YMMV / Mega Mari

• Awesome Music. Oh, hell yes.
  • The Prologue/Title/Final Battle song deserves mention.
  • There is a reason both Eirin's Stage and Patchouli Castle 1/2 are so difficult. In this game in general, epicness of stage music is proportional to difficulty.
    • There's also the theme for the bosses of Patchy's castle, which first gets play when you battle Yukari.
    • One of the bosses in Patchy's castle, Copy Marisa, has a delightful unique battle theme.
  • Reisen's theme is delightful as well.
• Breather Boss: The Marisa Clone is placed after Yukari and a Yellow Devil Expy for probably this exact reason.
• Goddamned Bats: Lily White, in all her hovering above your head while you're making tricky jumps glory.
• Good Bad Bug: Thousand Knives can be used to skip two Patchouli fights at the end of the game. This is particularly useful because one of them follows a grueling boss rush and precedes a two-phase Patchouli Machine fight, all in the same stage.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Many people dislike the fact that this game reintroduces several annoying game mechanics from Mega Man out of faithfulness to the source material, rather than improving on it by either modifying those mechanics to be less frustrating or just omitting them in favor of something better.
• That One Attack:
  • Reimu would be a very easy boss, easier than Cirno, if it weren't for her Yin Yang Orbs. These things hit hard, can move in different patterns, deflect most projectiles, and stick around for the entire battle after being fired. Once she hits low health, she begins spamming them in quick succession. Even if you manage to kill her before she can kill you, they stick around a few seconds after her death and can finish you off in that time.
  • Youmu's sword slashes cover a wide area, are extremely difficult to avoid, and even block your shots. Yuyuko's ghost shield throw (when she's on the ground) is dangerous for the same reasons, but thankfully a lot less frequent than Youmu's slashes.
  • The final Patchouli mecha has an ultimate attack that throws a hologram of itself forward. While it takes a long time to charge, she's invincible while preparing it, getting the timing for dodging it down pat is not easy, and it shoves a good 75% of a full healthbar if it connects.
• That One Boss: Despite being arguably the hardest boss in the game, Yukari has a surprisingly simple pattern compared to virtually every other boss. Of course, this isn't what makes her hard. What makes her hard is that there is a bottomless pit during the fight and you must stay alive by jumping on platforms that move in random directions. And Ran and Chen are spinning all over the place and firing bullets at you. And you can't hit her 90% of the time. Given how hard she was to fight in her debut game, this certainly isn't surprising.
• That One Level:
  • Eirin's stage. Oh dear god Eirin's stage. It features a darkened area at the start, then a couple of fights with the Prismriver Sisters, then a long drop full of spikes that you would expect in one of the later Wily stages in a Mega Man game, then it has a long sequence that is full of the aforementioned hover machine rabbits (with a few bottomless pits for good measure). And the entire stage is full of those damned Tewi clones. Eirin's stage is the reason you don't start with Cirno, despite the fact that Cirno is the easiest boss, because Cirno's weapon is Eirin's weakness, but you will need a LOT of different weapons to get out of Eirin's stage in one piece.
  • Youmu's stage featuring a boat ride full of will o' the wisps and the backbreaking stair climb from hell hasn't won any fans either.
  • Patchouli Castle 1 is fairly decent to begin with; there's plenty of enemies as you would expect, and the first half of the level is fair, if not challenging- you even get a Mushroom Tank (restores all health to one character) But the difficulty really ramps up when you reach the second half. You eventually come to a horizontal blue corridor and follow it to it's end, and drop down- the scenery changes to Yukari-esque blocks with eyes in them, and you need to get moving to the bottom of the screen, because the bitch has stolen Quickman's instadeath lasers from Mega Man 2 and the next five to six rooms are filled with them. Not fast enough? You die and get sent back a little way. Complicating this matter further is the fact that there are items for the grabbing on your way down, including another Mushroom Tank. This area is the sole reason most players are advised to choose Sakuya's Thousand Knives (Marisa) over Quicksilver (Alice) because Thousand Knives stops time (and thus the lasers from moving) allowing you more time to get the items. It helps that you can't get the Mushroom Tank without Thousand Knives because lasers spawn from the corridor it's in. And then to top it all off you have Yukari as a boss, amply covered above.
  • Patchouli Castle 5 is the obligatory boss rush level, but it's not just that - there is a stage before the boss rush (mercifully short, but containing some difficult enemies such as Prismriver Sisters and two Meilings), and after the boss rush, there is a fight against Patchouli herself, followed by a two-stage fight against her Patchouli Machine. And if you run out of lives, it's back all the way to the beginning of the stage with you, which means you get to do the boss rush all over again. If you don't take Thousand Knives to skip the Quickman laser part of Castle 1, take it to skip one of the Patchouli fights in this stage. You'll be thankful you did.

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