YMMV / Mega Man Legends

• Anti-Climax Boss: Juno from the first game is a pushover. You can run around in circles shooting and dodging all of his attacks easily, and this is even worse if ones uses the fully charged Shining Laser in the fight. Some players interpret it as part of his character. As Juno himself points out, he's not designed for combat while Trigger is. Of course he's going to be rather easy.
• Audience-Alienating Ending: The second game ends on a bitter note for everyone, with potential disaster about to befall them. With the 3DS sequel canned and the franchise's fate uncertain for decades, it's difficult to recommend playing the game, at least for the story.
• Awesome Music:
  • Mega Man Juno's leitmotif is Bach's little fugue in G minor. Perfect for his character.
  • The Flutter vs. Gesellschaft. So awesome that it was remixed for the character's appearances in three other games.
  • Servbot to the Rescue from Misadventures for capturing the bravery of one little Servbot Storming the Castle to rescue the Bonnes.
• Best Level Ever: The Main Gate and Elysium.
• Can't Un-Hear It: Susan Roman, who voiced Sailor Jupiter/Lita in DiC's Sailor Moon English dub and Mayor Amelia in Legends 1, provides the voice of Mega Man Volnutt in Legends 2. Her acting in Legends 2 is very similar to that of Sailor Jupiter, making it hard to distinguish each other once the connection is made, especially if you got used to Mega Man's voice in the first game.
• Common Knowledge: It's commonly stated that Carbons are robots that merely imitate humans and aren't the same thing. The series and its writers have stated many times that Carbons are not robots or even Reploids, and are instead virtually the same as humans, with the exact difference between them and humans never being revealed. Whilst Carbons can easily replace organic parts with machinery, "regular" humans could do the same thing by Mega Man ZX (which, when combined with Reploids being given lifespans equivalent to their human counterparts, resulted in Humanoids and Reploids being virtually indistinguishable from each other).
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Despite the number of combat options at your disposal between parts and various weapons, the general style of most players will be to pump up your Buster's attack (or range, depending on the battle) and circle-strafe while spamming your shots until everything dies; weapons are usually entirely optional besides for cheesing certain boss encounters. The second game tried to vary things up to prevent this, but the circle-strafe strategy really does hold up for most of both of the main games, to the point that a weapon like the Shining Laser is little more than a completionist's Bragging Rights Reward.
• Contested Sequel: On the one hand, Legends 2 had a deeper and more involved storyline that revealed a lot about Mega Man's past and the lore of the world as a whole, and also had a wider variety of weapons and equipment with tweaks to the controls to streamline combat and movement. On the other hand, it also had much fewer optional side areas and sidequests, and its dungeons were smaller and less complex, making for much more linear and constricting gameplay. It's up for opinion which game is better.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Mega Man's Imagine Spot in the Japanese demo for Legends 2 of him joining forces with the Bonnes involves him and Tron happily frolicking in a field of Love Bubbles... while Mega Man is shooting innocent civilians.
• Cult Classic: At the time of its release it didn't sell very well and had mixed critical reception. These days it has a decent fanbase who love the series and are calling for Legends 3 so strongly, they're making it themselves now that Capcom axed the project.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Sharukurusus, the humanoid Reaverbots, in both games — they run fast, hit hard, and can leap to avoid shots. They also appear in packs, so you may be blasting away at one and fail to hear the clanking footsteps until its friend impales you. And in the first game, there's even an invisible version that only reveals itself when it's just about to impale you.
  • Firushudot — the crocodile-shaped Reaverbots from the Lake Jyun Gate — are exclusive to one corridor in the first game, but they have a long-range sonic beam attack and are horrendously powerful even against beefed-up armor and firepower. And, again, they tend to pop out of the walls in groups. Your best bet is to either walk slowly or run like hell.
