- Anti-Climax Boss: Wily Machine 1, which is surprisingly easy compared to the level you had to go through. The first phase goes down in a few hits from Fire Storm, and the second can be beaten with Rolling Cutter or Thunder Beam. Neither of them have attacks that are particularly hard to dodge.
- 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. In fact, Cut Man was considered so easy as to be a complete joke. It's even believed by many that his status in the Ruby Spears cartoon is a result of his reputation for being so easy to beat.
- Fire Man 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. Alternatively. moving about 10 pixels forward allows you to jump and fire simultaneously to avoid all of his fire attacks while slowly whittling him down. Without either of these strategies, however, he is That One Boss.
- Breather Level:
- Cut Man and Bomb Man are both easy, and so too are their 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 straightforward 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 Dark Horse:
- 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 Mega Man: Dr. Wily's Revenge for the Game Boy (and, by extension, any of the Game Boy games).
- Cut Man was popular enough to make it into the Saturn version of Mega Man 8 as a boss. He also appeared in Mega Man X8 as his original 8-bit self (presumably as a hologram) in Optic Sunflower's stage if you have a Mega Man X: Command Mission Save File on your Memory Card.
- Disregarding his difficult boss fight, Elec Man is also fairly well-liked due to his design and effective weapon. He's even Keiji Inafune's favorite Robot Master.
- Game-Breaker: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
- Goddamned Boss: The Yellow Devil can be this on the Genesis version. You don't have access to the "Pause Trick" from the NES version, but it attacks a lot slower than the NES version, allowing you to survive. However, the eye still has a very short window, and if you miss any shot, you have to repeat the process over again.
- Good Bad Bugs:
- The famous "Pause Trick". Since enemy Mercy Invincibility fades while the game is paused, pausing the game while a projectile such as the Thunder Beam is passing through an enemy will cause that enemy to take another hit from that same projectile as soon as the game is unpaused (and the process can be repeated multiple times). This is often used by gamers to beat the Yellow Devil, but can be applied to other bosses. In fact, in order to get the Gold Medal in the Boss Challenge against him in Legacy Collection, you must abuse this glitch.
- Ladders are the most borked in this game (and Capcom could never quite get it right), making it possible to clip through walls and move faster than the graphics can load.
- It's possible to have infinite boulders using the Super Arm (but requires staying on the same screen) by pressing the attack button on the same frame that the final piece of debris from the last thrown boulder leaves the screen to spawn a duplicate boulder from thin air. Speed runners heavily rely on this on the Wily Stage 3 boss.
- Gameplay Derailment: The Pause Trick glitch is such an effective way of dealing with enemies and bosses (particularly the Yellow Devil) that it pretty much throws the game's otherwise brutal difficulty out the window, at least in terms of combat. Unusually, it became an officially-sanctioned way of playing the game, as they purposefully leave the glitch intact in modern rereleases and even expect you to use it to get a Gold Medal in the game's Legacy Collection rerelease.
- Goddamned Boss: Once you memorize the Yellow Devil's pattern (and develop quick enough reflexes), it's actually more tedious than hard.
- Harsher in Hindsight: "Fight, Mega Man! FOR EVERLASTING PEACE!" This line becomes sad when you put into consideration what happens in Mega Man X and especially Mega Man Zero. To put it this way: Mega Man never attained everlasting peace. Then again, considering things do eventually get better during and after those series thanks to other heroes named Mega Man, it may be Heartwarming in Hindsight instead.
- Never Live It Down: The infamously poor US cover
◊ is an endless source of amusement for every Mega Man fan. Capcom has since acknowledged its memetic status years later, nicknamed him as "Bad Box Art Mega Man," and included him in games like Mega Man ZX Advent and Street Fighter X Tekken. - Polished Port: The remake contained in The Wily Wars, which beefed up the graphics, remixed the music, and added a save feature.
- Scrappy Mechanic: The Scoring Points system is weird and vestigial, and for a variety of reasons, this is a game where score matters very little (there are Respawning Enemies that give points, the amount bosses give you is randomized, the game doesn't save your score, your points roll over if you hit 10,000,000, the game is hard enough that completion rate matters more than score anyway), but what pushes it here is the Score Balls. These drop from defeated enemies with the same rate, if not greater, than weapon and health drops, and do nothing but increase your points. Not only can this trip up fans of the newer games, but it also makes farming for drops considerably more tedious.
- Scrappy Weapon: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
- Self-Imposed Challenge: Veterans of the game would often try to, say, finish the game with only the one shot necessary to beat it fired. Naturally, these would become Achievements/Trophies in later remakes.
- Suspiciously Similar Song:
- That One Boss: The Yellow Devil, a boss so tough that the Pause Trick mentioned above is considered a totally genuine, guilt-free strategy for beating it. Its method of attack is simply to move across the room in blobs, which move fast, hit hard, and require several perfectly-timed jumps to dodge, so even if you know the pattern, it's still a tough fight. Oh, and its one weak spot, the eye which occasionally appears, is a small target that sometimes pops up too high to even hit with the normal Mega Buster, dragging the already grueling fight on even longer. On top of that, the Thunder Beam, its weakness, has a somewhat wonky attack pattern, meaning that it can sometimes flat-out miss the eye, even head-on! Ironically, while the Wily Wars iteration made the game harder, the game makes the Yellow Devil easier, as it suffers slowdown during the fight, making it easier to dodge its pieces.note
- There's also the Mega Man clone at the end of Wily Stage 2. It has the same abilities as the player and will use whichever one you have equipped, except it ALSO deals significant contact damage, and can't be easily cheesed with the pause trick. Fire Storm and Thunder Beam do the most damage to it, but are also the hardest weapons for you to dodge when it inevitably returns your fire.
- That One Level:
- Ice Man's stage, if you're doing it without the Magnet Beam. The first set of annoyances are jumping on disappearing blocks over Gabyoalls, which can only be destroyed with Special Weapons and are low to the ground. Then you have to cross over a large pit with Foot Holders. Not only do they have an unpredictable pattern, but they shoot sideways randomly. If you get hit, not only do you have a high chance of being knocked off, but you can fall right through them. Even if you have the Magnet Beam, the game has a quirk where the top of the screen overflows to the bottom very shortly. If you climb too high, the game thinks you've fallen into a pit.
- The first half of Guts Man's stage contains platforms that move along a track and periodically flip down over a wide chasm. If you don't jump with near-perfect timing every time the platforms flip, you'll fall. As in Ice Man's stage, you can effectively skip this part if you have the Magnet Beam, but the intention is for you to have already completed Guts Man's stage upon entering Elec Man's so you can use the Super Arm to move the rocks that the Magnet Beam is behind (the alternative is to complete Elec Man's stage twice, as the Thunder Beam is the only other weapon that destroys said rocks). Fortunately the rest of Guts Man's stage is easily manageable.
- Wily Stage 4. You have to fight Bomb Man, Fire Man, Ice Man, and Guts Man all in a row, and if you die, you go back to the start. Unlike boss rushes in later games, there are no health pickups between matches, not to mention Energy Tanks haven't been introduced yet. The game throws you a bone by allowing you to get a 1up and the Yashichi, which refills all of your health and weapons, just before the boss rush, but this is a small comfort when the actual succession of fights is so unforgiving.
- Vindicated by History: While the game only sold modestly in Japan and outright flopped in the US, the first game became much more recognized and eventually iconic after the rip-roaring success of its sequel established Mega Man as a major franchise.
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