Scrappy Mechanic / Mega Man

I come to realize I always find myself back in the same spot
That place in Heat Man's level with those annoying fading blocks

—Translated lyric from "Air Man ga Taosenai"^note "I Can't Defeat Air Man"

There are many, many, many reasons why the Mega Man series has inspired some of the most infuriating, controller-throwing incidents in gaming history, and inspired its usage as the page image for this phenomenon:

General

• The disappearing and reappearing (appropriately named) Appearing Blocks are not only a Scrappy Mechanic, but also a series staple. The gist of them is that the blocks will follow a set pattern that one must memorize in order to avoid falling off, but the fact that the games tend to pair them up with Bottomless Pits and One-Hit KO hazards means that this process of memorization often amounts to Trial-and-Error Gameplay. Certain items such as Item-2 and Rush Jet can help make things easier, but they have to be unlocked beforehand and aren't in every game. Even the sound they make pisses retro gamers off to this very day. Even worse, some fan-created games add "Yoku Spikes" to the mix - disappearing and reappearing Spikes of Doom.
• Once you enter a Boss Corridor, a checkpoint activates so that if the boss kills you, you respawn at said corridor, with no way to backtrack. Did you use up all of the energy for the special weapon (which doesn't reload between lives, by the way) that the boss is weak to? Well, unless you're willing to drain out your remaining lives and restart the entire level just to regain access to that weapon, time to whip out the default weapon and fight the boss the hard way!
• Enemies respawn once you scroll far enough for their respawn points to be off-screen. Meaning that if you destroy a rather annoying or dangerous enemy, but something (like a hazard or a pit) pushes you back, you'll have to fight it again.
• The Game Boy variants, Mega Man 7, and Mega Man 8 force you to beat four of the robot masters first before you can go after the next four. Mega Man & Bass takes this up to eleven with an odd system that unlocks new stages depending on which ones you beat prior. Saying this mechanic is unpopular would be an understatement as it seriously cripples the Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors theme the franchise is known best for. At least the Xtreme games on the Game Boy Color gave players an option to tackle any of the eight Mavericks on Extreme Mode after unlocking it.
  The Mega Man Homepage: (On 8) Once again, you must tackle four Robot Masters at a time. (Why does Capcom keep doing this?)