  • From the second game, Shoebafun. Only found in two levels in the second game, but easily the most paranoia-inducing Reaverbots. They are floormasters that pop out at random and eat you alive, and the only way to escape them is either jumping at exactly the moment you see one coming up or through some serious button mashing once it's got you.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: The Bonne Family Pirates, especially the Servbots. To wit: They got an entire Gaiden Game starring them (namely Tron and her cadre of Servbots), followed by Tron and the Servbots making the cut twice for the Marvel vs. Capcom series (first in 2 where Tron and a Servbot are playable, and then in 3, with the Kattelox Island stage also featuring Teisel, Tron, and a lot of Servbots). Heck, Tron was announced as playable for Marvel vs. Capcom 3 before any other Mega Man character, and, along with Zero, another fellow Ensemble Dark Horse, they are the only representatives in the game. Tron and the Servbots (along with X and Zero) would then appear in Project × Zone, meaning Tron has officially made more appearances (outside of cameos) than Volnutt has.
• Epileptic Trees: Considering that Legends 3 was cancelled before much could be known about it, there's been a ton of theories surrounding what could've been the game's plot. Of particular note is the fact that (as pointed out by Nintendo Power) newcomer Barrett's name is a portmanteau of Roll's grandfather's first and last names (Barrell Caskett), has a metal plate over his left eye just like Barrell, and wears old-timey clothes, suggesting that time travel shenanigans would've somehow been involved.
• Fanon Discontinuity: While the series is still well-liked, the fact that the original humanity is extinct, albeit succeeded by humans descended from artificially created humans, makes the Mega Man series feel like a Shoot the Shaggy Dog in hindsight. Some fans like to treat this series as its own universe and not connected to the rest of the Mega Man timeline (which is furthered in some camps by the fact that the bad ending of Mega Man X5 implicates X himself as the founder of Elysium despite the events of the subsequent Mega Man Zero series). DEATH BATTLE! sums it up in their Mega Man Battle Royale when Boomstick is capping off Volnutt's analysis:
  Boomstick: WOAH WOAH WOAH! Don't try and pull that "happily ever after" crap! HUMANITY WENT EXTINCT! THE PLANET IS FLOODED! AND THE LAST MEGA MAN IS STUCK IN SPACE FOREVER, BECAUSE LEGENDS 3 IS NEVER GONNA HAPPEN! That peaceful future that Doctor Light fought so hard for turned out to be total bullshit, and if you think about it, it's all his fault! Love and peace are lies, God Is Dead, and we're all totally f**ked! (crushes his beer can and throws it on the ground)
• Fridge Brilliance: Why do you go to Data to save your game? Because his original purpose is to hold Mega Man's memory.
• Fridge Horror:
  • The revelations between the scant amount of info the games supply, and Word of God from writers and characters designers, about Carbons: Totally normal-looking, flesh-and-bone organic beings that inherited the earth in the aftermath of humanity's extinction — up until you find out that they can interface and replace themselves with copious amounts of technology. The best example would be Volnutt himself despite being a Purifier Unit that can merely pass for a Carbon; his armor isn't just a suit he wears, but actually replacing the near entirety of his body just for Digger operations and battle. And Bon Bonne isn't a baby in a suit of armor; that giant robot body is his body, but he's still a Carbon. Body Horror doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of something that is simply the new norm for what's left of the world.
  • The Carbon Reinitialization Program. It's never disclosed as to what exactly it is, but one thing's known for absolute certain: it ends in the extinction of all life on the planet. However, taking a second look at the ancient mural in the first game depicting Trigger's battle with Juno gives an idea. It can be seen that the bottom of Eden, Juno's personal means of the procedure, is open, revealing some cannon-like formation, and fire is raining from the sky. Considering Trigger's Buster is depicted as a bow, if the same rationalization of Elysium's advanced technology is applied backwards for the fire, it creates a pretty disturbing image of just what the Carbon Reinitialization Program entails...
