YMMV / Mega Man 8-Bit Deathmatch

• Anti-Climax Boss: The fights against Ra Thor and Ra Devil are surprisingly easy with the right weapon, with both of them having less HP and easier attacks than you'd expect. While Ra Devil has some tricky attacks when it Turns Red, it's still more manageable than most of the other v6 bosses. According to CutmanMike, this was intentional.
• Awesome Bosses:
  • The Guts Dozer, as of v5B: After the player frees Guts Man from Wily's captivity, a brief but hilarious Escape Sequence occurs with the Guts Tank trailing right behind them (complete with an 8-bit redux of the Gutsman's Ass riff), forcing them to plow through a horde of Mets before making a big leap into the boss arena, which has been upgraded to a full open-space area. The battle itself would normally be your run-of-the-mill boss fight, except you have Guts Man helping out, and he's required to stun the boss with boulders so you can get in close and attack with Napalm Bomb or Flame Sword. The post-boss scene is equally epic; Elec Man and Bomb Man join in on the destruction of the Guts Dozer, with Bomb Man carving a giant pit in the ground for the player and Guts to toss the giant tank in and dispose of it.
  • The fight with Sunstar. At first seeming like a Hopeless Boss Fight, once Sunstar notices that you managed to damage him slightly, he goes all out against you in one of the most intense, fast-paced, and challenging fights in the game.
  • Eclipse, a giant Eldritch Abomination created when the remains of the Evil Robot fuse with both Sunstar and the Wily Star. You pilot a new and improved Gamma in a Punch-Out!!-esque Behemoth Battle. When Eclipse suddenly kills you and hope seems lost, cue some rousing words from a Duo beyond the grave, and you then get back up and hardly take any damage from Eclipse's attacks. You finish it off by punching him all the way into the Sun.
• Awesome Music: The Chapter 8 final boss theme introduced in v3a, which plays when you fight the Evil Robot.
• Breather Boss: Within the Boss Rush that's accessible after clearing the game, Proto Man. He's a much simpler and easier fight than the bosses directly before or after him, and there are several free health refills if you do mess up. In the campaign, this makes sense, as you have to fight either the Mega Mech Shark or the team of Fake Men immediately afterward, but this isn't the case in Boss Attack.
• Complete Monster—"The Advent of the Stardroids!": Terra is the alien leader of the Stardroids who proves to be far worse than his canon counterpart. Terra is first introduced murdering Duo, before kidnapping Dr. Wily and forcing him to build the Wily Star for Terra's ultimate plan. Terra would send his Stardroids off to enslave various robot masters, promising a cure for the Roboenza virus. Terra would eventually come to deal with the heroes himself, blowing a hole in Dr. Cossack's ship and then kidnapping Maestro, planning to kill him and then finish off everyone on the ship. Terra's ultimate plan is to revive his master Sunstar and use him to wipe out all inferior beings in the entire galaxy. Terra's last moments are him laughing manically, thinking that his omnicidal plans are about to come to fruition and relishing in watching Maestro's despair, thinking that he won't be able to stop it.
• Creepy Awesome: The Evil Robot, who is reinterpreted as essentially an avatar for Evil Energy itself, with little-to-no dialogue except as a multiplayer bot and a hallucination, which left an impression on players due to said interpretation along with his highly memorable boss fights.
• Demonic Spiders: Bots infected with Roboenza are annoying to fight in general, but the worst of them are:
  • Type-A Roboenza bolsters the bot's damage significantly, making them much deadlier to fight. It's especially bad if the bot spontaneously contracts it in the middle of a fight, turning the tide of battle.
  • Type-W Roboenza makes all of the bot's attacks a Spread Shot with three projectiles, making it really tough to effectively dodge them. If the bot's attack is already a Spread Shot to begin with, then it triples the amount of projectiles anyway. Hope you like taking nine Triple Blades to the face!
  • Type-I Roboenza gives the bot partial invisibility, letting them sneak up on you very easily.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: During the early days of V5, Fakeman quickly grew a following in the active player base with many players renaming themselves after police and law-themed names and using his skin, especially when MM9FAK is being played. It also helps that Fake Man himself plays a far bigger role than he did in Mega Man 9, being one of the two final bosses the player can face.
