase 2 less so, but still quite easy).
- Breather Boss: Cut Man and Bomb Man. Cut Man's attacks are sluggish and easily dodged, and Bomb Man is more likely to kill you through Collision Damage than he is with his bombs. Both Robot Masters (especially Cut Man) aren't well-protected against the Mega Buster, either.
- Fire Man is this for players who fight at close range. It's entirely possible to brute force him with the Mega Buster by holding the direction he's standing and Button Mashing, provided you start with full health, as you'll outdamage him by a slim margin. Fighting from a distance, however? See That One Boss below.
- Breather Level:
- As Cut Man and Bomb Man are easy, so too are their stages, which are the easiest of the six Robot Master stages. They don't have any infuriating gimmicks or particularly tough spots like you'll find in Guts Man or Ice Man's stage.
- The third Wily stage is very straight forward with no real gimmicks.
- Demonic Spiders: Big Eyes will be the bane of many players' existence. Three hits from one kill you, they have two jump patterns (and only one can let players get past it) and they take twenty buster shots to kill. So of course they put one at the end of the stages of two thirds of the game's Robot Master roster AND put three in a row at the beginning of Wily Stage 1.
- Ensemble Darkhorse:
- Guts Man is often considered the most iconic Robot Master from this game, if not the entire series. Not surprisingly, many people were pissed that he didn't make it into Dr. Wily's Revenge for the Game Boy (and, by extension, any of the Game Boy games).
- Cut Man: he was popular enough to make it into the Saturn version of Mega Man 8 as a Bonus Boss.
- Game Breaker:
- The Fire Storm is quite possibly the most effective weapon in the game, thanks to a fairly large ammo pool, a fairly large hitbox with a reliable straight shot in a game where most weapons focus on arcs, a short-lived flaming shield which is enough to kill most non-boss enemies outright if they collide with you (and does multiple hits against opponents with short Mercy Invincibility, to the point where the first stage of Wily Machine 1 can go down in seconds just from touching it), and does at least double damage to more than half of the bosses in the game (including half of the Robot Masters, the Yellow Devil, and the first stage of the aforementioned Final Boss).
- The Elec Beam is the other major contender for most effective weapon in the game due to its versatility in hitting enemies above, below, and in front of you all at once, has an overall larger hitbox on the frontal shot, is equally effective against regular enemies, and is much easier to land numerous hits in one shot with using the pause glitch. A good player can easily use it to destroy the Yellow Devil in one cycle.
- Goddamned Bats: Bladers, spastic helicopter enemies that move slowly until they come close, then they suddenly rush you with barely enough time for you to react. In Wily Stage 2, they'll do all that they can to drop you into the bottomless pits below.
- Ditto for Fleas, which are awkward to hit thanks to their small size and the speed of their jumps.
- Flying Shells, especially in Bomb Man's stage. They can only be hit whenever they attack, and they shoot an eight bullet spreadshot that can be tricky to dodge. Even worse, they respawn almost instantly when defeated, and in Bomb Man's stage, they appear en masse while you maneuver over death spikes, and you WILL die if you touch them since mercy invincibility won't save you!
- Goddamned Boss: Once you memorize the Yellow Devil's pattern (and develop quick enough reflexes), it's actually more tedious than hard.
- Good Bad Bugs: The famous "Pause Trick" glitch, which allows you to rapidly pause the game while an attack like the Elec Beam is passing through an enemy, allowing them to take multiple bits of damage from the same shot. This is often used by gamers to beat...
- Harsher in Hindsight: The encouraging words at the end of the game "Fight, Mega Man! For everlasting peace!" are incredibly depressing whenever you take the Mega Man X and ESPECIALLY Mega Man Zero series into account, as everlasting peace was never accomplished.
- Polished Port: The remake contained in Mega Man: The Wily Wars, which beefed up the graphics, remixed the music and added a save feature. The only tradeoff is that the difficulty is ramped up even higher than the original game!
- Scrappy Weapon:
- The Hyper Bomb, while powerful with a decent explosion radius, suffers from a severe delay that only starts to tick down when the thing comes to a complete stop. By the time it does explode, odds are the target will have moved out of range, and since it doesn't explode on contact like Bomb Man's version did, it flat-out can't be used on certain bosses. The Wily Wars port rectified this slightly by having the Hyper Bomb explode as soon as it came to a complete stop, but even still, other Special Weapons do a more efficient job unless one is fighting Guts Man.
- The Super Arm is crippled due to its reliance on external ammunition in the form of specific blocks, which can't be generated by Mega Man and aren't available in many stages, making it completely useless in such situations (and just like the Hyper Bomb, this means very few enemies and bosses can be damaged with it). Said blocks don't respawn until the stage is restarted, by the way, so if you missed Cut Man with one block, you're not going to beat him with just the Super Arm.
- "Seinfeld" Is Unfunny: This game had incredible graphics, gameplay and level design for it's day, but more than a few fans feel it is highly outdated and that many games in the series have done everything this game did and better, including Mega Man Zero, Mega Man X and to a lesser extent ZX, due to more gameplay elements and more concrete story elements. This is hardly unanimous, however.
- Suspiciously Similar Song:
- That One Boss:
- Yellow Devil, Yellow Devil, YELLOW DEVIL. Many gamers throughout the years have never been able to conquer this infamously tough boss without exploting the "Pause Trick" glitch.
- Elec Man and Fire Man become this if you fight them without their weaknesses. Elec Man is incredibly spastic and unpredictable, and his weapon the Thunder Beam has huge hitboxes and can kill you with three hits. Fire Man on the other hand simply blasts at you with his weapon constantly. It's incredibly fast and hard to dodge, and comes at you in random intervals.
- Ice Man isn't easy as well. While he does attack in a pattern, you need precise timing to dodge his Ice Slashers, or else you may as well kiss a third of your health goodbye.
- That One Level:
- Iceman's stage, if you're doing it without the Magnet Beam. There's a large chasm you must cross on Foot Holders, moving platforms that drift back and forth at random intervals. In addition, they fire at you while this is going on and it's perfectly possible to fall right through one. And then about halfway across, Pengs will start to Zerg Rush you. Without the Magnet Beam, it really starts to feel like a Luck-Based Mission.
- Wily Stage 4 is another one, mainly for having an incredibly tough boss rush with Bomb Man, Fire Man, Ice Man, and Guts Man right before Dr. Wily with no way to heal yourself in-between battles and no checkpoints in between the Robot Masters. Thankfully, the small area in between Guts Man's and Dr. Wily's rooms counts as a checkpoint, and Wily is so easy that he more than makes up for the previous bosses.