  • As far as the backstory is concerned, Trigger was a Maverick in the eyes of the society he was created to uphold, despite the irony of being a Purifier Unit for destroying such irregularities. And he had to wage a One-Man Army war for an untold amount of time against his entire civilization's defenses, kill lord knows how many other fellow Units, and ultimately uphold not a command, but a promise to the Master in a conflict that ultimately tore down nearly all of Elysium. Trigger was effectively X if the latter had to destroy Neo Arcadia from the inside-out after keeping its peace for so long, fully aware that the people he was supposed to protect would've considered him the senseless and destructive villain.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Active Buster in the first game, and its successor, the Homing Missile, in the sequel. Absurdly expensive to upgrade, but if you do so you end up with a long-range, fully automatic missile launcher that homes in on enemies, does a lot of damage, and can hit multiple enemies to boot. he Active Buster is pretty good as well, being a homing missile launcher. Although it is a just a touch weaker than Shining Laser in attack strength, once fully upgraded, the other stats are at the absolute limit, turning it into a long-range missile machine gun. Balanced in the fact that the truly breaking part of the Active Buster is the final Energy upgrade, which gives you infinite ammo. With a weapon that has nearly infinite range and is only surpassable by two other weapons in the game. The final Energy upgrade alone costs more than the total price of any single special weapon in the game, more than 100,000 Zenny (in-game currency) more than the Shining Laser total, the most powerful weapon in the game.
  • The Shining Laser is described as a weapon so powerful it frightens Roll, and it lives up to that reputation, killing anything it hits in seconds, having long range, and being upgradable to infinite energy. Once again, though, it needs a lot of money to reach that point. The Shining Laser is a possibly intentional example. It can down bosses faster than Sonic the Hedgehog. It sort of balances out, though, because it's not available until late in the game and costs a LOT to upgrade its stats. Lampshaded when Roll admits the power of the weapon is so great it almost frightens her.
  • Easy Mode in its entirety. Not only do you get four times the number of Zenni you'd normally get from Refractors, but from the very first dungeon, you are given the most powerful Buster Part in the entire game: Buster Max. It fully maxes out of all your standard weapon's properties (something that's completely impossible to do on Hard and Normal Mode) and turns it into a god-like weapon on par with a fully maxed-out Shining Laser. Needless to say, you can only get this by beating Normal Mode in under three hours or just by beating Hard Mode since it trivializes bosses to such a ridiculous extent that it renders all Special Weapons except the ones that are mandatory for progression officially obsolete.
  • If you beat the game once, you unlock Hard Mode, where everything has more health, takes less damage, and deals more damage. Beat the game on Hard Mode and you unlock Easy Mode, which is for all intents and purposes identical to Normal Mode, but you start with a part that you can equip that maximizes every attribute on your Mega Buster (an impossible feat in any other mode) which means extremely high attack power, extremely long range, you never have to stop firing your Buster, and your Buster shoots extremely fast. Combine that with the never-ending circle strafe strategy mentioned below makes short work of every boss in the game, including the super-resilient final boss. Additionally, easy mode cut a bosses normal mode HP in half, and it takes twice as long to bust your shield.
  • In 2 the Homing Missile replaces the Active Buster, is gotten as early as the Ground Crawler and unlike the ground crawler which can't hit floating enemies this one can, the only downside is it's super expensive, almost as expensive as the Shining Laser, the thing that makes it so good? Well for one the explosion knocks any smaller enemies over, those reaper thieves? Immune to the Buster Gun and Ground Crawler? The Homing missile takes them out in three shots. Second it fires FAST! Very fast, so fast in fact that you might end up accidentally having to wait for it to load back up before firing it again. Thirdly it's insanely effective against the Final Boss, who borders on SNK Boss at times.
  • The Drill Arm in Mega Man Legends 2. If you max out its attack power (Which doesn't cost very much) the bosses of the first two major dungeons will die as soon as the drill touches them, and there are plenty of opportunities to get close enough to do so.
  • The Ground Crawler, again in Legends 2. It's inexpensive to upgrade and MURDERS ground enemies. It even nails air enemies that dare get close enough.