Classic series

• Mega Man: The lifts in Guts Man's zone play with the controls and can end up (more often than not) dumping the player into Bottomless Pits, due to inconsistent timing. They're also one of if not the only case in the entire franchise where Mega Man's physics instantly catapult him downwards into the pits below like a bullet if he's on a lift when it drops; if you don't jump in just the right time, the player won't even get a second to register their failure.
• Mega Man 2: Getting a Game Over is very punishing in this game especially, since doing so causes you to lose all of your E-Tanks. You can only hold up to four at once, there's only nine in the entire game, and four of aforementioned nine E-Tanks are in the Wily stages, in areas where you have to use weapon energy where it's extremely scarce. A Game Over can be notoriously damning in the Boss Rush in Wily 5, in which case you'll have to fight all eight Robot Masters as well as the two-phase Wily Machine with nothing but paltry health refills in between fights.
• Mega Man 3:
  • Surprise Boxes (also known as ? Tanks), which can be shot open and contain a random power-up, from a small energy/weapon pickup, to an extra life or E-Tank. What makes them so frustrating is the fact that they're always hidden in hard-to-reach places like normal extra lives and E-Tanks are, and don't respawn after they're opened, making them not worth the effort. Fortunately, the idea was refined in Mega Man 4 with Eddie, who appears in his own dedicated rooms, respawns if the player revisits the room after dying or restarting the level, and can't drop small pickups.
  • Rush Marine is frequently derided for not only being such a situational device (it can only be used underwater), but in this game especially being completely redundant as Rush Jet does the exact same thing except you can use it out of water as well. It doesn't help that the Marine drains energy so quickly, that it becomes risky to use in water sections with bottomless pits like in Gemini Man's stage. 4 would change the Rush Jet so as to not make the Rush Marine obsolete, while future games dropped the Rush Marine altogether.
• Mega Man 5:
  • The Rush Coil, for no apparent reason at all, was changed to something much worse and less intuitive. Instead of just jumping on Rush and being bounced into the air, you jump on Rush, Rush jumps, and then you have to jump off of him manually before he lands. Nobody was happy about this, and by the item's next appearance, it had been changed back.
  • While the Charge Shot is larger, pierces defeated enemies and takes less time to charge than in Mega Man 4, getting hit while charging it will make you lose it. This means that if you're not good at avoiding attacks and don't have/can't use a Robot Master's weakness, the fight just got a lot harder. Bizarrely, it’s still kept in Mega Man 6.
• Mega Man 6: The Jet and Power Adapters are cool and very useful items, but having to constantly deselect and reselect them from the Pause Menu, just to use the charge shot or slide when those obstacles pop up, can get annoying fast, especially since a little cutscene plays each time you select them. You can skip the cutscene by pressing Start, though.
• Mega Man 8:
  • The snowboard in Frost Man's stage and the first stage of Wily's Tower. These sections are high-speed auto-scrolling levels similar to the Ride Chaser stages in the X series. You're accompanied by a flying drone that tells you to either "Jump! Jump!" or "Slide! Slide!" right before you need to do such. Though they start off simple, they pick up very quickly (sometimes putting enemies in the mix), and the margin for error continuously becomes more and more thin. There's even a segment in Frost Man's stage where you have to ignore a "Jump! Jump!" command in order to get a bolt. And the faster things get, the more the commands tend to interrupt themselves. There's a good reason why Wily Tower 1 is considered the That One Level of this game.
  • The lack of weapon weaknesses for regular enemies is often criticized. Despite a lot of the weapons having potentially interesting utilities, this makes a lot of them rather unimpressive outside of their gimmicks, since a charged Buster shot always does the same damage or better (the major exception being the Flash Bomb, which has a damage-over-time mechanic that lets it outshine the Buster against certain targets). While this doesn't render them useless, and 8 isn't the only game in the series to do this, it's rarely seen as a point in the game's favor.
  • E-Tanks are absent in 8 as well as Mega Man & Bass. The closest there is to a replacement is the Rush Charger, where Rush flies over the screen, dropping weapon and energy refills. Not only is this completely determined by the Random Number Generator but the powerups are dropped gradually during whatever fight or action you're in: if you're in a pinch, especially fighting a boss, this is at best going to seriously going to screw you over and at worst get you killed trying to leap for a health pickup.
• Mega Man 10: The decision to have many bosses reserve certain attacks to Hard Mode. It results in many of them having very static patterns on Easy and Normal, making for bland fights—a particular case is Blade Man, who has a gigantic sword on his head that dominates his design, but only bothers to put it to use on Hard.
• Mega Man 11:
  • While getting hit normally doesn't cancel a Mega Buster charge, getting hit while charging with the Power Gear activated does.
  • While it's less of a hassle to summon Rush's forms now, both of them share an energy meter instead of having separate ones, so you lose access to both if you use one too much.