• Fanon: From the Optional Boss of Chapter 13, one running piece of this is the idea that Maestro was made by the alien supercomputer Ra Moon, or is otherwise connected to it. Maestro is extremely powerful, able to handle Duo's energy (who said that, as it is alien in nature, robots who originate from Earth cannot use), somehow knew to carry all of the Lanfront artifacts to its door to use as a key, also knows Ra Moon's name without ever being told whereas they've always needed telling in every other context, Ra Moon's fight is said by it to be some sort of test rather than an attack which it remarks as successful in Maestro's victory, and to top it all off, the trophy earned for this victory is called "Origin".
  • Building off of this, some conclude that the Dawn Breaker is Maestro's own signature weapon, which got replaced by the Variable Weapons System installed in them for the tournament, and this is actually supported by the fact that the code controlling what weapons bots get in Chapter 13 contains a line that will give any bot named "Maestro" the Dawn Breaker.
  • Further supported that when playing any Chapter 13 map, the player character's default weapon is always Dawn Breaker rather then the base Mega buster.
• Fridge Brilliance:
  • Maestro's appearance, in how it both gives a nod to the "generic character" angle while at the same time cleverly using a trick from the franchise to make it work within a canonical context of the Classic series. There is no such generic robot in the Classic series proper, but there is in the Battle Network series, an alternate timeline to the Classic series that makes up its cast by porting over Robot Masters into NetNavis: the NormalNavi. All it takes is a reversing of this process, to take the "featureless placeholder" and create the robotic counterpart for it in the Classic series universe, instead!
  • In Version 6, Duo explains that robots from Earth are usually unable to handle his energy due to its alien nature, but Maestro is special in that they're perfectly compatible with it. Considering that the V6 Optional Boss implies that Maestro is a creation of or is somehow linked to Ra Moon, it's no wonder they can handle alien energies so well.
• Funny Moments: Has its own page.
• Game-Breaker: Has its own page as well.
• Goddamned Bats: Roboenza Type-O infected robots screw with your movement by constantly pulling you close to them, making them tricky to deal with, especially if you prefer to use weapons that rely on careful positioning like Chill Spike or Rolling Cutter.
• Growing the Beard: Around v3 or v4 is where the game really begins to pick up on quality: the former for having a more-or-less original boss, the latter for using a slew of completely new sprites^note there isn't a Mega Man & Bass FC to rip sprites from and introducing a story exclusive to 8BDM that isn't an Excuse Plot.
• Heartwarming Moments: In the Optional Boss of v5, one thing that became abundantly clear was that you as Maestro had stolen Mega Man's life from him, whether you intended to or not, and that might well have him on the path to becoming a new Quint, desperate to try and save what he'd lost. However, in the climax of v6, a cured Mega Man has a private talk with Maestro, and reveals that this revelation had already come for him — but he'd managed to push those feelings down. He considers you a friend and hero, and so long as the world remains safe, it doesn't matter who the one doing it is. Hell, he manages to spin those feelings of budding resentment into a positive, contemplating how incredible it is that they can be so human-like to experience such emotions.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In the single player campaign, just before fighting Gamma, Dr. Wily makes you fight through all of the Robot Masters of Mega Man 1-6 one by one. In Mega Man Legacy Collection, one of the challenges is a huge Boss Rush against every Robot Master from those six games one by one.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: This has been the general reaction to the post-v4 bosses. It says a lot that nearly every single boss from v4 and v5 are covered in That One Boss. Their attacks come out too fast to effectively dodge, they take tons of punishment, and if you're fighting one of the two Marathon Bosses introduced in v5, you have to start the whole fight from the beginning if you die. That's not even getting into the re-introduced Boss Rush mode, where if you die once, it's all over. All up against many, many bosses with One-Hit Kill capabilities. v5B attempts to rectify most of this by adding an Easy difficulty setting, which slows bots down and reduces damage you take from the bosses, as well as altering the Boss Rush by giving the player three lives for it and removing the sub-bosses.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • NoBass ^ExplanationAfter a player named BxR (standing for Bass X Roll) got banned from TSPG for harassment, many jokes arose around that shipping, as well as Bass in general, usually accompanied by a sprite of Bass behind a “no” sign.
