The intro is great. There's no intro stage yet, of course, but the menu thingy turned out really good. It was hyping me up. I chose to play on difficult, not normal, because I've seen in a video that's actually the only difficulty available originally.

It seems like europeans and americans were a bunch of gaming wussies back then, so the western version of the game included a new, less-hard option, they called "normal" even though it was actually supposed to make the game "easier than normal".

After trying to go through the water levels a few times, I gave up on those damn instant-kill spikes and decided to go somewhere else. Wood Man's stage was much less frustrating. I first got to him after a couple of game over screens, which isn't too bad. I thought his level was generally easy, except for the fire-breathing dogs.

Hm... Something wrong isn't right...

The level design really got much better. Levels dragged on for a little bit longer instead of being way to the point. It was no longer an early experiment like Mega Man 1. But Mega Man himself thought things were looking fishy when I got to the first boss... Or at least he looks like he did.

The boss was okay, he was easier than what I had face on MM1 because he did a lot less damage overall. It was all about timing a jump over his leaf barrier. Once I got that out of the way, or rather once I learned how to get out of the way of those natural bullets, he was smoothly defeated.

A new weapon-get screen, the first one ever on the series, shows up telling me I now have Leaf Shield at my disposal. It also offered a save password, which I'm sure was a very welcomed feature in the series.

I thought maybe Quick Man's weakness could be this leaf thing, so I jumped onto his stage where I was startled by this Energy Tank on my left. It exists much earlier in the series than I had expected.

The bullcrap started right after though, so there was no time for festivities as some goddamn instant-killing giant shinkuu-hadouken laser beams sequencially showed up. I was almost getting through it... When I didn't... And again, and again...

I must say, this level was much more enjoyable than most of MM1's because it was so dynamic. Even if you had to be precise, it was still fluid enough to get you to going through the game over screens. So far, this is a much better game.

Finally getting to Quick Man himself, it didn't take long to realize Leaf Barrier was not his weakness. I did everything I could on my first tries, and eventually, someone god busted! Not him, though. Me. It's time for a break.