Mega Man X series

• Mega Man X2: After you beat two of the eight Mavericks, the three X-Hunters, Serges, Agile, and Violen, begin to shuffle around any stages you haven't beaten yet every time you return to the stage select, whether it be from beating a stage or getting a Game Over. And this is where the main problem arises: if you beat a Maverick stage without defeating the X-Hunter in their stage if they're there, they're gone for good, botching a 100% Completion run, forcing the Zero fight at the end of the game and locking you out of the Golden Ending. To make matters worse, the methods for finding the hidden rooms that they're fought in can get pretty obtuse.^note For example, the one in Bubble Crab can't be accessed unless you kill the Sea Canthller before it can reach it, and the one in Magna Centipede can't be accessed unless you don't get caught by a single searchlight after beating Chop Register. In the case of the X-Hunter room in Overdrive Ostrich, it can't even be accessed at all unless you've already beaten Wheel Gator, forcing a Game Over if you still want to fight him, which will only make him go to a different stage, along with any of his buddies if they're still present. This can be especially frustrating if said Game Over was to one of the X-Hunters themselves since they can be pretty tough - die one too many times and they'll high-tail it somewhere else entirely.
• Mega Man X3:
  • This game includes a variant of the X-Hunter system with the Nightmare Police, Bit and Byte. Once two mavericks are beaten, Bit will show up in one of the next three stages, then Byte in one of the last three. Unlike the X-hunters, these encounters are mandatory. There is no way to predict when they'll appear, meaning you may very well find yourself battling them without their weaknesses, and they'll give an early-game X one hell of a time. There's also an alternate boss in the endgame that can only be encountered by killing the Police with their weaknesses, so bad luck may lock you out of that encounter.^note Though said boss is That One Boss, so it's not a huge loss.
  • X can use various ride armors to navigate through the levels. Unfortunately for X, he needs to get the Chimera armor first before any of them can be used (the Chimera being the base set) and then find the other four hidden well through each area. Compounding this is that (unless the player has no problem killing himself afterwards, the stage he gets that in is home to the Maverick many save for last, making the armors feel like wasted potential.
  • Probably to account for the player's likely intent of using the armors when they can, the damage output by the enemies in X3 at the start is pretty damn high. X can find himself being killed very easily. Though for some players, warranting a defensive play style instead of a reckless offense can be an appeal to the game.
  • The chip system. Like with armor parts in the games proper, X3 introduces chips that can further your abilities. However, X can only equip one of the four chips for some arbitrary reason that only serves to be a painful choice to the player. What really sucks is that X3 has a sucker-punch secret of which the player can find a chip that enables all four if they never got any chip prior to finding the hidden capsule, which make players wonder 'why bother with the chips?' in the first place or 'why can't we swap the chips out?'. (like Mega Man X4 did with the two Arm Parts)
• Mega Man X5:
  • Your path to the good ending is luck-based. Despite improving your chances by playing the game proper, that's all you improve: your chance. This is bad enough, but let's also bring attention to the main impact of this, namely: Zero. If Zero survives and the colony's destroyed. Zero's around to endgame. If you fail or he goes Maverick, not only is he gone for good; but any health tanks or weapon upgrades he had goes with him. So, the player is left with two options: Bench Zero and let X get all the pickups to prevent Zero from taking any with him upon which he Can't Catch Up, or try to divvy them up between the two characters and hope you prevent him from death.
  • In this game and the following title, the armor system requires X to get all the parts of his armor to be able to even use them or their features at all. This meant that on average, the armors you'd get would be useless for exploring the levels unless you needed their perks to reach certain items.
  • The time limit which gives you 16 hours to stop the Eurasia colony, which translates to 16 played stages whether you succeed or not. With 8 stages and two mandatory Dynamo battles, this leaves you with 6 failed attempts at levels and thus not a whole lot of room for error. In a series where the core point of the game was to explore, look around, find secrets, and learn the boss's weaknesses via Trial And Error, this forces you to go to specific stages at specific times and follow a regimented path through the game (in other words follow a walkthrough), or Save Scum to explore levels finding things and then reload and remember where they are when you play the level for real. Worse, it also ties into the parts system. The bosses in the game level up and they drop parts for refinement when you defeat them starting at level 8 or above. They start at level one and do increase in level the less time you have. This means that you have to waste time suiciding at the game's start to get the parts you want from all 8 robot masters, or just play it normally and only get four parts you may or may not want.
  • Alia. She "helps" you every step of the way during your first play of each level, stopping you dead in your tracks and forcing a tutorial on you. She's like Navi times a thousand as, unlike Navi who mostly stops forcibly pestering you after the Noob Cave, Alia pesters you with this intensity for the entire game. It's also not helped by the Captain Obvious nature of her assistance: like previous Mega Man games this one is still structured to teach you via its level layouts, which renders her assistance redundant at best, but even then a lot of her tips boil down to inane protips like "avoid those spikes!" or "see that ladder, which is the only possible path you could take? Sigma's up there!" Fixing this must have been high on the developers list as, despite Mega Man X6's Absurdly Short Production Time, they did in fact fix this by relegating Alia to an optional button prompt.
• Mega Man X6:
  • Rescuing Reploids. Notable as it's a feature in a previous game that was sought to be better developed as general consensus was it was wasted in X5. However, their mortality from Nightmare Virus possession ruins the fun this could have had. This is worsened by the fact that some carry with them parts that may be necessary for you to complete certain objectives, and when they die (due to the Nightmare Virus infecting them - and they may be put very close to those Reploids), so do your chances of obtaining them. It becomes so distracting to the overall gameplay experience that a few people view it as an irritation rather than a feature.
  • The Nightmare Phenomenon. Although comparable to X1's own stage effects, they are far more detrimental here with even at their best being "some are less detrimental and thus better serve to be active than the others" while X1's helped you more often than not^note Of the Nightmare Phenomenon, only Blaze Heatnix's Nightmare Fire in Blizzard Wolfang's stage and Metal Shark Player's Nightmare Iron in Blaze Heatnix's stage can truly claim to be beneficial since triggering them is needed to reach otherwise-unreachable areas of the stages and open the path to the Nightmare Area and the latter's Dr. Light Capsule (and with the latter, unless you have Player's boss weapon to destroy the iron cubes, you can't progress that far along the path anyways). Special mention goes to Infinity Mijinion's Nightmare Dark, which renders Commander Yammark and Rainy Turtloid's stages near unplayable. A notable runner up is the Yammark nightmare which produces little fireflies that take some immense punishment to get rid of unless you shoot them with with the Yammar Option. Zero has no trouble with them; but they love to get in X's way and hinder his shots. What's even more of a scrappy mechanic is that the game is vague on what exactly triggers a Phenomenon in the first place and more importantly how to get rid of it^note Each stage has two specific Phenomenon that can affect it at a time, and going to a stage will trigger its related Phenomenon in the other affected stages. However, each stage can only have one active Phenomenon at a time. The only way to get rid of the Phenomenon in a stage is to play another stage to trigger the other specific Phenomenon. For example, going to Infinity Mijinion's stage before heading to Commander Yammark's stage will trigger Nightmare Dark, but if you go to Rainy Turtloid's stage first after Mijinion's but before Yammark's, the Nightmare effect in Yammark's stage will be Turtloid's far more manageable Nightmare Rain. Good luck memorizing which stages are affected by which Phenomenon triggered by what source stages, on top of either completing the stage in question or just killing yourself several times to force a game over and return to the stage select screen manually to get the desired Phenomenon.
  • The Z-Saber being slow while attacking enemies. This is problematic when Zero goes against invulnerable targets, since it can last very long and it cannot be canceled.
  • A specific Zero move, Sentsuizan, is more of an annoyance than a help, given that it's activated pressing UP + Z-Saber button, and it can't be cancelled until Zero lands on the ground again. While not usually a huge deal, the transfer gate in Infinity Mijinion's stage has a segment where the player must cross a massive Bottomless Pit by hanging from wires while fighting enemies. Grabbing hold of the wires requires the player to hold up, but attacking while doing so will send Zero plummeting to his death immediately, forcing the player to awkwardly take their finger off the up button anytime they attack. This makes the section almost unplayable as Zero if the Sentsuizan has been obtained.
  • Getting the parts is a scrappy mechanic of itself; getting the ability to USE a lot of them stinks. You have to collect Nightmare Souls to boost your rank, which at certain levels increases the number of parts you can equip. To be able to use three or four parts, you have to collect over 5,000 and the maximum 9,999 souls respectively. The souls however only go for eight per Nightmare Virus (four if you don't grab it before it starts to shrink), 200 per each of the eight Investigators, or a grand total of 600 per Dynamo encounter if you use his weakness weapon on him. The grind is so tedious and frustrating that many just settle for two parts and a limited upgrade (which only requires 1,200 souls, which even if you go out your way to upgrade both X and Zero separately is very doable before hitting the endgame even if you never fight Dynamo).
• Mega Man X7:
  • Due to his 10-Minute Retirement, X is not playable at the start of the game. He does not join the party until you either defeat all 8 Maverick bosses, or rescue 64 Reploids, which at minimum, requires you to get every single one in the first four stages you play. Additionally, you need to be playing as X in order to collect his armor pieces, meaning that unless you start the playthrough by rescuing every single Reploid in the four stages that don't have armor pieces, you will almost certainly need to replay the stages that have them if you wish to obtain them.
  • Rescuing Reploids is even more difficult than before, as rather than only being killable by one specific enemy type, now any enemy or hazard can kill them. With how little room for error there is if one wishes to complete the game without replaying stages, the lack of forgiveness in this area certainly doesn't help.
  • Rescuing specific Reploids provide permanent power-ups that can be permanently allocated to one of the characters you brought into the level, but said power-ups that cannot be banked for later use. If you get them, you have to use them as soon as you leave the stage. This makes X's late appearance even worse, as unless you know specifically which Reploids have those powerups so you can avoid them, X is almost certainly never going to be able to catch up to Zero and Axl.
• Mega Man Xtreme 2:
  • Unlike X5 and later games where all characters get special weapons regardless of who defeated the Mavericks, here, it's either X or Zero who gets the weapon, not both. Now, this makes sense in the X and Zero mission modes, but not in Extreme Mode, where both X and Zero are available. Even worse, some power-ups require X and Zero to have proper weapons to acquire. Gave X or Zero the wrong weapon by accident? Too bad, the power-up that required the other character's weapon cannot be obtained.
  • Also, X and Zero can buy upgrades from Iris with DNA Souls, with Zero being able to equip up to 3 upgrades and X equipping up to 4 of them...unless X has a full armor, in which case, he can only equip 2 upgrades, whilst Zero can equip 3 regardless if he has a full armor or not.

