The stream went well! I played some more of it on my own and here's what I think of it
It's definitely not as good as the original Rockman/Megaman. This isn't a huge surprise if you're like me and you think the original Rockman is basically a top 3 Megaman game (the other two for me are 2 and 8, for the record). But it does have a ton of fun with being a remake while also being very respectful of the original material! It doesn't think that things like Megaman not having the Charge Shot or Slide are "mistakes" that need to be "corrected" or "modernized". It prizes the identity of the original game and carries over what makes it stand out from the other games. Hell, it even carries over the POINT ORBS from the original! Why? I don't know! But I appreciate the gesture!
I think that the cutesy art looks fantastic. I love the additions of Time Man and Oil Man, they feel like they fit right into the cast, and Oil Slider is a suuuper fun ability, I love that it's here. It reminds me of the Rush Cycle from Megaman 8, it's so fun! Every time I used it on stream I was like "I'm probably going to eat shit if I use Oil Slider here, but I'll try anyway". And 99% of the time it worked and you just wanna pop off when you go through a dangerous section by skateboarding all over that. It's so cool.
The problems I had with it are as follows: The game is too cramped vertically. Screens are 8 blocks high, which I think is literally half of the height of the NES games, meaning that you get an uncomfortable amount of cramped low ceiling platforming which doesn't feel good. It's literally the same vertical screenspace as the Game Boy games, and although they also felt pretty cramped, at least they didn't try to fit the level design of the NES games into that space. These aren't bad levels (at all!), but they all feel pretty hurt by this restriction.
The bosses also have really long post-hit invulnerability periods, and they also generate big invulnerability periods on their own via their new "big attacks". Sometimes they'll do those big attacks back-to-back which means you'll just have to sit for a loooong while just to get an opportunity to strike.
The controls also take a bit getting used to, and could've been worked on a bit better. All (or nearly all?) of your Special Weapons annoyingly cause you to stand in place for a bit (or a LOT in Time Slow's case), and you can do the little shimmy to do tiny adjustments to your position, but it's either a small shimmy or a HUGE leap forward, with no in-between. Some of the weapons also feel like they take too much weapon energy, but they DO recharge fully after death, which I think is a big plus! I also love that Rockman here comes standard equipped with Energy Balancer, no awkward weapon switching all the time just to recharge your weapons!
The final boss also has a desperation move that requires you to do something pretty dumb to not get hit by it. I literally couldn't figure out on my own, I had to go to a wiki page to figure out what to do. It left a very sour taste to the end of the game.
There's a million alternate characters to play as, and they even give them different properties, like Cut Man being able to wall-kick and Ice Man being able to use enemies as platforms, but from what I can tell, you really can't do much with these different properties, and none of them feel anywhere near as good to play as regular Megaman. They're just for boringly collecting stuff that you couldn't collect as regular Megaman. Roll is soooooo cute though I wish she was more fun to play.
Anyway, with all that out of the way, it's a pretty decent game and definitely on the higher end of Megaman games! I didn't screw around with the level creator though, it seems that level creation and sharing was a big part of what people loved about the game back then.
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