  • Yay, I scratched Sunstar! ...oh no, I scratched Sunstar. ^{Explanation, heavy spoilers}Sunstar starts off his boss fight mostly just walking towards you menacingly and attacking every so often. Then you damage him enough that he notes that he's sustained a scratch. And then he starts taking you seriously. Needless to say, the resulting reaction of relief that his first phase is over followed by panic over Sunstar no longer screwing around is fairly common amongst players fighting him for the first time.
• Nightmare Fuel: Has its own page.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
  • Many of the original series' Scrappy Weapons were completely refurbished and improved on in this game. The Hyper Bomb, Leaf Shield, Top Spin, and Power Stone are good examples.
  • Quint was largely hated in Mega Man II due to being underwhelming as a boss encounter, wasting the idea of a time-displaced Mega Man as a boss fight, and the weapon you get not being worth the effort. His reinterpretation in 8-Bit Deathmatch, however, is well-liked, not only doing the concept of fighting a future Mega Man justice, with a five phase fight, but also for managing to make the character tragic and pitiable, and tweaking Sakugarne to work better.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The wave bikes in Wave Man's stage. They travel very fast, and when you crash into a wall, you can sometimes die instantly instead of being thrown up into the air first because of server lag.
• Shocking Moments:
  • The appearance of the Evil Robot in the Mega Man 8 chapter is probably the original Signature Scene and Growing the Beard moment of 8 Bit Deathmatch, to the point of it being well-known in most fangame circles and the likely origin of Trio's fan popularity.
  • The moody ambience is strong in the Mega Man 10 Wily Castle level, with the rain pouring, the Silent Rain track playing, and the only other opponent visible in the map being a solitary Sniper Joe. Once you frag him, however, the much more energetic Abandoned Memory kicks in and six opponents join the fray... and then all of them contract Roboenza simultaneously, when it's usually one at a time.
  • The final boss fought at the end of Chapter 12 might be unexpected, as it is a Game Boy final boss in a chapter for Mega Man 10. What propels it into shocking territory is the second phase, where Duo and King team up with you to try to take Wily down once and for all. The cutscene after it qualifies as well, since Terra establishes his immediate, Dragon Ball Z-esque dangerousness by killing Duo with little effort.
  • The duel with Sunstar firmly establishes how incredibly powerful he is, and that nothing will ever surpass his strength. And then, in the post-fight cutscene where the Game Boy games give him his Redemption Equals Death moment, expectations are subverted when the remains of the Evil Robot latch onto Sunstar's head, force a Demonic Posession, and then readies up to fight you again, bringing down the entire Wily Star once outlasted as well.
• That One Attack:
  • For the Genesis Unit, their Attack Pattern Delta (or "Delta attack thingie", as Hyper Storm H calls it). Buster Rod G jumps back and forth and constantly creates clones of himself that move towards the other side of the room, while Hyper Storm H vacuums you towards him. It'd already be hard enough to dodge the clones with the vacuum effect in play, but Mega Water S also constantly creates water spouts near your position, forcing you to stay on the move and dodge them as well.
  • Sunstar has tons of these, but special mention goes to Nova Beam, his Wave-Motion Gun attack. He'll charge up for a bit, then fire a huge laser at you that will lop off over half your health if it lands a direct hit. It's tricky to jump out of the way in time, and later in the fight, he'll start turning from side to side while firing it, so you'll have to jump over it many times in succession.
• That One Boss: Has its own page here.
• That One Level:
  • Until their eventual revamps, both Cut Man and Spring Man's maps got this treatment. The former due to its small, compressed size due to its role as an intro map and the latter because of the sheer volume of springs present with very little stable ground.
  • The team deathmatch levels for the Mega Man & Bass and Mega Man: The Wily Wars chapters, for the most part, can be fairly challenging due to the enemy team outnumbering yours, and your allies have the same tendency to suffer from Artificial Stupidity as the enemy. Unless you get weapons suited for group fights, some of these levels can be brutal.