Mega Man Legends

• Mega Man Legends:
  • The special weapons system for being very restrictive compared to previous games. Firstly you could only carry one special weapon at a time, including utility gear like the vacuum arm or the drill arm (the latter of which is required for some ruins, effectively forcing you to go in without a secondary weapon at all). This also makes weapons that would be situationally useful (Like the Grand Grenade or Splash Mine which are very effective against specific enemies) entirely useless because you're better off equipping a much more universal weapon. Secondly was enemies don't drop ammunition: you had to either head back to a save point or purchase and use the rather expensive Hyper Cartridge (and you could only carry one at a time), meaning if you were deep into a ruin or in a boss fight and your weapon ran out, you were up a certain creek without a paddle.
  • The map system in the ruins. The island has one large generic underground ruin and several sub-ruins scattered about beneath the ground, and each area has its own map. This makes sense. However the ruins themselves are divided into smaller areas each with their own maps and you can only view the map of the area you are currently in. As all the ruins in the game (even the Very Definitely Final Dungeon) are all linked by Doors To Before and are basically one massive underground complex with tons of backtracking and exploration, to the point it could almost be considered a Metroidvania game, this makes exploration much more needlessly confusing than it needs to be.
• Mega Man Legends 2:
  • Its license system. The first game gives you a digger's license, which serves to railroad you in the direction of the plot and is upgraded as the story progresses. The sequel decided to instead make you take a Digger's Exam: a timed level with a very strict time limit with a weapon loadout that pushes you about as close to a No-Gear Level as the game can get, making for a mind-numbingly difficult run. Not only are the tests mandatory^note While you can take them early, sooner or later you'll reach a mandatory-to-explore ruin that is above your grade, but all the enemies in every ruin upgrade to more powerful versions of themselves every time you pass an exam.
  • The underwater segments. Does playing the exact same game, except with an obnoxious wriggly screen effect, every enemy being "flying" Goddamned Bats with far more mobility than you, and moving at about 10% your normal speed sound fun? It's a strong contender for one of the worst aspects in the entire franchise owing to how completely pointless and obstructive it is, and is the sole reason the two flooded ruins are the That One Levels to the license system's That One Sidequest.

