Mega Man 5/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Awesome Music: There's only one Wily stage theme this time around, but it makes up for it by being one of the best final level themes in the series. Just listen to it!
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: Crystal Man gets a lot of positive attention due to his cool design and weapon-theming. Being designed by the creator of One Punch Man also helps.
  • Game Breaker: Once you collect all of the MEGAMAN V letters, you unlock Beat. While he's only useable in the fortress stages, your feathered friend will help you break them over your knee. He aggressively homes in on enemies and bosses anywhere on the screen and hits hard. He can even predict where the Wily Capsule will go when it tries to befuddle you with Teleport Spam and will hit it the second it reappears. Later games would tone him way down, but he still dips into this status every now and then, albeit for different reasons.
  • Goddamned Bats: Sumatrans and Apache Joes, which often appear in the same levels together. The former are tiger robots who will aggressively throw themselves at you and have a nasty habit of getting in multiple hits before you can finally kill them. The latter, as their name implies, are Sniper Joes riding in attack helicopters that give them free-range movement that keeps them safe from your attacks while they can safely dive bomb you and pepper you with gunfire.
  • It Was His Sled: Surprise, surprise: Proto Man wasn't actually the main villain and was framed by Dr. Wily.
  • Scrappy Mechanic: Unlike in the previous game, getting hit while charging your Mega Buster will cause you to lose the shot. Thankfully, the obscene boost in power it got here makes up for it.
  • Scrappy Weapon: The Power Stone is infamous for being a terrible weapon that can't hit anything thanks to its weird spiraling movements. Sure, the rocks it summons are big and hit fairly hard if they connect, but it's a lot easier said than done.
    • The Charge Kick is an example in the vein of Top Spin: it's a melee weapon in a franchise built around run'n gun gameplay, but unlike Top Spin it can't even be used in the air since it simply gives Mega Man's slide damage-dealing properties and a ton of invincibility frames. Thankfully, it inherited another trait of the Top Spin: it packs a surprising amount of utility and can be devastating if you know how to use it.
    • Gravity Hold is a screen-clearing weapon like Rain Flush, but it deals a pitiful amount of damage that isn't worth the ammo cost. And when you do kill something with it, the dead enemy won't drop any health or ammo pickups.
    • The Water Wave is a more visually impressive Bubble Lead (being several columns of water rushing forward as opposed to a big bubble) and is every bit as useless thanks to being ground-bound and surprisingly weak. In fact, it might be worse since you can't use it in the air. Period.
  • Sequelitis: Downplayed; this game certainly isn't bad, but it's considered to be one of the weakest entries in the classic series due to its weak arsenal of weapons, meager difficulty, and overall samey presentation.
  • So Okay It's Average: Mega Man 5 is by no means a bad game and is very fun to play. However, its lack of innovation means it has trouble sticking out among more ambitious titles in the series and is less fondly remembered as a result.
  • That One Boss: This game's fairly easy and for the most part, its bosses are pushovers... except for Charge Man. Thanks to his massive body, tendency to turn invincible, and love of abusing collision damage, he's surprisingly tough compared to the other Robot Masters. Having his weakness doesn't do much to help, because it's the Power Stone.
    • Dark Man 3 and Big Pets are this among the fortress bosses. The former can freeze you in place with his scattershot attacks, and the latter requires a lot of careful gunplay and precision platforming to defeat it in a reasonable amount of time.
  • That One Level: Crystal Man's stage, thanks to the Crystal Droppers positioned over long stretches of bottomless pits. If you don't have the Star Crash to protect you from the falling crystals, you will die a lot thanks to their patterns being completely random.
  • That One Sidequest: Finding the letter plates that unlock Beat. For the most part they're easy to find... except for the one in Stone Man's stage, which you will not find unless you think to destroy a random destructible wall. It's the only wall of its kind, and while there's a visual difference from other walls in the stage, it's both subtle enough for players to miss while blazing through the stage, and again, shooting it isn't exactly intuitive.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks: The game's baffling take on the Rush Coil, where Rush turns into an awkward-looking platform that manually raises you up. It's not a bad utility and gets the job done, but the springboard version is a lot more fun to use and easier to control, making it vastly preferred by fans as a result. Unsurprisingly, the very next time it showed up it was reverted to its original design, and this game's version hasn't seen the light of day since.