  • A non-combat Game Breaker is the Vacuum Arm. This will suck in refractor shards for you; since they don't last very long, they're normally a pain to pick up, but with this Arm you'll never miss a one. It gets infinite energy with a single upgrade; once fully upgraded, it can suck in a whole room's worth of refractors near-instantly. Get in the habit of using this thing and you'll be very rich very fast — which makes the whole rest of the game easier.
  • Another non-combat one is the giant golden bird-reaverbot in the Pokte Caverns on Manda Island. It drops a fairly large amount of zenny, can be killed without too much difficulty, and unlike any other enemy in the game, it respawns every time you exit and re-enter the room. It is hands down the best method for money grinding, and it can be found only about a quarter of the way into the game!
• Genius Bonus: The Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft share names with sociology terms, meaning "society" and "community" respectively. The former is larger and more expensive than the latter, mirroring their actual definitions.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • In the second game, there is an oversight where holding down the fire button and pressing forward repeatedly (causing Mega Man to enter and exit his walking animation) allows you to bypass the Buster's rapid stat and fire very rapidly via cancelling the animation that occurs between shots. This is very useful for the S Class Digger Test.
  • Also in the second game, skipping the cutscene before the Final Boss's second form will start the fight with the boss missing a small sliver of health.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Legends 2's cliffhanger is heart-wrenching, with the series stuck in limbo for so many years, and the 3DS sequel canceled prematurely. What Data says at the end tops it all:
  Data: Sorry, Mega Man, but it looks like you might be stuck up there for a little while more...
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The series' premise of an After the End world where everything is segmented into islands, objects from an advanced ancient civilization are a constant source of interest, and everyone uses some form of Mini-Mecha in their daily lives brings about a surprising amount of layover with CyberConnect2's Little Tail Bronx series, made even more humorous when that company went on record saying they would agree to take over the Legends 3 Project without hesitation if Capcom just asked them. While Tail Concerto merely matches up with the above description, the similarities go even further once Solatorobo: Red the Hunter is taken into consideration with Red and Chocolat being an adoptive brother-sister hunter duo who live on a mobile airship called the Asmodeus (much like Mega Man, Roll and the Flutter), the main hero being unknowingly related to a villainous group that wants to commit genocide against the world (Red to Baion and the other hybrids, Mega Man Volnutt to the System), and The Stinger of ZX Advent — which occurs thousands of years prior to Legends — has Master Thomas mention that the world needs to be "reset", with it being unclear as to what this entailed. In Solatorobo, the "Reset" was an event that caused the eradication of the human race during World War III and the rise of the Caninu and Felineko to replace them, and Baion plans to use an ancient technology to eradicate these two species due to considering them "failures" just like the humans before them, a la the Carbon Reinitialization Program.
  • The Servebots almost feel like precursors to the Minions from Despicable Me.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Some fans of Mega Man Battle Network got into the Legends games, Misadventures of Tron Bonne and Legends 2 in particular, just to see where Yai's NetNavi, Glyde, came from. The fact that at least four other Legends characters have Expies in the Battle Network series^*the aforementioned Yai is based on Yaito of Pokte Village, while siblings Shu, Appo, and Dah inspired the similar Shuko, Atsu, and Ty; additionally, Ms. Millions is commonly believed to be the BN counterpart of Mayor Yōkan, though there is no official confirmation that this is the case, unlike the others is also a draw.
• Launcher of a Thousand Ships: Mega Man Volnutt. He is shipped with any girl in the series, even very minor ones.
• Memetic Badass: Thanks to SomecallmeJohnny's review of The Misadventures of Tron Bonne, Denise has garnered a fan following as an unstoppable badass due to her effortlessly being able to flip over Tron's Gustaff with her bare hands.
• Memetic Loser:
  • Teisel Bonne, whose most prominent role in Legends 1 and 2 is basically to get his ass kicked by Mega Man over and over. He also spends most of Tron's spinoff game captured and in-distress. Dialogue makes it clear that off-screen he is a feared, capable, and respected leader of pirates, but that's, well, off-screen.
