YMMV / Mega Man 9

• Accidental Innuendo: Concrete Man's weapon is abbreviated as the "C. Shot" on the menu... The way it looks in action and functions doesn't help matters.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: Don't act surprised when it turns out Wily was behind everything. Especially if you read the achievements list.
• Contested Sequel: Whereas at first it got a fairly unanimously positive reaction, to the point where it was for years considered an act of Fandom Heresy to suggest that the classic series ever use anything other than 8-bit-style graphics and sound again, reactions to the game have become a lot more mixed over the years.
  • To some, 9 embodies everything good about the series, with high difficulty, memorable boss battles, an excellent arsenal of weapons, and doing a near-perfect job of capturing the NES games in their feel and style. To others, it suffers from being too hard for the sake of it, relying too much on the traditional formula, and even regressing well-liked features like the charge shot and slide to play on nostalgia.
  • The story is also contentious, particularly the expiration date law. Some feel that the dark light it shines on the rest of the series is unnecessarily edgy for the lighthearted Classic games, while others feel it makes sense given how many robots Wily has stolen or reprogrammed over the years as well as planned obsolescence in real life.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Splash Woman, mainly due to her being the only female Robot Master aside from Roll.
  • Jewel Man, Galaxy Man and Tornado Man are surprisingly popular. The former two mostly due to their incredibly useful weapons, and the latter for his cool design.
• Fanart at First Sight: Splash Woman's reveal really got artists going as, save for Roll, the OG series never had another female robot, let alone a female robot master before.
• Fanfic Fuel: The Expiration Date law, which is sometimes used in fangames to justify the plot, or tied into retellings of the games. The 8-Bit Deathmatch expansion based on Mega Man & Bass uses it as the jumping off point for King's rebellion, while it got integrated into later versions of Rock Force after fan feedback. Other fans have the law be repealed after this game's events.
• Funny Moments:
  • Upon defeating the final boss, Wily pleads for mercy as usual. Mega Man's response is to summon Rush and present a slideshow of every time Wily lost in the previous games.
  "And this time! And this time! And this time!"
  • Fake Man's weakness is chuckle-worthy. It's the Jewel Satellite. You're bribing him to stop.
• Game-Breaker: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
• Goddamned Boss: The first form of Wily Machine No. 9. It spits out large, bouncing rocks very quickly, and can only be damaged by shooting them until they explode (and the blast hits its mouth). Sounds simple, right? The problem is how easy it is for the rocks to explode somewhere else, such as at the machine's feet, or right in your face instead. And if you mess up one rock, there's a very good chance he'll immediately spit out another one and damage you. Mind you, this is the first of three back-to-back Wily fights, so if you mess up too many times, you have to do the robot master re-fights again, too.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: The game's difficulty can be too much for its own good, from the over-saturation of Spikes of Doom, to bad enemy placement in some levels, to ridiculously precise platforming. The fact that the game lacks an easy mode (the DLC instead added two even harder difficulties) certainly doesn't help.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!:
  • Fans and critics thought that the game tried too hard to be like 2, from using similar music in some places^note The stage start theme comes to mind; 9 is the only game in the main series that reuses note-for-note a previous stage start theme, to Mega Man losing his charge shot and slide. That said, it does feature a ton of elements from future games as well.
  • Although many players enjoy this game's status as an NES throwback, others see it as just another form of Capcom Sequel Stagnation - a Capcom franchise refusing to evolve even in sound or visuals from its heyday. It doesn't help that 7, 8 and & Bass were generally held to have spectacular art, and the art of this game is a willful step backwards by comparison.
• Memetic Mutation: The Internet didn't wait to smear Rule 34 all over Splash Woman when she was announced. The ending scene — where Auto is taking photos of her posing at the beach — doesn't help any either...
• Older Than They Think: This isn't the first time Dr. Wily has done a Monster Protection Racket, nor is it the first time he made a robot copy of Dr. Light. He first tried both of those things in a 1994 manga series called Rockman: Yomigaeru Blues. ^note  His methods of said racket during Yomigaeru Blues and Mega Man 9 differ, though, in the manga itself he has the Wily Patrol, a squad of the Robot Masters from the first 3 games as well as Enker and Punk to bring the "evil robots" to justice, while in the game, he convinces Dr. Light's first set of Robot Masters that were made without his own help that they still have purposes even after their expiry date, before using them to frame Dr. Light for Wily's crimes.
• Once Original, Now Common: In 2008, the idea of modern video games deliberately made to look and feel like much older games was very rare (outside of fan works) and difficult 2D platformers had largely fallen out of fashion in favor of newcomer-friendly 3D games (the closest you'd get to a mainstream 2D platformer was New Super Mario Bros.), so Capcom doing both at once was a very bold move. Today, retro throwback games (be they platformers or just games that use pixelart) are a dime a dozen, especially in the indie sphere, making Mega Man 9 and 10 harder to appreciate (the fact that Mega Man 11 finally made the jump to 3D didn't help either).
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: A huge one, as while 8, the game preceding it, is seen as among the easier enteries, this game is considered to be on par with the first game, in other words, it competes with that game for being the most difficult of the classic series.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: While 8 is still seen as one of the weaker titles and knocked the Classic series out of commission for a long time, 9 resurrected its popularity and is still often held as one of the franchise's strongest entries.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Mega Man's loss of the Charge Shot and Slide and their transfer to Proto Man. Many find that it makes his playstyle feel backwards and blander than it once was, while Proto Man isn't quite the right substitute because he takes double damage and knockback from everything. The main consolation is that the Robot Master weapons are some of the strongest ones in the series.
  • Removing the quick weapon swap introduced in Mega Man 7 was reviled by fans. Another reversion from 7 and 8 was checkpointing for the Wily Fortress, meaning that you'll have to restart it all over if you need to restock at the store partway through (and 9's fortress is one of the most difficult in the series and only has 2 E Tanks and only 1 M Tank).

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