Mega Man is weird, man. They made a bazillion of them, and they all pretty much play exactly the same, but somehow only Mega Man 2, 3, and maybe 9 are considered actually good while the rest have all sorts of nitpicky reasons for people to brush them aside. Allow me to share a different take - My favorite is Mega Man 4. How you like dem apples? Read more and watch gameplay here.
My preference for Mega Man 4 is largely due to one thing, I think. I got Mega Man 3 and 4 for Christmas one year and one game had the Mega Buster - where you hold the shoot button to charge up the shot which has become a Mega Man staple ever since - and the other one didn't. Mega Man 3 felt like a more simple old busted game and Mega Man 4 felt like the new hotness that was making progress. That was all that mattered to my little 8-10 year-old mind (I can't remember exactly ...) so Mega Man 4 was always my favorite. It wasn't until I ventured onto the Internet some 10-years later that I realized that, holy crap, not everyone loved Mega Man 4 as much as I did.
Mega Man has been a weird franchise for me in general, to be honest. When I was a kid I could play through them and actually beat them, and back then we didn't have readily available route lists and had to figure out the boss order on our own! I played through them again - or Mega Man 1-4 at least - as an adult when the Mega Man Anniversary Collection came out on PS2/Xbox/GC and was able to beat them again. Nowdays, though, as a much older curmudgeonly adult who doesn't deal with frustration very well, I can't do it anymore. I get to a boss and die and quit because I don't care and have other games to play. This isn't a Mega Man exclusive problem for me, though, as I don't have the patience for most 2D platformers these days.
This video is sort of interesting-ish in that I just used a password with everything unlocked so I could run through the levels and not actually fight the bosses. I would have fought the bosses - especially since I had all of the weapons - but they're not there anymore if you re-enter levels you already beat. Kind of lame. Kind of whatever. I got to tell fun stories, which is what the video was really about anyway.