  • In-universe, there is Denise Marmalade from The Misadventures of Tron Bonne. She repeatedly gets her ass kicked by Tron (and shows up late to Tron's first robbery, due to having overslept and needing to be woken up by her mother), and is constantly chewed out by her superiors for it (never mind that plenty of other police officers fail to stop Tron over and over too). Eventually, Tron actually feels bad for her, and arranges it so that Denise will be credited with capturing Loathe and Glyde. Though, when Teisel points out she's acting out of a concern for a friend, Tron denies it up and down.
• Memetic Mutation: Not as prominent as some memes, but there's a joke among fans of the series that Mega Man underwent "reverse puberty" between games 1 and 2, due to a change in English voice actors making him suddenly sound younger.
• Moe:
  • Volnutt. He's such an adorably sweet saint that it's hard to not like him.
  • Roll as well, as most of her interactions with MegaMan tend to be very adorable. She's also a really nice person, just like MegaMan.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The plot and setting of the first game are very unsettling, contrasting highly with the beautiful visuals. To sum up, throughout the game the citizens of the island mention that a major disaster strikes the island every 100 years and seemingly kills everyone on it. As you go through the various ruins the people become more and more afraid, convinced that the looming disaster and their deaths are imminent. When Mega Man finally encounters and awakens Mega Man Juno, it turns out he is the one responsible for the disaster and plans to do it yet again, making the fears entirely justified.
  • Pretty much all the ruins in the first game, as well as all the Bonne's strongest robots (Tron's giant spider robot, the Feldynaught is a standout example). The second game's ruins are pretty scary too, although special mention goes to the Saul Kada Ruins.
  • This article would be remiss if it did not mention this music:
  • That horrible buzzing sound your alarm makes when Reaverbots are nearby is guaranteed to make you jump. Every single time. Thankfully, it was removed in the sequel.
  • The Old City in the first game is a more mundane example. It's a sector of Kattelox that's mostly abandoned. Unlike the rest of the island, it's bleak, gray, and dirty. There's no music whatsoever, and the streets are completely empty... aside from the packs of feral dogs that noisily (if ineffectually) attack intruders.
  • Volnutt's screaming as he is being electrocuted by Juno in the climax of the first game may bring back memories of Mega Man getting electrocuted by Wily in Mega Man 8, while not as horrifying.
  • Data's Big Damn Heroes at the end of the first game helps save Kattelox Island. It also uses Mega Man Trigger's authority to summarily delete, aka kill, Mega Man Juno when he's already down by usurping his position. All this from a robot monkey that can't stop dancing and as is cute as a button.
• Portmanteau Couple Name: Mega Man x Tron Bonne is punnily given the name of Megatron.
• The Scrappy: Appo and Da in Legends 2. They have Gonk designs perpectually stretched into a stupid grin, their speech patterns seem like they were intended as a parody of Beavis and Butt-Head, and they force you to do an Escort Mission protecting them as they insist on accompanying you to Glyde's base.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Good luck hitting mobile Reaverbots or boss weak points in the first game without getting slapped for it. Predating analog movement and a proper lock-on mechanic, this game's lock will root you in place and doesn't show you where you're going to be shooting properly. In several encounters, it's also simply not going to hit a high damage point on a boss from down low, meaning you'll have to manually jump up and shoot them in the face with only a really basic auto-aim assistance instead. The sequel's modernized controls for the time combined with real lock-on effectively fix the problem entirely.
• Self-Fanservice: While their designs are already appealing to begin with, Rule 34 artists often go to town on the games' female characters. Sera and Yuna less so, though they do have their dedicated fan artists, but artists often give Roll Hartman Hips, while Tron's fan artists often give her both larger hips and a larger chest.
• Ship-to-Ship Combat:
  • The fanbase is split almost directly down the middle on whether Megs should be with Roll or Tron.
  • And lord knows what he's been up to with Yuna and Sera in the real time following the ending of Legends 2. Suffice to say that some of the Ship-to-Ship Combat in the fandom revolves not around which girl Mega Man should take, but whether or not he should take all of them.