Mega Man Zero

• All of the Zero games have absurd requirements for a good ranking and hiding certain unlocks behind A and S ranks. And to make matters worse for the first three of them, using Cyber-Elves permanently subtracts from your score. Worse, the series finally brings back the franchise's patented Power Copying gimmick, except for Zero to even learn them he needs to maintain at least an A rank.
• Mega Man Zero:
  • The Skill level system. When you start the game, Zero can't do a triple slash combo with the Z-Saber or a fully charged shot with the buster. In order to get the weapons to their full potential, you must kill a lot of enemies with that weapon so that you can earn experience points to increase the weapon's level. That would be a good idea if the weapons didn't take forever to level up, since the amount of experience you earn from defeated enemies is determined by Zero's attack. For example, killing an enemy with one Z-Saber slash gives you one experience point, two slashes gives you two and so on. Oh, and if you want to have a chance against Aztec Falcon, you better grind for experience points for your weapon to reach an acceptable level if you want to beat him. Thankfully, Mega Man Zero 2 reduces the amount of experience required for your weapons, and by Mega Man Zero 3 and Mega Man Zero 4, this system is scrapped entirely.
  • The Retry Chips. Zero doesn't have lives in the first game. If you die during a mission, it's game over. Then, you have four options: use a Retry Chip, load your last save file, give up the mission or exit the game. The problem? Retry Chips are absurdly rare that not even enemies drop it. If you're out of Retry Chips, your only option is to load your save file. And if you choose "Give Up", not only you can no longer choose that mission again, but you also lose everything from that mission permanently. This includes Cyber-Elves and, if you haven't collected them already, one of the three elemental chips. It's no wonder Capcom brought the lives back from Zero 2 onwards.
• Mega Man Zero 3: Unlocking minigames either requires the Battle Chip Gate and specific battle chips or fulfilling absurd requirements like a perfect score on every mission or using only one type of weapon through the entire game and getting an overall S Rank, with two exceptions, one of which requires you to do a New Game Plus from Normal to Hard mode.
• Mega Man Zero 4:
  • The Chips system had everything to be a good idea by virtue of having a large number of chips you could make, but good luck getting the recipes or even figuring them out. You will need to either talk with NPCs and Cyber-Elves at specific times or under specific conditions, or to read a guide.
  • The Z-Knuckle at first seems like a cool idea, ripping enemies' weapons and use it against them, but there are only a few times where they actually see use outside of puzzles.

Other Games

• The DOS versions have terrible controls. The space bar is used for shooting, but jumping is assigned to the J key. Escape is used to open the weapon menu, but F9 and F10 are used for pausing and quitting, respectively. Finally, the weapon menu itself doesn't use the arrow keys for selecting a weapon; instead, you have to press the letter key corresponding to the weapon (and E-Tanks in 3). The entire control scheme is hell on a player’s fingers; they’re better off using DOSBox to remap the keys to more manageable positions.
• Mega Man: The Power Battle: The stage select is a roulette, meaning that you need to time it right if you wish to exploit the Robot Masters' weaknesses - except you aren't told which boss is on which stage, which makes it unnecessarily confusing. Add that to the fact that the game automatically selects one if you take too long to choose, and you can see why the sequel replaced it with a more traditional stage select (one that even hinted at the bosses' weaknesses at that).
• Mega Man 2: The Power Fighters: The assist characters waver around this; even if you chose a character with a useful helper (Proto Man/Duo), you're forced to use them once Eddie shows up and get no option to switch to another weapon (since their time limit acts as a weapon in of itself)...which, of course, prevents you from using the boss's weakness for some time. If you're playing as Mega Man in particular, prepare for a rough time since Rush is just an attacking assist and Mega Man gets no protection whatsoever, resulting in a Power Up Letdown.
• Mega Man Powered Up: In the classics, Mega Man's buster shots pass through walls, which was sometimes needed or very helpful in the level design like in Cut Man's stage. The remake removes this, but usually compensates in its new level design — unless you're playing the Old Style game mode that recreates the original game design with Powered Up's engine, where the problem becomes much more apparent and forces Mega Man to be exposed to danger more often. Mega Man C(harge) can circumvent this quirk with charged shots in the main New Style game, but you can't play as anyone other than the default Mega Man in the Old Style.
• Mega Man ZX: You can only have one mission accepted at a time, and you must accept a mission at a transerver first before you can start it. This means plot events won't trigger if you go to the area they take place in without the relevant mission accepted, and you have to tackle missions one at a time even if they take place in the same area. Thankfully, ZX Advent lets you have multiple missions active at the same time and they're automatically accepted after talking to the mission giver without needing to go to a transerver first.

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