  • The Fakemen chase sequence in the final boss stage that occurs only if you attempt to enter the blue door with the Fakeman inside of it on any playthrough beyond the first (or change your graphics settings to Software instead of Open GL). You're being chased and fired upon by four Fakemen in police cruisers that are capable of spawning small groups of Fakemen on police bikes and flying Fakemen. You're on the back of Auto's truck, which is fairly small (even when he extends the truck's platforms to give you more moving room), making dodging all of the bullets fairly difficult even if you're trying your damnedest to not get shot. Auto will also periodically throw out weapons, health and weapon energy to give you a fighting chance. The problem with that is that the weapons he does give you aren't a whole lot of help in fighting off the Fakemen (aside from the Ballade Cracker), the health and weapon energy tends to come out in small doses when you're probably using more than what the small capsules give back, and at one point he accidentally throws four useful weapons (Remote Mine, Gyro Attack, Hard Knuckle and Super Arm) out too far and end up giving two of the Fakemen the weapons instead (while the latter two weapons completely miss the truck and the Fakemen entirely, effectively wasting them), and given that robot master weapons tend to do much more damage than the standard buster shots, it makes an already difficult escape sequence even more difficult to survive. To top it all off, if you die at any point in the chase (even if you're literally just a few moments away from the end of it), you have to start the entire chase all over again.
  • In the Mega Man V campaign, Mars’s stage. It’s a cramped environment with little space to maneuver and plenty of opportunities to get cornered, and the enemy robots, especially Crash Man, are packing powerful weapons. Additionally, your AI ally, Skull Man, is pretty useless compared to most others. Fortunately, Mars himself is a fairly easy fight once the level is done.
  • Another V example: Saturn's stage. The only area that isn't a tight corridor is a central room with lots of low-gravity environments... which turns Gravity Man's chip damage attacks into a lethal Meteor Move. Besides him, your opponents are Charge Man (who Charge Kicks and gets into your face really fast), Napalm Man (deals tons of damage and creates an unsafe area to move in from his grenades), and Flame Man (same as Napalm Man, but with Flame Blast). Thankfully, like Mars above, Saturn is easily defeated once the other robots are dealt with.
  • One more Mega Man V example, the third Wily Star level, themed after Ballade. It has yet another tight environment, and your opponents are once again very lethal: Astro Man will deal a ton of damage if you get anywhere near him, Grenade Man's explosives deal lethal amounts of damage if you get caught up in them, and Wind Man's projectiles will either juggle you around or land you right into an Astro Crush or a Flash Bomb explosion. Also, unlike the above two stages, you'll still have to take down Enker, Punk, and Ballade one last time once you beat the others. It gets even worse if you're trying to get the Ballade Cracker weapon, as now you have to keep Bass alive through all this in order to unlock it.
• That One Sidequest:
  • Collecting all of the weapons in chapter 13. While farming enough bolts to get most of them isn't that bad, getting the Mega Man Killers' weapons is a big challenge; you have to keep your AI allies alive in the three Wily Star levels. Even once you have those and the Dawn Breaker, you'll still be missing two weapons. Sakugarne can be found in one Wily Star level in a location that's not too hard to get to, but the Mega Ball is a massive example of Guide Dang It!, being found on a random ledge in Jupiter's stage.
  • Getting the strange artifact in Snake Man's stage is frustrating for the same reason getting Ground Man's CD in Mega Man & Bass is frustrating: you have to summon Rush in a small area that's vulnerable to enemy fire, then protect him while he finishes his long burrowing animation and the other bots try their best to gun him down.
• Unexpected Character:
  • The Evil Robot from Mega Man 8 is the Final Boss of the 8 arc. Especially since he comes in with little-to-no foreshadowing. A double-whammy, too, as he makes an equally-unexpected reappearance in the V chapter despite seemingly dying last time he appeared.
  • The cast of Mega Man & Bass, due to the fact the game had used fangame versions of 7 and 8's casts up to that point (meaning that all of the characters that show up in that arc are completely made from scratch), along with an appearance by the Genesis Unit, from The Wily Wars.
  • The cast of Mega Man V in Version 6, due them being initially planned for Version 7 before Capcom announced Mega Man 11, and the 8BDM developers not revealing how they would handle it until the 10th anniversary of the game.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: While Gamma looked neat, his being a flat sprite made him look more like a well-drawn advancing billboard. On the other hand, Chapter 12's boss, the Wily Iron Golem, is an incredibly convincing 3D rendition of the original boss done solely through layers of sprites in front of each other.

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