• Spiritual Licensee:
  • Until an actual one came out, these games were as close to a 3D Metroid game as one could get at the time. You take control of an Ambiguously Human robotic hero with an Arm Cannon to explore ancient ruins in an over-the-shoulder third-person shooter style, completing a dungeon usually results in a power-up or MacGuffin that unlocks the next dungeon, and along the way you find various power-ups that give you new secondary weapons and movement abilities, which let you access optional areas and explore previous dungeons in new ways. The first game in particular eventually lets you discover that (aside from the Main Gate) all the dungeons are connected to each other through passages needing the Jump Springs and/or the Drill Arm to get through, highly reminiscent of the wide-open exploration of early Metroid titles.
  • The Legends series in general is heavily influnced by Studio Ghibli's Castle in the Sky, to the point it may be the closest video game adaptation we're ever gonna get. For example, the vaguely After the End setting is on point, and a few bosses in the first game are remarkably reminiscent of the Laputian robots from the anime. If that's not enough — the Japanese VAs of Pazu (Mayumi Tanaka) and Sheeta (Keiko Yokozawa) also voiced Rock and Roll respectively!
• Strawman Has a Point: There's a scene in Manda Island in Legends 2 where Tron is trying to break Mega Man's trust in Roll by telling him she overcharges him for weapons and effectively steals money from him. This is treated in-game as nothing but Tron making stuff up, but many players have pointed out how ridiculously expensive it is to fully upgrade several weapons in both games, with it requiring an elephantine amount of grinding. This is enforced by the fact that Roll lowers her prices when you give her gifts. Though, this may mean she's just picking up more of the slack, it is a bit annoying you have to give her plushies and jewelry to get her to help cheapen prices when you're trying to save the world.
• Superlative Dubbing: Most English dubs of Japanese-made games on the PS1 were cringe-inducing at best, and Mega Man 8 and Mega Man X4 are still among the most infamous examples of bad voice dubbing in video games. In comparison, the English release of the Mega Man Legends games stand out for its overall decent voice acting. It helped that unlike 8 and X4, most of the English voice actors in this game had experience in dubbing western animation before.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: While Legends 1 has been Vindicated by History, most would agree it hasn't aged particularly well in terms of controls. Legends 2, by contrast, provides Mega Man with a full range of movement and the ability to lock on while moving, better camera control and aiming by using the analogue sticks, and features dungeon design that feels like a Truer to the Text adaptation of Mega Man (Classic) level design in 3D.
• That One Attack:
  • The green orb attack most Bonne boss robots use in Legends 1. It's large and tricky to avoid, homes in on you, does a lot of damage, and breaks your shield so you take increased damage from normal attacks. Oh yeah, and the Bonne robots usually fire two of them in succession.
  • The Final Boss in Legends 2 is meant to be difficult, being a Mother Unit, and all but two attacks from her second form take the cake. The first is a laser, launched from her chest, that sweeps back and forth across the field and does a crapton of damage if it connects. The second, tied into the first, is her Desperation Attack where she fires a black hole that, while it doesn't damage you, makes you much easier to hit.
• That One Boss: Yakuto Krabbe, Tron's crab-like machine in Legends 2. And considering it's one of the earliest bosses where you will have little in terms of upgraded weaponry, it's a hell of a Wake-Up Call Boss.
• That One Level:
  • The Clozer Sub-Gate in 1 becomes this if you don't know the Guide Dang It!. At a particular part in the dungeon you find a cracked ceiling that has to be demolished using two specific special weapons. The problem is that 1) it isn't immediately obvious you can break that ceiling because this is the only time in the game you encounter a destructible ceiling; 2) there's only a single hint in the game that a certain special weapon can break the ceiling, given in the description of the Grand Grenade; and 3) the items needed to craft the Grand Grenade and the Powered Buster (the other special weapon that can break the ceiling) are easy to miss if you don't go exploring (though the Grand Grenade item is found inside the Flutter, which makes it unlikely to overlook). Players who don't know what they're supposed to do here can get stuck forever pondering how to proceed.
