Mega Man 2/YMMV

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  • Alternative Character Interpretation: The ending's somber tone causes some to think that Mega Man is plagued with guilt over destroying the Robot Masters for the greater good. This interpretation was explored upon by The Megas in their Mega Man based rock opera.
  • Anticlimax Boss: The Alien is much, much easier than the Wily Machine beforehand, as it attacks by firing a single bullet that is easy to dodge and flies around in a predictable pattern. It's justified however thanks to it being a tiny holographic projectile with a small cannon Wily was using as a last ditch effort to defeat Mega Man.
  • Breather Boss: Flash Man is pretty much the easiest boss in the game thanks to the fact that his "attack pattern" consists of running around his stage and stopping time randomly to fire at you. He runs around in a set pattern, and only attacks after using his Flash Stopper. Not only do you practically have to let him kill you, but killing him without getting hit is not only possible, but downright probable.
    • Metal Man too. He's not as easy as Flash Man, but his Metal Blade attacks are easily avoidable. He's even easier in his rematch, where you no longer fight on a conveyor belt AND have access to his own weapon, which kills him in two shots.
    • Heat Man is a well-deserved breather after getting through his hellish stage (at least without Item 2) as he gets locked in a very simple attack pattern when you keep pressure on him.
    • Once you know the trick behind his AI, you'll never get hit by Crash Man again. His jumping and firing is connected to your own firing, so simply get close to him, shoot, and walk right under him as he jumps and tries to hit you with a Crash Bomb. And that's if you don't simply kill him with the Air Shooter, which can one-shot him if it catches him at the right angle.
  • Breather Level: Flash Man's stage becomes this if you save him for later. Once you have a few utility items and Crash Bombs, you can take the safer paths through the stage that are loaded with health and ammo pickups, one-ups, and even E-tanks while avoiding the Crazy Cannons and Sniper Joe walkers. Wood Man's stage is also fairly easy due to being a fairly straight trek to the boss where you kill a ton of easy enemies and do very little in the way of platforming.
  • Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Most of the game's weapons range from middling to awful, save for one standout: the Metal Blade. It fires massive sawblades at any angle, one-shots most enemies that don't resist it, quite a few bosses are weak to it, and it has such a huge ammo count that you can practically use it as a Mega Buster alternative. Unsurprisingly, most players go after Metal Man first and use nothing but the Metal Blade, save for the few instances where the situation demands you to use another weapon.
  • Crowning Music of Awesome: Virtually ALL of the tracks, but especially the now-iconic track that plays in the first two Wily Castle stages. This game has more remixed music tracks than any other game in the franchise!
    • The music in Wily stages 3-6, however, is a reverse of this trope. It's a depressing tune, just a few notes slowly rising up in pitch to the 12th key, then restarting again. It's one of the least talked about tracks in the entire franchise and when is talked about, is generally criticized for being far inferior to everything else
  • Demonic Spiders: Sniper Armors, which are Returning Sniper Joes piloting giant walkers that replace the Big Eyes from the first game. They're just as durable, and when defeated they toss the Sniper Joe pilot at you for a smaller, less irritating battle. They also have a tendency to show up in levels where it's easy to accidentally scroll them back onto the screen after killing them.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: Air Man. He's got a unique design among Robot Masters, and the memetic song made in his honor has caused fans to view him as something of an undefeatable badass.
  • Even Better Sequel: One of the benchmark examples, to where at the very least the game is considered an improvement over the original in every way.
  • Game Breaker: The Metal Blade. It's a weakness to Bubble Man, Wood Man, Flash Man, Metal Man himself, and the second-to-last boss, not to mention it uses a ludicrously small amount of ammo per shot, meaning it would take a conscious effort to try and deplete it of ammo! Also, unlike any other weapon in the game, this one can be thrown in all eight directions, making it much easier to strike any Goddamned Bats. Plus it can cut through lesser enemies in a row.
  • Goddamned Bats: This game introduces a truly annoying staple enemy encountered in almost every game afterwards: Pipis, robot birds that drop eggs full of tiny baby birds that home in on you. The babies attack you all at once in a huge cluster that's flat-out impossible to avoid without Metal Blade/Leaf Shield usage, or in the case of Crash Man's stage, a helpful ladder glitch.