  • Glyde's base in 2. Several areas of powerful enemies that unleash Bullet Hell, the walls are lined with regenerating turrets, and running away to Data to recover your energy and save is a bit of a trip.
  • The Nino Ruins in 2. It's a Down the Drain area and has all of its trappings: most of it has you moving veeeeery sloooooowly through water (which also messes with your jumping physics, making it harder to dodge enemies), is labyrinthine and very, very long, and it's packed to the brim with some of the more tedious and/or annoying Reaverbots in the game. At least it's got some good music for you to listen to. By extension the Kimotama Caverns fall into this category as well, just without the cool music (you instead get the Clozer Woods ruin music from the first game, which is more Nightmare Fuel than anything).
  • Even worse is the second game's Saul Kada Ruins. An abundance of lava and enemies with fire attacks makes it very easy to be ignited. If you haven't picked up a few Medicine Bottle upgrades and can't put out the flames, you can easily lose most of your health to a single mistake. On top of that, there are obnoxious butterfly enemies that can paralyze you and slow movement to a crawl (fixing that means risking draining that Medicine Bottle even faster) and bird-faced rocket turrets with insane range, damage and homing capabilities. An annoying sequence where you team up with Tron and Bon to stop the flow of lava asks you to use the notoriously fiddly Lifter while contending with multiple, fast enemies and a lava pool. There's also the giant Reaverbot fight, where aiming up at its face messes with the camera and makes it incredibly easy to walk onto lava by mistake. To really rub it in, you're not able to defeat this boss the first time you meet it. You're supposed to move past it and return after stopping the lava flow it uses to heal. Your only hint beforehand is Roll making a vague comment about this one being different from bots you've fought before. You can waste time, patience and ammo in the first confrontation due to not knowing this.
• That One Sidequest:
  • The Technical Course racing minigame in the first. They're Time Trial obstacle courses that require you to navigate through sets of pylons while hitting other pylons that temporarily stop the clock. While passing all the courses to get the item reward is fairly easy, mastering each course to beat the first place developer times is insanely difficult.
  • The S Class Digger test in the second game. You're given a Buster with crappy stats and five minutes to clear out a fairly large dungeon full of powerful enemies. Doing it requires either using the Claw Arm to pick up enemies and throw them into each other (which means getting close to them and probably taking damage, as the hitbox for the Claw Arm is terrible), or stutter stepping to fire the Buster faster (which will be hell on your thumbs).
  • The 100-question quiz from Legends 2. After completing the 10-question quiz — which isn't too difficult or time-consuming — the Mayor, who's also the principal of the only school on Manda Island, offers you their national treasure and two ways to obtain it. Either pay two million (with an m) Zenny, which is the same amount needed to fully upgrade the power on the homing missile so it's crazy expensive, or take the 100-question quiz. The questions range in topic from pop culture, to history, to science, to physics... They even throw in a question about the Mega Man Legends universe and if you get just one question wrong you have to start all over again.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: This happened to the series in general at the release. While Mega Man was best known as a franchise of 2D platformers with distinct stages where you fought bosses to acquire their weapons, this game was an over-the-shoulder third person shooter with wide-open exploration and Action RPG elements. The series has since been Vindicated by History, but at the time this was not what Mega Man fans were expecting.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Juno◊ from the first game and The Master◊ from the second game are both very feminine-looking male characters.
• Vindicated by History: In 1998, the game had poor sales, and the reception to Legends was mediocre at best. In fact, it was often pointed out as an example of how a transition from 2D to 3D could go wrong. Now, it's a beloved Cult Classic — the backlash over the cancellation of Mega Man Legends 3 is a testament to its popularity. A part of this comes from the fact that the controls for the first game and The Misadventures of Tron Bonne were mediocre, but the story held together. The controls were greatly improved for the second game and the story doubled down on the intrigue and awesomeness.

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