  • Good Bad Bugs:
    • Simply pausing the game can let you abuse all sorts of physics-based glitches. Rapid pausing and unpausing turns Mega Man into an invincible bulwark thanks to him getting a single frame of invincibility with every unpause, can extend his jumps to the point of nearly flying, and essentially give the Metal Blade infinite ammo.
    • Using Item 1 near Air Man's boss door can take you to the Mega Man equivalent of Glitch City or Minus Land: an unholy fusion between Wily 2 and Air Man's stage that's glitchy as all hell, but somehow still playable. The lack of an endboss means you have to reset the game though, since you normally have to kill the Picopico-kun to beat it. See it in action here.
      • One can pull off this trick in other levels to access similar glitched up Wily Castle levels. However, the boss data doesn't load up in any of these cases, meaning getting up to that point will trap you.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Hype Backlash: As probably the most popular game in the Mega Man series and one of the most acclaimed games of all time, it naturally tends to get this from time to time. In particular, more than a few fans consider Mega Man 3 to be the actual pinnacle of the series, and those that don't tend to give that treatment to either 4, 9, 10, or from the late 2010's onwards, even 7 due being Vindicated by History. But the unifying thread behind these dissenting opinions is that the game's still too simplistic compared to later titles, to the point of feeling primitive. Questionable stage design and weapon balancing are also marks against it for some.
  • It Was His Sled: Holy crap, Wily's an alien! Except he isn't, and that was just a decoy. The alien form in general counts though: back when the game came out, it was a huge surprise for obvious reasons, but now, it's one of the most famous moments in the franchise's history.
  • Magnum Opus: For Keiji Inafune, to the Classic series, and the franchise as a whole.
  • Memetic Badass: You can't defeat Air Man!
  • Memetic Mutation:
    • Thanks to the song of the same name, you can't defeat Air Man.
    • Also, "Okkusenman", to the point that some fans think it's the name of the song (Wily stage 1) it's based on.
  • Polished Port: The Wily Wars re-release gave the game a 16-bit graphical upgrade, remixed music, and a save feature. While opinions vary on if the graphics and music are truly an upgrade or not, it's hard to find anyone oppose to a more conventional, non-password focused save feature.
  • Scrappy Weapon: More than half the game's weapons are these, unfortunately.
    • The Atomic Fire is something of a proto Charge Shot, firing weak shots that you can charge up into bigger, more powerful blasts. Unfortunately, it takes forever and a day to fully charge the Atomic Fire, and charge shots consume a ton of ammo. It ends up being Awesome Yet Impractical outside of the two bosses that are weak to it.
    • While the Time Stopper is true to its name and stops time, it's way more of a hindrance than you'd think. Once it's active it drains all its energy in one go, you can't change weapons or even fire your buster while it's active, and if there are any enemies in your way? Unless they're small enough for you to jump over (which they likely aren't), you'll either have to let the Time Stopper wear off so you can kill them, or face tank damage in order to get through them. The Flash Stopper in Mega Man 4 is basically an apology for how hard this weapon sucks.
    • Being the first shield weapon of its kind, the Leaf Shield is a rough start for its lineage. You can't move while it's active or else you'll throw it, and it won't block projectiles. However, it does see some use in Crash Man's stage and Wily Stage 4, where you spend a lot of times motionless and assaulted by Goddamned Bats that die on contact upon hitting it. Still, it's far more situational than it has any right to be.
    • The Crash Bomber gives you very little bang for your buck, since it has a very small ammo count and deals pitiful damage to anything it makes contact with. The explosions, while damaging, are delayed and only go off if the weapon hits a wall. And like with the Flash Stopper, you can't pause if you've got a bomb active. It's not really a step up or down from the previous game's Hyper Bomb, but rather a step sideways.
    • Bubble Lead. It's a ground-traveling weapon that doesn't even hurt 90% of enemies that can easily be hit with it. Fairly self-explanatory right there.
  • Signature Scene: The opening is this, to the point where anything that pays homage to the 8-bit era has a high chance of beginning with an ascending shot of a building with the hero at the top. Even the promotional video for the Mighty No. 9 Kickstarter alludes to it.
  • So Cool Its Awesome: It built on the foundation of the first Mega Man game and improved its flaws every which way. The awesome music, the fact it averted the "second in the series is the Oddball In The Family" trend that Super Mario Bros. 2 (not counting the Japanese/real SMB 2, as wasn't released in the United States until 1993), Zelda II: The Adventure of Link and Final Fantasy II "started" and the fact it has a password option for players to continue playing. Which was something the first game sorely lacked.
  • Tear Jerker: The ending. Before the credits start, it simply has Mega Man taking a long walk home looking introspective and sullen while surprisingly melancholy music plays over the passing seasons. The scene's minimalist presentation makes it even more of a solemn affair: depending on how you look at it, Mega Man either feels guilty and even sad over having to kill his fellow robots, or is simply exhausted and worn down from the fight with Wily while possibly feeling homesick. Thankfully, the mood picks back up once he arrives home and the credits roll.
  • That One Boss:
    • Air Man, at least in the games hard mode thanks to having a tornado pattern that's almost impossible to dodge. Even in easier difficulties, their tight spacing and projectile-deflecting tendencies can give newer players some trouble.
    • Quick Man is even worse. Not only does he live up to his name, but he is an unpredictable spaz who deals a disgusting amount of collision damage while you try your best to dodge both him and his Quick Boomerangs. It's very easy to run right into him, even moreso in his home stage where you're forced to jump around thanks to an uneven floor. The Time Stopper doesn't even kill him in one go, forcing you to make a Sadistic Choice: either you pop it right at the start of the battle and finish the rest of it yourself, or try to get him to half health without dying so it can finish him off.
    • Without the Atomic Fire or Metal Blades, Wood Man. His shield isn't too tricky to dodge, but trying to avoid it while staying away from his falling leaves can be frustrating, especially since the leaves require pixel-perfect dodging.
    • The Mecha Dragon's status is a big reason why this trope is YMMV: for some he's a Breather Boss who you can practically beat in your sleep, but to others he's a terror on par with the Yellow Devil. It all depends on how good you are at dodging his fireballs, because in most cases, all it takes is one solid hit for them to knock you off the tiny platforms you fight him on and drop you into a bottomless pit.
    • The Buebeam Trap at the end of Wily Stage 4 is considered by many to be one of the worst designed bosses in the series. A series of wall mounted turrets, they're all spaced around a huge room and can't be hurt by anything other than the Crash Bomb, a weapon with a very limited ammo count. You barely have enough bombs to kill it as is, and you'll need to waste at least one of them to destroy the barriers blocking a few of them. You also need at least one usage of Item-1 to get to one of the turrets since you can't hit it otherwise. If you run out of either of these weapons/utilities, you're fucked.
      • Not to mention the only way to refill Crash Bomb energy if you run out, would be to shoot hundreds of impossibly placed Tellies and a bunch of Sniper Joes in narrow hallways, in the hope of getting those desperately needed energy capsules... yeah, you're better off killing yourself to restart the stage.
    • Wily Machine 2 has an incredibly easy first stage... but an incredibly irritating second due to using attacks with ridiculously disjointed hitboxes, as well as shot patterns that are flat-out impossible to dodge.
  • That One Level:
    • Quick Man's stage is insta-kill hell, throwing you into a ton of "React or DIE" situations where you're instantly killed by his infamous Force Beams if you don't traverse his rooms as quickly and cleanly as possible, and even all the skill in the world won't help you if you don't enter them the right way. If you make it to the end, you have a hallway infested with Sniper Joe Walkers as well as Quick Man himself waiting for you.
    • If you don't have Item 2, Heat Man's stage is just as hellish as Quick Man's. The disappearing and reappearing Yoku blocks from Ice Man's stage in the first game return, only this they form a massive, sprawling line that takes place over insta-kill lava and cavernous death pits. Thankfully, Heat Man himself is far easier than Quick Man.
    • Wily Stage 4 isn't exactly hard, but it's definitely tedious, forcing you to travel long and slow stretches across insta-kill spikes on slow moving mobile platforms from Crash Man's stage. Dying even once sucks, because making your way back across the stage is painful.
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